Pastor and author Rick Warren notes that all the important events of our lives are planned in advance without our input….and that everything that happens to us is “father filtered.”    According to Warren, even the most challenging, painful, and traumatic events are filtered through God’s providential agenda.  God “smiles,” Warren suggests, when we read our lines and play our parts in the life script God has already written for us. It seems that for Warren, unless we “color inside the lines” we have somehow turned our backs on God and may risk meaninglessness in this life and damnation in the next.

While Warren’s Purpose Driven Life has benefited many persons, I want to suggest an alternative spiritual pathway – the way of Holy Adventure in companionship with a Holy Adventurer, who like ourselves is constantly charting new pathways, nurturing, creativity….and inviting us to “color outside the lines.”

In Whiteheadian language, I believe that God presents us with many possibilities or initial aims in each moment of experience – lively propositions or lures for feelings - -and says in the spirit of a good parent (let me be a bit anthropomorphic here) “surprise me, do something I haven’t fully expected.” While some surprises may indeed create pain for ourselves, others, and God, and that’s the cost of creativity, our deviating from the divine aims may not be sin, but a reflection of the interplay of call and response – divine creativity and human creativity, embodied in our lives.

In Warren’s world, God lives in a perpetual “Ground Hog Day” (the movie) in which nothing new happens and nothing occurs that God hasn’t, in principle planned or known in advance.  In a world of adventure, new things constantly are happening to God, and God rejoices in the opportunity to “do a new thing” and be a “more lively God” in response to the world God is constantly inspiring.  God is constantly creating and wants us to be creative, too. There are no guarantees of “success,” but there is the companionship of an Adventurous God, who treasures our lives and constantly offers new possibilities for living God’s Holy Adventure.

For those who would like to explore an alternative approach to Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life for yourself or a group study during Epiphany or Lent, let me invite you to read my Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living (Upper Room). 

Bruce Epperly  is Director of Continuing Education and Professor of Practical Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary and co-pastor of Disciples United Community Church in Lancaster, PA.  He is the author of sixteen books, including “Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living.” (Upper Room, 2008)