The mission of the Willow Creek Association was, said Mellado, “to help churches thrive. And the way we did that was by equipping church leaders . . . to be the catalytic mechanism to spur innovative thinking inside their churches.” The founding idea of the WCA was that as the leadership goes, so go the churches. It therefore sought to produce better, more creative church leadership.
The most difficult concept for a traditional church to grasp is the counterintuitive mission deeply embedded in Willow Creek’s model: that it is a church designed for the members it doesn’t yet have--the nonconsumers—rather than for the faithful who already have joined. Willow Creek’s focus on nonconsumers over consumers illustrates the difference between Box 3 and Box 1. Box 3 thinking materializes opportunities that exist but may not be visible.
While Box 1 thinking is comfortable and unthreatening, Box 3 thinking can seem contrarian. Indeed, when the Willow Creek case study was first discussed in class, one of Mellado’s fellow Harvard MBA students noted that the church’s program for reaching out to nonconsumers was like “taking business-class, frequent-flyer, million- mile-club kinds of people who fly all the time and pay full fare and asking them to sit in coach. And then taking first-time flyers—people who are afraid to fly—and putting them up in first class so they can have the absolute best first experience of flying in an airplane.”
But Mellado points out that the early Christian church grew from a handful of Christ’s disciples to three hundred million members as quickly as it did by serving the unchurched first and foremost. The church that Hybels originally envisioned was unique for its missionary spirit. The work of the WCA was to underscore that mission of service and outreach and to present the future-building Willow Creek model as logical and creative rather than jarring.
The other core aspect of Willow Creek’s success was that its founders built it around a strategy. “Strategy and church were two words that hardly ever mixed,” said Mellado. Some people, including business professors and students, tried to suggest that applying business disciplines to spiritual pursuits was inappropriate, that there was an important distinction to be made between selling Nike sneakers and selling religion. Religion was private and personal, and matters of faith were not subject to strategy.
Hybels disagreed. While the act of deciding whether to accept religion or convert from one faith to another might be deeply personal, the work of providing seekers with information and experience on which to base their decisions was surely amenable to strategy. Hybels said, “I happen to think that meeting the spiritual, physical, emotional, and cognitive needs of people through the church is a lot more important than selling shoes. But [I can’t] just divorce myself from my brain and let no strategy exist, waste resources, waste people’s time, and have no intentionality.”
Willow Creek was all about intentionality. While the church accorded great respect to a seeker’s private decision about taking or leaving the offer, in all other matters that might help shape the decision, strategy guided every aspect of creating the offer. Importantly, however, Willow Creek did not adulterate the substance of the Protestant belief system on which the church was founded. But because the WCA would attract pastors from many different Christian denominations, its curriculum was not mainly devoted to theology but rather to the church’s innovations in the areas of worship, outreach, and effective church management and stewardship.
I cannot emphasize enough how unusual an organization the Willow Creek Community Church was at the time of its founding. Certainly some of its uniqueness owes a debt to Hybels’s early business experience and training. But at the heart of Hybels’s vision was his insight as a teenager that there was a growing population of nonconsumers of religion and, worse, that many churches responded to their plight with surprising indifference. It was a problem that in 1975 had cried out to be solved. The WCA would take the solution to a new level.
The surprising power of the WCA idea—especially since Hybels initially conceived it as a way to free himself from a growing set of distractions—was that it had the potential to become a viral instrument. The WCA team would build a global network of pastors trained to be leaders and innovators. The network would then become a force multiplier for Willow Creek’s appeal to the unchurched, but with each pastor adding something new to the mix.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The Three-Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation. Copyright 2016 Vijay Govindarajan. All rights reserved.