Board apologizes by name to Nancy Ortberg, Nancy Beach, Vonda Dyer, and other women. Larson asks people not to give up on Willow.
In the summer of 2008, Bill Hybels stood in front of thousands of pastors and other church leaders gathered at Willow Creek Community Church and admitted his megachurch had failed.
“We made a mistake,” he told the crowd gathered for the 2008 Global Leadership Summit (GLS). A detailed Willow study had found that the church had helped many people find new faith in Jesus, but had failed to teach them how to practice the spiritual disciplines needed to grow their faith.
He vowed the megachurch would do be better in the future.
Ten years later, Willow Creek’s leaders confessed even more mistakes. On the eve of the 2018 GLS, they admitted in a special congregational meeting that the church’s leadership had failed to appropriately handle the allegations of sexual misconduct against Hybels.
Lead pastor Heather Larson announced that she was resigning immediately. The church’s elder board announced that its members would also step down in an orderly fashion by end of 2018.
Steve Carter, the church’s lead teaching pastor, had earlier resigned on Sunday, saying he could no longer continue at the church in “good conscience.”
At tonight’s family meeting, elder Missy Rasmussen stated on behalf of Willow’s board, “We are sorry that we allowed Bill to operate without the kind of accountability that he should have had.”
She also said, “We believe that [Hybels’s] sins were beyond what he admitted on this stage.”
She apologized by name to Nancy Ortberg, Nancy Beach, Vonda Dyer, and other women who had made accusations, and said the board exhorts their founding pastor to publicly do likewise.
“Our entire elder board has had to come to grips with the areas ...
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