Willow Creek Lesson and Rant

My friend, Stephen, and I were talking about Christian resources when we stumbled upon William Lane Craig's excellent website. In the site, we found an audio blog that responds to a recent research project that Willow Creek church did this past year. The findings were this: the plans and projects that Willow Creek invested in to get people to participate in were not raising up disciples for Christ. Instead, they found that people need to learn how to feed themselves and "aggressively" pursue basic spiritual disciplines. The site that talks about this more in depth can be found here.

What I read warmed my heart because it reinforces the ministry philosophy that I have been taught and that I hold onto as I serve God in my full time occupation and my service at church. However, I find many people hold onto Willow Creek's old philosophy - participation is all that is needed to be disciples of Christ. This is false. What this view leads to is a body of Christ who participates out of obligation to personal relationships (i.e. I am coming out due to social reasons and on strength of friendship) with no self responsibility of growing spiritually. This leads to a self centered approach to service and evaluation of "church" because they believe they need to be served or trained and is the obligation of the church or leaders to provide this service.

Warning: a rant. This is no way a rant on anyone or any conversations I had with people recently, but a response to this small, but visible movement in the body of Christ.

A more extreme version of these "participating" church members start to complain that all they get taught is milk (i.e. Hebrews 5-6) and that they want to be taught "solid food". This comes up often - too often - in my conversations with Christians. I have had 3 conversations on this subject in the last week alone. I believe that anyone requesting solid food in the spiritual sense is not ready for it. In the Hebrews case, it was not anyone who was learning that made this observation or even made the request - it was the teacher, the leader, (the author) who made this observation and brought this up as teaching. The author knew it was time for the group to move on and said so.

However, I find most people who make this observation on their own or request solid food teaching from others are those who are not yet ready to receive it. It is because they have not yet graduated from milk - the application of the basics of Christianity and obedience to commands that apply to all Christians.

More on this later as I read and study more of Hebrews 5-6. Any thoughts?