Purpose-driven or faith-driven?

Full disclosure: I’ve not read Warren’s fabulously successful Purpose Driven Live. There is a copy of it in our home as my wife was required to read it as part of a staff development team-building activity at the church where she works. So, perhaps I’ll get to it at some point.

Alan Wolfe, professor of political science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, has written a review of Warren’s best seller in In Character magazine titled “The Limits of the Purpose Driven Life: Can Twenty Million Readers Be Wrong?”

Here’s an excerpt:

A faith-driven life? A life devoted to Jesus? Those objectives are clear, and for people who seek them, and who seek a sense of purpose through them, Warren’s book, as its success suggests, has been a great boon. But by its very anchoring in evangelicalism, Warren’s understanding of what purpose requires will fall flat to those more focused on the world around them than on the eternity that awaits them.

Purpose is so important to human beings, it is such a requirement if we are to lead a good and meaningful life, that Warren is to be commended for bringing the subject into our public conversation in such a powerful way. But to act purposefully when unexpected conditions arise, to know what to do when we are distracted from pursuing our goals, to fit our sense of purpose together with others who may not share our religious commitments but who do share our country – for all of these occasions, there has to be something in between a world of people acting aimlessly and without purpose and a world in which people find a sense of purpose by surrendering themselves to God for all eternity.

This is a thoughtful article and worth reading.