Jesus Christ's Superflock
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THE COMMUNAL APPEAL extends far beyond actual sermons. On one side of Willow Creek's auditorium is a food court with seating for 750 and a mezzanine bookstore that offers 10,000 spiritually oriented titles. On the other side are the hushed executive offices of the church's 500 employees and an industrial kiddie-care complex. During services, crawls on the Jumbotron screens announce, "the parents of child #267 need to come to the Sunday School." With so many working parents worried about the welfare and whereabouts of their offspring, the megachurch, with its tremendous amount of youth programming—from organized sports to Bible study—aims to become the guardian of choice. Celebrity speakers, including Mr. T., Mel Gibson, Stephen Baldwin, and Randy Travis, add glitz, while communal celebrations—more than 750 people were baptized in the reflecting pond one summer—further bind the congregation together.
And then there are the "breakout" rooms of the church's myriad self-help groups. Much like the old Communist Party, the entire Willow Creek enterprise is built on a network of interlinking cells, some 2,700 small groups, by the church's own estimate. There are groups for singles, for couples, for recovering addicts—for every possible combination of identity or interest or problem.
Presiding over all these cells is Hybels, the genial paterfamilias. Back in 1975, at the age of 23, Hybels wondered why so many people claimed belief yet so few went to church. So he and some members of his youth fellowship went door to door asking questions. The answer was surprising. The impediment to family faith was, in a word, men. Men don't like being religious in public. It's not that they aren't eager for the epiphanic experience; it's that in the company of women, men don't want to be ordered to sing, to say stuff, or to give anything. They don't like losing control. Hybels learned that men are the crucial adopters in religion. If they go over the tipping point, women follow, children in tow. Hybels knew exactly how to comfort his "unchurched Harry." He gave his parishioners a new name. They became known as "seekers." And he gave the service a new name, too: "felt needs." "Now let us pray" is not as efficacious as "Join me in prayer," which is not as successful as what I heard at Willow Creek: "I'm going to pray, and you may want to join in."
The sensitivity to male concerns is at the heart of Willow Creek's appeal. All churches provide redemption, but few can provide a lasting community for men. To do that, Hybels created special men's sections called Iron on Iron (a tip of the hat to Robert Bly), which hold seminars on subjects like "How a Man Grows in Christ" and "Building Purity." Usually these groups meet in clusters of six to eight men, but there are occasional events for up to a thousand men. This move from squad to battalion is the key to male affiliation. As the owners of professional sports franchises have learned, if you can allow men to bond while maintaining the sense that everything is voluntary and unforced, they will form a nucleus of furious energy. They commit. Just look at season-ticket prices.
For years, a poster hanging outside Hybels' office asked: "What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?" These questions are lifted not from Saint Peter, but from Peter Drucker, the patron saint of management.
Can the appeal of megachurches last? Willow Creek and its ilk are not just competing with other denominations, but with all other forms of entertainment, especially television. By intensely focusing on the needs of its congregation, by using sophisticated electronic showmanship, consumer-driven enterprises like Willow Creek can make the process of "doing church" incredibly compelling. Old-line faithful and secular urbanites may scoff at these one-stop- shopping malls of community and faith, but the needs that megachurches try to address are real. Modern society has created this market, and any religious institution or political movement that wishes to compete for this audience had better understand it.
James B. Twitchell teaches English and advertising at the University of Florida. The most recent of his several books about consumption and marketing is Branded Nation.
Photo: Alex Webb
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As in the days of Lot, it is now. Lot was not interested
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God's people are destroyed for lack of knowledge
because their preachers have rejected knowledge.
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The coming revival, a nameless revival
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Why was the Pentecostal Revival stopped?
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