Willow Creek Introduces “The Table” to provide “Fellowship in Neighborhoods”

Orginally published on Thursday, October 26, 2006 at 7:23 AM
by Todd Rhoades

It’s the first night of “The Table,” a new program offered by Willow Creek — a nondenominational megachurch that regularly draws several thousand people to its services at a 155-acre campus nearby, in South Barrington. “The Table,” however, is deliberately kept small as Willow Creek seeks innovative ways to meet the changing needs of churchgoers searching for ways to express their faith.

AS dusk settles on this neighborhood of 1920’s bungalows and old farmhouses northwest of Chicago, Randy Frazee strums a banjo on his front porch, waiting for his dinner guests to arrive. No cars line his curb because everyone who is coming lives within walking distance.

Once the 12 guests — ranging in age from about 7 to 70 — and the Frazee family have gathered around three tables set end-to-end, they join hands, and Mr. Frazee, a pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church, says a prayer. A meal of barbecued brisket, cheese potatoes and green beans follows.

Throughout the evening, conversation occasionally touches on favorite scriptures and “walking with the Lord.” The guests tell about their best and worst moments of the week. As dinner wraps up, Mr. Frazee asks one of the couples to talk about “how Christ walks in their life.”

Willow Creek’s shift in strategy mirrors moves by other houses of worship across a number of denominations to overhaul the programs they offer to build their congregations. These organizations say they are modeling their outreach practices on proven business and marketing strategies — not unlike what Wal-Mart is doing by adding more-fashionable clothes or what Borders is doing with its smaller “express” bookstores — to reach potential new members or to keep existing ones. They are also changing how they deliver those messages, using videocasts on cellphones and other new technologies, including an increasing emphasis on blogs and podcasts.

Bill Hybels, the founding and senior pastor of Willow Creek, has used business-world strategies — notably branding and word-of-mouth marketing — to help the church grow from 125 congregants 30 years ago into the megachurch it is today. While Mr. Hybels says he does not use marketing techniques to spread God’s word, “we do attempt to harness the full potential of modern technology and business strategies to communicate with our members and our community.”

He has also brought in advisers like Mr. Frazee, who use business ideas to spread the message of the church. Mr. Frazee said many of his ideas grew out of a friendship he had with a Texas developer. “I mentored him in spiritual matters and he mentored me in transferable concepts to the church from his world of business,” Mr. Frazee said. “I would say it was one of the many factors that led me down a path to the ‘Table’ concept.”

The new messages — from Willow Creek and other nondenominational churches to mainstream denominations like the Episcopal and the United Methodist churches — tend to focus on connectedness, theology and shared values.

According to academics, including Robert B. Whitesel, who teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University, that change represents a shift from some past marketing efforts, which sought to make church more fun and inviting to baby boomers.

That trend brought coffee bars to many churches and a proliferation of Christian rock bands in church. Services included little Scripture reading or hymn singing, and, in some churches, took the shape of self-help workshops, particularly in nondenominational churches seeking to be more relevant to younger people.

To spread the word of increased intimacy and a more serious focus on spirituality, some religious groups are now spending a lot on marketing.

As a sign of how powerful some of these new marketing efforts can be, a total of more than 6,000 people recently attended several hundred weekend “Tables” in the neighborhoods surrounding Willow Creek’s campus. These “Tables” supplement small groups that the church has already organized around people with similar interests — like mothers, singles or teenagers. But the idea of “The Table” was based on proximity, Mr. Frazee said, so that people began to meet neighbors who weren’t just like themselves.

Corporate marketers have been using similar events for years to create closer connections with their brand. Nike, for example, has worked with gyms on new workout routines to make its brand visible beyond sporting goods stores.

For churches, events like the ones created by Willow Creek are meant to offer members a similar closeness, albeit for a more profound purpose: religious worship and discussion.

“In the early church, people didn’t get on their camels to go to Bethany to worship,” said Mr. Frazee, who created similar programs as pastor of a church in Fort Worth before he joined Willow Creek in 2005. “We have adults who seem to have suffered a spiritual stroke. They go to church, but they have forgotten that wonderful sense of hanging out, that basic expression of fellowship in their neighborhoods.”

Willow Creek, which says it has 6,100 participating members, advertised “The Table” on the home page of its Web site, http://www.willowcreek.org, and used the site to match members’ high school districts with a “Table” in their neighborhood.

A desire for less-traditional worship helped propel the growth of megachurches like Willow Creek. Its home feels more like a corporate campus — with a Starbucks-like coffee shop and a cafeteria featuring pizza — than a church.

While megachurches like Willow Creek are still among the nation’s fastest-growing places of worship, a study released last month by the Institute for the Studies of Religion at Baylor University found that academics and religious leaders say that people seeking religion today want something else from churches. This is encouraging churches to develop new messages and new ways to spread them.

That move is not unlike corporate America’s new effort to reach consumers who have turned their backs on traditional marketing methods and shifted their attention to the Internet from television, newspapers, magazines and other older media.

“This can’t be primarily about making Willow bigger,” Mr. Frazee said. Instead, he said, he hopes that these experiences will extend the idea of church beyond the notion of practicing faith in one specific place.

“For a business, creating an experience may provide a means to an end, such as selling a product,” he said. “But for the church, the experience of community and belonging is our end. It is the sense of belonging with God both here and in the kingdom to come.”

In the next phase of what has been branded “Neighborhood Life,” recently formed “Tables” will create Bible study groups. The next step will be to have each “Table” begin local charity projects.

For Ruth Jarrard, a Willow Creek member who joined the Frazee family’s table on that Sunday evening, the event was distinctly different from worshipping at the church’s huge auditorium.

“Sometimes that can be overwhelming,” she said. “This was more about neighborhood and what you can do, because unless you get to know them, you’ll never know when they need your help.”

Read more of this article at The New York Times...

MORE INFO:  (From the Willow Website):
The Table is the hub of Neighborhood Life where people come together and get to know each other. It is the starting point for the community to reach out to neighbors with the love of Christ.

THE TABLE
Details

Gathers monthly
Meets (ideally) on Sunday afternoons (5-7 p.m.)
Centers around sharing a meal (something simple like a potluck or pizza)
Involves no more than 30 people (usually 10-15)
Is led by a Neighborhood Host with the help of a DVD or Willow materials
Offers a casual, inviting atmosphere
Provides time to talk and “hang out”
Includes a diverse mix of people – single, married and intergenerational (including children if space permits)

Typical Agenda:
Prayer
Meal & conversation (Develop friendships. Discover each other’s stories.)
Prayer
Settle in (around a DVD or other tool provided by Willow)

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