Hybels’ “Mistake”
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.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:23 am
As a Southern Non-Denomination Protestant Christian, It has been intresting to watch the attraction of the “Mega-Church” and it’s developement. For some, it meets their needs as a social outlet, and baby sitter for parents. A networking dream come true for others. Activities flourish like a buffet of choices. One of the true benefits is the vast number of different bible study groups that allow a member to dive into a specific area of study that intrests them. Teenagers and youth have a christian environment to hang out in contrast to a secular social group that may influence youth badly. Self-help groups are available for whatever ails one, and even spiritual support for co-dependence individuals exiting rehab exists for many of the large ministries. I see these as positives, as many a new christian has gone back out into the world to only again be overwhelmed by the world…………But, I also accept the reality that MORE always means both more good and more bad as in any large organization. The very small church with a small gathering of nothing but the elderly looking at each other each week to see who has died and who hasn’t, is not the answer.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:57 am
I’m a simple man with simple requests: Can we use the hymnals again? Can we sing songs that aren’t so repetative that they become vain repetition?
November 12th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
What ever happened to the scriptural teaching that believers are branches and Christ is the Vine? New converts were once taught to have dependence on the Holy Spirit of God to fill their lives and guide them into all truth. This doesn’t mean there is no place in the church for various activities that may be helpful to believers, but they certainly are not the primary source of spiritual aid.
I find it very strange that so many of these mega -churches are in such lock step with the activities and self-help trappings of secular organizations you can hardly tell them apart.
How can the Church ever impact the world if it is only a “religious” duplicate of what the world already has?
The Lord didn’t say come unto me and I will give you man’s concepts of what ails you and what can make you right.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Roho, if the megachurches and their copycats hadn’t bled off the young and foolish with cotton candy church, then the old folks who merely want to continue the traditions of their ancestors wouldn’t be all alone. This is the only truly valuable (in and of itself) form of “diversity” (i.e. young people and old people spending time around each other, and the former learning from the latter) and yet it’s never emphasized.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Two of your comments specifically caught my attention:
“Here’s an idea: maybe the whole idea of running a church like a business is fundamentally flawed.”
THANK YOU for saying this. In the church and family settings, there are deeper, more profound consequences that affect people’s actual lives - not just their pocket books or their self-esteem - and we need to acknowledge that and put the correct emphasis on teaching doctrines and the truths Jesus did and not worry so much about ‘programs’. Some programs work for what they are designed to do, and I’m definitely not against fun and fellowship - but it’s possible for fun and fellowship and (some) programs to actually ADVANCE the goal we’re trying to attain, instead of detracting from it.
“This is the only truly valuable (in and of itself) form of “diversity” (i.e. young people and old people spending time around each other, and the former learning from the latter) and yet it’s never emphasized.”
I could not agree more. Titus 2 is a perfect example of this - older men and women being instructed to teach the younger. When did we get away from this?
November 13th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Tom…………….A great point that you make!…….The desire for materialism has seperated the generations with parents naturaly wanting their children to do well. (Making it easy to only come around on hollidays.) I’m a firm believer that out of control ambitions are destroying the traditional family as much as anything. Far too many couples are allowing the “Daycare” to raise their children inorder to drive the big SUV and keep up with the Jones’s…..But often they justify their OWN materialism with some intangible futuristic statement like, “We are working hard so we can send our only (un-aborted) child to a good college.”………Yes, the first child interfeared WAY too much with ambitions early in the marriage!………..I’m being cad, and I must admit how refreshing it is when I meet a young person that truely loves older people. I have wonderful memories of my Great Grandparents, and would not trade them for all the gold in the world.(Some of my ancestors married at very young ages in a very rural atmosphere.)
November 24th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
I recently wrote a few posts of my own about my problem with some of the metrics used in determining spirituality of churches. I at least find Willow Creek’s admissions honest and refreshing.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I enjoyed your analysis. I have to disagree on the ethnic diversity as a marker of the supernatural. I think the diversity of the early church is overplayed these days for politically correct motives.
Once we discount the Jewish/Gentile diversity (which was self-evidently necessary), the early Church was made up of a relatively similar group of southern European and near East peoples. Looking at any individual in any church at that time, I think we’d be hard pressed to assign any of them to a particular group, since they were all so genetically and culturally similar (Greek culture was dominant). An physical anthropologist is not going to call a group of Corinthians, Greeks and Jews a racially diverse group. They are all peoples of the Mediterranean subgroup of the Caucasian race. The early Corinthians may have even been Celts racially.
And when you look just a few hundred years later, in the period where the Church was unified spiritually but had not yet degenerated into pre-Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism, we see the churches grouped explicitly around nationality.
The supernatural is the only thing that can account for the growth of the early Church from a small cult to the dominant religion. It did this largely along self-consciously ethnic lines, as reflected in the ancient Orthodox churches. Thus, the Armenian Orthodox Church (the oldest Christian nation/church), the Greek Orthodox Church, etc, all organized along ethnic lines.
The judgment of Babel still holds today, which is that ethnic divisions among men are natural and serve as firewalls for the spread of evil in our fallen world.