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July 05, 2006
Axis of Willow
Scot McKnight recently broke the news that influential evangelical megachurch Willow Creek in South Barrington, Ill. (outside Chicago), is shuttering its groundbreaking Saturday night church service for 20-somethings, dubbed "Axis."
Lead Pastor Gene Appel explains in an update on the Axis website, "Axis is not ending, but the weekly expression of the Axis service is. The vision to reach 20-somethings has not changed, but how we reach them is changing." Appel also announces that Axis Ministry Director Darren Whitehead will now be leading Willow Creek's high school ministry ("Student Impact") full-time.
Axis Director of Programming/Teaching Pastor Jarrett Stevens had recently announced his departure (to Andy Stanley's mega North Point Church in Atlanta). It's unclear how much of an impact that had on the decision by Willow Creek's leadership, but no doubt it was a factor.
The driving force behind the decision seems to be, as Appel explains, the vision for Willow Creek to be "a healthy, diverse church with an intergenerational vision" (emphasis added).
Reaction in the blogosphere has been marked by a real sense of loss for this pioneering ministry. Youth Specialties' Mark Oestreicher said, "I find this very sad." And Dan Kimball expounds at length on his reaction: "It saddened my heart - but I was not at all surprised. I am surprised it didn't end sooner actually. ... I truly wish these alternative worship gathering and ministries within a church would work - but they usually don't."
Countless evangelical megachurches have been influenced by Willow Creek over the years, and many of them have also adopted this approach to doing "generational" ministry, based on the homogeneous unit principle, which Willow Creek was largely responsible for popularizing. These are the churches that back-in-the-day would've bravely launched "alternative worship" services or invested in "Gen X ministry," and, as the latest Emergent Village podcast comments about briefly, are now pursuing "emerging" services (for the "emerging generation," apparently).
I (cynically) predict it will take the rest of the evangelical world another 5-10 years to figure out what Willow Creek has already discovered—intergenerational, multicultural ministry is the best approach to doing church (and being the Church) because it genuinely and clearly bears witness to the Kingdom of God in our midst.
I sincerely hope it doesn't take that long for evangelicals to wake up and follow the lead of Willow Creek's founding pastor Bill Hybels, who has now rejected the homogeneous unit principle. (And BTW, in his "conversion," has also become a leading evangelical voice on the subjects of racial reconciliation and social justice! No coincidence there.)
I would highly encourage those churches to read Tim Conder's new book The Church in Transition, in which he touches on the "significant dangers in a preponderance of ministries based on likeness" (p. 157). Conder explains, "Far more divergent stories exist in even the most homogenous of churches. ... [and] the predominance of ministry strategies and programs based on likeness works strongly against stories from different journeys being told in our churches."
Posted by Steve K. at July 5, 2006 01:58 PM
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