This immense auditorium is so big, so bright, so surgically clean it’s unnerving. It is, in fact, the largest auditorium in the entire Chicago area–larger than the Arie Crown or the Lyric Opera–with seating for 4,554 persons. Ten minutes before the 11:15 AM starting time, the place is almost full of well-scrubbed, colorfully attired, bright-eyed folks who seem to be just tickled to death to be here on a Sunday morning. They’re a slice of white, middle-class suburbia: husbands and wives with small children and toddlers, tanned middle-agers, graying but still vibrant senior citizens, yuppies, swinging singles, even some unaccompanied teenagers. But few Asians and practically no blacks or Hispanics. And certainly no raggedy types–no homeless, no drifters, and no psychos, for God’s sake.
McChurch!
The service I’m attending is one of three held this summer weekend at Willow Creek. All are filled to near capacity, ensuring an attendance of about 14,000. Most of the year there are four services each weekend–two on Saturday evening, two on Sunday morning. Together they attract an average of 16,000 people, making Willow Creek the second largest Protestant congregation in the United States. (The largest is First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana, where each Sunday Jack Hyles draws 20,000 or more, many of them bused in from inner-city Chicago neighborhoods.) Attendance at Willow Creek is growing, more slowly than a few years ago, but steadily. On occasion it can swell: some 25,000 poured in last year to hear Ollie North explain his personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Yet the acoustics are so good and the staging so practiced that it’s hard not to be drawn into the performance. We soak it all in, remaining very much the spectators in our cushioned comfort. The applause is polite–no standing ovations, cheers, or alleluias.
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According to Christian pollster George Barma, at least 60 to 70 million adults are nonchurched: that is, they lack a church or temple affiliation, even though they may claim on a survey to be Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim. In a lot of cases they just drifted away in their youth and never came back. Others outgrew their belief system. Some were offended by the insensitivity or dishonesty of church leaders.
This advice, I notice, seems to have a remarkably contradictory effect. As the brown offering bags are passed through the rows, they are soon overflowing with money–paper money, and not a lot of singles. Clearly many gathered here are churched Harrys and Marys who regularly attend Willow Creek because they like the atmosphere or because they’ve brought with them (as all good Creekers are urged to do) an unchurched Harry or Mary they’ve encountered in their neighborhood or at work. It may also be that some visitors are so disoriented by the suggestion not to give that they open wide their wallets out of shock. Whatever the reasons, the method is effective. If 16,000 people are present on a typical weekend, they must be averaging $10 each to account for the weekly take of almost $200,000. I find myself wondering, is Christianity supposed to be so successful? More than one well-intentioned project has gone down the tubes when it became so prosperous that accountability got lost and somebody in the organization started stealing from both Peter and Paul to take care of number one. Church consultant Lyle Schaller also wonders about big operations like Willow Creek. “Who will hold these megachurches accountable for their actions?” he wondered in an article in Christianity Today magazine. “To whom are the senior pastor and his staff accountable?”
He’s especially passionate about one thing. “I don’t want this place ever to be known as Bill Hybels’s church,” he tells me. “I don’t want any kind of personality cult here. Our sole purpose is to turn irreligious people into followers of Jesus Christ.”
