Nurturing the Spirit to Serve

An Interview with Pastor Bill Hybels, Willow Creek Community Church
by Karen Beattie

Two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ turned his world and its social structure upside down. Suddenly the last became first, the foolish became wise, and the poor were made rich. That's what Pastor Bill Hybels and believers at Willow Creek Community Church, located in the affluent Chicago suburb of Barrington, discovered when they ventured into inner-city Chicago and neighboring countries to minister to the poor. They returned to Barrington understanding that they're not as wealthy as they thought. The poor had riches that suburban people knew little about.

In 1994 the church developed a partnership with Vision Chicago (World Vision's urban ministry with MidAmerica Leadership Foundation), which introduced them to inner-city needs. Today the church has 38 ministries to Chicago's poor, with a goal to involve 8,000 people a year in ministries to the inner city and neighboring countries, including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico.

Throughout Willow Creek's 22-year history, Hybels has shaped the vision for the church, which now draws 16,500 people to weekend services. He recently talked to World Vision about the church's responsibility to help the poor, how they responded, and the riches they discovered in poverty-stricken communities. Hybels, 45, has written several books, including Honest to God?, Too Busy Not to Pray, Descending into Greatness, and Fit to be Tied, which he co-wrote with his wife, Lynne. The Hybels live in Barrington, Ill., with their two college-age children.

After starting Willow Creek Church, when did you know it was time to start reaching into inner-city Chicago and neighboring countries?

We started the church in 1975 with just a few couples, and no money or facilities. We felt we had to stay very focused on the development of the core of Willow Creek so we had a basic launching pad, or headquarters, for all the ministries that would flow out of the church someday. It was about at the 10-year mark that we felt we had a strong enough base that we could then peek over the walls of Willow Creek and start to ask God, "Okay, with a stable, growing congregation, what is the next step for us to take with regard to the world outside?"

What do you see as the church's responsibility toward the poor?

It's pretty obvious from the teachings of Jesus that when Christians are given the mandate to spread the gospel it's more than just a verbal message. It's extending the kingdom of God holistically. So part of the church's role is to proclaim the message of salvation, and part of the church's role is to tend to people's needs, whether those needs are relational, emotional, psychological, physical, or financial.

We've tried for the past 10 years or so to wrestle with what that means for Willow Creek Community Church. We have a housing ministry for the suburban poor, a food pantry, a counseling center, a benevolence ministry, and a ministry that repairs cars for single moms and the poor. Last year the more affluent people at Willow Creek donated 600 cars to those who are struggling with transportation. So we're really committed in our suburban area to try to be Christ to our community.

But then we had to figure out what that meant with regard to our responsibility to the inner city and around the world. After many years of dialogue and experimentation with certain partnerships in ministry in the inner city, we linked arms with World Vision. They provided overall direction and leadership to building coalitions of ministries into which Willow Creek could pour its volunteer forces. World Vision, through Vision Chicago, had expertise in urban ministry which we didn't have. But what Willow Creek had was financial resources and volunteer forces.

We're always trying to provide resources and personnel in the hope that the inner-city ministries we help will eventually move toward being self-sustaining. We're very nervous about creating unhealthy dependencies. Vision Chicago showed us - and continually shows us - that if we provide resources and volunteers, we can help ministries catch their own stride and move to a point where they can sustain themselves. Then we can move to other projects.

What is your definition of poverty?

When most people think of that word, they think of financial poverty, or poverty of opportunity that keeps people entrenched in a dead-end system. Willow Creek exists in an economic zone where that word is rarely used. However, we see spiritual poverty, relational poverty, emotional poverty, marital poverty. We see people who have everything materially but have a vacuum inside their soul. Jesus said, "What does it matter if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?" It's a bad deal. So we try work on the spiritual poverty of the people around Willow Creek, lead them to Christ, disciple them, and then we challenge them to leverage their knowledge, talents, and resources for the sake of those who have less materially.

How did your attitudes toward the poor develop?

My father was a successful and eccentric businessman who sent me all over the world because he felt I needed to see the world and become independent. One of the trips he sent me on was throughout Africa, by myself, when I was 16. I landed in Nairobi, Kenya. I took a cab to the hotel and then walked downtown to check out the sights, thinking it was going to be like downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan. Instead, I saw stunning, heart-wrenching poverty - people with bloated bellies, discolored hair, and leprosy.

It was a shattering experience. Until that point in my life my main concern was how fast I could get through college so I could take over our family business and make money and buy a bigger boat and fly a faster airplane. I'll never forget going back to my room, getting on my knees before God and saying, "This changes everything. In some way, something I do in the future has to address people who are living in conditions like these." Once you really see it for yourself, it's pretty hard to close your eyes and your heart to that kind of poverty ever again.

How do you motivate affluent suburbanites to care about the poor?

The challenge is to get them to experience it, because once a genuinely committed follower of Christ sees the need in the inner city or neighboring nations, and sees the opportunities for advancing the kingdom, then usually that person becomes motivated.

Sometimes people in suburban churches get a bad rap. Our people work extremely hard, many of them work 70 or 80 hours a week. They ride the train down to the business district, so they leave at 5:30 in the morning and don't get home until at 6:30 at night. They're faithful spouses, conscientious parents, active church members, they're generous with their resources, they lead small groups, they witness to their neighbors. They're terrific people.

So I have to thoughtfully challenge our believers to integrate caring for the poor into the way their life works because it's extraordinarily easy to induce guilt. But that isn't the motivation that will sustain their involvement over a long time. We want to cast a vision. We want them to experience God using them in these cross-cultural situations, and then have that internal, Holy Spirit-ignited flame warm their spirit for future involvement.

What effect has serving the poor had on your church?

I have no regrets over the time it took to build a strong enough core upon which to build our extension ministries, because when we did start working beyond the walls of Willow Creek, there was a pent-up desire within the church that made it a life-giving experience. Our people were more than ready to extend their miraculous experience of God to those outside of the church, and they had a spirit of wanting to serve and wanting to give and wanting to invest and roll up their sleeves to help others.

As we started doing projects in the inner city, and in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other countries, it was like pouring gasoline on a fairly robust fire. It has been nothing but positive.

How does ministering to the poor spiritually affect those individuals who are involved in ministry?

We started holding pilot groups with believers in our church and asked, "How did Christ get more fully formed in your life?" We learned that the teaching ministry of this church has a significant impact on the spiritual development of the people. But we also learned that there is nearly an equal impact when someone goes down to the inner city to work for a day alongside the poor. When they see God work in a different environment, when they see him working among the poor and with people of different cultures, something transforming happens in their lives.

Our mission at Willow Creek is to turn irreligious people into fully-devoted followers of Jesus Christ. So we reasoned that if a cross-cultural ministry experience among the poor has a transforming effect on our believers, then we want every single believer in our church to have at least one of those kinds of experiences every year.

How do you and those in your church keep from being overwhelmed by all of the needs?

Keeping my own perspective clear is one of the major challenges of my leadership: to realize that Willow Creek is not going to win the war on poverty, it's not going to transform Chicago, it's not going to redeem the world. I have to remind myself that Willow Creek is responsible only for identifying its God-given part in the redemptive and compassion-giving drama that we're about - what God is about. So we're not necessarily responsible for the whole city, for all of our neighboring nations, or the whole world. We're responsible for doing that which God directs and calls us to do. The elders of this church spend a lot of time trying to determine what that is. We also spend a lot of time affirming our people and thanking them and inspiring them to be faithful in doing that part. We try not to lay on their shoulders a burden that's heavier than God intended any congregation to bear.

Is there such a thing as compassion fatigue?

Absolutely. And one of the reasons why we set the goals that we set, and try to involve our congregation at a certain rate of participation in helping the poor, is so they can be care-givers over the long haul. We don't want them to dive in and drown in the exhaustion and fatigue of it all in the first six months. We try to establish a rhythm of serving in the inner city or in the neighboring nations that would be sustainable for the average member of this church over a long period of time.

How do you avoid paternalism in your external ministries?

We talk about this in our training before anyone goes anywhere. We have thorough training procedures. If 15 people are going to spend a week in the Dominican Republic, they might have half a dozen training sessions during which our international ministry staff reminds them of the values of servanthood and humility and the values of rolling up their sleeves and helping out and being sensitive to a different culture. Servanthood is a deeply entrenched value in this church. Our congregation would see themselves as servants around Willow Creek as well as in these situations - not as experts, but as servants.

How do you balance social action and evangelism?

By keeping both of those discussions on the table in all of our planning meetings concerning our investment of resources and people. Scripture calls us to do both. It calls us to pour cups of water in Jesus' name, and calls us to proclaim the gospel. So when we're considering what projects we're going to get behind and what partnerships we're going to form, our folks make the assessments of our investments and wrestle with the mix of ministries we're involved with. We ask, "Which of them are basic relief and which are more evangelistic?" We keep both discussions on the table and try to integrate them in a community as best we can.

What can we learn from the poor?

Our people come back from serving in the inner city or neighboring nations and talk about the reality of the faith and the depth of the community that exist in the churches in the poverty-stricken areas where we serve. They talk about the expressiveness of the worship, the dependency on God and inner-dependency on each other, and the humility. Often their own lifestyles are challenged and they wonder if their own faith has been a bit too circumstantially oriented.

Those who serve often find that they received more than they gave, and they learned more than they taught. The recurring lesson is that our affluence is not as big a blessing as we think it is, and is often not worth the price that we pay for it.

Karen Beattie is a free-lance writer in Chicago.

Comments

Be the first one to add a comment.

To post a comment, please login or register

Nurturing the Spirit to Serve

God's Word

Urbana Stories

36 days until

December 27-31, 2009