I’ve been piled high with life (3x too much life to be precise…but that’s for another post). So until I get my head above ground, I’d love to let you peek into a Willow Creek Community Church (huge mega-church in Chicago) board room and hear just a little bit of what they’re discovering as they research and reflect the last 30 years of “seeker-sensitive” “program-driven” church and its effect on growing people into spiritual maturity:

From DisciplesFirst

Willow Creek Community Church, a mega-church of tens of thousands with a multi-million dollar budget and one of the first churches to promote being seeker-sensitive and to offer a program-driven, full-service approach to meeting the spiritual needs of people, has started rethinking what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years. They’ve discovered that “participation” in a packed schedule of church activities doesn’t mean people become real disciples (though it is one way to build a large institution). They are rediscovering the spiritual disciplines that cannot be programmed and staff-driven. They are discovering that creating the church version of a shopping mall doesn’t help people really become the committed disciples they had always sought nurture.

Bill Hybels calls this realization the “wake-up call of his adult life.” What Hybels says they are “pioneering” as personal spiritual life plans one might recognize as the ancient discipline of having a “rule of life.” I truly complement Willow Creek and its leadership on admitting when they discover that depth of spirituality is not what they are fostering, and wonder what the future of the mega-church movement holds when the initiator of it all begins to question the very essence of what they’ve been doing.

Maybe the American tendency to excess in everything has led us to morbidly obese congregations, too large for their own good. You can view a couple 13 minute videos by leaders from Willow Creek here.

What is happening in the Church when the pioneer of mega-church mentality is now discovering that what they had been creating in their members was not necessarily a life in union or intimacy with God, but avid attendees? I am truly thankful for the humble hearts in the WC leadership and pray that I can learn from that.

Watch the first 5 minutes of this video, then read the section of Scripture below. What do you notice about church planting? What do you find frustrating, or liberating?

What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

–Paul, a missionary and planter of the Good News; 1 Cor 3: 5-15