While skimming through the blogs I read on a daily basis I came across something very interesting. If you’re a church leader, someone deeply involved in your church, or someone disgusted by church leaders you’ll probably find this just as interesting.
Before I get too much deeper into this post I want to first say that I have always really respected Willow Creek and it’s pastors. I’ve had a chance to hang out with a few of them at different conferences and really have enjoyed them and their hearts. That’s why this is so interesting… a large church who’s willing to admit their wrong in order to get things right. As part of a huge research initiative Willow Creek has uncovered some pretty interesting data that is changing things at Willow. Here’s what Hybels had to say…
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 service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.
After talking to over 20,000 from over 30 churches Willow is learning some very interesting things that we as church leaders MUST learn or we will CONTINUE TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES in the way that we do church.
Let me encourage you to take about 20 minutes to learn more about this research and think through how it affects you and your church. You can do it 3 ways.
Read the short article from Leadership Journal’s Out of Ur Blog
Read the Book REVEAL: Where Are You?
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i found quite interesting the topics at hand here. greg hawkins took service,classes,small groups,care,and oppertunity to serve as five key elements used by the american church to help people grow from there self describe spiritual journey to a more intimate deeper love for god and his people. through there research they found that it was the people who described themselfes as close to jesus,and jesus centered that where not reciveing the benifit of spiritual growth at the rate of the growing in jesus,and found jesus groups. but a question that comes to mind as we rethink church. does that mean that we shall no longer hold classes,services,small groups, care or provide opertunies to serve? or just less of them? does that mean that the love of christ isnt begin examplified in those elements. or is the love of christ being taught through those things but just not understood. is there clear lines of communcation between gods givers of the service and gods partications between his observers. how do we rethink church.how do we enable his servants,and equip them to be more mature in the relationship with jesus.if jesus is in all of those five elements of teaching the question becomes how much jesus? is it just something we do,and then sprinkle a little jesus into it or is it all about him. how do we know the anwser to these questions? where do we accuratly begin to find ways to become better teachers and showers of intimaicay with jesus?
Comment by rodney buchwalter October 23, 2007 @ 6:09 pm[...] Willow Creek & Reality « andrewsikora.com [...]
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