Baptist Press reports that Willow Creek Association’s own study shows their methodology is a failure:
Willow Creek has released the results of a multi-year study on the effectiveness of their programs and philosophy of ministry. The study’s findings are in a new book titled “Reveal: Where Are You?,” co-authored by Cally Parkinson and Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. Hybels himself called the findings “ground breaking,” “earth shaking” and “mind blowing.” And no wonder: It seems that the “experts” were wrong.
The report reveals that most of what they have been doing for these many years and what they have taught millions of others to do is not producing solid disciples of Jesus Christ. Numbers yes, but not disciples.
I’ve often thought that the real problem with the “Church Growth” movement is not so much its insistence on metrics and research but rather its tendency to measure and optimize for precisely the wrong things. When we have a faith based on the “narrow way” it would make sense to measure something other than church budgets and total attendance. There are two reasons I think things went badly:
1. As covered in the recent pop-economy book The Tipping Point, studies have shown that groups can only grow to about 150 or so before new sub-groups form with stronger internal loyalty than the larger group. Thus, unity is easier to achieve below the level of about 150 individuals. Once you significantly exceed that, bureaucracy and factionalism take over, creating their own institutional imperatives. A church with a huge staff, payroll and building debt simply cannot optimize for anything but offerings and numbers.
2. Deeper measures of spiritual growth are harder to do. Thus, what’s easier to measure (numbers in attendance, offering income) becomes a proxy for what’s hard to measure. Unfortunately for the church in the last 30 years, that assumption was incorrect.
Proper measurement variables are essential for any business, and even more essential for the church. Businesses that optimize for market share, total sales, growth, or even profitability are destined to fail: total long-term risk-adjusted net-present-value profit is the only measure worth optimizing for. Just as sales growth is not the same as profit growth (and in fact can be detrimental), growth in attendance and fundraising does not mean spiritual growth.
Here’s an idea: maybe the whole idea of running a church like a business is fundamentally flawed.
Businesses can be run on scientific metrics and experimentation because, frankly, it’s just money and the negative consequences are pretty tolerable if you get it wrong: you make less money than you otherwise would. I conduct scientific experiments daily in my business in the quest to optimize for total risk-adjusted profit.
I don’t do the same at home, i.e. I don’t perform experiments on my kids in real-time while raising them. Why? Because my kids are infinitely more valuable than mere profits or a business. For my children, I use the most conservative methodology possible, relying on traditional child-rearing methods developed over hundreds of years that slowly change.
As the Baptist Press article discusses using this very same analogy, parents who relied on so-called “scientific” child-centered methods for raising their children (as popularized by Dr. Spock in the 1950’s) had poor results. Those sticking to traditional methods had the better outcome.
Now we’re seeing the same result in the church: seeker-sensitive churches monkeyed with the proven traditions of the church and screwed up an entire generation of believers, just like trendy parents screwed up their kids with child-centered pop psychology.
Just like our kids, the church is too important for experimentation: much better to take the conservative strategy of tradition and incremental change over long periods of time.
But from what I can tell, the Willow Creek people still haven’t learned anything:
Perhaps the most shocking thing of all in this revelation coming out of Willow Creek is in a summary statement by Greg Hawkins:
“Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he’s asking us to transform this planet.”
The bureaucracy is too deeply entrenched to just pull down the tent and go home. If Hybels were truly sorry for the mess he’s made, he’d quit ministry and go sell cars or something. He’ll have a new book and a new forty-day study in a year or so, explaining what was missing in his former approach and the sure-fire way to fix it. And you can bet it won’t involve going back to what works and dismantling the resource-hungry bureaucracy of the megachurch movement he’s spawned.
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