Word: africanization
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...Willow Got ReligionLarry Butler first visited Willow Creek in the 1970s and left fast. "I liked the teaching, but I didn't see anybody like me," says Butler, 57, a solidly built, hazel-eyed African-American pharmacist from Oklahoma. "I didn't have any problem with the people, but I didn't know if they had a problem with me. So I thought, 'I'll go elsewhere.' " Other minorities who sampled the church felt similarly uncomfortable. Yet Butler returned to Willow in the early '80s, later inviting his wife Renetta and, as he says, "hoping things would change." (Read...
...Renetta, who ended up running five: they were a ground-level "safe haven" where congregants could express and dispel received stereotypes. At the very first, in 2001, a well-meaning white woman kept using the phrase "you people." "Do you people want to be called blacks?" she asked. "Or African Americans? I never know what to call you people." Eventually it became too much, and Larry, along with Renetta and his brother Garnett, explained to the woman and eight other white congregants in the room that "every time you say 'you people,' you're holding us back - it's like...
...February 2009, Willow had hit the 20%-minority threshold that signifies an integrated congregation. Today its membership is 80% Caucasian, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 2% African American and 8% "other" ethnicities. Says Bibbs: "The church would never be the same again...
...several years. Most disturbing, according to about a dozen minority congregants, was that Hybels never promoted a nonwhite member to a pulpit pastorship or senior staff position at the main Willow campus. (Bibbs, never a "teaching pastor," now advises other churches on multiculturalism at the Willow Creek Association.) An African American recently joined Willow's elder board. Curtis Sallee, a black 15-year "Creeker," comments that while "what Bill has done racially has been nothing less than miraculous, there needs to be someone who speaks for the church, a teaching pastor or staff, who's a minority. That...
...there is one part of Willow already living 2050. It is not the sanctuary. At Promiseland, Willow's vast Sunday-school complex, Jim and Ellen Strasma wrangle a band of 2-year-olds: seven Caucasians, a Caucasian-Asian, six Hispanics, an Indian American and an African American. A boy in a T-shirt and sporty maroon track pants shares a miniature plastic baguette with a ponytailed Latina. He looks like a preschool Bill Hybels, yet one of his parents is Asian American. The Indian-American girl and the African-American girl dance together. As pickup time approaches, Ms. Ellen explains...