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The Good News Interview
Kay Warren
By Elizabeth Turner

Kay Warren is gloriously ruined. After several purpose-driven years, the wife of Saddleback pastor Rick Warren is delving into the sanctified life in her new work, Dangerous Surrender: What happens when you say yes to God. With the feel of an Oswald Chambers devotion and the timeliness of an evening news update, Warren’s “Dangerous Surrender” challenges us to confront the “kingdom of me” and to open our arms to God’s call to serve the suffering. Drawing on her own experience of being confronted with the evil in the world, Kay sheds light on the ravaging effects of HIV/AIDS on children, abandoned women, and the lost. Kay’s own battle with cancer has allowed her to minister to people plagued with disease and disability. Recently, Good News spoke with Kay about the Christian call to serve.

 

In Dangerous Surrender, you draw on a large fellowship of Christian voices through the centuries, including more recent writers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Henri Nouwen, and Jim Elliott. How have writers like these prepared you to hear and be receptive to God’s call? Who else has influenced you spiritually?

They have mentored me from afar. Most of my mentors are not alive. I met Elisabeth Elliott once. Mentors include Mother Teresa, Gary Thomas—he’s a good friend of mine—and Henri Nouwen, as well as the ones you mention. When you read them it’s like having a conversation. They’re friends.

   

 

Do you consider any brothers and sisters you’ve met in Africa a mentor?

Absolutely. Even though there are some differences, some things never change, and spending time with pastors’ wives over there, you share challenges – how to balance ministry and family, how to deal with your husband’s time being so consumed by ministry.

Death to self seems, for you, to be vital to ministering to others’ dying.  How was dying to self necessary for you to be able to serve the dying, particularly in faraway places?

You have to try to put yourself in their shoes. I always ask, how would I want to be treated? What would I want someone to do for me in this circumstance? Even though you’re asking about what you would want, you’re doing it so you can serve them. You can’t consider your own comfort. So it really is about dying to self.

You mention that taking communion became a way that Christ reminded you that He knows suffering, that there is a fellowship of suffering. What else has this communal ritual taught you as you work to alleviate the suffering of HIV positive people?

I really didn’t anticipate myself serving the poor and growing in Christ through that, and I didn’t anticipate the Lord’s Supper as being such a rich resource. Not to pick on anybody, but it’s not a major thing for a lot of non-liturgical denominations like the one I grew up in. But there’s sharing in fellowship in the Lord’s Supper, a unity of relationship with Christ. So I’ve found it to be vitally important. There’s a sweetness in it.

Have you ever shared the Lord’s Supper with someone who’s dying?

No, I haven’t. Not yet. But I would love to.

United Methodist numbers show that while denominational membership in the United States has decreased, membership in the continent of Africa and other central conference locations has grown exponentially. What do you think the church is doing there that it isn’t doing in North America?

Well, I’m not an expert on this. But I can tell you my observations, especially two main ones. First of all, in Africa, the believers have a passionate commitment to the Word of God. There aren’t a lot of theological debates about what Jesus really meant when he said something or whether that applies to us. There’s a more literal acceptance.

They’re also more open to the supernatural than we are here in the West, partly because of the cultural upbringing, with tribal religions. There’s a readiness to believe.

And because of the poverty—they can’t go to the doctor and get antibiotics and be on them by seven p.m.—they rely more heavily on prayer, and God’s intervention. They have a very rich hope of heaven. In the West, Americans have so much that heaven isn’t a big deal to many anymore. Why would we need it?

How do you describe the prevalence of sex slavery still rampant in many places to people who are accustomed to the abolishment of slavery? How do you bring those realities near to women and men who are unable to travel to Cambodia, Thailand, or India?

I like to tell stories. When I’m speaking, I try to make it personal.  And I encourage people to look in their own community. The fact is that it’s not just around the globe. In every big city in the United States, there’s trafficking. Sometimes it’s bonded labor, where an immigrant comes thinking she’s going to work but is kept in a place unable to leave and with fear of being deported. Other times it’s sex slavery.

What would you like to see happen in the next few years with HIV/AIDS?

Well, I don’t know if it will happen in my lifetime, but my goal is to end HIV—that people will say, “remember that scourge? Remember that disease that took so many lives?” And ending it requires local churches getting involved.

 

Elizabeth Turner is editorial assistant at Good News.



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