This articles details a seimic shift. Willow Creek Community Church has more attenders on a Sunday morning than the entire Diocese of Chicago and likely any diocese in the United States. Their average Sunday attendance is greater than all the members of the DCNY (even including those dead and still on the books, those who have left for other churches but are still on the books, those who are inactive and still on the books, etc.) ed.
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
By DALE BUSS
June 27, 2008; Page W11
Religion, like marketing, has its funnel. And many evangelical megachurches have spent the past quarter-century focusing on the rim, attempting to get spiritual "seekers" just to sample a service -- and hoping that they will at some point join the faith. These churches have grown by staying away from hard-core biblical teaching and instead have lured the curious with slick multimedia presentations and skits, sermons with the cultural relevance of "Saturday Night Live," and maybe an iced cappuccino for the trip home.
But now the leading exponent of this approach, Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, has plunged its Sunday-morning services much deeper into the faith funnel. More music is provided for worship, not just ambience; and more messages target "mature" believers, not just new ones. One recent sermon challenged listeners to publicly show their commitment as Christians, an appeal that would have seemed strange a year ago. For a business owner, that might mean talking about Christ with employees, it was suggested; for a teenager, it might involve risking status with peers.
"We can start at the top of the hour saying, 'Here's the deal,' and get right at it -- as opposed to having to demonstrate the fact that we're conversant with the culture," explained William Hybels, Willow Creek's founding and senior pastor.
Also now, Sunday-morning visitors are more likely to be greeted than to be allowed to slouch in anonymity. On Memorial Day weekend, for example, Mr. Hybels invited those who were struggling with some life circumstance to stand up where they were. Then believers nearby placed hands on them while Pastor Hybels prayed.
"People exploring Christianity these days want to see authenticity and genuineness in the relationship -- not the boomers' 'leave me alone' thing," said the church's executive pastor, Greg Hawkins, in an interview from his office on Willow Creek's sprawling South Barrington, Ill., campus.
This shift constitutes a megadevelopment in the world of megachurches. For over 30 years, Willow Creek grew explosively thanks to its obliqueness toward Sabbath-day orthodoxy and quickly became the standard-bearer of a powerful new movement in evangelical Christianity. Thousands of churches sprang up in its wake and grew the same way.
But recent market research showed Willow Creek's leadership that some great weaknesses lay beneath the surface even while average weekend attendance had grown to 23,000 people. Too many of their flock, Mr. Hybels and his staff discovered, considered themselves spiritually "stalled" or "dissatisfied" with the role of the church in their spiritual growth, and huge portions of these groups were considering leaving Willow Creek because of it.
And the surveys -- designed pro bono by a McKinsey partner -- showed that believers who reported themselves "close to Christ" or "Christ-centered" were actually better evangelists than the often enthusiastic, but thinly prepared, new faithful.
This week, the church published the second of two books aimed at helping outsiders understand its "spiritual growth conversation." There are lots of interested readers. In Troy, Mich., for example, Woodside Bible Church has burgeoned for 15 years with a straightforward focus on worship and preaching from the Bible -- not the Willow Creek approach. But Doug Schmidt, the senior pastor of the suburban Detroit church, said the revelations of the Willow Creek survey "should cause every single church leader to evaluate our biblical purposes and whether we're accomplishing those."
Elsewhere in Troy, Kensington Community Church doesn't plan to move away from the seeker model even though it surveyed its own members in partnership with Willow Creek. "Our mission is still laser-focused: Reaching people who think God is irrelevant to life," said Kyle Nabors, Kensington's executive director. "Unchurched" fathers remain its priority.
Some of Willow Creek's critics have enjoyed saying "I told you so." But George Barna, one of America's foremost students of evangelicalism, insists it would be a mistake to interpret the church's midcourse correction as a mea culpa. "I greatly admire Willow's willingness to measure aspects of people's spiritual journey rather than mere static measures of behavior," the president of Ventura, Calif.-based Barna Group said. "It is rare to find a church that evaluates real transformation."
Mr. Buss is the author of "Family Man: The Biography of Dr. James Dobson." He is a member of Woodside Bible Church.
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