The first time I saw Warren, he was striding down the aisle of a United Air Lines flight—the middle leg of a 24-hour journey from Los Angeles to Kigali, Rwanda—handing out Chick-fil-A sandwiches to church members on the trip. He stopped to help a stranger get her luggage into the overhead, glad-handed the flight attendants, patted people he knew on the shoulder, and went back to his seat in business class.

Like a politician who loves the campaign trail, Warren feeds off people. A large, gregarious man with spiky hair and a goatee, Warren dresses in Hawaiian shirts and wears no socks, even on stage at Saddleback. He's known as Rick or Pastor Rick, not Reverend Warren. "Rick is not sophisticated in any way," says his wife, Kay. "He's always been the class clown." He jokes about his weakness for doughnuts, and he uses one-liners to deflect questions he'd rather not answer. Ask about politics, and he'll reply, "I'm not left wing and I'm not right wing. I'm for the whole bird."

Rick and Kay, married 30 years, were both the children of small-town pastors. Rick's father, Jimmy Warren, was a "church planter" and carpenter; he literally built dozens of small churches. The family never had money, but Jimmy, like Rick, was a down-to-earth guy with a big personality. Rick first thought about going into politics but turned to the church in high school. He started Saddleback in his apartment in 1980.

In the quarter-century since, Warren has developed an approach to management that drives all his enterprises. He challenges people to think big. He is patient about results. And he builds decentralized organizations. "Most people make two common mistakes," Warren says. "We set our goals too low, and we try to accomplish them too quickly."

A student of business, Warren has read Drucker, Alvin Toffler, Ken Blanchard, Tom Peters, and Jim Collins. But he says he learned his most important lesson about leadership soon after starting Saddleback. As the church grew, Warren tried to do everything himself—preaching, weddings, funerals, pastoral counseling, and seeking out new members. He collapsed during a Sunday service and endured a period of depression and doubt. "If you're going to have a midlife crisis," he says, "it's nice to have it when you're 26." He came away with an insight that eludes micromanagers everywhere—that for an enterprise to grow, the leader needs to give up control.

"In any organization, you have to decide whether you want growth or control," Warren says. "You cannot have both." Warren told his flock that he could no longer take care of them and that, from then on, they'd have to care for one another. They would do that by forming small groups.

He had hit upon an organizational structure that has allowed Saddleback to get big and stay small. Today it has 3,300 small groups organized by neighborhood, interests, or experiences: men, women, teens, mothers of preschoolers, people who speak Korean, wives of unbelievers, fitness buffs. ("How can you serve the Lord to the fullest if your body is rundown, tired, and not functioning as God designed it to function?" says an ad for an aerobics group.) Saddleback says it was the first church to go on the Internet, and a key function of its website today is to organize the groups, which typically meet weekly to pray, study the Bible, and do good works.

 
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