Visit to Willow Creek (Day three) – Steve Bartz and Nancy Beach.

Church Governance and Conflict Resolution

In the morning, we were led by Steve Bartz, who has been an elder at Willow Creek for 18 years. I was struck by his commitment. As well as being an Elder, Steve is the president of Graybill, Bartz, & Associates, Ltd., an investment research and management firm. He was also previously a vice president at Bank of America and Continental Bank. Steve has undergraduate and graduate degrees in finance and he has also studied theology. Far from being ‘too busy’ to be an Elder, here is a guy who felt compelled to give his all to the local church for the sake of the world.

After a morning with Steve Bartz I felt like I’d been with a truly exceptional leader whom God has used greatly in the background to help Willow to be all that it is. I was reminded vividly how every church needs Elders of not only real character but also a very high standard of leadership and administrative calibre. Here was a man who has given a significant portion of his life and energies to protect the unity, development and holiness of Willow Creek so that it is optimally led and protected. They’ve had to be highly responsive to change whilst giving solidity and strength to a growing church and very capable staff team. He gave us all a big pack of material including policies and the Eldership interview process that will be very useful in the future at PBC.

Steve went through their understanding of a biblical view of Eldership and how Elders can increasingly delegate responsibility. The key responsibilities of Eldership are:

1. 1. Provide Spiritual Oversight (which includes)
   1. a. Confront false teaching
   2. b. Set policies:
      1. i. Both of which has needed careful prior theological reflection
2. 2. Shepherding the flock (which includes conflict resolution).
3. 3. Manage the church
   1. a. Steve acknowledged that it is a fine line for an Elder to finds the right level of involvement where a church is in its growth and activities.
4. 4. Pray for the sick
   1. a. With a church of 22,000, they’ve needed to empower others to do this too!

Any potential Elder undergoes a rigourous interview procedure which involves answering questions around five key areas:

1. Character.
2. Competence – a huge requirement is the competency in handling and teaching God’s word.
3. Chemistry – with the wider team
4. Courage – Steve said, ‘It takes guts to be an Elder, do these potential Elders have deep strength of their own opinions when they have to face hostile folks and often have to take something away from someone?’
5. Calling – Steve said that enthusiam, talents and gifting is not enough, because Eldership is too tough and needs to be anchored in a clear sense of call for Elder and spouse.

The Spiritual Gifts they most look for in Elders are:

• Discernment
• Wisdom
• Leadership/Administration

The rest of his session was a deep look at methods of conflict resolution, which Elders have to be involved deeply in or need to train up others to be able to do it. Again, we were given excellent material.

Nancy Beach

The final two hours of the day were with Nancy Beach, one of three primary teaching Pastors at Willow Creek and Vice President of the Arts, Willow Creek Association. She is the author of An Hour on Sunday, a book that has helped me immensely in my thinking about Sundays at PBC, and the newly released Gifted to Lead. An effortless communicator, we saw inspiring moments on the big screen from recent services at Willow as she explained how their services were approaching worship and teaching at Willow these days. We discussed various ways of calling people to worship, the role of music within services and the role of other forms of prayer and response.

Nancy reminded us of the many things in a service planners ‘toolbox’. She also wnet through a service planning process that was very interesting and something we will be moving towards more at PBC:

Phase 1: Design phase (often about four weeks ahead of the service – unless a special event like Christmas.)

• Needs to be a team, otherwise you get one person’s limited perspective
• They need to be ‘idea people’, not even necessarily the people who can carry out the ideas.
• They need to know the big idea of what the Pastor will teach about in that service in the future: a theme, a scripture, a goal?
• The purpose is quantity of ideas – before you later choose which idea you’ll use. 90% of ideas won’t be used, but are stepping stone to the right idea
• Creativity and food go well together!

Phase 2: Development Phase

• Often decisions made in the design phase have to be modified for various reasons, so plan B, or plan C are used.
• Sometimes this part is over e-mail, phone-calls – often not a meeting
• The Holy Spirit is fully part of this process, and helps knit together services designed for the people He knows who He’ll bring to the services on a Sunday.

Phase 3: A Sunday in the future – Willow calls it ‘Game Day’

• What are rehearsals like before the people come in? We need to create a joyful unifying experience for teams long before the doors open.
• They’ve decided they’d rather come earlier and have a calm, joyful experience before the service starts than frantic, stressful times. They rehearse enough before the service so that they can have half an hour free just before the service starts to quietly get centered on Jesus.
• They look at this process and change it whenever it is necessary.

Phase 4: Evaluation

• Why evaluation? This is how we learn
• Why evaluation? This is how we get better
• 90% of it should be celebration about what God accomplished in the service.
• What went well?
• What did we learn?
• What could be improved?
• They always do evaluation before design for the next service.

In the evening six of us from the UK contingent went into Chicago to watch a Chicago Bulls game at the United Centre. Very cool!