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...Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago's northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus' words "Love thine enemy." As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels' preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy blond but now white. Indeed, if there is a whiter preacher currently running a megachurch, that man must glow...
...Making of a (White) MegachurchWillow Creek Community Church's main complex, in South Barrington, does not tower so much as sprawl: eight low-slung buildings, landscaped on a swampy and thus underdeveloped grassland amid Chicago's bustling, affluent northwest suburbs. As the church has grown - especially with the 2004 completion of a new sanctuary building with an escalator and interior waterfall - it has become more self-consciously handsome. But like Hybels himself, it abandons pious overstatement for corporate efficiency: church as conceived by Jack Welch. (Read "Church Group Attacks Christmas Commercialism...
Hybels, a former chaplain for the Chicago Bears with many black friends, says, "I thought I was gonna faint." He was stunned to realize that racism is "not just an individual issue but a justice issue" with "structural and [systemic] aspects" violating dozens of biblical admonitions. "I went from thinking 'I don't have a race problem' to 'There is a huge problem in our world that I need to be part of resolving...
There were also larger race-oriented seminars and reconciliation-themed book clubs. Bibbs founded an annual "Justice Journey," busing Willow staff and black Chicago pastors together to bloodstained civil rights pilgrimage sites. Hybels added black, Hispanic and Asian performers to Willow's music and worship teams. In 2006, Willow introduced a Spanish-language service for Latinos, who were streaming into the area...
...congregants, naming a person of another color to tell you what Scripture means, week in and week out, crosses an internal boundary between "diversity" (positive) and "affirmative action" (potentially unnerving). Daniel Hill, a former Willow young-adult pastor who founded his own fully multicultural River City Community Church in Chicago, says, "There's a tipping point where the dominant group feels threatened." Consciously or unconsciously, Hybels stands at that point...