Word is that the Willow Creek Association will do a 10 minute video acknowledging the fact that Bill Hybels is gone and why.  They may spend more time than this but the lead- in video is an attempt to get this behind them so that they can move forward with the leadership summit.

So maybe ten minutes to explain away something so ruinous to the history of the GLS.  Ten minutes to quickly “acknowledge” the “controversy”. Ten minutes to explain away this annoying “challenge” that the WCA has been dealing with for four months. Ten minutes to make the “acknowledgement” that they believe they are forced to make. Ten minutes to somehow excise the memory of the man that envisioned and developed the concept of the WCA and the Global Leadership Summit. Ten minutes to insert a choreographed statement that is supposed to suffice and allow the GLS to plow forward. Ten minutes to so easily call the GLS God’s thing, in spite of the reality that everyone knows it was Bill Hybels’s baby, created, incubated, and nurtured by him as a crowning reflection of his leadership. Ten minutes to seek to distance the GLS from the man who spent 26 years providing “insight” into leadership issues, while at the same time listening to the input of countless speakers on leadership health. Ten minutes to essentially do what they must do in order to move onto the business of selling leadership ideas. Whatever the actual content of the acknowledgement, ten minutes seems far too little time to address the complexity of this situation.

Can this possibly be happening? The WCA is presenting itself as a victim of this “controversy”. They are minimizing this situation to a level of absolute pathology. To in any way try to characterize this situation as like a CEO gone bad or a pastor guilty of moral failure is so disingenuous as to be absurd. Bill Hybels and the WCA are so organically enmeshed that it is impossible to think of one without the other. He envisioned it, championed its’ inception and development, and was the principle figurehead from year to year. To act like he is just a pastor who may or may not have had moral failure is beyond incomprehensible. The very DNA of the GLS has BH’s imprint, so that when he leaves it is a cataclysmic shift that cannot be denied. Minimizing it as like any other situation where a pastor leaves should insult the intelligence of everyone that comes to the GLS. Do they think that they can in so cavalier a way quickly insert some minimalist statement about a man who created and was the driving force behind the WCA and the GLS? Apparently yes.

How about explaining to the thousands of participants how a man, an icon of leadership championing, can participate and teach about leadership for so long when he violated almost every healthy element of being a good leader? Does the WCA really believe that people are that naive? BH sat under the instruction of countless experts on what comprises a healthy leader and  organization, while at the same time using entitlement as an excuse for sexually abusing women. And he created a governance model that was as repressive as any despotic government structure. There are well over 250 stories (and growing)  of people who experienced coercive abuse either as employees or congregants at Willow. These stories are beginning to congeal into a picture of a ruthless leader who used fear and shame to impose his will on all that were subject to his authority.

Should the participants in the GLS be told about the real way that Willow operated? How can an organization like the WCA put on a GLS when it’s sponsoring parent, WCCC, violated so many principles of healthy leadership and healthy organizational structure? Should they be called out for this hypocrisy? ABSOLUTELY! But the poor victims, the WCA, are taking criticism for this “controversy”. Give me a break! Attenders should be warned that they have been led by someone who spoke about leadership but was not a healthy leader. How can this happen, that a leadership conference can be led by someone who was hardly affected in a positive way by the very conference that he created? This man who is inseparable from the DNA of the WCA and the GLS is treated like a common person who can just be sent away with very little in the way of an explanation for the complete hypocrisy of the whole sordid situation. The WCA wants to push through, make some bland statement that explains it all away, control the narrative, and then fast charge into the next chapter of the GLS.

Tom D basically saying that the attenders need the GLS is so wrong. What they need is an explanation as to why a man could supposedly lead the GLS for over 26 years while at the same time violate every basic tenet of healthy leadership. How about a session on how as scripture says we can be “ever learning but never coming to the truth”? The WCA has a responsibility to tell the attenders how they managed to allow this hypocrisy to continue. The simplistic way that they are trying to  slip slide this quickly by the attenders is simply an insult to the intelligence of all the participants and the rest of us that can see the bigger picture.

The current WCA leadership’s response to this travesty is in fact  an homage to the leadership model that BH actually created. You must choreograph everything. The WCA does not need to talk about BH’s propositioning of women  as some discrete act in the past, but rather as a reflection of behavior inherent in an organization that has perfected the model of how to get in front of bad press.

What is needed is organizational repentance. How about the WCA saying “we were complicit in the organizational process that allowed this domineering man to stay un-confronted with how his domineering style of leadership has abused people? Can the WCA extricate itself from culpability for their collusion in this process? I think they learned from BH how to spin things to minimize damage, paste the page down, and move on to the next chapter. But my understanding of scripture is that the whole organization should confess and lament and ask for forgiveness for its’ part in allowing a man to lead in a way so contradictory to the very principles that the WCA was peddling to thousands of leaders. Own your hypocrisy! Ten minutes!

What needs to be done would more likely take ten weeks to do an examine of the radical hypocrisy and collusion that the WCA is guilty of by its’ enabling of BH. The first nine weeks would be best served by prayer and examination of the core sin of the organization. The WCA should not get off the hook so easily by trite statements that “the GLS is not about one man”. But it was. Admit it. Are the WCA leaders so drunk with the kool-aid that BH has been serving them for years that they cannot step back and recognize that they have an obligation to explain the obvious dichotomy between the message that the GLS sold and the lack of ownership of those very principles?  Do they presume on the naivety of those who observe this process?

The WCA has to stop their paternalistic pattern of treating their constituents as essentially stupid. Any thoughtful person can recognize the fact that what the WCA preaches and what it does are two different things. Any thoughtful person can easily ask why the WCA was led by a man who violated the very principles that the GLS taught. How could he continue to act without being confronted? Who were the Nathans in this story?

The spin doctors at the WCA, schooled by a master, will seek to portray this simply as a discreet set of acts by just a mere pastor gone wrong. The WCA should pass out kool-aid while their statement is being read to symbolically reflect what is really going on in their handling of this. BH still is present in the way that BH’s organization seeks to cover up his behavior. Who would have thought that Bill’s construction of an organizational structure would eventually serve him well, by minimizing and clouding the real problems that his behavior reflects?

To the kool-aid drinkers the video scenarios could go somewhat like this:

          The WCA acknowledges BH’s behavior at the beginning of the GLS!                                  W huh!Got that out of the way. Please people pivot to the incredible content of             the  conference and do not ask questions about the obvious hypocrisy of the                 whole situation.  Amen? Now charge forward to new and exciting ideas about             healthy leadership!

It is only a remnant of the people who will call out this hypocrisy. In scripture there usually was only a small band of those who prayed and called upon leaders who had sinned to repent, confess, and turn from their wicked ways.

Chronicles 7:14 “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

The WCA must take the time to confess its’ complicity in idolizing and enabling BH’s behavior. They need to say “we allowed a man who had clear entitlement characteristics to roam without accountability, and this resulted in numerous instances where he acted in a sexually inappropriate way. We failed to confront him and hold him accountable. We were more afraid of Bill than of God.” This is the strongest argument that they cannot just look at Bill’s behavior as his own. It was the failure of the WCA and the WCCC that enabled his behavior by not standing up to his clear, long expressed sense of entitlement. It is like a family that sets no limits with a bully child and then the child acts out against a class mate. When I see that as a psychologist, I understand it as a system problem with systemic culpability. The leadership of the WCA has sinned as well, by knowing the entitled behavior of Bill and allowing it to continue to its logical end of hurting people.

But instead, it looks like they will take ten minutes to satiate some simplistic notion of only his  moral failure so they can sprint ahead to a “successful” summit.

Lord create in all of us  a broken and contrite heart. Break the heart of the WCA for what breaks your heart. You are a God of Truth and Honesty. Your heart breaks for the way this situation has been minimized, and Your reputation tarnished in the eyes of the world.