I was reading “Time Magazine’s” most recent article on Bill Hybel, founder and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. Willow Creek is located in the northern part of Illinois and is described as a community of white affluent suburbanites. For many Christian pastors, the question that needs to be honestly addressed is, what type of foundation was your church built on? The article interviews the founders. This is what they had to say: Bill Hybels and several of his friends founded Willow Creek Church in 1974, aiming at people with little Christian affiliation- the unchurched masses. The church grew, and as the article pointed out, Bill Hybels became the poster boy of what we know now as the mega church. However, the crux of Willow Creek's foundation was that Willow Creek did not attract any people of color. From the genesis of Willow Creek Church, the ideological force used and promoted by church-growth consultants was the endorsement of a homogeneous unit principle: “people like to worship with people who are similar to them in age, wealth and race.” This is the quintessential foundation of exclusivity and justifies why white America continues to uphold the values of institutional racism. Yes, religion is intrinsically part of this evil force.

A business plan must be established before launching a business. The first step of a business plan is writing a mission statement. When you analyze the mission statement of this pastor and his friends, their mission is a business plan absent the true mission plan of Jesus Christ written in Luke 4:18-19. The church of Jesus Christ is concerned and committed to working and preaching the gospel to the poor, the oppressed, the captive, and the economically disadvantaged. Jesus' mission statement included all classes of people. His mission was not exclusive but it included all of humanity created in the image of God. The church-growth consultant's entrepreneurial ideas were on parity with Jack Welch's concept of what it takes to have a thriving corporation. One exception must be noted. The article strongly suggested a truth that most of today's churches would respond to with a diffident approach to a touchy subject - “But like Hybels himself, it abandons pious over-statement for corporate efficiency – a church conceived by Jack Welch.” The facts of Willow Creek point to the veracity of this statement. Could it be that Bill Hybels, like some other white pastors, is looking at the indictment of God for them to destroy the false foundations of a flawed gospel that became a country club institution (church) for the select few?

The reality is that White Christianity is slowly fading into obscurity given “the projection made by the Census Bureau that by 2050 the U. S. will contain no racial majority.” These demographics are accelerating exponentially thereby making some white Christians nervous as they sit on the edge of change they have resisted for so long. Their resistance pales before the power and authority of God. It can be said with confidence that the melting pot of America is no longer a patriotic fairy tale.

There is nothing spiritual about the foundation of any church when it is built on exclusivity. Sound familiar? In the wake of the election of 2008, the big elephant of racism sitting in our cathedrals was reawakened. Was it always there? Yes. Many clergy played hide and seek on both sides. Religion was our ‘Wite-Out’ used to erase words and attitudes which caused wounds of rejection and self -hatred. Yet still, the disease of racism remained the stumbling block of hypocrisy in the most sacred places of our communities. It took something as great as this election to make visible to the world the sight of Christians tripping over the elephant which had become alive and dangerous.

A long history of white hatred towards African Americans led white religious theologians to fabricate a perverted theology which they honestly believed God had ordained and approved. The word “God” was their sedative to ease their evil consciences from feeling any kind of remorse and to eliminate the possibility for change in religious institutions.

The article supports the notion that religious institutions remain “color-coded” and are the last institutions to embrace change when it comes to desegregation.

   We must ask ourselves the same question that Dr. Martin Luther King did, if we truly are advancing the celebration and acceptance of diversities of races and ethnicities in the Body of Christ: “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”

To measure an integrated congregation at Willow Creek with the 20% threshold rule does in no way meet the standards of a true picture of the existence of integration. This statistical breakdown reminds me of the one-drop rule. A person who looks white on the outside, but whose family history indicates that one parent was African American, would be classified as fully African American solely based on the theory of the one-drop rule. This law was eventually abolished by the Supreme Court. Today, we would call him/her biracial or a person of mixed race.

We are saying the same thing in the case of Willow Creek especially when the statistics state that the majority of the parishioners of that church are 80% Caucasian. The one drop-rule can be analogous to how we view integration. Because we see a few people of color sprinkled among the majority of the congregation which are Caucasian, immediately we come to the social and politically correct assumption that integration is now fully embraced. The one-drop theory does not make for an integrated mega church. All it does within the majority, in this case 80% Caucasian, is continue to develop “spiritual incest”- ultimately evolving to maintain its existing status quo of racism. For Willow Creek it is a beginning. They have a long way to go to root out systemic racism. It will take more than programs and educating “white folk.” The power of the gospel and the leaders who purport to be agents of change far extends the reach of the church. It will take pastors to come out of their church kingdoms and create an endemic move to confront all systemic evils of racism. How can Bill Hybels take on a white community, asking it to shift and be inclusive, opening its doors to African Americans and other minorities that will eventually become part of its community in the near future?

Because of the hesitancy of Bill Hybels to include minorities in positions of leadership and having a voice in the decision-making process, I am again cautious in agreeing that “the harmony of His Kingdom has already arrived at Willow Creek.”

Attitudes of the heart must first change with Bill Hybels and his leaders. My conclusion on the matter comes by way of a suggestion. Let those people of color (minorities) along with a young white generation become the leading voices for teaching and leading the way on how to create strategies to perfect the true picture of an integrated multicultural, ethnic, and racial church. Change takes time. It is time that interrogates possibilities until direction emerges. Jesus Christ said, I will build My church to be a place that racism cannot come in.