How Willow Creek Is Leading Evangelicals by Learning From the Business World

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"Messing With People's Minds" Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels, right, with association president Jim Mellado and summit producer Corinne Ferguson | Photograph by Saverio Truglia

Jack Welch called the other day. He wanted to talk about his friend Bill. Forget the notion that the ex-GE chief is a curmudgeon -- the guy just gushed. Bill "is a man with enormous capability, a man who can rally a team around a vision." Bill runs a fast-growing organization based just outside Chicago that today has affiliates on every continent except Antarctica. "I have my four Es," Welch says, referring to the four leadership qualities he looks for in executives: Someone who has energy; who energizes others; who has edge ("someone who can say yes or no decisively"); and who can execute. "Bill has them all, along with a strong P: passion. He's a winner. He could be running a company -- or a country."

He could be, but he is not. Instead, Bill Hybels runs a church. Willow Creek, the congregation that he founded 35 years ago, has grown into one of America's largest -- on a typical Sunday, 23,000 people attend services. And each year since 1995, Hybels and his team have done something unprecedented: They run what amounts to a pop-up business school called the Global Leadership Summit, bringing a stellar faculty, including Jim Collins, Colin Powell, and Jack Welch, to the Willow Creek campus in South Barrington, Illinois, to teach pastors and laypeople leadership and management.

"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."

Hybels's primary targets are not secular execs like Schlesinger; he's aiming for church leaders. "I think the local church is the most important institution on the planet because of its transformative potential, so why should we limit the learning that pastors and faith-based leaders are exposed to?" Hybels says. "We try to find the people with the most thoughtful ideas about leadership, and we ask them to take their expertise and learning and spread it out over our audience."

That audience is enormous. This year, pastors from more than 70 countries were among the 7,000-strong crowd at Willow Creek, including the leaders of 4 of the 10 largest congregations in America: Hybels; Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch.tv in Edmond, Oklahoma (27,000 weekly attendees); Andy Stanley of Atlanta's North Point Community Church (23,000); and T.D. Jakes of the Potter's House in Dallas (17,000). The summit is simulcast by satellite to more than 130 locations, where 62,000 more people across the U.S. and Canada watch. It is also taped and translated into 31 languages -- this year, Albanian, Khmer, and Congolese French were added -- and by the end of January, an additional 65,000 people from Argentina to Zimbabwe will have attended local video-based Global Leadership Summits.

Evangelical Christianity proudly has no pope, and given its predilection for splintering, it can hardly be considered a single church. But if evangelicalism does have a global power center, it would have to be Willow Creek, thanks largely to the summit. According to cable-TV pioneer and venture philanthropist Bob Buford, who played a key role in the summit's development, "Willow Creek is the most influential Protestant church in the world -- one might even say the most influential church in the world save for the Vatican."

Among arborists, the willow is known as a particularly aggressive, versatile tree. In ancient times, medicine men harvested its bark and leaves, which are full of salicylic acid, a natural precursor to aspirin that soothes aches and pains. The willow's hardy, enterprising roots spread widely and rapidly to find the water that it needs to grow. Most varieties can thrive in poor soil.

All of this makes the willow a perfect, if unintended, metaphor and namesake for this congregation and its ambitions for the summit. (Willow Creek was named after neither a tree nor a babbling brook; it started meeting in 1975 in a movie theater called the Willow Creek, in Palatine, Illinois.) The summit sprang from Hybels's conviction that church leaders lacked leadership training. "I'd been trying to help churches train pastors, and I kept asking myself, Why do some churches flourish and others languish? Is it location? Denomination? Urban versus rural? Rich versus poor?" Hybels says. "I could think of an exception to every theory, until I realized that every thriving church was not just well fed but also well led. It was a potent combination of great teaching and great leadership."