Four Who Know How

1. Do you treat customers differently?

Company: Willow Creek Community Church

Service Innovator: Lee Strobel (leeps206@aol.com), teaching pastor and director of communications

Customer Service Program: Seeker Services

When Bill Hybels started the willow Creek Community Church in 1975, he was preaching to about 100 people in a converted theater in Palatine, Illinois. Today he attracts about 17,000 churchgoers every weekend to a 78,000-square-foot auditorium on a 145-acre campus in South Barrington, Illinois. Willow Creek is a superchurch that has tackled the peskiest customer service problem of all: How can you convince people to use your product or service without compromising the integrity of your mission? That's an even tougher challenge when your mission is to turn atheists into missionaries.

To meet that challenge, Willow Creek offers seeker services -- church services geared toward people who don't usually go to church. Lee Strobel, a teaching pastor for Willow Creek, is one of the church's atheists-turned-missionaries. He converted to Christianity in 1981, after almost three decades as an atheist. "I don't think I would have converted had I set foot in a traditional church. I had a bad church experience early in life," says Strobel, who started examining Christianity after attending one of Willow Creek's seeker services.

Strobel has preached at Willow Creek's seeker services since 1987 and works as the organization's director of communications. He explained to Fast Company how Willow Creek has grown by treating different "customers" differently.

In the beginning, church founder Bill Hybels understood the need to create two services -- one for seekers and one for believers. The idea was to optimize what could be done at each of those services. It was an intuitive look at the situation. The problem he saw was, How can we worship God at a church service when lots of folks don't even know God? The answer he came up with was, Let's create a worship service that is purely a worship service. Let's also create a service for spiritual seekers to help them understand who God is.

We thought about the seeker service from the perspective of the unchurched person. If you're already a follower of Jesus and you're looking for a church, you're looking for brothers and sisters of Christ who are going to love you and invite you into their community. But seekers are almost the opposite: their biggest value is anonymity.

During our weekend seeker services, we provide anonymity; it's a nonparticipative experience. We use art, drama, multimedia, dance, and video to open up the issue of the day. It may be parenting, marriage, the workplace, or relationships -- practical, everyday issues. The design of the auditorium is neutral. There are no crosses, no religious symbols. It's just a regular auditorium.

We also have a seeker service for Generation X, the Baby Busters. The question we ask is, How can we translate Christianity into a language and an art form that Generation X can relate to? They're a different generation with different experiences -- so they need a different service. We have a Saturday night service designed for them, with their music and their drama. We address different topics and break the sermons up into smaller pieces.

Another innovation is a new ministry called "seeker small groups." Here we're addressing the epidemic of loneliness -- people becoming alienated from one another, people not sharing their lives with one another at a profound level. We're seeing an increasing number of people who don't want the anonymity of our seeker services. Studies show that 23% of unchurched people have some interest in processing their spiritual journey with others. They want to investigate Christianity in the context of community.

As teaching pastor, I preach at our seeker services, where I look into the eyes of people who are like I was -- people who are skeptics, confused about Christianity, or investigating. I can look them in the eye and say, "I know what you feel. I've thought what you've thought."

We're going to continue to innovate to keep our focus -- turning atheists into missionaries. And we'll use whatever method is appropriate to the changing culture to accomplish that goal. New ways, but the same message.