Living Journey

World News

The Times December 27, 2006

Where God meets big business - and it’s soon coming to a church near you

Tom Baldwin in Willow Creek, Illinois American Evangelical Christians scare the hell out of secular Britons and, while their reputation may be unfair, it has been long in the making and is reinforced by some truth. [...]

[...]And more recently the European Left has been concerned about an American Religious Right bent on ensuring that the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic prophecies come true through the current President’s policy on Iraq, Israel and the Middle East.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Evangelicals have a very different, but also damaging, image. The damp-palmed jeans-clad vicar who plays guitar in a Christian rock band does not scare anyone but fashion writers.

Somewhere between these two caricatures there may be an answer to the riddle about why Britain and America, nations with history, language and culture in common, have grown so far apart on religion.

That answer may just be found in Willow Creek Church, near Chicago, recently rated in a survey including 2,000 pastors as the most influential of any in America. It has grown from virtually nothing into an Evangelical megachurch with weekend congregations of 20,000, assets of $150 million (£76 million) and an annual turnover of $26 million. If that sounds like a business, that is because it is run like one: Harvard and Stanford MBA s handle the day-to-day management.

In the past decade Willow Creek has tried to export its formula to Britain and other countries through a separate $17 million-a-year association that has a branch office in Southampton. It now has 891 churches and other groups in Britain, from which almost 3,000 British delegates have attended its teaching conferences.

Many credit Willow Creek and other US churches with helping them to buck the British trend of an apparently general decline in congregations. Figures published this month suggest that Evangelicals account for a rising one-third share of the 870,000 regular attenders remaining in the Church of England.

So what does Willow Creek have that poor old St Winifred’s Church does not? The first thing that you notice is how little there is to notice. At Willow Creek’s 155-acre site, there is a vast car park, a series of bulky and nondescript buildings that would not look out of place in a technology park and a Starbucks-style coffee shop. But there are no crosses, stained-glass windows, bells, statues, altars or any other of the bits and pieces usually associated with Christian worship. This is a “seeker-sensitive” environment, designed to appeal to the unchurched.

Instead, Willow Creek offers “high-quality”, for suburban consumers used to the high convenience of the shopping mall. And, if it was not so good, 20,000 people would not keep coming back for more every week.

Weekend services, where occasionally a “portable cross” might be brought out, are packed into three sittings at its auditorium, which has a capacity of more than 7,000. Sets are created by a full-time designer, a live band provides music and there are huge video screens on either side of the stage. Thousands of children are cared for downstairs in a complex called Promiseland, where toddlers receive one-to-one attention from an army of volunteers. Anxious parents can pop down to view their offspring from behind disguised mirrors. Screaming babies can be taken to a soundproof glass box from where the parents can watch the service on screens. Older children are lavished with specially produced videos and games, and it is often they who drag the rest of the family to church rather than the other way around.

Although Willow Creek also stages a more theologial service in midweek, the weekend events are close cousins of the light entertainment and self-help industries. Celebrities are occasionally brought along, while the preaching focuses on adjusting to stages and challenges of life such as “coping with debt” or “not measuring up”. A CD of the show is available on the way out.

Bill Hybels, who founded the church in 1975 as a place where his godless friends might go, is similarly unthreatening. He wears a polo shirt and caps his salary at $95,000 a year (one of Willow Creek’s proudest boasts is that it has avoided the faintest whiff of a Bakker-esque scandal over the past 30 years). Mr Hybels recognises that the American Evangelicals’ branding problems do not help in addressing what he calls the “precipitous fall in church attendance” in countries such as Britain.

“I’m grieved that a segment of Evangelicals have reduced what it means to exemplify the life of Christ to our world,” he says. “When you search the Scriptures, the greater bulk of where Christ said we should be putting our time and energy is in relieving the suffering of the poor and overturning oppression. The choices about where to make the big investments have been misguided.” He does not need to spell out that those misguided choices were to focus on sex - sins of the flesh - and abortion before social justice.

But there is no doubt that abortion in particular galvanised American Evangelicals to enter the political arena. Being pro-life has become a matter of political orthodoxy for those eager to harvest Evangelical votes at a time when they have overtaken mainstream Protestants to represent over a quarter of the US electorate.

So, too, has opposition to gay marriage. In the 2004 election gay marriage was ruthlessly exploited as a “wedge issue” by the Republicans. President Bush’s support among white Evangelicals rose from 68 per cent four years earlier to 78 per cent. Mr Hybels has no intention of diluting the literal interpretation of the Bible, which makes quite plain that homosexuality and abortion are sins. Evangelicals believe that liberal Protestants in America and elsewhere are equivocating themselves out of existence.

Instead, his point is one of emphasis. While Fundamentalists have a generally pessimistic view of original sin and believe that most of the world should be abandoned to its misery, Evangelicals involve themselves in politics because of a sunnier perspective that can yet confound the easy stereotype.

Mr Hybels’s optimism is perhaps best illustrated by his role as Bill Clinton’s spiritual adviser throughout his Monica Lewinsky-tainted eight years in the White House. Mr Clinton returned the favour by turning up at the church in 2000 to tell the congregation that his spiritual health was a “work in progress”.

The Willow Creek founder maintains a political neutrality similar to that of Billy Graham, who certainly did more for the Evangelical Movement in Britain than the likes of Mr Falwell is likely to do. Mr Hybels told The Times that he has voted “different ways on different occasions”. He is far from disengaged on social issues. He is more likely to be heard speaking out about poverty, Darfur and global warming than he is to be fulminating about the evils of gay sex.

There are, of course, vast differences remaining between the world views of liberal Europeans and US Evangelicals. While both want to alleviate suffering, the latter have less interest in long-term nation-building and multi-lateral institutions. An even greater gulf of misunderstanding exists over the widespread belief among many Evangelicals in the Book of Revelation prophecy of Christ’s return, the conversion of all the Jews and a final terrible war with Satan. This helps to explain the rigid support for Israel among those conservative Americans who are convinced that they are living in a Biblical era.

Gary Schwammlein, Willow Creek’s German-born vice president for international ministries, acknowledges that it is “harder to reach out to people in the UK than here, in the Midwest of America, where church attendance is already high - it is a different culture.” Mr Schwammlein, a scientist who was recruited from a top job at Monsanto, then illustrated just how different that culture was by setting out his belief in creationism over Darwinism and his anger over the past 300 years of the Enlightenment. But Stephen Sizer, the vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water in Surrey, insists that it is possible to steer clear of the more jagged rocks of US Evangelism, saying: “The stuff on homosexuality and abortion does not translate to the UK.

Yet Mr Sizer has been strongly influenced by Willow Creek as he doubled his congregation over the past decade. “Christians here are in the minority, they are defensive. I learnt a lot from them about how to be outgoing. They also have all this management expertise and, while in the UK we think that anything goes in the voluntary sector, they have a dedication to pursuing excellence.” Like other members of this Evangelical association, he sounds as though he has been on a management consultancy course, with talk of “building teams”, “creating an effective vision” and “leadership skills”.

In this sense, the lasting influence of US Evangelicals on the British Church may yet have more to do with the eternal truths of business school than the Bible.

I couldn’t have put it better myself!