Willow Creek: "We made a mistake."

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9924531.post-13996584167913030002007-10-18T11:32:00.000-05:002007-10-18T12:15:14.534-05:002007-10-18T12:15:14.534-05:00Willow Creek: "We made a mistake."There is <a href="http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2007/10/willow_creek_re.html">an interesting article on Out of Ur</a> (the Christianity Today hosted blog with contributors from Leadership Journal) about Willow Creek and something called <a href="http://revealnow.com/index.asp">REVEAL</a>. Apparently, there was a survey they did at Willow over the last year or so...and the results showed that all the money in the world and high levels of participation in church simply weren't making a difference in spiritual growth. Very revealing... From the article: 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: <blockquote style="font-style: italic;">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.</blockquote> 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: <blockquote style="font-style: italic;">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.</blockquote> 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.Interesting...but not terribly surprising. tentpeghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11567686834716579572noreply@blogger.com