We Were All Willow Creek, Once

In 2007, Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago made a rather stunning admission. Its church model, influenced by practices in the business world, defined spiritual maturity as participation in programs. And programs had abounded. Membership had grown phenomenally. Local church leaders from around the country flocked to its training programs and implemented their own versions of Willow Creek.

At the church we were then attending in St. Louis, we had witnessed – and experienced – the implementation of the Willow Creek model. Programs proliferated. Ministries were made over. Studies of books of the Bible were replaced by studies of The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkinson and Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. Some ministries, successful and needed ones like the prayer ministry, were eliminated.

At congregational meetings, when asked if the church was aiming to become a Willow Creek, the elders would deny it. Over successive meetings, the questions became confrontations. The elders would deny it, often heatedly. And they would continue to send staff to Willow Creek seminars and training programs, and invite the congregation to Willow Creek video training programs.

I was asked to be a member of the elder board on the basis of my experience in corporate communications. I declined, pointing out that it wasn’t one of the qualifications listed in 1 Timothy.

We stayed at the church longer than we should have. I kept holding on and praying for change. It only got worse. Ultimately, the church lost a huge percentage of its members, hit financial difficulties, and laid off numerous staff members.

And then came the 2007 statement by Willow Creek. They had been wrong. The model had been wrong. Programs and participation did not result in spiritual maturity. People were not being helped. People were not become more mature and better equipped disciples.

I do have commend Willow Creek for its admission. But for those churches that went chasing the Willow Creek model, and chased it for years, this was a train wreck. We may never fully know the extent of the wreckage, the wreckage in local churches, the wreckage in the church at large, and the wreckage in individual church members and families.

Last week, I began reading Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. I was ten pages into it when I thought the authors were writing about my own experience with churches we’ve attended.

Slow Church is about how churches, and especially if not solely churches in Protestant evangelical America, have been capture by the culture. And it’s about what might be done to find a way back. I won’t call it a recovery program for the Willow Creek problem, but there is at least some truth to that. The book contains so much insight that I plan to write about it here for several Mondays to come.

I wish the authors had written Slow Church a decade ago. It explains much.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

WWJD – and the “J” is Jack

I've read Fast Company magazine for close to a decade. I like its approach to talking about business, and the editors’ slightly but not overly edgy approach in describing the new economy or new technologies or people (and the people are usually different from the ones who find in Fortune and Forbes).  The articles lean to the counter-intuitive, pointing to innovators and entrepreneurs who often see opportunities where most people see nothing.

In December, 2010, the magazine had feature stories on the chaos in the advertising industry, Gov 2.0 promoting civic engagement at the local political level, how games are becoming common in our work and life in general – and a story entitled “What Would Jack Do,” with the Jack in the question being Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric.

It turns out that Welch, business guru James Collins, Colin Powell and other business, government, cultural and religious leaders routinely speak at annual Global Leadership Summits at Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago, attended in person by 7,000 pastors and church leaders and viewed via satellite by 62,000 people in the U.S. and Canada, and later by videotape by 65,000 more worldwide. The goal is leadership training, absorbing lessons taught by business leaders as well as well known speakers from Christian and other religions.

The idea that the church can learn better leadership skills from business is not new, and Willow Creek hasn’t been the only proponent. The church has been hosting these summits since 1995, and there were numerous consultants and conferences before and since. For more than two decades, the language and practices of business have been absorbed by scores of churches in North America and elsewhere.

As business people (and the rest of us) are fond of saying, you can’t argue with success. Churches – especially large and so-called “mega-“ churches, have employed the lessons of business – strategic planning, vision, mission statements, management, leadership training, and long-term plans.

I don’t argue with the success of using these ideas to maintain and grow large institutions and organizations. But I do have to ask how this changes our biblical understanding of the church.

I've worked in corporate America for almost 37 years, in communication jobs – employee communications, community relations, issues management, media relations, executive speechwriting – that placed me almost at the center of what business leadership is about. The lessons of leadership clearly apply to business. They can apply, in a modified way, to academia and non-profit organizations like foundations and charities.

But the lessons of leadership are largely about the preservation and growth of organizations, like companies, universities, and the United Way. They’re not about spreading the gospel message or making disciples. (To its credit, some years back Willow Creek publicly acknowledged that it had fallen short in the making of disciples – helping people growth in their faith. It had been much more about attracting “seekers.”)

The lessons of corporate leadership do not come free of charge. They carry certain baggage, certain assumptions. Business people are familiar and comfortable with these assumptions, because this is what they know. Assumptions include: 

• The utilitarian purpose of all resources –all are to be used, and even overused if considered replaceable, and, if necessary, jettisoned, for the good of the enterprise. 
• The structures of governance – like the board of directors, executive teams, chief executive officers and administrators. 
• The predominance of one stakeholder group, perhaps two; it’s usually investors for publicly held companies. 
• An emphasis upon performance standards, and particular in the area of what sells. 
• And measurement – quantifiable, explainable, understandable numbers.

The language and teachings of business are impregnated with these things. They form a kind of structure or business rhetoric for the specific “message” or content, and in so doing they shape both the message and its results. Embrace the teachings of business for a non-business enterprise, and you embrace all the assumptions that come with them.

Years back, I attended a church that was trying very hard to embrace the Willow Creek model. For me, going to church often felt like going to work. At one point, I was asked to stand for the office of elder. And I was told my primary qualification was my background in corporate communications. I said I didn’t recall that qualification from the list in 1 Timothy 3.

I didn’t stand for elder.

We are to be disciples. We are to be salt and light in the community and culture at large.

The process isn’t supposed to work the other way. 

This post was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but they revamped the site and the archive disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting a few of the article I wrote.