Willow Creek "Wake Up Call"

I thought this article from Christianity Today about some realizations at Willow Creek was insightful and worth sharing:

October 18, 2007
Willow Creek Repents?

Why the most influential church in America now says "We made a mistake."
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, Reveal: Where Are You?, co-authored by Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek. Hybels called the findings “earth shaking,” “ground breaking,” and “mind blowing.”
If you’d like to get a synopsis of the research you can watch a video with Greg Hawkins here. And Bill Hybels’ reactions, recorded at last summer’s Leadership Summit, can be seen here. Both videos are worth watching in their entirety, but below are few highlights.

In the Hawkins’ video he says, “Participation is a big deal. We believe the more people participating in these sets of activities, with higher levels of frequency, it will produce disciples of Christ.” 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. In a moment of stinging honesty Hawkins says, “I know it might sound crazy but that’s how we do it in churches. We measure levels of participation.”

Having put all of their eggs into the program-driven church basket you can understand their 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, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against 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 wake up 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, 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. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he’s asking us to transform this planet."

Sovereignty and Freedom in Minnesota

I know this is well after the fact, but, as most people might remember from the news, this past August there was a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis, in which several people died.

Minneapolis is also the home of two well known pastor/theologians, Greg Boyd and John Piper. Each had a very different interpretation of the tragedy, and just today I came across their own blog posts about it.

Piper posted first and Boyd responded. Here's the link to Boyd's response, in which he also gives a link to Piper's original post: http://gregboyd.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-35w-bridge-collapsed.html

I don't know if I would agree with everything Boyd has to say on every issue (though I thought his book Letters from a Skeptic was excellent!), I think he's right on target here.

Any thoughts?

What it's like in Haiti.

Last summer I spent some time on campus at Asbury Seminary where my wife and I met a lady who was visiting from Haiti where she and her family work at a Christian school. I asked if we could be on her email list, so we've been getting periodic updates on her and her family's experiences this fall. Pasted below is her account of life in Haiti over the past couple of months.

With all the details of Haitian struggles in mind, I'm ashamed at the trite things that frustrate me in a typical day:

Dear Friends and Family, Now that I've started doing weekly prayer request emails, I've neglected doing updates. Here's a brief look at what's been going on in our lives lately.

We're just about to finish the first quarter of the school year. We have a good staff, including some new people, and a larger student body than last year. We had a wonderful staff retreat at the beach in September. We have had some great chapels with strong responses from the students.

Though things have been going well at school, at home we have had a series of problems with our utilities. I told you back in August about how our electricity was out for several weeks over the summer. Two weeks after I got home, that was fixed, but shortly after that, our transformer blew. Some workmen from EDH, the power company, came to look at the burned-out transformer (after we begged them to do so for a few days), shook their heads, and went away. EDH doesn't have extra transformers or money to buy them. The neighbors got together and decided to buy a transformer. Once we had done this, we waited for three weeks before the power company came to install it. When they finally did, they put it in wrong, and it didn't work. This was repaired but the power at our house still didn't come on. Finally that was fixed. Please understand that between each sentence of this account I am leaving out weeks of discussion, phone calls, spending money, and general frustration. In addition, our telephone doesn't work, and to complete the picture, while doing road work last week, the mayor's office broke our water line.

I wish I could say that all these setbacks mean nothing to us in light of all the blessings we have, but I fear that we get rather upset. Not only are we paying for our utilities, but we have to pay for backup systems too - cellphones because landlines are unreliable, generator and inverter because city power (even when it works) is only on for a few hours a day, water trucks when city water doesn't come. It seems sometimes that we spend as much energy and effort on keeping our household utilities functioning as we do in our jobs! Add to that the slow response time when things don't work, the frequent requests for bribes, and the bills that either don't come at all (but you'd better somehow know how much to pay, otherwise you'll be disconnected) or are thrown over the gate for the dogs to drool on and eat, and you can see why we get tired of dealing with these issues!

My prayer request emails lately have been full of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work" and this week I promised to stop listing all that stuff. It's boring for you to read and depressing for me to write. But I couldn't resist a brief overview of the situation. I hope it at least encourages you to enjoy your utilities at your house!

Trying to count it all joy in Port-au-Prince,

Right on Wright!

Here is an extremely accurate summation of the perspective of liberal theologians (and an admonition to us all about the implications of the Resurrection) given by N.T. Wright in an interview with Christianity Today I came across today. It would be hard to say it any better than this:

Why do you say that the doctrine of the resurrection is politically revolutionary?

Liberals like Crossan seem to imagine that bodily resurrection is just a way of saying the present world is irrelevant and what matters is the future postmortem existence. Like Marx, they think that if you tell people that all is going to be right in some future life, they won't worry about their social and political disquiet in the present.

Clearly, in the 1st century and in the 21st, that is not so. The reason the Sadducees opposed the doctrine of resurrection was not primarily philosophical, but because they knew that people who believed this kind of thing were likely to be much more vigorous in their pursuit of upending the social order and trying to redress injustice than people who didn't.

If you believe in resurrection, you believe that the living God will put his world to rights and that if God wants to do that in the future, it is right to try to anticipate that by whatever means in the present. It is your job as a Christian, in the power of the Spirit, to anticipate that glorious final state as much as you possibly can in the present. Live now by the power that is coming to you from the future, by the Spirit. And in the same way, live socially and politically because God is going to put the world to rights. That's the great theme of justice in new creation. It is up to us to produce signs of resurrection in the present social, cultural, and political world.

Because resurrection is a creation-affirming doctrine, it also goes with the desire to change injustice in the present. That's why I love the epigraph at the beginning of the book's final part—a quote from Oscar Wilde's play Salome, where Herod hears about Jesus raising the dead and says, "I forbid him to raise the dead. This man must be found and told I don't allow people to raise the dead."

Herod knows, as all tyrants know, that if somebody is going about raising the dead, then their power has met a greater power.

I also apply this culturally: within the Enlightenment world of the last two centuries (as represented not least by liberal theology), we see a horror of any idea that God might actually act in the world. People produce fancy-sounding reasons for this, as though it would be quite wrong for God to step in and raise one person from the dead. Why didn't he step in and stop the Holocaust? And so on. But in fact the whole Enlightenment project is at risk. They want God banished upstairs so they can get on with running the world downstairs.

But with the resurrection, we have God saying, "No, I want to put things downstairs to rights, thank you very much. I started doing it with Jesus and you'd better get in line." That's a shock to liberal theology, just like it's a shock to all kinds of other tyrannies—and liberal theology has become its own sort of tyranny.