Renovation of the Church E-Book

Kent Carlson

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 298

Beschreibung

Christianity Today Book Award winner Leadership Journal Top Book of the Year Copastors Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken tell the story of how God took their thriving, consumer-oriented church and transformed it into a modest congregation of unformed believers committed to the growth of the spirit--even when it meant a decline in numbers. As Kent and Mike found out, a decade of major change is not easy on a church. Oak Hills Church, from the pastoral staff to the congregation, had to confront addiction to personal ambition, resist consumerism and reorient their lives around the teachings of Jesus. Their renewed focus on spiritual formation over numerical growth triggered major changes in the content of their sermons, the tenor of their worship services, and the reason for their outreach. They lost members. But the health and spiritual depth of their church today is a testimony of God's transforming work and enduring faithfulness to the people he loves. Honest and humble, this is Kent and Mike's story of a church they love, written to inspire and challenge other churches to let God rewrite their stories as well. Read it for the church you love.

Leseprobe

Renovation of the Church

What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation

Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken

Foreword by Dallas Willard

www.IVPress.com/ books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2011 by Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International VersionTM Copyright © 2001 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Parts of chapter six, “Setting Aside Ambition,” first appeared as “Pastoral Ambition: Does Success Chip Away at Our Souls?” Out of Ur, October 3, 2006  www.outofur.com/archives/2006/10/pastoral_ambiti.html#more. Used by permission.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: pomegranate: Jonathan Kantor/Getty Imagespomegranates: Joe Clark/Getty Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-6858-2 - (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3546-1 (print)

To our wives:

Diane and Julie

Our journey at Oak Hills has been carried lovingly in your hearts, and we are deeply grateful for your constant and unwavering belief and support

Contents

Foreword by Dallas Willard

Introduction

1: The Creation of the Monster

2: Deciding to Change

3: The Keys to Transition

4: Rethinking the Gospel

5: Consumerism

6: Setting Aside Ambition

7: Co-pastoring

8: Understanding the Church

9: Spiritual Formation

10: Outreach

11: Worship

12: Mistakes

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Formatio

About the Authors

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Endorsements

Foreword

How do we present the radical message of Christ in a church that has catered to the religious demands of the nominally committed? In other words, if we have gathered people into congregations by appeasing their appetites and desires, how can we help them deal with the fact that their problems in life and character—even “in church”—are primarily caused by living to get what they want? How can the cross and self-denial become the central fact in a prosperous, consumer culture? How can discipleship to Jesus—in a sense recognizable from the Bible, with the spiritual transformation it brings—be the mode of operation in a thriving North American congregation?

Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken, pastors of Oak Hills Church near Sacramento, California, answer this question—the single most important question in the church culture of North America today. They do that by telling the story of how they interacted with God, along with loving and courageous members of their congregation, to actually do it. It is first of all a story of how they personally came to grips with the dynamics of a large “attractional” congregation widely viewed as very successful. They found that “we [in the dominant form of church life today] have trained Christians to be demanding consumers, not disciples.” “It was this issue of consumerism that brought the conflicting values of external success and authentic spiritual formation into such sharp contrast.”

But the dynamics of outward success in a church are rooted in the motivational forces of the pastors and leaders. These have to change before anything else does. The pastors must themselves become disciples (in the New Testament sense), genuinely becoming in their concrete existence, their life and relationships, what we see repeatedly depicted in well-known biblical passages. It is personal ambition that drives the machinery of “success” in the church context, which is what comes out in the many dimensions of character failure that now are all too familiar. Often church members are caught up in their desire to be associated with a “successful” church. Among the treas-ures expressed in this book is, “Christian leaders are more ready to be candid about sexual lust than ambition.” But lust fulfilled is only one dimension of the deeper drive to have my way. The deeper root of consumerism in the church context is sensuality.

When that root has been cut in the individual life, then genuine ambition for God, and pride in the cross, can flourish (Galatians 6:14). The power of God can then flow through transformed character into a world desperate for it. Success is redefined by the spread of kingdom presence throughout the community. Church growth is not just more Christians but bigger Christians, flush with Christ’s character.

The co-pastors of Oak Hills Church came to know this through their own personal growth together—often in the travail and tumult of congregational processes and the pain of radical authenticity between them. They came very practically to know and to rest in what it means for Christ to be in charge—not abstractly and in theory, but concretely, with real people and events, “warts and all.” Another amazing insight is that “it is spiritually formative to be dissatisfied and unable to resolve it.” That is the prime location of faith and grace, building character.

The authors came to grips with major issues for practice—for what we actually must do if we intend to make the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20 into the mission statement of our group. First, we must intend to do that, and must lead our people into that intention. And our central message—our “gospel”—must be one that has a natural tendency to produce disciples of Jesus, not just avid consumers of religious goods and services. Disciples are self-starters in kingdom living, on the road with Jesus day in and day out. The gospel of life now in the present kingdom of the heavens (Matthew 4:17) will produce disciples. And then we organize our “meetings,” of whatever kind, around that intention and that message. We set the meetings up in a way that intelligently develops disciples and fosters their progressive transformation into Christlikeness from the inside. Careful attention to the Spirit, the Bible and how experience actually moves in individuals and groups will enable us to do this. It has been done repeatedly in Christian history, and can be done now. Outwardly, in fact, our operation may not look much different than it does now. But its content, its goal and its outcome will most assuredly bring the people involved into a path of contemporary holiness that looks at Matthew 5–7, 1 Corinthians 13 and Colossians 3:1-17, and says: “Of course. That’s us.” Grace with training in fellowship will bring us there.

The authors would be the first to tell us that they have not “arrived” or have it all worked out. Indeed, as they clearly indicate, it just is not that kind of thing. But they understand the glory and goodness of Paul’s practice: “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). They know this is not inspirational verbiage or only for spiritual oddities, but a statement of realism for church life. Anyone can carry this out, because God certainly will enable those who intend it. They will learn how as they go, because they have a Teacher who is faithful. Who is “with you always.” Really.

Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken love the church—not an abstract one but the one that meets here and there, down on the corner or in a warehouse. They love their church. They know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the church—those that meet—which discipleship and intelligent intention toward Christlikeness cannot more than fix. Anyone who is concerned to break the grip of un-Christlike Christianity on the church visible today, or on themselves, has only to “follow their example as they follow Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 11:1). Please read this book and creatively apply it to your situation, with the Teacher beside you. You don’t need more money or new facilities. Just begin where you are and all else will take care of itself. No, God will take care of it.

Dallas Willard

Introduction

KENT CARLSON

“Hi there. We’re new to the area, and we’re looking for a new church home. We found your website and were wondering if you could answer a few questions about your church.” On the surface this begins a conversation repeated countless times every week in the religious life of North America. This family has a decision to make, and they are trying to make it in the only way they know how. They have a list of wants and desires that they hope a church can fulfill, and they are doing some comparison shopping. Out of the various churches in the area, they are trying to find the one that most closely aligns with them.

It’s a big deal for a family to find a church. It can be an unsettling time. The reasons for looking for a new church home varies from person to person. This may be a new beginning for them, and they may want to get involved in a church for the first time, perhaps in decades. They may be looking for a church that is similar to the one they came from. On the other hand, they may be coming out of a difficult church situation and are looking for one that is opposite of the church they left. They may be wondering if our church has a denominational affiliation or what style of worship we have. They may be interested in our youth or our children’s ministry. Their priorities may be doctrinal, political or simply practical (“Do you have an early service, because we like to take our boat out on the lake on Sundays?”). And sometimes they want to find out, although it is unlikely they will say it this way, if they can meet God here.

Underneath it all, though, there is something going on that makes all this rather complicated and messy, and, from our perspective, exposes some core difficulties about church life today. This family innocently approaches our church as consumers, and I, in turn, respond as a provider of religious goods. It is my job to present our various “products” in such a way that this family will be inclined to choose us over the religious offerings of the other churches in town. There is a weirdness to this. I’ve never gotten used to it. I know it is the way the game is played, and I have no ideal alternative as to how it might be played differently, but I can’t help but feel that there is something fundamentally flawed about the whole thing.

Eventually, someone looking for a church home will ask some variation of this question: “So, what kind of church are you?” Such an easy question to ask, but I don’t think it is a very easy question to answer. I don’t know how to describe a church in a short telephone conversation. Actually, I don’t think I know how to describe almost anything of substance in a short telephone conversation. It’s like someone asking me, “What kind of a family do you have?” How would I answer that? Would I talk about the house we live in, the cars we drive, the various things we have accomplished, the jobs we have, the investments we have made? I suspect not. I think I would begin by telling some of the stories of our family. I’d talk about some of the big moments, the tragedies, the celebrations, the milestones, the disappointments, the mistakes. I’d also tell some of the hilarious and absurd moments, as well as some of the quiet, poignant moments that can almost capture the heart of my family.

In a sense, that is what Mike and I are trying to do in this book.

The Story of a Church

This book is a story about a church. It is written from the perspective of two pastors who have lived and struggled in the midst of it. We write not as theorists but as practitioners. We are telling this story not as historians but as “evangelists.” We write about good news, wonderful news. We write to inspire. To challenge. Perhaps even to incite a rebellion. We dream of another way of being the church. We dare to hope that this dream captures others as well.

We write for two reasons. First, in spite of wonderful stories of outward success and church growth, we believe that the church in North America is in serious trouble. We know there are voices in the church today who disagree with this assessment. Some even go so far as to point to the rise of the megachurch and other external successes as indicators of a robust Christianity on the move. We respectfully disagree.

If church leaders believe that the church in North America is healthy and is merely experiencing troubles that have typically plagued the church through the centuries, then they will gently tweak existing structures and programs, or perhaps simply add to what is already happening. In other words, if the patient is not sick, nobody will look for a cure. We believe the patient is indeed desperately sick and needs to recover from a religious system that places a premium on outward success. We add our voices to the growing number of those inside and outside the church who are calling for the church to be reformed. We Christian leaders have created the current religious system, or at least have been complicit in its flourishing, and we ought to feel a responsibility for the rather meager and impotent product that has resulted. An important and messy dialogue on these issues is required of us. This book is an attempt to lend our voices to that dialogue.

Yet in no way do we believe that we are getting everything right. Quite to the contrary, we spend many of our days wondering if we are getting anything right. Some days we find ourselves looking at our church as a laboratory, and we’re desperately trying to keep the laboratory open so we can keep the experiments in spiritual formation going. Some days, after another failed experiment leaves us with broken beakers and smudged faces in a smoke-filled room, we try to find the motivation to clean up the place and start over again. This book is not another success story. We’re not convinced we know how to do it. We offer neither a seven-step strategy to reform the church nor five key principles for success. We are simply dissatisfied with the state of the church in North America, repentant over our part in it and determined to find another way. This book is about that journey.

The second reason we are writing this book is less dramatic, but no less important for us: we hope this story will benefit the people of Oak Hills Church. When we unplugged from the high-octane, entrepreneurial, pragmatic, success-driven, attractional model of church growth, our church was plunged into a decade-long roller-coaster ride of excessive (at times) introspection, organizational upheaval, uncertainty, plummeting attendance and fractured relationships. Sadly, a certain percentage of this was due to our own mistakes and internal and philosophical angst. We struggled with how to restructure the DNA of our church without ruining the church in the proc-ess. It has been a costly journey. Well over a thousand people left our church for other churches in the area. Many of those people had poured years of work and resources into the ministry. It hurt to lose them. We know it harmed many of them as well.

The larger story though, and the one we want to emphasize here, is that many stayed and struggled with us. Many others joined us in the midst of this story. Others, wonderfully, have returned. We are thankful for all of them. We continue to dream together of doing church another way. In good times and bad, through seasons of confusion and clarity, hundreds of people have refused to give up and have demonstrated in countless ways their support, trust and belief that God was and is up to something. They have embraced the Benedictine vow of stability. They have pushed back at the cultural norm of viewing the church as consumers, a place to get their spiritual needs met. Their loyalty and long obedience in the same direction is a constant source of encouragement and a powerful motivator to stay faithful to our calling as pastors. We are extremely grateful for them. This story is largely their story, and we wanted to write it so that they would know the story and understand their place in it.

The Shape of the Book

The first three chapters of this book comprise a quick overview of the story of our church. This story is told with an emphasis on explaining the tumultuous transition that began around the year 2000. In truth, there is nothing that fascinating, or at least unique, about our church before this. We were riding the same religious and cultural wave that brought relative outward success to thousands of suburban churches during that time. But our story since then has been somewhat unique, and while it is still fresh in our minds, we want to tell it.

The greater portion of this book, though, is an attempt to take some of the larger, overarching themes and “learnings” we have stumbled upon and flesh them out in greater detail. Some of these themes overwhelmed us like flashes of lightening. Other themes snuck up on us gradually, and only after the fact, upon careful reflection, have we noticed their power and influence on us. Regardless, these have become some of the core values that brought about and shaped our church in the past decade. While this section of the book will be more objective and propositional, we hope you will be able to see the intricate connection these themes have with our story.

There is something else you should know. Relentless authenticity is a huge value at Oak Hills. We are aware that this does not make us at all unique. In fact, you would have to search pretty diligently to find a church that didn’t say it values authenticity these days. Yet we believe it is common for people to be more drawn to the concept of authenticity than the thing itself. There remain many in our world who do not enjoy being confronted with the raw truth about themselves or others. Many of us enjoy our truth in neat and tidy packages that do not disturb us too greatly. For good or for bad, our story is neither neat nor tidy, and it would not be in keeping with who we are to pretty it up or put an overly polite or religious veneer on it.

Mike and I are pastors. We tenaciously believe in the church. Even in our most cynical and despairing days we still had this sense that the church is the bride of Christ and is therefore precious to him. Even when we wanted to quit and be butchers, or spend our days in the bleachers of Wrigley Field, or do almost anything other than work in a church, we found that we could not walk away from Christ’s bride. In many ways this book is our attempt to express our stubborn love for the church in general and Oak Hills Church specifically.

1 The Creation of the Monster

KENT CARLSON

Oak Hills Church began with seventeen people on a Sunday morning in November 1984. We had rented space in a strip mall in the heart of the quickly growing but still quaint little suburb known as Folsom. For a number of weeks I walked Folsom’s streets, going door to door, inviting people to this brand new church. I hated it. I can’t think of a person who came to our church because of all that door knocking. But it was all I knew how to do. Finally, a number of young families from another church visited us, and we began to grow slowly from there.

Almost everyone in the church joined a small group of some kind. Whenever we had a party or some sort of an event, almost everybody attended, and there was a sense throughout the church that something very good was happening. I had no particular philosophy of church planting, an intentional strategy of outreach or even a well-developed theology of the church. I just had a rather vague interest in leading a community of people who wanted to learn how to follow Christ together and live fully. Those were very enjoyable and deeply rewarding days.

We were young and everyone shouldered the responsibility of leading. The leadership team of this small church met every week for four hours. We went on two leadership retreats a year. We had regular poker and cigar nights. We all played on a softball team together. We took vacations together. We simply enjoyed hanging out with each other. And the church grew slowly.

By 1990 there were close to two hundred people coming to Oak Hills, but there was a sense among the church leadership that something was not quite right. Most of the people in our church had come from other churches. This was not bad in itself because the majority of them had recently moved into the area. But we had not seen many new believers become a part of our church. Like most churches, one of our stated purposes, one of the reasons we existed, was to reach people who were outside the family of God. We simply admitted to ourselves that we were doing a lousy job of this.

The Willow Creek Experience

While we were discussing all of this, the phenomenon of Willow Creek Community Church, in South Barrington, Illinois, was bursting on the church-growth scene. Willow Creek had spent the 1980s orienting its church around reaching nonchurched people by the thousands through their seeker-targeted services, and the world was taking notice. I had a very good friend who was intimately involved with Willow, and he kept telling me I had to come to one of Willow’s church leadership conferences. So in October 1990, seven us from Oak Hills (affectionately referred to in Oak Hills Church lore as the Chicago Seven) hopped on a plane and spent a week at Willow.

We sat through four days of one of the most inspiring events I had ever attended. We were in awe of the facilities, the professionalism, the music, the dramatic sketches, the multimedia, the messages and the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. But there was a moment at one of the sessions that remains the most memorable for me. Bill Hybels, the founding pastor and visionary architect of the Willow movement, was speaking. His message was simple, believable, convicting and highly motivating. He asked a very straightforward question: “If lost people matter to God, then why don’t they matter to you?”

I can still remember the moment when Hybels said those words. I was leaning forward on the edge of my seat with my head in my hands and tears in my eyes. I remember vowing at that moment that if God allowed me to remain as the pastor of Oak Hills, I would do everything in my power to reorient our church around reaching lost people. And then I just raised my head an inch or so and looked down the row at my six friends, and each was sitting in the same way, edge of the seat, leaning forward, head in their hands. We caught each other’s eyes and knew that something had happened. We got it. We were hooked. As we gathered in the evening in our hotel, we made plans, we prayed, we dreamed, and we began to prepare ourselves for the adventure ahead.

Bringing Willow Creek to Folsom

Since 1988 our church had been meeting on Sunday afternoons at another local church. It was the only place large enough in Folsom that we could afford. We knew that Sunday afternoons were less than ideal to begin new seeker-targeted services, so we decided to begin a Saturday night service. These began in the spring of 1991, and those were wonderful and exciting days.

One of my many failed majors in college was theater, so the production and performance aspect of the Willow model was great fun for me. It was right in my sweet spot. Every week we had the challenge of putting together and performing an hour-long theatrical production. We had great music, intriguing dramatic sketches, engaging testimonies and sermons that—as it often said in our brochures and periodic community postcards—wouldn’t put you to sleep. We came up with a slogan that became a byline in almost every piece of literature we published: Oak Hills Church—You’ll Be Surprised!

For the first time in our church’s history we had a philosophy of outreach that was both intentional and effective. This was part of the pragmatic genius of the Willow model in those days. (Willow has significantly altered this model in the last few years.) Every weekend there is a service where people can bring their nonchurched friends. This service is carefully evaluated on how it will be received or experienced by the nonchurched people attending. Much time, energy and passion is given to this service by staff and laity. Thus a very clear message is delivered to everyone that this church cares about reaching nonchurched people. The idea is to take the most conven-ient time in the week, Sunday morning, and dedicate it not to churched people but to the nonchurched. All the people of the church are then invited to come to a midweek service, known as New Community, where the believers worship together, celebrate what God has done, learn from God’s Word and remind each other of our responsibility to reach the lost.

We bought into this philosophy of how to do church with total and almost reckless abandon. People began to invite their nonchurched friends. Seekers came to our church and subsequently brought their own seeker friends. We blanketed the area with postcards advertising the various sermon series we were presenting. As Willow would describe it in those days, we were seeking to create a safe place for people to hear a dangerous message. And we were doing all this in a less than ideal setting. We still weren’t able to meet on Sunday mornings, and we met in a very churchy sanctuary without theatrical lighting. But we knew this would soon be different.

We were finally able to purchase a piece of undeveloped property in the middle of town and worked feverishly to remodel twelve modular units (trailers is the less gracious term). We created a large-group meeting space by putting six modular units together, which allowed us to squeeze in about 350 people at a time. We outfitted this little catacomb-like auditorium with state-of-the-art sound, lighting and video. Finally, we could begin to deliver the performance excellence that we dreamed of. The other modular units became our office space and children’s classrooms. It certainly wasn’t Willow-like in its outward appearance, but it was, at least, our own space, and we could finally meet on Sunday mornings.

We moved into our new location in 1994 and immediately switched our Sunday afternoon service to Thursday night, calling it, predictably, New Community. We moved our Saturday night service to Sunday morning. Our very first Sunday morning we had about four hundred new people attend, and growth just kept climbing after that.

Within a couple of years we had one thousand people coming to Oak Hills, which obviously isn’t that many people in the megachurch world, but in our little pond it was impressive. It certainly overwhelmed us. A good number of people who had been attending on Sunday afternoon, but not Saturday night, never quite made the transition with us. It was fine for us to have this seeker service as one of the many things we did as a church, but it was difficult for them when the seeker service became the central focus of the weekend. Still, with hundreds of new people coming, the loss of these old “Oak Hillians” was just part of the price of reaching nonchurched people. We missed them, but we hardly had time to think about it.

I remember being excited and bewildered during those days. In becoming a pastor, I had never thought that much about outward success. I just liked the idea of being a pastor and living in community with people I loved. But this was something I had never anticipated. It was exhilarating and intoxicating. We would finish a service and there would be a long line of people waiting to talk with me. People who wanted to confess sin and who were wondering if God could make a difference in their life. They had just sat through a sixty-five-minute service that was fast-paced, well put together, interesting, compelling, funny, informative, entertaining and emotionally stimulating, and many wanted to see how they could know this God we were talking about.

I remember one such moment with great clarity. I had just finished talking and praying with a long line of people after one of our better conceived and more powerfully performed services, and I went over and plopped down next to our creative arts pastor, Manuel Luz. Manuel was directly responsible for everything that happened in our seeker services and New Community. We knew we had done a very good job that day. From a performance perspective, we had put together a first-rate product. The artistic elements were very compelling and technically excellent. There were times when people were laughing uproariously and others when they were wiping away tears. (“Make them laugh and make them cry”—in some seeker-church circles this is known as the Disney formula.) After settling into the chair next to Manuel, I sighed and said, “Wow!” And with uncharacteristic dark irony Manuel said, “You know, we don’t even need God to do this.”

Of course both of us knew he was speaking facetiously. Of course we knew that our stated purpose was for building God’s kingdom, not our own. And both of us knew that Scripture clearly teaches that without Christ we can do nothing. But we also knew that we had carefully planned that service for exactly the result we had achieved and that we were getting quite good at it. But the fact that I remember this two-minute conversation some fifteen or so years later demonstrates that it conveyed an element of truth. I believe it scared me. But the monster had now been created, and it demanded to be fed.

The decade of the 1990s was a time of great growth and excitement in our church. Our regular weekend attendance hit as high as seventeen hundred people. In our little community that was a pretty impressive thing. It was an invigorating time. New Community was the highlight of every week. Almost four hundred people would come every Thursday night, and we would constantly remind ourselves, as Bill Hybels would say in those days, that the church is the hope of the world. As people were making decisions to become followers of Christ, we felt that we were a part of something very big. Our increasing attendance only served to reinforce the belief that God was up to something and that he was using us to further his work in this world.

In 1997 Mike Lueken joined the staff of Oak Hills. Using the language that was in vogue at that time, he became our pastor of spiritual formation. His job was to give his attention to the back half of our mission statement. Ripping off Willow’s well-known mission statement, we were seeking to “turn nonchurched people into a community of fully devoted followers of Christ.” Mike was to help all these new people making commitments to Christ to become fully devoted followers of Christ.

During those years we made yearly pilgrimages to Willow for their Church Leadership Conference and the Leadership Summit. We would take dozens of people with us every time. We found that these Willow junkets were the most effective way of infusing new people with the fervor and genius of the Willow model. We believed that we had indeed reoriented our entire church around reaching nonchurched people. We had, in many ways, accomplished what we set out to do.

It was also, speaking candidly, a pretty heady time for me personally. The rapid growth of our church caused us to be noticed in our area. Somehow Willow found out about us as well. As a result, on several occasions I was invited to meet with a very small group of pastors from around the country who had the privilege of spending a few days with Bill Hybels. In a very freewheeling and intimate atmosphere, we listened to him talk about the challenges of leading a large and growing church. This information and training were a tremendous help with the leadership challenges I was facing. In addition, and I say this with some embarrassment, the fact that I was recognized, at least to some degree, as an up-and-coming leader in the seeker- targeted movement filled me with a sense of inflated importance.

In Defense of Willow Creek

Since this book is, obviously, a very unapologetic critique of the church in North America today, it is crucial for me to make some clarifying comments about Willow Creek’s influence on Oak Hills and on me personally. Since our church’s story during the 1990s is intimately tied to the influence of Willow Creek, it may seem that our critique is aimed particularly at Willow. This is simply not true. Our concern is more specifically with the larger church culture in North America, which has a very limited understanding of the gospel of the kingdom of God and an unhealthy focus on outward success. This church culture has reproduced deeply conflicting values in millions of Christians.

We paint here, admittedly, with a very broad stroke. We don’t take issue with Willow Creek specifically but with the inherent biblical and formational defects in the broader North American church culture and the large entrepreneurial churches in our country. A pervasive focus in the religious culture throughout North America is that success lies in attracting people, churched and nonchurched, to their particular church organization. This attractional model, we believe, is fundamentally flawed and will not be able to produce in any significant way the kind of Christ followers church leaders want to produce.

The more personal truth for me, though, is that I would not be half the leader I am today without the influence of the ministry of Willow Creek. I cannot think of a church in North America today that has been more influential in challenging churches all across the world to be more intentional in reaching the nonchurched. It is always easy to throw stones at those who are out in front. And Willow has always been out in front.

I have never attended a conference at Willow where I have not been deeply moved and motivated to follow God in more radical and sacrificial ways. Bill Hybels’s inspiring and visionary perspective on our life with God and our calling to serve this world with abandon is powerful. In addition, it would be a mistake to understand Willow as representing a stagnant or unchanging view of the church. Willow has always been willing to engage in authentic evaluations of their own ministry. They exhibit a humble introspection and openness to criticism that is developed only among people more committed to the cause of Christ than to their own success. Their recent groundbreaking research on spiritual maturity in their church through the Reveal study is one of many examples of this.