WCA Training Bill Hybels

Bill Hybels
Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church

What's the best subject or question you've been asked this week?

• How to do leadership development? That somehow it's expensive and vague, but it's really not that complicated.  

How do you build a model to transcend traditional growth hinderence?

• You are responsible for re-imagining the leadership structure and organizational structure.
• 2 Tim 2 principle, combed the congregation to find people that could be trained and empowered to make a difference long term.
• Made an interesting assumption here, that you hire staff to find small group leaders.  There is no other purpose for position.  Consistent with the confused calling of many who seek ministry rather than empowerment.

• Mid - Size could be grouped by affinity.  Goal is to generate natural friendships.
• Wildly effective is curriculum coming out of Sunday morning message in South/Central America
• Willow found 90 section leaders, trained them, and meet and train weekly.
• ROLE: Fill their section, Connect people in their section, disciple everyone who wants to be, and help people use their spiritual gifts...fill, connect, disciple, mobilize. 

Bill on Leadership Development:

• Romans 8 gift of leadership
• Inborn natural development of emerging leaders
• If you don't find a way to do it, you'll simply be miserable for not making developments. 
• Leadership Development can be as simple as making a book assigned reading project

Reasons to do it:

• 1) Good Leadership Book 2) Affirm quality ideas 3) Talent observation

• Take a summit talk, watch the talk, discuss with purpose
• DVD is dying on a shelf in your office, but for free you can do fantastic talent observation, growth, and quality ideas

Are there values (good or bad) at longer tenures as a Pastor?

• Congregations get immune to change when they think the pastor is always going to leave
• You cannot change a value in a congregation inside of 5-7 years
• Generally Longer are better than shorter...unless the longer tenure leads to sleeper leadership

Succession:

• Don't worry about it until mid to late 50s
• Discussion needs to happen for the welfare of the church
• Three Big Ideas: Internal search phase, external search phase, 18 month transition era.
• Most important for who is making the call for who the successor will be.

• Be sure to have a clear relationship of the old pastor to the new pastor, especially if he stays in the area
• Not only do you have to define the departing pastor role, but each family member will need to have a discussion as well. 

Bill on the Same Sex Marriage / Attraction Issue:

• This is not going away in our lifetime.
• No gay chooses to be gay, they discover they are gay
• Once they discover they are gay, they did everything they could to turn back, to make a choice not to be gay.
• When they discovered they couldn't changed, they fell into depression or contemplated suicide. 
• If they had a faith background, they find a body of believers, but are tormented because they don't want to come out as gay, but they don't want to live with it either.
• Bill Recommends:: Justin Lee - Gay Christian Network - TORN Book
• Two Camps in Gay Christian Community
• SIDE A: look at 6 texts in scripture believing that the Holy Spirit has given them the right to date and be married
• SIDE B: look at 6 texts in scripture believing that the Holy Spirit be pure and chased. No dating or marry the same gender.

Jesus says 'this is how to treat everyone'. -- just treat them the way you wish to be treated. ACTION: Spend time discovering how I want to be treated.