Up a Creek
S. M. Hutchens on the Dangerous Success of Rudderless Christianity
The most disturbing and widely publicized finding of Reveal, Willow Creek Community Church’s years-long exercise in consultant-directed self-analysis, was that a significant percentage of the members who have profited most from its ministry, having moved forward along its continuum of measurement for spiritual growth (tithing, serving, and evangelizing), are dissatisfied and thinking of leaving.
A more amenable result to the church, of course, would be that the dissatisfied are the less rather than the more mature Christians, but Willow Creek has discovered that the more advanced a person becomes by its own measures of spirituality, the more likely it is he is thinking of going elsewhere.
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S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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