[update 8/18] watch (or listen) to Rick Warren’s Sunday 8/17 sermon, The Kind of Leader America Needs, that followed-up on the forum

(photo credit: C-SPAN)

[update 8/16] From a Saddleback family email newsletter >> “Here’s the real story behind the ticket distribution. The moment McCain & Obama were announced as this month’s Civil Forum guests we were overwhelmed with thousands of requests from partisans who wanted to fill our auditorium with their troops. To prevent them from taking all the seats we did two things: First, we reserved 95% of the 5000+ tickets as FREE to our Saddleback volunteers who faithfully serve our family. We then sold 5% - less than 250 seats - to other members & outsiders in order to defray the expenses of this (now) national event. … One untold story is that we invited the principals of schools in the Santa Ana district to select some worthy students to attend for free in order to experience the American election system. 22 students and 2 chaperones have been awarded seats.”

[update 8/11] Now the saddlebackcivilforum.com website is saying, “All general admission tickets have been distributed.” Apparently, public tickets were never available, b/c tickets (up to $2,000 each) were already sold out to church members/ attenders.

[update 8/7] Rick Warren on cover of TIME Magazine (8/18/08 issue) - read cover story or read about the candidates on faith

[update 8/4] It’s 5:47pm (Pacific Time) and only ticket info at official site says: “a limited number of community tickets will be available Wednesday August 13.”

[original]

Rick Warren and Saddleback Church (with others) are hosting a Saddleback Civil Forum on August 16th, that’ll bring presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain onto the same stage! Huge media event and associated junket. The event will be live-streamed on the web and on CNN — probably the best place to watch it, unless you have HDTV and someone puts the live feed on cable. (I don’t have HDTV.) Tune in 5:00pm Pacific / 6:00pm Mountain / 7:00pm Central / 8:00pm Eastern.

Ticket information was supposed to be available today, August 1st. But apparently the ticket info launch date is now Monday, August 4th. Typically easier to launch something on a Monday than Friday.

For media people, you can request credentials, request interviews, get press kit, and more at www.rickwarrennews.com. Wonder how many live-bloggers and live-twitter’ers will apply for credentials, and how many will get credentialed. (For the record, I’m not applying.)

“… they?re still working out how many media spots there will be and what Secret Service says it needs. Not to mention what the campaigns will require in terms of seats for their people. // This will be the only time between now and the convention that the two presidential hopefuls will be in the same place. … It?s not going to be a debate. They will briefly be on stage together but then Warren will first question Obama and then McCain. The order was determined by a coin toss.” — via OC Register