From Locutus, Fast Company recently profiled how Willow Creek is teaching other churches to run their operations as a business. The Creek has attracted such successful business luminaries as Jack Welch (GE) and Carly Fiorina (Hewlet-Packard) to their conferences. The President of Babson College offers this endorsement:
"Willow Creek offers a deep set of lessons about organizational life that I have not been able to learn anywhere else," says Babson College president and former Limited Brands COO Len Schlesinger, who has studied the church for nearly two decades, though he himself is Jewish. This year, he took several of his Babson colleagues to the summit, which has also attracted delegations from Best Buy, Chick-fil-A, and Toms Shoes. "The quality of the teaching is extraordinary," Schlesinger says. "The fact that Willow Creek is a church and the fact that it is evangelical mean that some people may have a great deal of difficulty with it, but they skip it at their loss."
Yes, because God forbid a little Jesus get in the way of your money making. Look, I'm beating a very sad drum at this point, but what is so attractive about a church that pressures you to be rich. Don't you get that from the rest of your life. Why would you also attend a church that preaches wealth?
I understand that running a church requires a certain level of organization and managment skills. And I get that a lot of pastors may feel lost in this arena and are looking for support wherever they can find it. But Willow Creek isn't about making your church run more efficiently. It's about helping you run a better business. Which, fine. I just don't know why you go to church for that.
With the recent collapse of the banking sector, with the implosing of the housing market and with all the corruption that comes with running a business, I'm not sure we want to put these folks on a pedastal and idolize them. But we do. Because ultimately, what motivates this country is how much money we can make, and not so much what we're doing for others. Which again, fine. It's served America pretty well for the last 200 years. But uh, just don't ask me to also assume that Chick-Filet is doing the Lord's work. Because, they're not.
Update: The author of the above piece in Fast Company offered his rebuttal in the comment section. And I thought it was only fair to post his comments below. Just to clarify, I wasn't attacking the author or the article. I was attacking a particular mindset of today's Evangelical Church. I probably should have made that more clear in my post.
Jeff Chu: In my reporting at Willow Creek, I never heard anything about the profit-based side of business. That’s not what my story was about. I’m surprised that anyone who gave it a careful read could conclude that the Global Leadership Summit–at least as portrayed in my article–was about taking lessons from business about how to make money. And the Willow Creek that I visited did not preach wealth; if anything, what I heard was plenty of exhortation about sacrificing and giving for the poor.