If progressives and radicals had all read Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church when it came out in 1995, we’d be far stronger today. It’s the most important book on organizing that most leftists haven’t read. Luckily, it’s not too late to discover it.

Warren founded Saddleback Church in suburban Orange County in 1980, starting with a Bible study in his home. Fifteen years later, more than ten thousand people were attending its services each weekend, and Saddleback had planted twenty-six other churches. The Purpose Driven Church was Warren’s attempt to explain how he’d done it, so that other pastors could do the same. It became a founding manual of “seeker-sensitive” Evangelicalism, which designs churches around the people who don’t yet attend one. By 2004, Warren’s book had sold more than a million copies, and it has since been translated into over thirty languages.

Evangelical megachurches are among the few American membership institutions to grow during the past half-century of community collapse. Just compare the growth of evangelical megachurch weekly participation since 1970 to the decline in yearly attendance at union meetings.