Willow Creek Leadership Conference

[TechDawgMc]

Since I'm bored with the current politics and religion discussions, I'll share a bit about my experience this week with the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. Willow Creek is the Chicago church led by Bill Hybels that has had a huge impact on the way people think about church -- targeting unchurched people.

It's been about 10 years since I last attended one (before teleconferencing -- it was at Shades Mountain in Birmingham). This one has been quite good. I was amazed at the growth of the Willow Creek Association. I hadn't been keeping up. I remember when there were so few churches they could put the logo of all of them on a one page flier. Now there's something like 10,000 churches and there were about 60K participants in the live broadcast (plus another 15-20K expected worldwide).

Some really good stuff overall. Andy Stanley did a nice deal on priorities where he basically said it's better to "cheat the church" on time than to cheat your family on time. Jim Collins and Ashish Nanda (of Harvard) brought some interesting organizational ideas in -- while recognizing that business skills shouldn't be directly translated to the church. Collins relationship with Hybels is interesting. Hybels made the point that Collins was sounding an awful lot like a Christian in his description of leadership and how to treat people. Collins responded that he was "among friends." Clear that Hybels is working on him.

The highlight of the day, though, was probably the interview with Bono. He gave a powerful and moving challenge for the church to get involved in the Aids crisis in Africa. Hybels made the comment that Bono had helped him see the need to really get involved and that he had helped Bono see the impact the local church could have in dealing with the situation. It's clear it's become something of a passion for Hybels.

Good stuff. I wasn't sure about the video-conferencing version, but having a group of people attending with you is better than just watching a video tape. I've found some useful stuff for teaching my leadership classes -- just wish I'd encouraged more of the pastors I know to attend.

[TYLERTECHSAS]

Some really good stuff overall. Andy Stanley did a nice deal on priorities where he basically said it's better to "cheat the church" on time than to cheat your family on time.

The highlight of the day, though, was probably the interview with Bono. He gave a powerful and moving challenge for the church to get involved in the Aids crisis in Africa. Hybels made the comment that Bono had helped him see the need to really get involved and that he had helped Bono see the impact the local church could have in dealing with the situation. It's clear it's become something of a passion for Hybels.

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Sounds like a great conference. Love the time quote. Also there has been alot of good press on Bono of late.

[Dawgbitten]

I was in Chicago last week and some caller called into a radio station I was listening to and said that Bono was performing and speaking at a church in Chicago. The Dj came on later after he found out the truth. I thought it was funny.

[TechDawgMc]

I was in Chicago last week and some caller called into a radio station I was listening to and said that Bono was performing and speaking at a church in Chicago. The Dj came on later after he found out the truth. I thought it was funny.

That is pretty funny. They did use some long clips from U2 concerts in the video, but it was a video interview -- I think they were a tad worried about being able to edit the language

Saturday morning Hybels talked about the importance of being clear in our message and then spent 30 minutes talking about the centrality of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. It was basically an evangelistic message. Then he said this needs to be a clear and regular part of the message of every church.

It sounded like he was a bit concerned by the idea of some churches taking his "seeker" approach but not really making the gospel part of it. I get the impression he feels some responsibility for the number of people who seem to be following the approach he and a few others developed, but maybe not in the same way Willow does it.