Woody sent me an article from October 18, 2007 entitled “Willow Creek Repents?” I think it originated in a Christianity Today's blog, "Out of Ur." I have abridged it below as a follow-up to my own essay called “Muffing up Maturity.”
Few would disagree that Willow Creek Community Church has been one of the most influential churches in America over the last thirty years.
Willow, through its association, has promoted a vision of church that is big, programmatic, and comprehensive. This vision has been heavily influenced by the methods of secular business. James Twitchell, in his new book Shopping for God, reports that outside Bill Hybels’ office hangs a poster that says: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” Directly or indirectly, this philosophy of ministry—church should be a big box with programs for people at every level of spiritual maturity to consume and engage—has impacted every evangelical church in the country.
So what happens when leaders of Willow Creek stand up and say, “We made a mistake”?
Not long ago Willow released its findings from a multiple year qualitative study of its ministry. Basically, they wanted to know what programs and activities of the church were actually helping people mature spiritually and which were not. The results were published in a book that was recently released. Hybels, the executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, called the findings “earth shaking,” “ground breaking,” and “mind blowing.”
Hybels previously taught that if more people participate in sets of activities on a more frequent basis, more disciples of Christ will be produced. This has been Willow’s philosophy of ministry in a nutshell: The church creates programs/activities. People participate in these activities. The outcome is spiritual maturity. Up until now Willow Creek has put all of its eggs into the program-driven church basket.
You can understand Willow’s shock when the research revealed that “Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.”
Speaking at the Leadership Summit, Hybels summarized the findings this way. “Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into, thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually… Other things that we didn’t put that much [staff and] money into is stuff our people are crying out for.”
Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research “the wakeup call” of his adult life.
Hybels confesses, “We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their Bible between service [sic], how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.”
In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.
Does this mark the end of Willow’s thirty years of influence over the American church? Not according to Hawkins. “Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture.”
(If you haven’t read “Muffing Up Maturity,” skip down and see what I wrote about this very subject before I read the article about Willow Creek.)
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