Willow Creek’s Big Adventure
by Gary E. Gilley. (December 2007)
As humiliating as the Axis failure had to be for Willow Creek, the latest bombshell dwarfs it by comparison
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It has been a tough year for the Willow Creek Community Church, the flagship congregation of the “seeker-sensitive” movement. Most know that Willow Creek has set the pace for 30 years in its redesign of the local church. More recently Rick Warren, and his Saddleback Community Church, have stolen the spotlight from Willow and, to some degree, eclipsed its influence on new paradigm churches. But rest assured, Willow, along with its Willow Creek Association, which boasts 12,000 member churches from 90 denominations, is still charting the way for those who look to felt-needs, surveys, the latest innovations and market strategy, instead of Scripture, for their structuring of the local church. [1] When Willow speaks, church leaders listen. When Willow marches out a new product or method, churches around the globe fall in line. Whatever Willow promotes others emulate.
So, as I said, it has been a tough year for Willow Creek and for its followers as well. It was only in September of 2006 that Willow shuttered its highly acclaimed Axis experiment. Axis was Willow’s “church-within-a-church” designed for 20-somethings. At one point the ten year project boasted 2000 worshipers at services designed especially for Generation Xers, but had fallen to 350 when the leadership decided to shut it down. What Willow discovered was that “Axis didn’t connect young adults with the rest of the congregation. Once they outgrew the service, Axis members found it hard to transition into the rest of the Chicago-area megachurch. Young adults also struggled to meet and develop relationships with mentors in the larger congregation.” [2] Who would have thought that separating the young people from the body of Christ for a decade would result in integration issues when they grew up? Somebody must have missed the fine print in a Barna survey. At any rate, Willow recognized its error and folded Axis into the larger congregation. This move came too late however for hundreds of Willow clones who were in lock step with the mother church. Many started similar church-within-a-church congregations under Willow’s leadership and most will now suffer the same fate.
As humiliating as the Axis failure had to be for Willow Creek, the latest bombshell dwarfs it by comparison. Willow’s leadership now admits, in the words of Bill Hybels, “We made a mistake.” Hybels, founder, Senior Pastor and Chairman of the Board of the Willow Creek Association, is referencing Willow’s philosophical and ministerial approach to “doing” church. This is the approach pioneered by Hybels and company, honed to perfection and dissimulated to eager church leaders worldwide. This is the approach which distinguishes the seeker-sensitive model from other models. It is this approach that Hybels now admits is a mistake.
Willow’s Confession
First, let me say that I admire Willow’s transparency and humility on this matter. Not many people or groups would make a public admission of error of this magnitude. To actually admit that the model of “doing church” which they have poured 30 years and millions of dollars into has been a mistake is incredulous. This is not to say that Willow’s confession is without flaw, for while they profess mistakes they still apparently think they have done pretty well. And they still believe that they are the ones to lead the church into the future, even if they have been wrong for three decades. But more on that later; for now what are the specifics of the confession?
One of the executive pastors of Willow Creek, Greg Hawkins, became deeply concerned that despite all the efforts of the megachurch perhaps they were not being as effective as they thought. As he watched people dropping money in the offering plate week after week the thought nagged him, “Are we spending those folks money in the right way?” [3] In 2004, with Hybels’ permission Hawkins led a study of the congregation asking the people how effective the programs and ministry of Willow Creek had been in their lives. Later Hawkins turned to 30 other Willow Creek Association churches to see if the results of the study at Willow would be comparable at these churches – they were. These results, which have been published in a new book, Reveal: Where Are You?, have been described by Hybels as everything from “earth breaking” to “mind blowing” in a disturbing way.
What are the specifics? Hawkins defines Willow’s ministerial goal as “trying to help people who are far from Christ become disciples of Christ characterized by their love for God and other people.” This is a most commendable goal, but how has Willow gone about trying to accomplish this goal? “We do that,” Hawkins states, “by creating a variety of programs and services for people to participate in. Our strategy is to try to get people, far from Christ, engaged in these activities. The more people are participating in these sets of activities with higher levels of frequency it will produce disciples of Christ.”
This has been Willow’s methodology of discipleship throughout the years – the philosophy that has been transported and reproduced around the globe. But what was discovered, via the multi-year, multi-church study, was disturbing. Hawkins identifies three major discoveries. First, that increasing levels of participation in these activities does not predict whether a person will become a disciple of Christ.
Secondly, in every church there is a spiritual continuum in which “you can look at your congregation and put them [the people] in one of five unique segments. The segments are aligned around someone’s intimacy with Jesus Christ and how important that relationship with Christ is to their lives.” The segments into which a local church’s people can be neatly slipped are:
Segment #1 – Those who are just exploring Christianity. Therefore, these are nonbelievers who are attending services or activities provided by the church (i.e. unbelievers).
Segment #2 – Those who love Jesus and have a relationship with Him and are growing in that relationship but are fairly new in that relationship (i.e. new Christians).
Segment #3 – Those who are close to Christ; their relationship with Christ is important to them on a daily basis. These are people who “might pray, read the Bible and have thoughts of God” on a daily basis (i.e. nominal believers).
Segment #4 – Those who center their lives on their relationship with Christ. Their relationship with Christ is the most important relationship in their entire lives (Hybels calls these “fully devoted followers of Christ”).
Segment #5 – Believers who are stalled in their relationship with Christ. They are not investing time on a regular basis in their relationship with Christ. Although they are actually investing time in church events on a regular basis they are not investing time in their personal relationship with Christ (i.e. nominal Christians).
For more, see:
WC Admission of Failure
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