Willow Creek Community Church, a mega-church of tens of thousands with a multi-million dollar budget and one of the first churches to promote being seeker-sensitive and to offer a program-driven, full-service approach to meeting the spiritual needs of people, has started rethinking what they've been doing for the last 30 years. They've discovered that "participation" in a packed schedule of church activities doesn't mean people become real disciples (though it is one way to build a large institution). They are rediscovering the spiritual disciplines that cannot be programmed and staff-driven. They are discovering that creating the church version of a shopping mall doesn't help people really become the committed disciples they had always sought nurture.

 

Bill Hybels calls this realization the "wake-up call of his adult life." What Hybels says they are "pioneering" as personal spiritual life plans one might recognize as the ancient discipline of having a "rule of life." I truly admire Willow Creek and its leadership on admitting when they discover that depth of spirituality is not what they are fostering, and wonder what the future of the mega-church movement holds when the initiator of it all begins to question the very essence of what they've been doing.