Willow Creek Classes

A colleague has directed me to Willow Creek Classes, where Willow Creek Community Church are uploading their teaching and training classes, with quite a bit of material worth browsing.

The classes are described as a ‘gathering of individuals for the purpose of learning, growth and development’, the goal of which is ‘to build a strong Christian foundation and catalyze spiritual growth’. The curriculum appears to be divided into four main areas:

• Bible & Theology
• Spiritual Practices
• Faith in Action
• Training

As my colleague points out, it’s interesting to see what they’re doing in the area of teaching following the results of their Reveal survey.

A few years back, Willow Creek released its findings from a multiple-year qualitative study of its ministry. They had wanted to know what programmes and activities of the church were actually helping people mature spiritually. They discovered that it was flawed to think that a church will generate Christian disciples by getting people to show up for activities. People need to take responsibility for their spiritual growth instead of just ‘participating’ in events. The results were published in a book, Reveal: Where Are You? (2007), put together by Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek.

Speaking at a Leadership Summit, Hybels summarised the findings this way:

‘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 came back, 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.’

No wonder that Hybels called this research ‘the wake-up call’ of his adult life. As he said:

‘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.’