Evangelical pastor Rick Warren this week said the upcoming 2,000th anniversary of the death and resurrection of Jesus highlights the Lord’s “unanswered prayer” of unity in the Christian world, a unity which he said will help bring the message of salvation to the world.
Warren, the founder of the Baptist Saddleback Church in California, spoke to EWTN Vatican Bureau Chief Andreas Thonhauser in Rome on attending a gathering of Global 2033, a Catholic evangelization initiative working to spread the Gospel message ahead of the two-thousand-year observance of Christ rising from the dead.
Asked by Thonhauser why he was speaking at a Catholic event, the Protestant minister claimed that “no single denomination can complete the Great Commission on their own.”
“There are 2.5 billion people in the world who claim to believe in Jesus Christ,” Warren said. Of those, “1.3 billion are Catholic. About half of the Christian Church is Catholic.”
Dismissing potential criticisms that his intent is to convert Catholics to Protestantism, Warren pointed to Christ’s prayers in John 17, in which he prayed to God: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
That plea “is still the unanswered prayer of Jesus,” Warren said.
“We’re never going to have cultural unity. We’re never going to have structural unity,” Warren pointed out.
“We’re never going to have unity in doctrine,” he further claimed. “But we can all agree on one thing. Every Christian understands we’re called to go [and evangelize].”
On praying alongside Catholics in Rome, Warren said: “I pray with anybody who believes Jesus Christ is the Lord of my life. These are brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Looking forward to 2033, Warren said: “What the world needs now is hope.”
The Baptist pastor further shared that EWTN has been a “great ministry in [his] life.” He pointed to the 2013 death of his son, who took his own life that year after struggling with mental illness.
“It was the worst day of my life,” Warren said. “One of the things that helped me through was on EWTN, they were praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. And the Chaplet of Divine Mercy ministered to me and to my wife.”
“It was a healing balm in my heart,” he said.
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This article was originally published by CNA.
