Word: smalling
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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...
...they did, as Hybels and Bibbs re-engineered the church to match its preaching. They built "Bridging the Racial Divide" gatherings into Willow's massive grid of laity-led "small groups." The meetings were essential, says 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...
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...
...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 that Jesus loves everyone. Sixteen small faces of various hues gaze up at her. God wants them all to be friends, she concludes - but the message seems superfluous. Here, today, Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation about Sunday school is finally refuted. In one room of one huge church striving to do the right thing...
...professor's patronizing efforts to help a female student lead to an unjust charge of sexual harassment. Though the staccato dialogue was Mametspeak at its purest, a political agenda drove the characters in a way it never had any of Mamet's previous slimy, but at least self-directed, small-time crooks or real estate sharpies...