{"id":207,"date":"2007-10-20T09:19:19","date_gmt":"2007-10-20T13:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/2007\/10\/20\/hybels-we-made-a-mistake\/"},"modified":"2007-10-20T09:19:19","modified_gmt":"2007-10-20T13:19:19","slug":"hybels-we-made-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/hybels-we-made-a-mistake","title":{"rendered":"Hybels: &quot;We made a mistake&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About six months ago Willow Creek Community Church released the findings from its six-year qualitative study of the effectiveness of its ministry. Christianity Today&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.christianitytoday.com\/outofur\/\">Out of Ur blog<\/a> analyzed Willow Creek&#8217;s study and said,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research \u201cthe wake up call\u201d of his adult life.<\/p>\n<p>Hybels confesses:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become \u2018self feeders.\u2019 We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In other words, spiritual growth doesn\u2019t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.christianitytoday.com\/outofur\/archives\/2007\/10\/willow_creek_re.html\">Read Out of Ur&#8217;s entire commentary here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About six months ago Willow Creek Community Church released the findings from its six-year qualitative study of the effectiveness of its ministry. Christianity Today&#8217;s Out of Ur blog analyzed Willow Creek&#8217;s study and said, Having spent thirty years creating and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/hybels-we-made-a-mistake\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}