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Hybels and his Willow Creek church are already headed down that path. Though Willow is not the most advanced example of multiracial church, it makes an excellent window into the new desegregation because of its size, its influence and the ferocious purposefulness with which Hybels has deconstructed his all-white institution. Willow may also be emblematic in that Hybels appears to have stopped short of creating a fully color-blind church. His efforts illustrate both the possibilities and the challenges that smaller churches may face as they attempt to move beyond black and white...
...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...
Willow Creek is a paradigmatic religious success story. In 1974, Hybels was a youth pastor whose meetings outdrew the church he worked for by a factor of three. In '75, he and several friends founded Willow, aiming at people with little Christian affiliation, informally dubbed "unchurched Harry and Mary." The congregation boomed - the word megachurch was reputedly coined to describe it - and Hybels became the poster boy for the new movement of exurban big-box churches...
...Harry and Mary were white: Willow attracted almost nobody of color. The gurus of the megachurch explosion were church-growth consultants, who endorsed the "homogeneous unit principle": people like to worship with people who are similar to them - in age, wealth and race. Hybels, while denying intentional exclusivity, says that "in the early days, we were all young, white, affluent, college-educated suburbanites, and we all understood each other. When we reached out to our friends, it became self-reinforcing...
...that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions created church climates that unofficially discouraged minority participation. Far from reconciling the races, Emerson concluded, Evangelicalism acted to "drive them apart [and] contribute to the racial fragmentation of American society." See the top 10 religion stories...