Reverend Rick Warren on How His Church Community Is Helping Displaced Families

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity & Colmes," October 25, 2007. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: The Reverend Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, and the author of the bestselling book, a book a like a lot, it's called "The Purpose-Driven Life," he is making his mission to help the displaced. And he now joins us from Rancho Santa Margarita.

And, Reverend Warren, welcome back to the program. Thank you for being with us.

RICK WARREN, SADDLEBACK CHURCH: Hi, Sean. You know, there are 18 fires here in Southern California. Three of them are actually here in the Saddleback Valley, where Saddleback Church is. About a million people have been displaced in the 18 fires, about $1 billion worth of damage, and we know the one that was set here was actually, as William LaJeunesse mentioned earlier, was actually set by an arsonist. The reward is now up to $250,000 for that arsonist of the Saddleback Valley fire.

HANNITY: You know, Rick, I'm a big fan of your book, and I know you've been involved in a lot of mission work. You're always out there helping the poor and assisting people as often as possible here. Tell us about the ongoing efforts that you have for all these people that have lost their homes and are displaced. What do you do for those people?

WARREN: Sure, well, the entire network of purpose-driven churches, we rally them pretty quickly. This is our, I think, eighth or ninth national or international disaster we've been part of, so we're pretty quick in being first responders.

We're doing primarily four things. First, Saddleback Church has 120- acre campus, so we are an evacuation site for victims who had to move out of their homes. And we've been taking care of those people now for probably four days.

Second, we're a staging center, because of our site, for the fire departments for all of the fire relief, and I think, in the last day, we've probably fed 500 firefighters on our campus.

The third thing that we're doing is we've sent out about 100 chaplains to other evacuation centers that are going out doing counseling, care, comforting, praying for people, helping them through the trauma of their — their losses.

And then the fourth thing is we're a clearing house for donations. Anyone who wants to make a tax-deductible donation to the people who are victims here in Southern California can go to Saddleback.com. And we're distributing that to the people who need it the most.

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Hey, Rick, it's Alan Colmes. Thank you very much for coming on our show once again.

WARREN: Hi, Alan.

COLMES: I was reading a piece you wrote back in 2003 about a previous fire disaster, where you went into five different ways you can counsel people who are going through grief, and first you say teach them to release their grief. And maybe you could quickly talk to us about how to cope with this on a personal level.

WARREN: Yeah, I'm actually going to be teaching on this, this weekend. I'm doing a message called, "How do you look up when you're burned out?" And my guest is — there's a guest testimony who's going to be Ken Blanchard, the best-selling management experts of all time who lost his home, by the way, in Rancho Bernardo this week. And Ken is going to be coming and sharing his story.

And it all starts with, if you don't talk it out, you'll take it out on your body. You have to express your grief. You have to let it out. You have to tell people, and you talk to God in prayer, and you talk to other people. That's the first step in dealing with a tragedy like this.

COLMES: You also talk about you can choose not to be bitter. You actually have that choice. And teach people to look at the parts of their lives that are of true value.

WARREN: Yeah, you know, it's very interesting, because William LaJeunesse mentioned the 2003 fire, which came up in my backyard. And at that time, our own family had to evacuate, and we were warned a couple of hours in advance. And we actually went out and said, "What would we put in our car to take with us?" And we didn't even fill our car. We realized that it's just stuff, that in the bottom line, we wanted pictures, and some papers, and maybe our bibles, and some [of] our hard drives, but most of it is very replaceable.

The greatest things in life are not things. And when this stuff comes along, we realize that our value is not our valuables, and our self-worth is not our net worth, and it's a time for people to realize there's a whole lot more than material. There's a spiritual side of life.

COLMES: Rick, we thank you so much for taking the time to take to us tonight.

WARREN: Thank you.

COLMES: We wish you and your parishioners the best of luck and Godspeed in this difficult time. Thank you very much.

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