Keeping the Focus
I was browsing the blog-o-sphere and ran into this article. It’s an article about Willow Creek reevaluating their ministry approach. I just read a couple of the articles and responses of what I gather are more of the important ones. I’m not really reading this to evaluate or judge Willow Creek – I’ve never been there and have only heard good things about their Arts conferences and read and recommend various books by Bill Hybel. I read this self-evaluation and I think of my church, Covenant Fellowship Church. I would say there are some similarities – we’re probably about as mega a church as you can get in Champaign Urbana at about 1000+ members, we have lots of ministries, and we try to build the whole community aspect. There are also lots of differences – one key thing which I’d like to discuss is evangelism. This has been a sticking point with me ever since my freshmen year. Pastor Min explains this every year in our evaluations but I still wish we would be more “seeker friendly” (NOTE: This is coming from someone who started the year off with 3 professing non-Christians in his own small group.) Sometimes I wish we could be like a big church – say like Willow Creek – and have lots of big events to invite people to. We have a couple in the first weeks of the year (NSO) and 2 the rest (Praise Nights). With this in mind, here’s a quote from the aforementioned article Because it?s the mature Christians who drive evangelism in the church Hawkins [Greg Hawkins is the executive pastor at Willow Creek] says, ?Our strategy to reach seekers is now about focusing on the mature believers. This is a huge shift for Willow.? It seems like they are changing their shift from being heavily seeker focused to investing more into their mature believers.
This rings a chord with me because CFC is all about training. We are all about helping people get deeper. Increase not just the quantity of Kingdom workers but also the quality. Sometimes I feel that we’re too focused on training and not enough on the ‘getting’. I argue that the ‘outreach’ that P.Min talks in the evaluations is integrating new members, many of whom are already Christians, and less of evangelizing to pre-Christians. This change of focus in Willow Creek gives me hope and helps correct my vision. It’s not the events that draw people in or do the evangelism, it’s the people. The programs are just one means but the core force behind it are the Christians who drive those programs. Good evangelistic programs need solid Christ-centered, people loving Christians to run them. Perhaps Willow Creek has focused too much on their programs so now they’re giving more attention to the people who are running them.
I look at my current and past small group members. One started up a Taiwanese outreach group this year and they brought a friend to church this past week. One of my small group members invited his classmate to dinner and Bible Study with us last week. I’m beginning to see that if we get people truly excited about God, evangelism will flow from that heart. While I do wish we had more avenues for people to exercise their evangelistic desires, I feel like we have a good focus that can perpetuate sound ministry into the future. People deeply in love with God will love others and draw them into the body – “the research shows that it?s the mature believers that drive everything in the church?including evangelism.”