Postby dolfan » November 5th, 2007, 8:02 am
Willow Creek's leadership has always tried to assess itself honestly. When you're in something for the long haul, it takes a long time to gauge how effective you are in some areas, especially large organizations. I'm not sure I agree, Jennifer, that the problem is one of following God vs. getting ahead of Him and doing things "man's way". God equips us with good sense, and our ways are His ways through us even when we miss the target. Not so sure God has a specific, preferred way to go forward with being the church of Christ, at least not one that He unfolds for us at the get-go. I think that years of trial and error are a valid way to discover, in time, God's ways, and that doing it in what you might call "man's ways" is exactly what God wants us to do, to keep following hard after Him, and that He unfolds the map a bit more clearly after we've marched around some wildernesses simply because we now know that He is confident in the simple fact that, hey, we CAN MARCH. And, that knowledge most often comes only in experience. Waiting on some divinely revealed, supernatural looking plan is simply a plan to fail, in most cases, IMHO.
And, given John Ortberg's departure a few years back and his own writings since then, and his emphasis on the spiritual disciplines and being, as he calls himself, "Dallas [Willard] for Dummies", is proof positive to me that God is showing WC a different path for a different kind of discipleship, one that we may all be reviewing hot and heavy in a few years.
Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven. (David Lipscomb, On Civil Government, 72).