Evangelicals: Tending the Flock — (Pt. 1) Bill Hybels on Willow Creek at 30

This month, Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington celebrates its 30th anniversary. For more than a generation, it has ranked among the fastest-growing, most influential churches in the United States. Its senior pastor, Bill Hybels, is seen as one of the architects of modern evangelicalism.

Nondenominational Willow Creek, with its movie-theater-style multimedia sanctuaries, contemporary music, plays, dozens of ministries, and laid-back, welcoming attitude, attracts 20,000 worshippers on weekends, introduced the term “seeker-friendly” into our religious lexicon, and created a model of “doing church” that has been copied in thousands of congregations across the nation and around the globe.

Hybels, 53, seems genuinely awed by the success of the ministry he started when he was in his early 20s and which continues to grow as it enters its fourth decade of spreading the Gospel.

Q. When you first had the idea for Willow Creek, what did you envision?

A. As a new and different way to do church, because I barely survived the church I grew up in. Not because I wasn’t sensitive to things of God, it’s just the structure of the church and the way church was done was very difficult for me to relate to.

So when I started to imagine how church could be done differently, that was a very exciting thought. I gathered some friends around me and we sort of brainstormed, and said, “What could church look like if we tried to make it relevant to our day?”

We thought about it from the moment people arrived in the parking lot: What would they experience when they came in? . . . How would they be greeted and shown hospitality? How would the room be lit? How would things up front look? What would the music be like? What would the service flow be like?

What would it be like if we unleashed the arts and used drama and video and dance and media and poetry? What would it be like if sermons were relevant to everyday life? Uncompromisingly biblical but intentionally practical, useful for everyday life? And with not a whole lot more in mind than just that —

Q. Well, that’s a lot.

A. Those were just broad ideas and we thought, well . . . we’ll see where it goes from there. We really didn’t have a plan beyond trying to do relevant services. And then, once people responded to those services, then we really had to say, “Well, what are we going to do with an internal structure? How are we going to develop people?” And we’ve spent 30 years working on that.

Q. Did you imagine that Willow Creek would be what it is today?

A. “Truthfully, we were seven days away from extinction every week for five years. There were so many times when we said, “Well, this is probably going to be the last service we’re ever going to be able to do.” So in terms of having grandiose thoughts of how this would develop, it was blocking and tackling and trying to survive week after week after week.

Virtually every day that I drive on our campus I think, “Who would have ever thought?”

Q. Is today’s most pressing spiritual need the same as it was 30 years ago?

A. No. Thirty years ago, we argued about what was true. Was there physical evidence for the resurrection of Christ? Or whether or not there was reason to believe the Bible is a valid truth source –there was arguing about what is true. These days people seem to be asking, what’s real? What’s powerful in my life? What will work? Because the alternatives to religion are getting exposed for what they really are, which is certainly less than the real thing.

There’s an escalating hunger for that which is real and powerful and transforming.

Q. So the search has shifted from the head to the heart?

A. Absolutely. I am so convinced of the biblical truth of Christianity, and convinced of its power, that when people feel its power, they will eventually be convinced of its truth. So, I really don’t spend any sleepless nights wondering if someone powerfully touched by Jesus Christ is going to wind up with their head on straight about the absolute truths associated with it. I believe they will.

Twenty-five years ago or so — in that era, when Easter came around . . . people came [to church] and said, “Do you expect me to believe that a 33-year-old carpenter who was killed came back to life? Persuade me. Convince me. Show me your evidence.” And if I delivered on that, hundreds of people were affected enough to continue to investigate Christianity.

Now people come on Easter Sunday and they’re hoping against hope that something will touch them deeply, and they’re wide open to whatever it is. They’re just hoping this [world] is not all there is. Because if this is all there is, then that just leads to despair.

WILLOW CREEK COMMUNITY CHURCH

1975

It all started with a youth group at South Park Church in Park Ridge, where attendance at services that combined contemporary music, drama and Bible teaching swelled from a handful of teenagers to 1,000 a night. One youth leader, a recent college grad named Bill Hybels, branched out with a few colleagues to start a new congregation. They held their first service in a rented Palatine movie theater — the Willow Creek — on Oct. 12, 1975. Attendance that first Sunday was 125. It dropped in half the following week, but eventually rebounded. By 1977, weekly attendance was 2,000, and the congregation bought 90 acres of farmland in South Barrington.

2005

The church now occupies multiple state-of-the-art buildings on 155 rolling acres along Algonquin Road and has satellite campuses in Wheaton, McHenry County, the North Shore, and its newest congregation in Chicago. About a dozen services at Willow Creek’s five campuses draw more than 20,000 worshippers each weekend. And the Willow Creek Association, launched in 1992 as a network of “like-minded, action-oriented churches” has more than 11,500 member churches in a dozen countries.