Megachurch Willow Creek Closing Campus Amid ‘Unsustainable Financial Scenario,’ Losing 10,000 Members
Willow Creek Community Church has announced they’re permanently shuttering their Chicago campus location, with senior Pastor David Dummitt citing an “unsustainable financial scenario.”
It’s a blow for Willow Creek, the multi-campus 10,000-member church founded by Bill Hybels that pioneered the church growth and seeker-sensitive movement but has seen its fortunes over the years as it hemorrhaged money, people, and reputation.
Their losses,began in 2018, the same year they purchased and moved into their Chicago location, after allegations of decades of sexual misconduct came forth against Hybels. These allegations included inviting women to his hotel room, making suggestive comments to female employees, extended hugs, kissing a woman against her will, and engaging in oral sex with an employee, leading Hybels to resign, along with the co-pastors who succeeded him, and then eventually the entire elder board.
They held massive staff layoffs in 2019 and 2020. When Covid-19 hit, Willow Creek completely shut down in-person gatherings for almost a year. When they did reopen, they did so at 25% capacity and mandatory masks for 2-year-olds and above.
In 2021, they made our radar after one of their woke pastors said that he Refuses to Teach to Mostly White Churches, describing it as ‘Casting Pearls Before Swine.’
In 2022, The church announced that they were cutting their staff budget by 6.5 million dollars and axing 30% of the employees, the result of losing over 10,000 congregants in the last three years. Things have not improved.
Doummit announced in a video on Monday that they could no longer pay the mortgage on the property they acquired just a few years ago, saying:
For years they (the campus) met in a rented theater. After a successful capital campaign they opened their doors in a new, current facility on State Street back in April of 2018. And at that time we had pledges to fund almost the entirety of its purchase with a plan to carry a responsible level of debt in line with the size and budget level of the campus at that time.
But … since 2018, Willow at large and Chicago went through some pretty significant changes. And while Chicago was a growing congregation, we’re faced with an unsustainable financial scenario.”
Doumitt insisted they have no other plans to close other locations.
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Pray that a real church will buy it.
Given the destruction that Willow Creek/Hybels has done to the American Church, I am honestly glad to see that place shut down. Their methods were copied by so many which caused so much hard to churches.
This is what Branch Rickey would call “addition by subtraction.”