What you describe sounds like a strategy to Create Ownership, which is one of the four best practices discovered by REVEAL. Can you elaborate on how REVEAL has influenced your thinking about how a church can best fulfill its mission to help people become fully devoted followers of Christ?
Bill Hybels: I’d start by going back to something that was a miss in the early days ofWillow, and it’s still a mystery to me why it was so much of a miss. It may be due to the fact I was still a fairly recent Christian when we started the church. In fact, I had only been a Christian five years. So when I started Willow, I loved reading God’s Word and I loved communicating with Him in prayer and reading good Christian books. I liked that just because of my relationship with God.
But I dramatically underestimated how often my colleagues and the people in the church practiced the classic spiritual disciplines. I just thought everybody spent time with God and surrendered their spirits before Him every day. That everybody worked hard to receive promptings from God, quieting the ambient noise in their lives so they could hear Him. I misjudged that, and the few times I preached on it, I remember seeing the semi-confused faces of the people in the crowd and thinking: “I must be doing a terrible job of teaching this because they are not getting it or they are not interested. I’m not getting the same kind of feedback I get when I teach on other subject matters.”
So, I wound up not teaching on the spiritual practices very often. It’s hard to do, and I got mixed response. Decades later I found out, primarily through REVEAL, I should have stuck with that. I should not have been dissuaded by the kind of feedback I was getting. I should have done a major series on the classic spiritual disciplines every single year, whether I saw confused faces or not. I should have just dug in and made that a regular part of the menu.
We also had some feedback that went like this: “Yeah, well, interesting. But I’d really like to know something more practical than this, like how to be a better parent. Why don’t you teach this other stuff at a seminar, not on Sunday morning?”
Well, we didn’t have the facilities or the teachers to hold those kinds of seminars. So, it wasn’t until decades later when we found out—through REVEAL—that you can strip away almost every other thing the church does. But at the core of the core of the core, growing people into Christ followers is all about helping them engage in God’s Word and inspiring them to invite God to be at the center of their lives. I did not emphasize that as much in the early days as I do now.
So you would do things differently today?
Bill Hybels: Absolutely. Now at Willow we have what we call the Getting Started Classes. The second movement in the Getting Started Classes is the spiritual practices: how to read your Bible, how to pray, how to surrender, how to confess your sins. We get people on track with these very basic things that will help them walk with Christ as soon as they show any movement.
In the early days of Willow, when someone showed spiritual movement we would congratulate them and point them toward a ministry where they could serve or a group where they could get to know other people. But we didn’t instill a strong awareness that, more than anything, people need to know how to relate to God through His Word and how to hear His prompting. How to navigate a day with Him in your head, in your heart, at your side—and all of that. It’s a deep regret I carry.
