The Ugly End Times Fruit Of Rick Warren And ‘The Purpose Driven Church’ Are In Full Bloom At Megacorporations Like Eleven22 And Lakepoint Church

November 10, 2026 admin News 0

The Ugly End Times Fruit Of Rick Warren’s ‘The Purpose Driven Church’ Is In Full Bloom As Megachurch Expansion Turns Congregations Into Corporate Empires

If you weren’t aware that we are firmly in the Laodicean church age, take a good look at what now passes for success in American Christianity. Over the past twenty years, we have watched the corporatizing of the local church accelerate. The pastor becomes a celebrity, the congregation becomes an audience, the church becomes a campus, and the ministry becomes a brand capable of expansion into one market after another. Somewhere along the way, feeding the flock gets swallowed up by growing the organization. The machinery demands more buildings, more locations, more employees, and more money to keep it all moving. Eleven22 and Lakepoint Church need another half billion to keep the lights on. How is that possible? It’s possible because the Bible is right and here we are.

“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Revelation 3:14-16 (KJB)

A major landmark on that road was Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church, published in 1995, which offered pastors a reproducible, five-part strategy for ‘church growth’. Warren presented it as a way to build healthy churches, but it wasn’t. The movement he helped popularize taught American Christianity to place far too much confidence in systems, strategies, and measurable, marketable growth. Once numerical success becomes the credential, the biggest operation gets treated as the greatest work of God. That is a spiritually disastrous exchange. At that point, you are not planting a church, you are opening up a francise and starting a business. Rick Warren in his book led the charge to get rid of hymnals, put everything up on a flatscreen, and change the name of each franchise from ‘church’ to ‘campus’. Today, the Church at Eleven22 and Lakepointe Church are the standardbearers of the business model, um, I mean, movement he started. Jesus will absolutely spue this out of His mouth in that day.

So let’s look at two organizations whose operations who are rocking The Purpose Driven Church model to such a high degree, The Church of Eleven22, led by Joby Martin, and Lakepointe Church, led by Josh Howerton. Eleven22’s own 2025 report lists $91.1 million in annual support and revenue, $176.3 million in assets, $56.6 million in long-term debt, and $24.8 million in staffing expenses. Its capital spending for expansion totaled $16.2 million. Alongside its church operations are thrift stores, a retreat center, and a construction-management ministry. What?? Blueprint1122 advertises $200 million in projects under management. This is not only church ‘business’, it’s big business.

Lakepointe is asking its people to participate in a $225 million giving initiative called Into The Breach covering December 2026 through December 2028. That includes ordinary giving, with $135 million designated for ongoing general ministries, $62 million for expansion and strategic projects, and $28 million for missions. The campaign connects financial commitments with a two-year discipleship journey. If you watched the video posted above and don’t feel nauseous, you might want to do a quick spiritual checkup to make sure you’re still “in the faith”.

Another thing that you see when you look, is the incredible insincerity of the “pastors” who are running the “big show”. Not only are these campuses started according to a replicatable business model that’s available for purchase, another thing you can buy are the sermons you will preach in the pulpit. Evidentially, the “jokes” are thrown in as a package deal. Christian, this is not the church that Jesus started, this is the church that Paul warns against. This is big business, plain and simple. The photo at the top of this article is not real, it was made with AI. And that’s fitting because the churches we’re talking about aren’t real churches, either. Welcome to Laodicea.

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