Willow Creek at 50: The Extensive Impact & Profound Damage

SPEAKERS: Julie Roys, Lance Ford, Bill Hybels

Note: This is a rough transcript and may contain some misspellings.

[00:00:00] Julie: Just recently, Willow Creek Community Church, one of the most influential churches in modern evangelical history, celebrated its 50th anniversary for five decades. Willow shaped how the church looks, how it leads, and how it measures success through its seeker sensitive model and its leadership platforms.

It became the blueprint for much of the Western church. But as we hit this 50 year milestone, the Willow story is no longer just about influence, it’s also about the damage it’s done. As we first reported seven years ago, numerous women have accused Willow Creek founder Bill Hybels, of adult clergy, sexual abuse, or her harassment, and sadly, hebels has never confessed this sin nor asked for forgiveness.

And the church has never adequately named the extent of Hebels abuse, nor apologized to the individual women harmed. It did, however, issue a general apology at its 50 year celebration in October

[00:01:00] Pastor Shawn Williams: to the women of those who brought those initial allegations forward, we’re sorry. Many of you carried pain for well over a decade, sometimes even decades, and your story wasn’t held with care.

Your story is initially faced with defensiveness and even dismissiveness. We’re sorry,

[00:01:25] Julie: but damaging in a completely different way was the church model. Willow Creek upheld and others replicated, not just nationwide, but worldwide, though at secret model was effective in attracting unbelievers to the Lord.

Data shows it was miserable at making disciples. And isn’t that what Jesus commanded the church to do? So why is Willow Creek upheld as a church to be celebrated and emulated? And what is the real story of its five decades in existence? Welcome to the Roy’s Report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church.

I’m Julie Roys.

Joining me today is someone who’s done a deep dive into Willow Creek Community Church. Its origin, its philosophy of ministry, and its fruit. He’s my good friend and director of Restoration resources at the Roys report, Lance Ford. Lance, welcome. Always a pleasure to have you. Yes. Good to be back. Julie and Lance, when you think about Willow Creek’s legacy at 50 years, what comes to mind first for you?

[00:02:37] Lance: The thing that I think about is the impact that Willow’s had, most importantly, uh, the impact that, that most people don’t recognize or think about. Uh, Willow Creek didn’t just build a church. They built a paradigm. And there are a couple of things that stand out about that. First, they reshaped how church looks today.

Uh, in the prevailing model, uh, you could go to just about any city in America and you could throw a dart on the maps that show the churches and go in and you’re gonna experience the influence of Willow Creek. It’s modern. It’s what used to be called seeker sensitive, particularly back in the nineties, very carefully crafted.

You even saw that in that clip of the apology, um, uh, of, uh, uh, regarding the, the Bill Hybels, uh, crisis. It was a very crafted teleprompter statement. And so this is, this is typical of these Sunday mornings, very crafted, production driven, rather than really being focused on making disciples of Jesus. And we’ll see later on that Willow Creek, even self-reported, their failure to make disciples, though they continued even at the time to uphold themselves as the predominant uh, voice in the shaping of churches.

The second thing was they really reshaped. How leadership should function. Uh, that it became very centralized personality centric, uh, modeled after corporate vision casting, uh, rather than, than biblical shepherding. And so now for decades, this became the model that most pastors and church planters were trained to follow up to today.

[00:04:32] Julie: Well, and in full transparency, 35 years ago, and I can’t believe I had, I had to do the math and I realized that it’s 35, almost 40 years ago. My husband and I went to Willow Creek Community Church. So we, I had just graduated from college and my faith was really kind of thin at that point. And we started going to Willow Creek.

We went to their midweek services, and it really was at Willow Creek that I began to put my faith back together. And even though I went to a Christian college, I had never heard of Christian Apologetics before. And, you know, for those who aren’t familiar with that term, I mean, it’s just a reasoned, uh, approach to the faith.

It’s a defense of why we believe what we believe, but I needed those answers at that point in my life. And so going to Willow and hearing Christian apologetics was really, really crucial for me as a Christian, but a Christian who, again, was asking questions and not necessarily finding a safe place, and, and I found Willow.

Was a safe place for unbelievers to ask questions, but it was a safe place for me to ask questions. And so that became really, really crucial in my own spiritual journey and I, I will always appreciate Willow Creek for that. And I saw friends of mine become believers. I remember I was in this, um, this sales organization between college and grad school.

And my boss became a Christian because I invited him to Willow Creek. And that became, uh, you know, a number of spiritual conversations. And, and he led, uh, somebody else, a colleague of mine to the Lord. And that friend, uh, led some people in his family to the Lord. And actually there was a midweek service where, uh, I actually was in a chain reaction where we had my mother who led me to the Lord.

And then. You know, we all talked about how, you know, it was this chain reaction of how the gospel was spread. And so that’s when I, when I think of Willow Creek, I think of those early days back when I was in my twenties and I saw the church doing something that I had never seen the church do before. I mean, I had grown up.

So we talk about making disciples. I grew up in a church, a small town, lots of great people and mentors in that church. I, I loved that church and it discipled me, but my non-Christian friends would never come to that church. And so I grew up thinking kind of the way my parents thought about church was the church that really, or, or the thing, the organization that really did things were like parachurch organization.

Those were the ones that actually reached non-Christians. But the, the organization that. You know, discipled me was a church, but when I came to Willow Creek, I saw kind of like this Parachurch church where this church was doing evangelism on the weekends. And that was something you could invite your friends to who didn’t know the Lord and it was working.

And so it was a, a revolutionary idea of church. And I have to say, like when I first. First came in, I thought, wow, this is it. Like I really thought this was the model because I saw people coming to the Lord. But I think that’s maybe, maybe only part of the picture, but you know, let’s, that was revolutionary back in the, in the 1980s when I went, the church started in what, 1975?

Mm-hmm. Back then it was really revolutionary. So take us back to kind of those early days. And what it was about Willow Creek that really broke completely new ground, uh, for

[00:08:24] Lance: the church. It, it is crazy to think it was 50 years ago. And so, and today, as I said, that you could go into so many churches today and experience of what’s blossomed out of the Willow Creek model, but, but all the principles and practices.

That we see today on Sunday mornings in the prevailing model of the churches with, and I’m talking about the churches where you walk in, everything’s dark, lights, smoke coming from the stage, you know, all this very concert. Yeah, top of feel. That’s now, no, we’ve got a lot of updates and technology added to it, but it’s the same thing that was going on 50 years ago.

So the Willow Creek model is a 50-year-old model. And so in 1975, bell Hybels and his team, they not, uh, launched Willow Creek in a rented movie theater. Uh, a lot of people know that it was the Willow Creek Movie Theater. That’s why it’s called Willow Creek. The church is. So their goal was to create a church for people that didn’t like church.

Uh, and they had an avatar that they called Unchurched Terry and Mary. Um, mm-hmm. And the idea was this church, uh, stripped away all the liturgy, all the pews, the hymns, and anything that they saw as religious ba baggage that might turn off. What they called irreligious people. And so they replaced it with storytelling and contemporary music and drama.

And this just carefully created quote experience. And it worked, and I should put quotes in, worked, uh, around the word worked, but people came and droves. But the problem was this, from the start, the stage became the center of gravity, and the goal was to make church attractive. It was not to make disciples.

Hopefully disciples happened, but that shift has really had enormous consequences on the church today.

[00:10:26] Julie: Well, and in Willow’s defense, I will say, they would, they would say that you come on the weekend, that’s where you bring your, your non-Christian friends, but you won’t grow unless you come on midweek.

You won’t grow unless you get in small groups. I mean, they really, they really did pump that. But even, I think what we found out later, and we’ll get to that is that even those who, who were, you know, a hundred percent, you know, all in the results weren’t what Willow E expected. And so I think, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re looking at something in hindsight and.

Again, hindsight is, is more 2020 than than when you’re doing it. But when, when Bill came up with this whole philosophy of ministry, if you wanna call it that, as I understand, it wasn’t, you know, something, I mean there was, uh, Dr. Gilbert, bill Zian, who was a professor at Trinity at the time, and now we know, um, not only was Bill accused of sexual harassment and clergy sexual abuse, but so was Dr.

Bill Zian. I knew Dr. Bill Zeke, and I was a student at Wheaton College. He was my professor in one of my classes, and he was flirtatious. And we all said, oh, well, he’s French. He’s French. You know, that was the saying all the time. Yeah, he’s French, I guess. If you’re French, you’re allowed to do that. You know, I thought it was odd, but I was like, okay, well he is French, you know?

But he did have this, this idea based on Acts 2 42 to 47 that the church all came together and they broke bread together, and then the Lord added daily to their number. Those who were being saved. This was something that really captured Bill’s imagination. I think it captured a lot of ours, uh, as we were going to Willow Creek.

So there was some biblical basis. It wasn’t like completely divorced from that. But at the same time, the real inspiration for what Bill did, and this is where I thought, wow, this is great. Like we can take the best of the Bible, but then we can take it from the business world, right? I mean, it wasn’t, it wasn’t just something he got from scripture.

It was, this was Bill Hebels, a man who was, uh, his dad was a successful, I think, produce. He was in the produce business in Michigan. Um, and he learned a lot from his dad, uh, but he also learned a lot from a guy by the name of Peter Drucker too. Is that right?

[00:12:51] Lance: Yeah, it is. Uh, and Peter Drucker is known as the father of Modern day Management.

And, uh, Peter Drucker’s influence has been immeasurable in the church. And once again, this is a name that that most people in the pews, they’ve never heard of a lot of of people that today they are eating from the plates that were created by a lot of these people that they’ve never heard of. Um, but Peter Drucker had a huge influence on the church.

He had a huge influence. On, uh, Bob Buford, the founder of Leadership Network out of Dallas, who subsequently had a huge influence on just. Dozens and dozens of just, I could drop names right now and everybody would recognize these famous pastors, they all come to this lineage. And Peter Drucker’s mentor was also was Robert Schuler of Here’s how you run things, here’s how you run a large organization.

But there was another person that also had a huge influence on Bill Hybels, and this was Robert Schuler. Uh, from. Crystal Cathedral fame. And so Robert Schueller famously planted a church in Garden Grove, California in 1955, uh, in a drive-in movie theater. And he started preaching from the top of the, um, concession stand and this, in this movie, uh, drive-in movie theater.

And so he started developing all these different ideas. That became what we call the secret sensitive church. And one of those ideas was even to go around and knock on doors and poll people, ask them what they wanted from church. Well, this is the exact thing that not only did Bill Hybels do, but Rick Warren did it too.

And my research, I’m, I’m working on the longest ever PhD research in the history of mankind. By the way, if I ever finish this, it’ll be an nice. Um, but, uh, this, good luck with that. Yeah. Yeah. So this, this is all part of what I started working on even a few years ago. What I found really interesting was that Hebels early on was taking teams to learn from Robert Schueller.

And, uh, then when Ro Robert Schuler’s name started becoming SA bit because of his, his ties to, uh, Norman Vincent Peel and others, uh, then Willow Creek. Did its best to scrub its history and Bill Hybels and the early teams connection with Robert Schueller and the influence from Robert Schueller. But it’s there.

It’s very factual. So there was a combination of these two sources, Robert Schueller. And the secret sensitive church models and ideology plus Peter Drucker and the leadership ideology and management theory. So that’s where we get the, the seeker quote. And a lot of people call it now the at attractional church model, and we should talk about that.

But then it also mm-hmm. With the leadership stuff we get, this is where leadership started overriding serving, in my opinion. And so pastors became CEOs rather than shepherds, uh, as, as, as part of this big influence.

[00:16:15] Julie: Well, and Fonda Dyer is a friend of mine. She worked at Willow Creek for a very long time as their production director.

And she told me, Julie, it was like leadership was an idol. Willow Creek, everything was about leadership. Leadership was the driving force. And, and yeah, that, that became kind of the, the tail that wags the dog, uh, according to some of those that I’ve spoken with. Uh, but Willow, again, this, this took off. I mean, the, the church exploded and it, it was no longer just.

Uh, a very large church and the mega church was just kind of this idea of a mega church was just getting, getting started, but it became a movement. And, and I remember this because everybody was coming to Willow Creek to learn how to do church. And I remember my sister at one point, um, she’s a children’s director at a pretty large church, and she came to Willow because her church wanted her to learn from Willow and how they were doing things.

And she was appalled by what they were saying. She was like, Julie, they say we have to entertain all the kids. And it’s, it’s a crime if the, if the kids are ever bored in church. And not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it became like you have to do dramas for kids. You have to do music for kids.

I mean, that at Attractional model now became something that children, that we had to do in the children’s church because we gotta track them and it’s gotta be exciting and, and everything else. And. Boy, you know, I can remember church not always being that exciting to me as a kid, but I mean, I think that’s okay because the Christian life isn’t just about excitement and, and bells and whistles.

But again, everybody was coming to Willow. Everybody was trying to learn from them. And again, uh, I mean, I know just from what she was telling me, some of the curriculum that they were passing off. She’s like, Julie, this, this isn’t really a lot of Bible teaching. This is more what we’re finding now, sort of like a moralism that’s, that’s getting passed on to these kids.

We’re making converse. We’re not necessarily making disciples. Right. And how deeply they’re converted. Sometimes I, I wonder too, because Yeah, you’re just not seeing, seeing the fruit, you know, long term you’re seeing. Initial excitement, but then when that excitement wears off, what’s what’s really

[00:18:47] Lance: there? So, yeah, it’s really right.

In 1992, they launched the Willow Creek Association, and this allowed churches to replicate Willow’s model. And by the mid nineties there were thousands of pastors flying to suburban Chicago to to Barrington, Illinois, uh, every year to learn how to build a willow church. Guess what? I was one of them. And I had planted a church.

We had planted a church in the mid nineties, in the northwest suburbs of, of St. Louis, Missouri. And. Our church was it, it took off. I mean, we started with a dozen people and it had taken off, got to several hundred. Everything was clicking, we were planting other churches. And um, we started loading up van fulls over our leaders once or twice a year for several years to go to Barrington and to learn more about how to make up this, this cool church.

Um. But by 1998, there was something that was really dying in me.

[00:19:55] Julie: Hmm.

[00:19:56] Lance: And even though everything looked great, I’m, I’m, I’m being invited to go speak and tell others how to do what we were doing. And, and, but something was dying in me. And I literally went to Lake of the Ozarks, my mother and father-in-law’s cabin for a few days just to see the Lord going, why do I feel something’s wrong on the inside?

And, and the Lord just really took me to. To task took me to the woodshed and basically the bottom line was he said, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re building a church. And I, I, I never asked you to build a church. I asked you to make disciples. And you’re a, you’re a church builder. You’re not making disciples.

And at the same time, uh, in fact, I know you’ve got the Dallas Willards, um, his best book, in my opinion, the Divine Conspiracy, wrote it in 1998. It came out right at the same time, and it was a godsend for me because he put words in scripture to what I was feeling. He gave me language. And the thing that just stopped me for days was when he said in his book, the Failure to Make Disciples is the elephant in the room of the church.

Mm-hmm. And man, I was like, I am guilty as charged. And so we went back and, and and really just started changing things in our church. And our church really slowed down in its growth, but it became stronger because we started focusing on making disciples. Well, the Willow Creek Association was really focused on leadership and really focused on how to replicate the Willow model.

And so by two thou, the year 2000, this blueprint was fully exported and it was Sunday centric. It was performance driven. And it was deeply shaped by really the American corporate imagination. And all you have to do is just look at some of the names of people that were influential in those conferences to know it was very corporate.

And so even if you didn’t, didn’t call yourself a Willow church, the odds were that you were following their playbook in some way. And like I said earlier, the odds are that you’re still following their playbook, whether you know it or not.

[00:22:04] Julie: Wow. I, I can remember that too. I remember going to little tiny churches that were all Willow Creek wannabes.

Like when you would go visit, go to a town and you’d go, go visit a church. Yeah. And, and it was funny because I’d come from Willow and I could see the same language, the same everything. And I was like, wow. Um, and, and somehow. It just seemed hokier when it was done, you know, on a smaller level, you know? And yeah, but I saw that and yeah, and yet you saw so many churches, you know, again, growing.

We see mega churches, you know, they’re popping up a lot more. They’re growing. So we’re seeing all this explosion of growth and impact and, and I remember thinking like, wow, Christians used to be so uncool when I was a kid and now we’ve got the coolest churches around. And you know, I mean, this was kind of the mentality back then.

And yet when you look at the actual numbers of how many people were actually going to church in America. Th there wasn’t a growth, was there?

[00:23:16] Lance: No. And and largely what was happening and still happening in America is that we are just rearranging the sheep. And so we’re, we’re taking sheep from a lot of small sheep sheds, and we’re putting them in larger sheep sheds.

In fact, I would go as far to say that, that, that, that there are a lot of well-known pastors that people call ’em pastors, but they’re not shepherds, they’re ranchers. And so surprisingly, in, in, in 1970, there were about 50 what we would call megachurches in the us and back then, what was called a mega church was really about a thousand or more.

Well, that definition’s changed. Today a mega church is usually considered a church of 2000 or more, and so presently there’s almost 2000 megachurches today. But, but during this same period. Uh, from 1970 to to now, um, weekly church at attend attendance dropped from about 30 and. About 38.5% to about 28%. So we’ve seen a 27% decline.

So we’ve built bigger buildings, we’ve drawn bigger crowds, but we did not build deeper disciples. And so that’s the paradox of the Willow model.

[00:24:37] Julie: And

[00:24:37] Lance: I

[00:24:37] Julie: remember when we went to Willow, and even after we left Willow, um, we would notice this in the Chicago land area because, I mean, it was such a, such a prominent church.

Um, that not only did Willow have a big front door, it had a very large back door, but I thought at the time that might not be a bad thing because Willow Creek evangelizes people, right? It brings them into the church, and then another church might do the discipleship, and maybe that’s a decent model because not these other churches weren’t doing a great job of evangelism.

So maybe this is the way it works, but the problem was. Was it, it’s the Walmart effect, right? Mm-hmm. When, when Wal Walmart comes in, all of these mom and pop shops often close down ’cause they can’t compete. Yeah. And the same thing happened in the Chicago area where a lot of these faithful churches could not compete with the, the glitz.

And, and again, when you’re putting on a show like that, I remember somebody saying to me, he was pastor of a willow wannabe kind of church, and he’s like. He’s like, yeah, you know, like if you wanna do, if you wanna reach this generation of people, you need a ton of programming. And that takes a ton of staff because the staff were doing all the jobs.

They were doing everything. And so the sheep, you know, those of us that are supposed to use our gifts, they’re supposed to grow by using our gifts. Unless you were on staff, you, you, you often couldn’t do that. And so again, this, this discipleship. And the discipleship making, I mean, part of training up people.

I mean like if you’re, if you’re a resident, if you wanna become a doctor, you have to be a resident for a while and you have to practice. Mm-hmm. And it’s a little bit, you know, it’s a little bit scary. In fact, it’s even scarier that they still call doctors once they become full doctors that they practice.

You know? But just, it is funny. Just a joke. My dad was a doctor, but I, I just. You have to allow a certain amount of mess, which is interesting. We went then to a vineyard church, which used to have a, used to have a state, a statement that we’re committed to a messy church because we knew that when people started ministries, as God led them, they wouldn’t do it perfectly, but there was a certain kind of beauty and things just got started and the Lord moved and the spirit moved and then they would clean it up afterwards was kind of the way that we talked about it.

But I kind of, I, I liked that because there was this sense, in fact, John Wimber used to have a statement, the Kingdom of God, the great thing about the kingdom of God is that everybody gets to play. Yeah. And that really is, it’s everybody is, is a part of it. It’s not the professionalization of church, it’s a family.

Um, but yeah, this, this whole, this whole attractional model. Really seemed to create baby Christians just not growing. Mm-hmm. And yet I think we thought it was effective until 2007. And that’s when Willow Creek did something kind of bold. Like they actually said, Hey, we’re gonna take a look and see are we being effective?

And they came out with this reveal study. Where they actually looked at their, their body and those who were even coming to the midweek, coming to the, the small groups, are they really getting disciple? And what they found was pretty surprising. And I remember this because I was at the time at the Moody Bible Institute with Moody Radio, and again, the flagship station of Moody Radio was right there in Chicago and Willow Creek mm-hmm.

Was such a force here. And when it came out, and it was like, oh dang. Willow’s not working. Um, that was, that, that made a pretty large impression. And we were talking about it a lot, uh, on talk radio, Christian talk radio here in Chicago. So, I mean, tell us a little bit more about what the results were and let’s, let’s dig into those a little bit.

[00:28:40] Lance: Uh, obviously this is a generalization, but this is their report. This is not our report. So this, we’re, we’re just. Parroting what the report was. So the basics of the report said that when people came to the Lord at Willow and started developing their faith at some point, not too far down their journey, they left Willow so that they could keep growing so that they could keep developing spiritual maturity because they were getting stagnated at Willow.

So the reveal report showed that church activity did not equal spiritual maturity, and so it was the most committed believers that were the least satisfied. And so a, a huge segment said they were stalled in their spiritual growth. And the, the system was producing a tenderers, but it wasn’t producing disciples.

And, and even Bill Hebels admitted publicly, he said, we made a mistake. Okay. 2007 started in 75, 85, 95, 2032 years later, millions of dollars spent on conferences. Mm-hmm. Eight. We owe you one buddy. You know, my bad. But we made a mistake, but it wasn’t just a programming glitch, it was a fundamental Desi design flaw.

And they had built this beautiful machine for attracting people, but it did not feed them

[00:30:09] Julie: well. And here’s the thing, when that came out, I didn’t see Willow saying, we gotta scrap the model. Like, we gotta really rethink things. And in fact, I, I, I couldn’t believe this at the time. They made it into a program and videos, and there was like the reveal curriculum.

Like, I don’t even know exactly what they were trying to teach, but it was like, what? Like it was stunning to me. It was like, let’s just keep marketing what we’re doing. And I, I mean, maybe there were some, I, I mean, do you know what changes exactly were made to Willow? Because I can say from the outside, and again, I, I wasn’t on the inside.

But I didn’t see any fundamental changes. I saw kind of the same, same thing.

[00:30:55] Lance: Yeah. I don’t think there were any real changes on what they were doing on the weekends. They were trying to add things to make up the gap and, and, but fundamentally the problem is, is look, Sunday morning, the, the, the main time when the church gets together, it’s for the church.

It is for the people of God. It’s, it’s not to be primarily an evangelistic effort and this thus is the problem is that in this at Attractional model, in this seeker model, once again, the idea was to create this phenomenal experience so that people that were starting to be drawn by God and seeking God would come.

The problem is we made the wrong person the seeker. Jesus said, I came to seek and save the lost. Mm. So you and I as believers we’re to be the seekers. We are the ones that are to go out and to find people. That God is moving in their hearts and the Lord is drawing them to them. We’re to go out and seek them.

They shouldn’t have to be seeking us and crossing these cultural boundaries to come into this place we call church. And so it’s a fundamental design flaw. It’s a paradigmatic flaw, I would say. And uh, it’s had a huge influence. And once again, all the way to today. It has this huge influence. And so today we are, as you said earlier, Julie, we’re creating, um, consumers and, uh, the, the, the prevailing model of the church today is that it’s become a vendor of religious goods and services.

Hmm. And so we make people, consumers. Of this religious stuff that we have. And if we had Scott McKnight right here, he would say that the big problem is, is that we’ve preached this limited gospel just primarily about salvation of whether you’re going to hell or going to heaven, and he’ll say, we’ve missed the mark, which I totally agree with him.

And because we’ve not preached the gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is a total change in your ethics and your ethos, even your personal economics. Hmm. So that’s what we’re getting on Sunday mornings. We’re getting this little, this little truncated Twitter gospel I call it, you know, it’s this little Tweeted gospel, 140 characters or less.

[00:33:33] Julie: And yet again, like we were saying, Willow Creek, by the time, you know, 2007 rolls around, they have become the gold standard. Everybody’s coming to them to see how to do church, and by this time. They have something called the Global Leadership Summit. And this became, I mean, massive, like hundreds of thousands of people attending this summit once a year with some of the biggest names coming in.

And a lot of this was, was founded on a leadership model that Bill Hebels had, but also John Maxwell, the leadership guru, he with Bill were, was in the very beginnings. Of this Global Leadership Summit. Talk a little bit about that. Which it’s still running the Global Leadership Summit. Yeah. And it’s still touting, you know, hundreds of thousands of people.

Uh, interestingly, I, I thought we really need to do a story on this, but do you know where a lot of the growth for the Global Leadership Summit has been coming from? Where some of the growth is coming for their sites because they’ve lost a lot of churches, prisons. They’re doing the Global Leadership Summit in prisons.

Seriously, I did not

[00:34:53] Lance: know that.

[00:34:54] Julie: Oh, yeah. It’s, I didn’t know

[00:34:55] Lance: that.

[00:34:55] Julie: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s almost,

[00:34:58] Lance: well, you’ve got a, you’ve got a captive audience, don’t you? I’m sorry I couldn’t help it, but I think it Well, that’s exactly

[00:35:04] Julie: right. I’m, I’m like, really? Wow. This is where we’re going for leaders, for the church to prisons.

I mean, I’m not saying that some of them couldn’t be, but I mean, I, it’s, I hadn’t heard

[00:35:14] Lance: that

[00:35:15] Julie: It’s dumbfounding. Yeah.

[00:35:17] Lance: So this is where Willow moved from being a church growth model to a global leadership engine when they started the Global Leadership Summit. And so it became for many pastors, uh, uh, a yearly pilgrimage.

It was the most important leadership event of the year. And at its peak, I believe in around 2015, there were over 6,000 sa or there were over 600 satellite locations in the us. Besides the big event in Barrington, Illinois, so there were more than 260,000 leaders, a quarter of a million leaders in over 15,000 churches that participated in this Global Leadership Summit every year.

And, um. Just here’s the great spiritual leaders that they brought in. Um, so you know why this was such a spiritual event. So there was Jack Welch from ge, also known as Neutron Jack. There was Carly Fiorina. Bill Clinton, another great spiritual leader. Uh, Colin, Colin Powell. Tony Blair, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jim Bono Collins Bono.

Yep. Yep. And so there were voices from corporate America and, and Fortune 500 top leaders, voices from politics. I know Condoleezza Rice was there, spoke there. People from entertainment bestselling. Authors. And so Bill Hebels himself, uh, said we try to find people with the most thoughtful ideas about leadership and ask them to spread their expertise over our audience.

And so this was, in his words, he called it a blend of high impact. God honoring messages was Savvy Street smart, don’t Alize everything. Lessons from business. And they poured it straight into the church. And so this has amalgamated now for about, you know, three decades now. We’ve had this so that now the word leadership has just almost completely erased the word servantship.

In the minds and even the language and the dialogue of most pastors and church staff members today. People don’t talk about being shepherds and being ministers. They talk about being leaders. Mm-hmm. And a big. Part of that has come from Willow’s influence, as you said, Julie, and they’re still doing it. I mean, the, the week after Bill Hybels publicly went down in, in 2018, just within a few days, the big leadership summit mm-hmm.

Was scheduled and the show went

[00:38:06] Julie: on. The show did go on and it continues to go on. Which, which dumbfounds me because. One. We have Bill Hybels admit in 2007 we made a mistake. This isn’t working. We have, yeah. Willow Creek itself, uh, with Bill Hybels. Just a, an epic explosion, right? I mean, like that church, what, what happened because of his moral failure, but it wasn’t just his moral failure.

And this is what irritates me so much about the fact that Willow has never. Never described the abuse of power, the way he punished people who didn’t fall in line, the things that he did to the women, so they wouldn’t talk. I mean, those things and the fact that the, the Willow Creek Board allowed him to do it.

And, and this. Mm-hmm. This is the epidemic problem throughout America right now. As I report on church, after church, after church, this is humming. This is coming and it’s, it’s grown. It’s infested the church and we’re still doing it. Like the GLS just goes on, like, we haven’t noticed that this, why would we want to replicate the leadership?

Of a man who mm-hmm. Who, who you know, in such spectacular fashion failed. I don’t understand it. Yeah. I, I’m still trying to put my, my mind around it.

[00:39:35] Lance: No, I’m, I’m dumbfounded by it too, Julie, and, and, and think about, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s really don’t lose this fact. Willow Creek was known for two big things.

And they put their, all their eggs in these baskets. One was what church should look like on Sunday. After 32 years. They self-reported and said We got it wrong, but they didn’t change it. And by then the damage had already been done. It was in the bloodstream of the church and that’s why we see what we see today in these attractional model of churches.

So they got that wrong. The other thing that they said, Hey, we we’re the best at, was leadership. And like you just said, they were an abject failure of leadership. Their, their, uh, their elders didn’t know what to do after that crisis, well before that crisis. They weren’t, they weren’t, they weren’t leading, they were following a one man rule.

Hierarchal system of Bill Hybels. So there were an abject failure in the two things that they’re most famous for. And once again, it still continues to go on. The beat goes on, and the answer seems to be, well, yeah, we missed that leadership up. Let’s just do it better. Well, that’s crazy. That’s, that’s like saying like a company saying, Hey, we’re losing, you know, 30 cents on every widget we sell, but we’re gonna make it up in quantity.

It’s insane.

[00:41:07] Julie: It is insane and and it wasn’t just Willow either. It was a lot of other churches that were doing sort of this corporate CEO mentality. Some of them weren’t. For example, marsh Hill Church, mark Driscoll. In a way it was the anti attractional model in the sense that it wasn’t seeker sensitive.

In fact, mark Driscoll was kind of in your face and would, would preach like over hour long sermons. So in that way it wasn’t, but it had that same CEO model, that same, let’s build this church as big as we possibly can. In fact, mark had, you know, it, it never was big enough for Mark and he had just aspirations for bigger and bigger and bigger.

It’s imploded in spectacular fashion. And talk about what, you know, some of the key churches that adopted this model. And and what happened to them? I mean, are we looking at Willow Creek being an anomaly, or is this more of the pattern?

[00:42:09] Lance: It’s pretty much the pattern. I mean, there, there’s no doubt. It’s pretty much the pattern because you can see that.

You know, churches from Gateway, I mean, still the same, same, same style, uh, life Church, which is huge. Now there’s not been an implosion with, uh, Greg Elle and, and, and, and Life Church, but we see so many of these other churches that have gone to Hillsong Fabulously a, a show on Sunday mornings. I mean, just look at what happened with Carl Lentz in Hillsong, New York, and there’s been a lot of other Hillsong churches.

That have really dissolved and gone down. And so this is all part of just baptizing corporate leadership culture and piping it straight into the bloodstream of the church. And so, you know, Harvard Business School wrote a case study on Willow Creek and, and, and then the author of that case study, uh, Jim Mulatto became.

The head of the Willow Creek Association, um, Bob Buford, the founder of Leadership Net Network, once said that Willow Creek is the most influential Protestant church in the world. And he said one might even say the most influential church in the world, say for the Vatican. And you know what? I don’t think he was exaggerating because Willow really did redefine what it meant to lead a church.

And pastors all over America followed that model. To the t. Hmm. And that model was the CEO style pastoring model.

[00:43:43] Julie: Well, and I wanna play a clip from a GLS where Bill Hebel said something that’s, that’s pretty shocking when you hear it, yet at the same time till he, till he makes the gaff that he does. I’m not gonna tell you what the gaff is, but up until that point, tell me if you’re not moved because this man, uh.

I had had just an ability, when I hear this, that same desire to wanna sign up for whatever he’s selling, I can feel it. Mm-hmm. I can feel it. But this, what he expresses here is, is quite breathtaking and I think we need to revisit it.

[00:44:23] Bill Hybels: I got seized by the beauty and power and potential of what a church could become.

And I walked away from the well laid out script for my life and swore to myself, I would not go to my grave without at least trying to see if what happened in Acts chapter two could be replicated. In the 20th century,

Willow has to reach its full potential because.

[00:44:59] Julie: It’s the hope of the world. Wow. Again, I mean, nobody can deliver the way Bill Bels delivers. I mean, when I would hear him, and this just reminded me of it, it like brings it back. Like I, I wanted to sign up for their, definitely wanted to sign up for everything.

Like I, you know, and, and, and the gospel is worth signing up for the, you know, the gospel is worth spending our life on. Yeah, but what he says at the end that Willow Creek is the hope of the world. He, he just

[00:45:35] Lance: got a little off. Uh, just a, just a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit off there. You know, and this was a statement that, that so many pastors, and I hear pastors parrot it all the time, the church, the local, and they’ll say the local church is the hope of the world.

And because this comes straight from Will, from from Bill Hyles. And there he says, he’s talking to his people and he’s saying, man, we we’re the hope of the world. Well, I’ll run through a wall with you for that then, if we’re the hope of the world. Yeah. All hope is lost if the church is, goes down. Well, first off, the scripture never says that the church is the hope of the world and Jesus is the hope of the world.

It says that the people of God are the light of the world. Right. But these are not mere semantics. The church is Jesus is the hope of the world, but when you, as a pastor are being taught this just pounded into you conference, after conference, book after book, then you better build a heck of a church.

Mm-hmm. You better darn well make a big old church because you’re the hope of your city. You’re the local church is the hope of the world. And so it’s, it’s it’s error. Hmm. Um, and, and, and, and a great measure to make these type of statements that become paradigms and become theory and become doctrine inside people.

[00:47:00] Julie: Wow. And I think I, I know I’ve said that before and yet, honestly, it’s, it’s hopeful to me that the church is not the hope of the world, just in the sense that, yeah, what we’re seeing in the church right now is a very dark time for the church. And we need to remember that Jesus is the hope of the world.

The church is disappointed. An awful lot of us, an awful lot of us are disillusioned and hurt by what we’ve seen in the church. And, and I think it’s important for us to come back to saying, Jesus is the hope of the world. We gotta get back to Jesus as a church so that we can connect to the hope of the world.

But, but yeah, it, it, it’s, it’s funny how things that sound so good. And just, just are off by a little bit. Yet that little bit is so incredibly profound. And so yeah, that’s, that’s what we see here. And I, if you could just, um, just break down for us maybe a few, four or five things that when you look to this model and what was held up as, this is what a church has to be.

What they were selling, what the church really took hold of and what we need to change.

[00:48:18] Lance: Yeah. So once again, this was being sold decades ago, and so I would, I would ask our listeners to, to, when you hear this little bullet list, I’m just gonna throw, throw out, see if this does not sound very familiar with what you’re involved in right now.

Willow Creek created the structure. And these principles that are very much alive with its flavor in the churches today. So first off stage is at the center of everything. Mm-hmm. So it’s, it’s the organizing principle that draws everybody. So celebrity, there’s a celebrity at the top. There’s, this is, this is our guy and it’s usually is a guy, right?

Mm-hmm. Uh, brand is the core identity. So there’s, it’s, there’s a lot about brand and branding. And hierarchal leadership structures form and lead the thing. And measurable success is divine is defined by expansion, constantly growing. Um, healthy things grow. You hear all these little things. Yeah, healthy things grow.

Healthy, things grow. Every time I hear that, I think, well, is, is that really true? Have you ever heard of obesity? Say, have ever heard of the tumor?

[00:49:33] Julie: I’m thinking of mold grows. A lot of bad things grow too. Yeah. There’s

[00:49:36] Lance: a lot of things, you know, that, that, that, you know, you know, I wanna be healthy, but I don’t want to grow.

Right now. I’m in a place I don’t want to grow. Right. So, but anyway, the, these memes, these super memes get into people and they just start believing it’s true. But those principles, those old principles of Willow are still very much alive and still very much driving the church today.

[00:49:58] Julie: So we’ve alluded to this, but.

Let’s talk a little bit about this leadership model that Willow had, that it exported, how it collapsed with Bill Hybels and, and also when that happened, how that exposed in many ways, the, the fault lines that were already present, but it really became very, very clear when these women came forward and. I remember this like it, I mean, I remember this so clearly.

Mm-hmm. Reading in 2018, these women coming forward with allegations and I knew some of these women and they were not lightweights, like these were godly women who would not be lying, and it just was absolutely stunning and yet so hard to believe because. You know, even though at this point in my life I would say I had gotten to the point where I didn’t really believe in the Willow model anymore, but I still thought Bill Hybels was an extraordinary Christian leader.

So this was just Absolutely, yeah. Stunning to me.

[00:51:09] Lance: Yeah, absolutely. So you’re, we’re talking about 2018 when as you said, there were multiple women. Uh, they came forward with allegations against Bill Hybels and, um, what was exposed wasn’t just personal sin, it was a leadership structure that was designed to protect power.

Hmm. And so the elders didn’t act like shepherds. They acted like executives. And this was the very thing that they had been trained to do. And this, this is why I’m always talking about systems, Julie, because every system is perfectly designed to get the results. It does. Mm-hmm. And that’s why these elders didn’t act like shepherds.

They acted like executives. ’cause that’s the way they’d been trained. Mm-hmm. And so they minimized, they deflected, they protected the brand. And the system, they, they exported to the world. The same one. Harvard praised. This was the same system that shielded their very own abuse and failed to protect the flock.

[00:52:11] Julie: And they brought in a PR executive to help them manage it. And I, I mean, and this is the same PR executive, mark Demas who, uh, was brought in. Mm-hmm. And so many other, you know. Ravi Zacharias was brought in, uh, for Thomas White at Cedarville University when they had a crisis, was brought in with Gospel for Asia when they had to pay $34 million for defrauding.

And of course, they never admitted they defrauded their donors, but they not, you don’t pay $34 million to donors unless you’ve done something wrong. Um, uh, again. This whole system, just like the corporations, we’re just gonna cover our butts. CYA. It’s no longer about protecting the mission of the church, it’s about protecting the brand.

And the brand is, as Mark Driskell said, I am the brand, right? Um, the brand is the celebrity pastor, whoever that is. And so friends, when we’re looking at what’s happening. This, and, and this is the thing, and, and it took me a while to see this, I have to say in 2018 when Bill Hybels went down, when I blew the whistle on Moody, when, you know, on the heels of that, you know, I saw James McDonald, what he was doing at Harvest Bible Chapel.

And, you know, it was, it was pastor after Pastor Mega church after mega church, Ravi Zacharias. And I, I thought it was just gonna be a few bad apples. And then it was like. It was like an aha moment when I realized, and it really was your talk, I think it was that 2022. So just three years ago when A 23, was it 23?

Yeah. When it just crystallized when you did that talk. It’s the system stupid and it was like, I mean, I had it, it gave me language. It’s not that I hadn’t, you know, seen that. Sure. But it was, there was something when you gave that language that it’s the system. Then it, yeah, again, it was like a light bulb went on.

And again, we have seen this played out in church after church, after church.

[00:54:34] Lance: Absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s the DNA and that DNA is everywhere, folks. It’s, it is the same architecture, a stage replace of the Bible. Uh, yeah. A charismatic leader replaces shared discernment. Hmm. Uh, an elder board functions as this corporate shield.

Hmm. And, and the brand becomes the center of gravity in these churches. And so, you know, a crisis will expose the fault lines. Hmm. And this isn’t a series of isolated. Implosions that we’ve seen. It’s a systemic model failing in real time right before our eyes. Mm-hmm. And yet it continues. And this is why I have challenged through my social media and even through letters to some of the people that I know that are leading the largest conferences and largest church planting conferences in the world today.

I’ve challenged ’em saying, you’re continuing to perpetuate this leadership system. You don’t acknowledge there’s a problem. And you just keep selling it and it sells like hotcakes.

[00:55:40] Julie: You know, it’s interesting that we’re having this discussion. It’s about two weeks since our Little House Church did a retreat and mm-hmm.

We, we did, we were discussing leadership is, is been somewhat controversial within even our Our House church and at the very beginning, um. Th this one of our members who put together the, the study, he put up two pictures of churches. One was a church in Bangladesh that he had visited a house, church. And you see people gathered, some are praying, some are studying the scripture together, but it just seemed, you, you could just sense they’re all working, you know, like they’re, there’s like this community.

Coming together to discern together, to learn together, to pray. And this is a, a persecuted church. I mean, this is, is a, a church under incredible pressure. And then he showed a picture of, you know, what we’re used to the pastor up on stage and we’re seeing the back of the heads of, you know, dozens of people.

And we just started reflecting on what, what are, what do you see in these two pictures? And this has made me not just go and, and say, I think what I’ve, what I’ve experienced, what I’ve seen in the past, you know, 10 years or so, it, it’s made me rethink church even as we do it in the west. Like all of the things that we’re doing with church is that really the biblical way to do it is having one person.

Dispense a lecture to us is, is that really the best way to learn scripture? I mean, don’t we learn that that’s like one of the least effective ways? Like, I mean, just pedagogically, someone preaching at you, someone lecturing isn’t the best way to learn. I mean, it’s okay for conferences and things like that, but I mean, on a day-to-day basis, you know, gathering together, how much time do we even pray together in church services these days?

I, in some churches, the prayer is, is basically just a little something we say at the beginning, and then it’s over. Yeah. Everything we’re doing with church, I just feel like we, we need to rethink. We need to really rethink and instead Willow is getting up at 50 years and celebrating and I’m like celebrating what exactly.

I mean, I’m, and I’m not saying there’s not good things that have happened there and are happening there. You cannot remove. The work of the spirit from his people, but at the same time, friends think of what you’re doing. Is this really the way to do church?

[00:58:30] Lance: Yeah, it’s, you know, the thing is, is that everything is so.

Highly produced. It’s, it’s, it’s overly produced. Everything is scripted, everything’s perfected, and then everything is presented. Hmm. And that’s just not a family, that’s not the way a family works. That’s not the way the family operates. I remember just kinda like you were talking about that experience of, um, the man sharing about.

Their, their, their church and how that they were doing.