Entries for November 2007

What if you were at the helm of one of the most successful megachurches in the country and you discovered that one of the keys to your success wasn't really making your congregants better Christians? In the case of Bill Hybels, the founder and pastor of Chicago's Willow Creek Community Church, the answer was admirably direct: own up to the mistake and make a course correction.

Hybels's accomplishments have rightly become the stuff of evangelical legend. Since founding Willow Creek in the mid-1970s in a rented movie theater, the dynamic pastor shaped a church of some 125 congregants into the second-largest church in America. It now claims more than 20,000 members attending services either at its main, 155-acre campus in South Barrington or at one of its five satellite branches in the greater Chicago area. In addition to seeker-friendly services, Hybels instituted a host of programs or ministries catering to the needs of his steadily increasing flock. Those programs were often touted as the energizing force behind the church's growth and vitality.

Religious fundamentalism has become one of the great cultural and political forces in the modern world. Associated with scriptural literalism and inflexible dogmatism, it has created divisions and hostilities within different religious traditions as well as among them. In its most extreme forms, it has led to acts of unspeakable violence. Little wonder, then, that scholars of religion have turned their attention to the subject—most notably in the University of Chicago's Fundamentalism Project, which under the direction of Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, produced five volumes on different aspects of the phenomenon.

Norman Mailer—before he died, almost implausibly, last weekend—fought with any individual or group that provoked him. And since that included just about everybody at one time or another, it's probably not surprising that he also quarreled, at least somewhat respectfully, with God.

Mailer's idea of God would not have fit most traditional conceptions of the Supreme Being, but the author definitely came to believe that God existed. In the introduction to one of his last books, On God: An Uncommon Conversation, a dialogue between the author and his friend and literary executor, Michael Lennon, Mailer owned up to an abiding obsession: "I have spent the last 50 years trying to contemplate the nature of God."