Rick Warren is a phenomenon in the modern church. It is vital that we all respond to him, and indeed that we respond to him aright. I have noticed that there seems to be a real polarisation certainly in the blogosphere. This is so strong that I have hesitated to publish my thoughts on a conference of his I attended- for fear of creating unnecessary controversy. I will be publishing my thoughts soon though.

I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they respond to difficulties whether in their own lives, the lives of others or indeed on a national or even international stage. Rick has made articles, sermon notes and his last weeks Saddleback sermon in mp3 format freely available on his site and speaks of the disaster in New Orleans as an unprecedented opportunity for the church to demonstrate the love of God to the world.

I was very impressed by Warren's sermon as he has grasped the point (which should perhaps be obvious I know) that when a disaster happen it brings to the fore our own personal "disasters" and makes us face again our own frailty and the certainty that there will be periods of our own lives where we face terrible losses on a personal front.

So Warren, preached last week a message on facing disasters and rebuilding, which although it used the hurricane as a springboard addressed peoples personal response to difficulties in their own lives.

I have listened so far only to the first half, but plan to listen to the rest later.

I was encouraged to see Rick doing this, as in some ways I took a similar approach to Warren in my own sermon "Right place, right time" - ie talk about the hurricane but also about applying the bible to our own lives - which is after all the business of the preacher.

If in our preaching we are building a bridge between the lives of our hearers and the world of the bible it seems to me we have to from time to time engage the world of our hearers and what has occurred in the previous week, or else our bridge will stop short and our hearers will find there is a gap to jump across for it to benefit them.