Willow Repents

While I was in college, I had the opportunity to intern at Willow Creek in Chicago.  It was an unbelievable summer for me.  It was right before my senior year of college and the opportunity to spend 3 months at the most influential church in America, possibly the world was more than I could ask for.  On top of that, I got engaged to an incredibly beautiful girl at a beautiful sunset on the shore of Lake Michigan.  Don’t know how I fooled her, but…

This past year, Willow Creek did a study that has just been released in the book Reveal.  Basically, they determined that the millions of dollars they spent on programs and staff might not have been the way to go.  Instead, they should have spent more time teaching people on spiritual practices like prayer, scripture reading and community. 

At last year’s Leadership Summit Bill Hybels, founding pastor said:

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…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.

You can watch Greg Hawkins, Executive Pastor of Willow talk more about it here and some more thoughts from Hybels here.  Definitely worth watching. 

This past year I read the book Simple Church which you can read my thoughts here.  We have decided at Beginnings to be simple.  To do a few things well and instead of a lot of things halfway.  What is interesting is that when you get to the foundation of being church and doing what church is supposed to do instead of what people expect, you can find yourself in some really healthy places.