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So you've heard me talk about this Church Marketing Sucks blog before. I like these people. Every so often (perhaps when they run out of updates), they "round up" some of their favorite comments from recent discussions. I was the favorite this time. That's right: I'm God's favorite and I'm Joshua Cody's favorite. I rock.

CMS is also talking about an article from last week titled, Willow Creek Repents? Apparently Executive Pastor Greg Hawkins decided that before launching another expensive program it might be good to see how the congregation was doing. They did some extensive surveying and found that a lot of what they were doing wasn't actually working.

Bill Hybels talked about the most dramatic finding at the last Leadership Summit. You can watch the video here, but basically, they discovered they weren't helping people become mature disciples:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and became Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become self-feeders. We should have ... taught people how to read their Bibles between services, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

They released their findings and, I hope, are in the process of turning themselves around.

For the leaders of a church that makes all of Outreach Magazine's lists (biggest, most innovative, fastest growing, etc.) to be able to admit their mistake and take action to fix it is pretty amazing. It would be so easy for Bill to ignore that information (which they instead published in a book called Reveal) and go on being a shiny, happy megachurch, but it sounds like they're stepping up to the challenge. Props.