Meeting at the 'Axis'
Karen Beattie
January 1, 1997
When Bill Hybels started a church in a movie theater in the 1970s, he wanted to create a service Baby Boomers would find relevant. Twenty years later, Willow Creek Community Church
has grown to around 12,000, one of the largest evangelical churches in the country. But a few years ago, Hybels and other church leaders realized that although they were providing answers for Boomers asking spiritual questions, they were losing the younger twentysomething generation. "The Busters were coming in and saying, 'This feels too slick, feels inauthentic, too much like a show. These people aren't like me.' " says Dieter Zander, one of Willow Creek's teaching pastors. "I think what Willow
Creek is doing is so good for [the Baby Boomer] generation, but Hybels realized what they were doing wasn't going to work for the younger generation."
In March 1995, Zander and a core group began meeting to explore the possibility of starting a separate church service for Generation X. A year and a half later, 650 Busters fill Willow Creek's gymnasium on Saturday nights for Axis, the Generation X service.
"The Boomers, when they came back to church, were looking for answers that would make them better," explains Zander. "They wanted sermons like 'Five Steps to a Better Marriage.' Generation Xers are more meaning oriented. They want help figuring out what life is about and they don't want sermons on 'Five Steps to something.' For them, life is way too complicated for that.
They don't want easy answers. They want to be given stuff to think about."
This congregation isn't impressed with props or performances, facades or titles. Here there are no easy answers, no trivializing, no clichés. There are no hymnals, no cushy auditorium seats, no sentimental choruses ...
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