The Hidden Diaspora of Mainline and Evangelical Adoption of Contemporary Worship

Abstract

By the early 1990s Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, Illinois, was perhaps the most prominent church in the United States. It was the hot ecclesiastical news of the day. Articles about the church appeared in publications across a range of readerships: Woman’s Day, US Catholic, the New York Times, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and Christianity Today. Sociologists of religion, too, were writing their dissertations on this rapidly growing church. Even the bulwark of serious scholarship on liturgical matters, the North American Academy of Liturgy, took a field trip to one of this congregation’s services in the 1990s when the Academy had its annual meeting in Chicago. In addition, increasing numbers of church leadership teams took their own pilgrimages to Illinois to see, appropriate, and imitate in hope of replicating Willow Creek’s success. What was it about Willow Creek that garnered the attention? It was the church’s seeker services on Saturday and Sunday. In order to provide an accessible, enjoyable experience for its suburban target audience, which the church called “Unchurched Harry and Mary,” Willow Creek had turned the church world upside down as it sought to remove every boring barrier that might have led these suburbanites to avoid other churches. The result was a thorough revisioning of Sunday morning. Relevant messages? Professional-grade popular music? Quality dramas? Outstanding hospitality (which reached even to thinking through the dynamics of parking)? Relaxed atmosphere? Attractive, business-style campus? Willow Creek had thought through all of these issues as it planned and led its multiple seeker services every weekend. This seeker-driven approach taught by Willow Creek offered a model for revolutionizing thousands of congregations. What was not nearly as prominent, capturing neither the headlines of the press nor the attention of the eager-to-imitate pilgrims who sojourned to Illinois, was that Willow Creek was undergoing its own liturgical migration. But this move was not happening on the weekends. It was in the congregation’s midweek worship services. These midweek services were the ones planned and held for the active Christian believers in the congregation. (At the time, Willow Creek carefully avoided calling its weekend services for seekers “worship.” They were for evangelism and outreach, not the worship of God. Its worship services—the “New Community” services—occurred mid-week.) Initially these midweek services were a bit of an afterthought since the driving vision for the congregation’s start in the late 1970s was evangelistic outreach. These mid-week services were along the line of a Bible Study with a few contemporary songs topically selected and placed in a nice order. But that status changed after the summer of 1982 when the congregation’s lead pastor, Bill Hybels, returned from a summer break having attended a small, charismatic Black church in