Saddleback Church
evangelical Baptist multi-site megachurch, based in Lake Forest, California, USA
Saddleback Church is an evangelical, non-denominational Christian multi-site megachurch based in Lake Forest, California. It is the largest church in California, and one of the largest in the United States of America. The church has several campuses in California and around the world, as well as a number of extensions. Weekly church attendance was 30,000 people in 2024. Its senior pastor is Andy Wood, and his wife, Stacie Wood, is a teaching pastor. Saddleback was formerly associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, until 2023.
History
In 1979, Rick Warren, recently graduated in theology, settled with his wife Kay in the Saddleback Valley area of Orange County, California. He began to probe the people in his neighborhood to find out what prevented them from coming to church. The answers that emerged were boredom, distance from everyday life, lack of welcome for visitors, insistence on money and inadequate programs for children. It is with these concerns that the church began in 1980, with a Bible study group, with six people, the pastor Rick Warren and his wife, in their condo.
“Saddleback Church” enters the record as evangelical Baptist multi-site megachurch, based in Lake Forest, California, USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Saddleback, Church and evangelical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q72158. VIAF identifies the subject as 125809168. The Library of Congress control number is no99004118. Authority coordinates are 33.663, -117.647. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024, 2023, 1979 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saddleback Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.