I lived in Chicago during the year 1991. One Sunday morning I happened to attend a large, very popular, and contemporary church called Willow Creek. Since then the size of the church and its ministry outreach has grown by leaps and bounds.
However, I was not particularly found of my experience on that warm Sunday morning in 1991. I remember there some sort of rope ladder on stage and the pastor used it to communicate a very basic message of salvation of some sort. I got nothing from the presentation. My father, who went with me, still remarks to this day about how so many were wearing shorts to church and how it felt like going to a rock concert.
Disclaimer: I do not think my dad has ever been to a rock concert. He was born in 1940 and thus in that old generation.
But I remember it was the definition of seeker sensitive and even then (pre-seminary days) knew it was not how church should be done. Well it seems maybe Willow Creek agrees with me now.
Bill Hybels stated in a recent article by Christianity Today:
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.
It seems they recently did a qualitative study of their church and its ministries and unfortunately it did not produce positive results. However the quote above and this next one gives me some reason to have hope that Hybels and Willow Creek might turn things around.
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.
Hopefully they will not put more and more millions into the next new thing instead of thinking about the older and cheaper things the church used to do. (i.e. liturgy, spiritual direction, expository preaching) But I am not 100% sure that they will not just go down the same path with now new and improved model that will unfortunately try and change all that wrong and right in Church's today.
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.
One can read the full article here: http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2007/10/willow_creek_re.html
Check out the videos offered on the link above also.
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