The Steam Tunnel Pilot

Rick Warren Reaches Out to Extraterrestrials

“We all worship the same God,” says Purpose-Driven Pastor

by Pat Shanks

In what many are claiming is a transparent effort to deflect attention from a recent controversy over his cozying-up to the Muslim community, Purpose-Driven Pastor Rick Warren has come forward to announce that his ministry horizons are far wider than anyone could have ever imagined.

     “Psalm 8 says that the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” said Warren in a video message addressed to supporters. “I am here to proclaim to you today that the fullness spoken of in the Psalter is about to take on unprecedented meaning.”

     Unveiling an ambitious program to extend the hand of fellowship well beyond the Van Allen radiation belts, “America’s pastor” has revealed that he has been in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence in an effort to spread the Gospel. 

     “I think the big lesson here is: it’s not all about your galaxy,” said Warren.  Accordingly, the mega-pastor’s well-known Global Peace Plan, or “Peace Plan 3.0,”  

 has been expanded into the Intergalactic Peace Plan, or “Peace Plan 3.141559265” (the number for p [pi], the understanding of which is fundamental to space travel). 
  

Using communications technologies now limited to the U.S. military, a series of intergalactic, interfaith conferences will be scheduled, beginning in 2015, with an ad hoc coalition of 42 human-like civilizations, largely but not exclusively located within the Milky Way Galaxy.  Warren claims God has been preparing him for this ministry operation for several decades, and that the sources he’s been studying in preparation for the event are centuries in the making. “You know I’ve read the complete works of Jonathan Edwards—in order—and you just know that he was open to extraterrestrial life.  After all, he was living and working in what was then a New World, so how could he not have been open to the possibility of new worlds elsewhere—as in outside the planetary realm?  Plus, the word ‘alien’ appears in his works forty-two separate times. That should tell you something.”  When pressed, however, Warren appears to have a difficult time deciding which is more of a marvel: the rapid advance of technology that will make this event possible, or his own scholarship and magnanimity. “A conservative estimate among astronomers is that we’ve only mapped out about 9% of what is known to be the universe.  That leaves 91% unmapped —which corresponds precisely to the 91% of our income that Kay and I give away,” America’s pastor added superfluously.

   In other quarters, Rev. Warren’s motivations are being viewed with considerable suspicion. “This is a NASA-sized smoke screen and nothing else,” says blogger Creed Gottschalk of GotCreed.com, a Christian discernment web site. “He’s just trying to take the heat off the Kingsway document. The chances that this is for real are about as likely as the space shuttle falling out of the sky and taking out one the many campus buildings at Saddleback,” Gottschalk said.  “I don’t think he’s even seen Star Wars.”





Who knew?  Thermians (top left), depicted in the
1999 movie Galaxy Quest, starring Tim Allen (above, right),
actually exist. Allen's character, Commander Peter Quincy
Taggart (right, in full regalia), may be based on Rick Warren.

    Kingsway refers to a recently-surfaced—then quickly submerged—“historic inter-faith document,” co-authored by Warren’s Saddleback congregation and the Islamic Center of Southern California.  By some accounts, the document purports to claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, and possibly contains an agreement by Saddleback not to evangelize Muslims, information which sent the Christian discernment blogosphere into overdrive. Warren denied some of the allegations, blaming sloppy reporting by journalist Jim Hinch of the Orange County Register. However, discussions between Hinch and discernment blogger Ken Silva suggest that the content of the Kingsway document—which has not been made fully public—was accurately reported by Hinch.

       This is not Warren’s first tussle with bloggers and apologists who claim that they represent orthodox views of the historic Christian faith—and that he does not.  “He just keeps stepping in it deeper and deeper every time,” said GotCreed’s Gottschalk.  “That he now feels the need to make up space aliens seems just about right.”  Chris Rosebrough, of Pirate Christian Radio, suggested in a Wisconsin-based terrestrial radio interview last week what Warren needs to do to extricate himself from this controversy. “He needs to quit with the fuzzy, evasive, non-theological, non-biblical definitions and give us something hard theologically as far as the definitions are concerned, and put to rest this idea that they’re promoting some kind of common ground based on Muslims and Christians worshipping the same God.” 

          Instead, it appears, Rick Warren prefers to look to the skies. 






The Planet Kolob.  Less-cynical commentators
 think this may be Rick Warren's real target.

       While his interest in and involvement with the extraterrestrial goes back a number of years, careful observers of his more recent statements would have detected clues of his extra-heavenly yearnings. “When I want to pray, my thoughts want to float away,” Warren told the 2010 Desiring God Conference by video.  Apparently, Warren’s thoughts had been floating away to distances measurable only in light years. 

       In the late 1980s, a brief stint as chaplain at the U.S. military’s NORAD defense facility, located somewhere in the Rocky Mountains—at least, that’s what the government wants you to think—whetted Warren’s taste for space evangelism.  A scientific breakthrough—to which Warren, as chaplain, was privy—came when astronomers discovered that radio signals from the 1920s were starting to bounce back in the direction of Earth. At first they thought these were fluke deflections from medium-to-large sized stars with exaggerrated magnetic fields.  But astronomers were less convinced of their original hypothesis when signals started coming back accompanied by mathematical coding which was interpreted as a request for clarification, according to forensic astrolinguists.

     “Apparently they were receiving transmissions of sermons by Aimee Semple McPherson and couldn’t believe what they were hearing,” explained astronomer Giaco Pastorini of the University of St. Hubbins Observatory in the Italian West Indies, and a former NASA employee.  “Chaplain Warren took it upon himself to explain systematic theology to the astrolinguists, who then relayed the information back into outer space.”



New Zealand blogger Art Stufflegriffin
of ApostatePlanet.net

      Warren’s first direct contact with the extraterrestrial community originated with the Thermian Federation, a civilization very similar to that found on Earth, situated in the Horsehead Nebula Region, part of the optical nebula 1C434, which sits at a distance of 400 parsecs (1,300 light-years) from our Sun. Film enthusiasts may recall a previous brush with the Thermians via the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest, starring Tim Allen, in which actors in a science fiction series are approached by representatives from an alien civilization, who have viewed the program and believe its content to be real.  The Thermians recruit Allen’s character and his crew in order to fend off an attack by a rival group of aliens which, if successful, would be fatal to their civilization.

     What few people outside the Ufological community realize is that the Thermians are, in fact, real; that the events depicted in the film are real; and that the whole project amounted to a massive public misinformation campaign—an attempt to divert the attention of Ufological investigators who were getting dangerously close to the truth in the mid- to late-1990s.  Speculation that the Tim Allen character is actually based on Rick Warren has not been confirmed.

    Though many discernment bloggers seem certain that Warren’s newly transpired intergalactic interests are a diversionary tactic, some have speculated that Warren’s real motivation is to target the Planet Kolob, a close neighbor to the Thermians, and thought to be the origin of Mormon civilization. “I say, ‘Good on him,’” said blogger Art Stufflegriffin of Timaru, New Zealand, proprietor of ApostatePlanet.net.  “We can correct their thinking—right at the source—and just nip this thing in the bud.  She’ll be right.”