Consume or Be Consumed 2.0

It turns out that ample research would be a good thing before posting a blog.  Primary sources are probably better than secondary.  As I looked into this Willow Creek deal a little more today I decided to watch the videos featuring Bill Hybels and Greg Hawkins.  Their thoughts were not nearly as "180" as I had been lead to believe.  

Greg Hawkins is still using charts and marketing techniques to try to understand the kingdom of God.  He mentioned the word "Scripture" (the same mention I put in the quote yesterday) but didn't actually cite any Scripture in the 13 minutes I watched him try to explain how they would take their church to the "next level".

Bill Hybels had a very revealing interview about his thoughts on the buzz around what Willow Creek was actually saying with their research.  If you don't want to watch the whole thing I think I can sum it up in one question and answer:

Interviewer: Controversy and misinformation has been swirling all around this Reveal thing since last October, in fact there was a blog, from the Out of Ur blog (the blog I cited yesterday) that was titled "Willow Repents".  How'd you react to that?  Repent of what?

Hybels: Well, that's how I reacted to it.  (He laughs.)  I wondered, what horrible, immoral thing have I done?  (He laughs some more.)  I think it was a poor choice of words, actually, because we have made strategic adjustments on an annual (or) every other year to try to be more effective in building an Acts 2 church.  I don't think when you make a strategic adjustment it qualifies under the word "repent".  I think every evangelical knows that's kind of a loaded up term and I think someone wanted to get some action on a blog and I think it was very unfortunate and quite disingenuous to title the article that way.  But such as it is, I will be the first to say, we learn and grow at Willow.  We make no apologies for wanting to get better...

I don't think anyone is asking them to apologize for getting "better", do you?  And yeah, repentance is a huge term loaded with lots of connotations like admission and need and sin.  And yeah, you better believe I have a hell of a hard time doing it.  But if finding out that you, as a church, have not truly helped believers out of the milk drinking stage of their faith (and have held out your model as one that all churches should follow), is not reason for some serious repentance, then what is?  

That would be my question for Pastor Hybels: of what should one repent?

"Building an Acts 2 church," he says.  It's interesting in Acts 2 that the first thing Peter tells the church to practically, relevantly, immediately do (because that's all that matters right?) is to "repent."  Repent and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins...  

"Do"ing church.  That's the buzz word.  The phrase we use for building the kingdom.  "How we do church," you hear it all the time.  The disciples of Christ in Acts 2 don't really "do" church.  They live church.  They devote themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.  They sold all their crap and shared everything they had left.  They met in each others' homes.  Maybe the point is to stop "doing" church and start building the kingdom.  

Living the kingdom.

But first we, I, must repent.

Consume or Be Consumed

I'd been hearing about this apology from Willow Creek Church concerning the way they've not only been evolving the way they do ministry in their own church but also have been heavily influencing almost every evangelical church in America for the past thirty years.  Ravi Zacharias noted it when I heard him speak and my pastor, Spencer Haygood also mentioned it recently.  This prompted me to look up exactly what Willow Creek was apologizing for.

I can't say how much I respect an honestly humble apology, especially from those with enough power to manipulate their way around one.  This confession seems to point to hearts seeking the Lord combined with brains which had only been seeking to market.  And marketing, Ladies and Gents, is exactly what this church model has been hinged on.  According to this blog the words "What is our business?  Who is our customer?  What does the customer consider value?" hung on a poster outside the door of senior Pastor, Bill Hybels.  

Questions about why American Evangelicals are such consumers?  

Anyone?

What they found in this extensive study was that they had made a lot of "Christians" but very few disciples.  According to the same website above, Hybels said

"...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 service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own."

I have to wonder then, what were they doing?  How does a church, for thirty years, neglect this aspect of ministry without question?  How do thousands of churches decide it's a great idea to follow this model?  How do millions of Christians not realize that the sand we're sinking in is incredibly shallow, yet somehow we are neck deep and it's all we can do to catch a few more short breaths?

The culture, at every turn, appeals to our most base consumerist instinct.  Likewise, the church asks no more of us but to Take, to Buy Into, to Drink the Kool-Aid.  "Come on and take a free ride," as one church sings.  What a sad, sad state it has left us in.

For a year I worked for a church based on this model.  Huge.  Three campuses around the city.  Giant NASA technology screens.  Light shows.  Parking Decks.  Give-aways at church.  Nice give-aways.  Like i-pods and airplane tickets.  Lots of people with lots of brand name clothing.  Lots of children that needed spanking.  Lots of genuinely nice people.  People with "good hearts".  Still, those I was able to talk to one on one would tell me point blank "there's no where I can go to really study the Bible".  All their programs.  All their technology.  All their terms for the way to really "do" church.  "There are small groups," one woman told me, "but the leaders have had nowhere to learn the Bible themselves, so how can they teach it to us?" 

Hopefully the trickle of the results to this study will not take long to be heard by those influenced severely by the former Willow Creek the-way-to-do-church-model.  Here's what Willow Creek executive pastor Greg Hawkins has to say about the future:

"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."

Let's just hope that this time around, the research is based more on Scripture and influenced by great theologians rather than the marketing techniques of Coca-Cola.