(Every weekend, some 15,000 persons make their way to the Chicago suburb of South Barrington, Illinois, to participate in the life of Willow Creek Community Church. Characterized by a contemporary worship style and a focus on appealing to non-churched persons, the church has been led for sixteen years by Bill Hybels. Under his leadership, Willow Creek has developed a unique ministry that is now being studied and emulated by scores of churches around the United States. He was recently interviewed by Preaching editor Michael Duduit.)

Preaching: Anyone who visits Willow Creek Community Church will quickly see that the overall worship style is very different -- very non-traditional. What led you to adopt the kind of preaching style that you use at Willow Creek?

Hybels: What led us to the particular format we use was the realization that it's difficult to do evangelism and edification optimally in the same service. What we decided to do was to have a midweek edification worship service and devote our weekend services more toward outreach - Christianity 101 for seekers and new believers.

At Willow Creek we have two distinct preaching approaches. At our midweek service we would most likely teach expositionally because that's a believers' service filled with people who already know Christ and love Him and who simply want to be fed and challenged and instructed from God's Word. At our weekend services there are many skeptics, cynics and investigators -- people who are outside the family of God peeking over the fence to see what it's like inside the family. So our approach would tend to be more topical and more directed at some common ground -- at the needs of non-churched people, showing the relevance of Scripture to the plight of mankind. One would tend to be more topical and the other more expositional.

Preaching: Give me an idea, for example, of the kind of preaching you might be doing now in the weekend services versus what you're doing on Wednesday night.

Hybels: Well, I just finished a six-week series on spiritual gifts at the midweek service for our believers. I've done weekend series such as "Telling the Truth to Each Other," "Christianity's Toughest Competition," "Faith Has Its Reasons," "Fanning the Flames of Marriage," "Parenthood," and "Breaking the Chains That Bind You."

Preaching: In the weekend services -- that are focused on the non-churched -- you take a more topical approach. How overt are you in your use of Scripture? Is there frequent use of Scripture, or is there simply an underlying scriptural basis for the more topical approach?

Hybels: I think the latter is a fair description, but it varies widely. For instance, on Father's Day this past year my sermon was entitled "Phantom Fathers" -- how fathers fail and how their failure often breeds resentment in the lives of their children.

I spoke right out of the story of David and Absalom. If you studied the passage carefully, David failed as a father and created an enormous amount of resentment in the heart of Absalom, which created all kinds of complications later on. So I spoke from the narrative of the Old Testament on Father's Day; whereas, when I did a series about a year ago titled "The Age of Rage," I used the Ephesians passage, "Don't sin in your anger" -- don't let the sun go down without trying to bring some form of resolve to it. In a series like that I tend to use Scripture as the underlying authority for what I'm saying.