Saturday, June 20, 1998

Network's management style puts an unlikely mix of congregations on the cutting edge

By Jeffrey Weiss / The Dallas Morning News

BARRINGTON, Ill. -- Willow Creek Community Church found fame more t han 20 years ago by using electric guitars and drama to draw the unchurched to worship. Now what's behind the scenes at the suburban Chicago megachurch -- a leadership style that blends the Bible with cutting-edge management theory -- is lashing together a new kind of church network intent on transforming how congregations work.

Six years ago, the church spun off the Willow Creek Association to teach churches the Willow Creek style and philosophy. Led by a Harvard MBA with a passion for evangelism, the association has gone from 10 charter members to more than 2,500 churches.

At a time when many traditional denominations are fracturing from within, the Willow Creek Association is forging an unlikely unity, tying together churches from more than 70 denominations.

Long-established denominations preserve tradition. By that standard, the Willow Creek Association is almost an anti-denomination -- eager to challenge worship style and church organization in the name of Christian evangelistic effectiveness.

The bottom line is that the Willow Creek philosophy and style cut across a wide spectrum of denominations to help churches grow faster and run better, supporters say. And unlike most other cross-denominational groups, Willow Creek aims only at the most innovative church leaders.

"It showed me what I think an authentic, biblically functioning community ought to look like in the 1990s," said Jeff Warren, a pastor at Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas who came to Chicago this month for a Willow Creek Association Church Leadership Conference.

The impact of Willow Creek's message of leadership is felt in the secular world, too. The nearby Northwestern University management school even takes students to Willow Creek church as a lesson in successful leadership style.

While many modern management gurus preach a similar message of innovation and excellence, few try to inspire followers with the claim that they're backed by the authority of God's own words.

Willow Creek church's senior pastor, Bill Hybels, supports some of his theories of conflict resolution, for instance, with the Gospel of Matthew: "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over."

Both the nondenominational church and the association have their detractors. For years, some have called the church's high-energy services a watered-down Christianity driven more by market research than the Bible. And some are uncomfortable hearing the association's management theory delivered as a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Whatever the source of its guidelines, the association has a record of success. Member churches claim more than 1.2 million members. If it were a denomination, the "Creeker church," as it's known to some, would be a little smaller than the United Church of Christ, the 12th-largest Christian denomination in the United States.

As the association leaders see it, at stake are the immortal souls of millions, even billions of people. Success on that level is measured by transforming stodgy, boring churches into powerful engines of evangelism and Christian community. But success may also affect the secular world.

Creeker hallmarks include an openness to change, a drive to properly identify and use people's talents, a demand for excellence and a process for getting beyond "train wrecks" without embittering relationships. All of which, association leaders say, can be found in the New Testament descriptions of the early church.

The association evangelizes the evangelizers during twice-annual leadership conferences such as the one last month. Some conferences have featured secular management experts such as Ken Blanchard ("The One Minute Manager" and "The Power of Ethical Management") and James Collins ("Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies").

Association leaders draw on research that shows that only 16 percent of people drive most innovations. Getting their message to those kinds of leaders -- the association has a goal of 16,000 members -- will drive the association's ideas into the majority of less innovative churches, said Jim Mellado, the Harvard MBA and graduate of Southern Methodist University who is president of the association.

This month's leadership conference drew more than 3,300 people from 20 nations and 69 denominations. Most of those who attend are pastors or lay leaders, but the Bible-centered message has also attracted disciples from the business world.

Al Tobiason has taken his 176-employee company's management team to several Willow Creek conferences over the past five years.

"It's changed our whole organization," he said. "In the past three years we've seen an incredible change in people's attitude toward their jobs and each other."

Tobiason is a member of Willow Creek church and the president of the company that prints the association brochures. Not all of his employees are Christians. But the techniques of vision casting, team building and identification of core values and principles "are truths that could apply to the secular and the saved sections of our organization," Tobiason said.

Some local church leaders say the Willow Creek Association is providing the kind of inspiration, vision and leadership they once would have sought only from their denomination.

The Rev. Steve Stroope is senior pastor of Lake Pointe Baptist Church in Rockwall, Texas. In August, his church will be one of two sites in the country to host satellite conferences during the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. His ties to the Southern Baptist Convention and the Willow Creek Association are complementary, not competitive, Stroope said.

"Willow is filling a gap in what denominations are not doing and would never be good at doing," he said. "There was a time when I was a kid preacher that the only place I looked for training and literature was the Southern Baptist Convention. Now I look to other sources."

The Rev. David Van Denburgh is the senior pastor of a Seventh-day Adventist church in Kettering, Ohio. Last month, he attended his third Willow Creek conference. His first visit was a revelation, he said.

"I turned to the guy next to me and said, 'This is what a denomination is supposed to be,' " he said. "We have no shortage of so-called experts in our denomination willing to tell pastors what they should be doing. But they're not doing it."

Van Denburgh is carefully blending Creeker innovation into his church's work.

"Willow Creek started with a clear patch of ground," he said. "We have a tradition standing on our patch of ground. No way do we want to bulldoze the thing if it doesn't deserve it."

The church that gave a name and direction to the Willow Creek Association was born in suburban Chicago in the early 1970s as a Sunday youth service aimed at kids turned off by traditional church. Willow Creek Community Church is now packing in about 16,000 people during four weekend "seeker" services aimed mostly at Boomer-generation non-Christians and another 6,000 people at weeknight services aimed more at believers.

"Seekers" in Creeker-speak are people who don't belong to a church but are seeking a spiritual home. The philosophy is to find ways to make it easy for those people to find that home in Christianity. Rock music, multimedia presentations and sermons designed to be relevant fertilized the church's growth. Each technique had to pass through the filter of the Willow Creek management philosophy.

Some academics want to tag the association with a title that makes its leaders very uncomfortable: "I think Willow Creek is becoming a kind of denomination," said Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociology professor and the author of The Restructuring of American Religion.

But "denomination" is a label that risks alienating the three-quarters of association churches that are already members of a denomination. And association leaders emphasize their desire to work with traditional church structures.

Traditional denominations are bound together by geography and history -- Germans and the Lutheran church, for instance; ritual and practice -- sprinkle or dunk; hierarchy or autonomy; and theology -- women should or should not be allowed to preach and lead services.

The Willow Creek Association cuts across those boundaries. The ideal is for association churches to have a particular zeal for evangelism, an eagerness to seek out innovation, an interest in creating a church-based community and an acceptance of the Willow Creek management and leadership style.

In some ways, the association is doggedly undenominational. It plants no churches, runs no seminary, supports no hospital, provides no insurance policy for pastors. It holds no membership meetings, passes no resolutions, issues no position papers on issues of the day.

Member churches pay $249 a year and attest to a brief, mostly conservative position on Christian faith. The association would not accept churches from a few denominations -- including Unitarians, Unity, Mormons and Metropolitan Community Churches -- that have doctrine considered unbiblical by association leaders. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for instance, adds the Book of Mormon and other books to their list of sacred texts.

But the association exerts no authority over its membership. Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian, a former theology professor and one of the inspirational founders of the Willow Creek church, offered an example:

In a small Southern town, a large association church is "persecuting" a smaller association church, he said. The larger, older church went so far as to get the smaller church's landlord to evict it, he said. In a traditional denomination, a bishop, conference president or standing committee might step in to referee.

"There is nothing we can do about that," Bilezikian said.

Quality control is mostly done by remote control, said Mellado, the association president.

"Right now, we've pretty much bet the farm on influence," he said. "We're never going to create a hierarchy. We're never going to create a controlling mechanism."

The members' only vote is with their feet -- stay or leave.

But association leaders acknowledge that numbers can be misleading. In a voluntary association it's hard to measure the level of commitment of any individual church to Creeker methods or style.

A few denominations are working closely with Willow Creek. The Christian Reformed Church incorporates its own pastoral conferences around Willow Creek's. And this month, 80 North American Baptist "church planters" had a conference within the Willow Creek conference to develop their own strategies.

That's the model for how the association wants to work with denominations, leaders say.

While the rock music and leadership style may grab attention, what really draws church leaders to the conference and the association is the bottom line of bringing the unchurched to Christ, said Warren of Park Cities Baptist Church.

"I always leave feeling like I am about the most important thing a person can be about on the planet," he said.

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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