Ordinary man

Pastor Rick Warren says he isn’t walking away from the hard stuff | Joel Belz

Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

When you find yourself featured, in a 10-day span, not just on the cover of Time magazine and in a story by one of The Wall Street Journal's best reporters, but everywhere else in the national media, you might be forgiven for losing at least a little of your sense of personal balance. So it may be one of the best measures of the kind of person Rick Warren is that when you sit down with him—the afternoon after he hosted Barack Obama and John McCain right there on his own platform—he seems so ordinary.

So my questions of Rick Warren were about his frustrations, in the context of all this media frenzy, at still being ordinary—at not being able to get his message across. What, for example, did he wish fellow evangelicals understood about him that they don't? What does he wish the secular media would get right that they don't?