'If you're not following me on Twitter, you're going to hell," says megachurch pastor Rick Warren, before cracking up. Mr. Warren—or Pastor Rick, as his teeming staff calls him—is leaning back in a red leather chair with his sneaker-clad feet up on the coffee table in one of his many offices on the 120-acre Saddleback Church campus in Lake Forest, Calif. He's only joking. He has plenty of followers already: Almost 1.3 million keep up with him on Twitter, and around 30,000 attend his sermons.
Mr. Warren's popularity soared after the release of his 2002 best seller, "The Purpose Driven Life," a self-help book about discovering and exploring a relationship with God that has sold about 40 million copies. "All of a sudden, people are calling me, well-known people are calling me, and I'm saying, 'Why are you calling me? I'm just a pastor,' " he recalls. Now he has come out with "The Daniel Plan," a diet book—though he says it is more than just a diet book—written with two doctors. It's already a best seller, and Mr. Warren, 59, plans to turn it into as much of a brand as "The Purpose Driven Life," which thousands of churches, corporations and even sports teams adopted as a 40-day plan.
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