"The Wake Up Call of His Life" - Bill Hybels on discipleship failures at Willowcreek

If you have not yet done so, I urge you to click here and watch Bill Hybels at the last Willowcreek Church Leadership Summit share how their congregation's leadership has recently been confronted with their inneffectiveness at turning seekers into fully commited followers of Jesus Christ. I also urge you to click here to watch Greg Hawkins' comments on the process the Willowcreek leadership went through that led them to that conclusion.

While the congregation I lead (Hillcrest Church) is not a "seeker-driven" church like Willowcreek, I have great respect for Bill Hybels. I am convinced his passion for bringing people to Christ is authentic. Knowing the criticism he and his team have received over the years for some of their innovations, I honor him for the tremendous courage it must have taken to publically acknowledge the results of their research. I urge you as a leader to watch these two video clips and then ask yourself the hard question, "Regardless of whether or not the church I serve is the same style as Willowcreek, do their conclusions apply to us, too?" Chances are they do, at least to some degree, as is the case in certain ways here at Hillcrest Church.

In the final analysis, the command Jesus has given to us to make disciples requires effecting profound life-change in people. May God give us the insight we need in order to know the truth about how well our ministries accomplish that goal, and may He grant us the wisdom we need in order to become much better better at doing it...!

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 cameback 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. … 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 services, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own." —Willow Creek Community Church senior pastor Bill Hybels [revealnow.com, 10/19/07]