Church and MegaChurch Stress Test

I go to the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, not as a signed up US MegaChurch fan, which I’m not, but because what you see is what you get — an opportunity to reflect on and learn about leadership with colleagues, in the context of a consistently world class training event put together from a wide range of sources by Evangelical Christians from outside my own expression of the faith. It’s also a personal check back for me to core discipleship values, and I really value the opportunity to take that journey systematically, rigorously and regularly.

But here’s a housekeeping question. How does a Megachurch like Willow Creek weather a recession? Those of us getting muddy and wet, if not shot, in the trenches sometimes wonder how the war’s feeling on the Battleship Invincible. It was interesting to find out.

In his opening address, Bill Hybels talked of the rough seas through which the enterprise was sailing. It included, amongst other challenges, $300K annual donors exploding in the water. There’s some comfort in knowing the seas look rough from a supertanker as well as from our little English dinghies. Of course my Anglo tendency is to be sarcastic about the differences, but it’s a fact that a place like that, as well as yea many more dollars resourced (the thing people always notice first) is also yea many more dollars committed and exposed.

Hybels acknowledged that the conditions we have all assumed to be normal may never come again, and simply hunkering down and awaiting the return of financial glory days is not an option for faith. This is a challenge to the Church to be the Church in the face of circumstances over whch we have no control. Acts 2:38 has to become a more a practical proposition, less a romanticised ideal. This means some formerly large donors downsizing radically, and accepting the humbler place of recipients, whilst those who still doing well step up their generosity.

Jack Welch, formerly of GE says “In a Crisis Cash is King.” Present conditions are an opportunity to own another kingship, and so prove what people in poor areas of the world often know better than rich Christians in the West — that there is nothing like the local Church when the local Church is being itself, rather than the means of getting a light dose of God at the weekend.

This strikes me as a significant philosophical principle for living in testing times, which I think it would be as interesting to try in the smallest housegroup as the largest megaChurches.

Something beautiful for God

In a way that might have been unthinkable to many Evangelicals of a previous generation, Bill Hybels led us the final session of the Leadership Summit to examine the life and leadership of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whom he described as the most influential woman on earth. Her drew heavily on Come, be my Light, a collection of spritual writings and diaries that went paperback in the UK this week.

When first published some secularist reviewers took Mother Teresa’s radically honest, realistic account of faith and doubt as a promising revelation of unbelief. All it actually indicated was their inability to understand “faith” in anything but shallow and obvious terms. In fact, Mother Teresa’s book is becoming a source of inspiration and hope to Christians the world over.

We walked through her early story and serious sense of call — someone who had few obvious attributes to offer, but believed that if God had given all of himself, she could not answer with less than all of herself. From daily exercise of disciplines she called “little practices” emerged a radical calling, relentlessly pursued. So she walked through various obstacles placed in her way by ecclesiastical authorities sometimes, as much as by the magnitude of the task.

Living in a society where feelings and rewards are often pursued as paramount, and people feel aggrieved over minor frustrations, there was inspiration in her faith: “even though I do not feel his presence for long periods of time, I will seek to love him as he has never been loved.”