Willow Creek Repents

How long will it take to awaken our leadership and their Laodicean followers?

How many times will we continue following one apostate motivator after another?

The result is always predictable: Frustrated, unfulfilled people, overcome with emotional fallout.

When programs are organized outside of TRUTH, it ends in frustration and a mass exit from the church, not to mention the potential loss of eternal life.

As we get caught up in the mega-church program and the church-planting initiatives presented by the daughters of Babylon, you’ll find that there is no “Truth” to settle into.

“You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free”.

YI, April 22, 1897

       Every child of God needs to have a faith well grounded and settled. What say the Scriptures in regard to this?--"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God."

How long will misguided leadership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church continue looking for numbers through compromise?

As you can see from this article, these programs come and go. They make a big splash and then disappear. Then some more exciting, promising program is introduced that promises success in gaining numbers.

And because they are all based upon error, it becomes an exercise in futility.

Many faithful believers become disappointed and are left trailing in the dust, and oftentimes purposely encouraged to leave the church.

We must pray that our leaders and administrators will fall on their knees and search their hearts before it is forever too late to reform. We must pray that they will follow God’s divine blueprint for His church before the door to the heavenly sanctuary is shut and probation ends.

Bill Hybels realizes that he “..made a mistake..” and that he should have gotten his people to “…read the Bible..” for themselves.

We can introduce all the “hype” we choose, but, bottom line is, Jesus Christ and His plan of salvation as revealed in His most unpopular truths from the Word of God.

As you read the following article from “Christianity Today”, you can see that Bill Hybels, himself, has become frustrated and unfulfilled with the approach of his ministry.

Let us pray that this man will come into a knowledge of, and accept God’s wonderful truths from His Holy Word.

Pastor Dan Shafer

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.