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Stalled Out?Yet in the past few years, desegregation proponents have wondered whether Willow's commitment extends to giving minorities a truly representative voice. Organizational shifts in the church resulted in the disbanding of many small groups, including those concerned with race. Hybels, with his convert's zeal on the topic and unique authority, left the main pulpit for 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...
Hybels acknowledges the situation as "extremely frustrating" and attributes it to the fact that paid leadership is drawn from the longest-serving church volunteers, who are still mostly white. The argument, however, doesn't account for the homogeneity of Willow's pulpit pastors, the past several of whom have been out-of-church hires...
...some white 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...
Still, observers inside and outside Willow applaud him. David Anderson, founder of the multicultural Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia, Md., says, "I bet they've done it faster and better than anyone else with a church that large starting off as all white." When I ask Hybels how important racial reconciliation is to Christianity, he says, "It's absolutely core to the Gospel. It speaks to whether all humans are made in the image of God and have the capability of being redeemed and used by God to perform his work. I'm going to persevere on this...
Some think the integration of American churches is inevitable. Willow Creek Association head Jim Mellado cites the Census Bureau projection that by 2050 the U.S. will contain no racial majority. "Every church will have to deal with that or find itself on the side of the road," he says. Hybels differs, saying that "there will still be people who will only want to worship amongst their own kind...