But this is a conservative, highly affluent part of the world, and the congregation reflects it – lots of trim, elegant, perfectly coiffed people in Sunday best.One part of the campus feels a bit like a biblical theme park. Certainly, the place is huge – a campus of several buildings and vast car parks spread over 120 acres beneath the hills of southern Orange County. His ambition is to turn all of Rwanda into a “purpose-driven nation”.It is hard to get an idea of the scale and scope of Warren’s plans by visiting the Saddleback Church. Mostly, though, the job of these groups is to find what Jesus, in the Bible, describes as finding the local “man of peace”, the person with decisive influence over the local community.Already, his approach has had an electric effect on leaders in Rwanda, a country for which he has a special fondness.

For now, his organisation has undertaken a series of pilot projects in 67 countries, just to see how it goes.At first, missions go out with tools they think will be useful to help out the local population – school and medical supplies, and the wherewithal to start small businesses. To his consternation, one-third of the 75 people attending the service were children orphaned by Aids.”It was a shock, a wake-up call,” Warren said. “That night I stretched out on the ground to pray under the African sky and asked, ‘God, what else am I missing?’” And so he launched his so-called PEACE programme – a kind of viral marketing project for global stability, economic justice and access to health care and education. It was stirred by his wife’s interest in Aids, and then confirmed during a trip to South Africa when he asked to be taken to a village, more or less at random.To his amazement, the pastor of the local church (which met in a tent) knew who he was – he had been downloading Warren’s sermons for years from a post office computer an hour and a half’s walk away. And three, they have local credibility.”Warren’s interest in addressing the world’s thorniest economic and social problems is relatively recent. “Two, they are able to provide the largest possible pool of volunteers.

In many places, in fact, they are the only civil service structure available,” he said. “One, they can provide universal distribution, since there is a church or place of worship in every village in the world. This is not a traditional, paternalistic model of missionary work, in other words; it’s more about creating a decentralised, cellular model of organisation that can reach the sorts of people who usually remain invisible and entirely powerless.Churches, in his view, are uniquely able to do things that government or business cannot. Always, the focus is on finding someone with credibility as a community leader and working through them.