In my opinion, the more a young church can get done through volunteers, the better. The fewer your staff is, the better. As I said earlier, when we started Willow, we were under tremendous financial stress. One of the upsides was that every week I told everyone attending the church, “We need you!” And they knew it was true.
We needed everybody to step up—to take care of kids, to help set up and take down chairs, and eventually, to help us find a piece of land. That brought people forward. At one point, I think we were dangerously close to having 100 percent of our attendees serving because we didn’t have any paid staff.
In 2004, Willow Creek’s well-known REVEAL study released findings that discovered church involvement at Willow was not proportionate to a person’s spiritual maturity. How has that study influenced your thinking about how a church can best fulfill its mission to help people become fully devoted followers of Christ?
I’d start by going back to something that was a miss in the early days of Willow, and it’s still a mystery to me why it was so much of a miss. 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 like I did.
I misjudged that, and the few times that 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 either they’re not getting it or they are not interested. I’m not getting the same kind of feedback that I get when I teach on other subject matters.”
So, I wound up not teaching on the spiritual practices very often. Decades later, I found out, primarily through REVEAL, 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.
