Preaching: Look ahead over the next several years as you see your church setting and the things that may be coming on us in the 1990's. How do you see your preaching changing over the next several years?

Hybels: I see myself doing less of it.

Preaching: Why is that?

Hybels: At Willow Creek we have transitioned to a team-teaching format. We're in five services a week and we're just moving into six now. We have two midweek services, Wednesday night and Thursday night. Now this fall we're moving to two Saturday night and two Sunday morning services. I hit the wall a couple of years ago trying to do them all, so now we have a rotation where I quarterback a team of four teachers, and try to lead the rotation to play to the strengths of the teachers yet keep the directional momentum to the preaching menu of the church.

I believe that more churches are going to move toward that as pastors find out that they will tend to either preach well or lead their church well; but if they're trying to do both, something's going to suffer, and sometimes everybody suffers. So maybe we'll be a prototype for the team-teaching approach.

The advantage to the congregation is they hear the voice of God through different voice boxes. They discern the wisdom of God through different personalities and gift mixes. The other advantage is that the teachers get more preparation time so that what they bring to the congregation can be better researched, more thoroughly prayed through, and applied to their own lives. A lot of us pastors preach what we have not yet applied in our own lives because by the time we're trying to apply truth to ourselves we're already in preparation for the next time up. That often leads to some forms of hypocrisy -- it's unintentional but it's almost inevitable.

I really believe that the church ought to be led by leaders and taught by teachers -- plural -- and administrated by administrators, etc. We're heading in that direction, and I think that's exciting.

Preaching: How often as the Senior Pastor do you find yourself preaching?

Hybels: Fifty percent of the time. Most churches only have a Sunday morning service so that would mean twenty-six times. In the course of the year, I'll probably speak twenty-six weekend services, but also maybe eight or nine of our midweek services. It's important to me to nourish and feed the core of the church at our midweek services and it's important for me to be a consistent communicator to the non-churched community in our area.

Again, we make those decisions more by gift-mix. Two of us on the teaching team have very strong evangelism gifts with our preaching gifts, so we would tend to do more of the weekend services. The other two tend to be a little stronger toward the midweek services, so we would play to the strengths. One of the four of us is a pure communicator who can really speak in either place effectively -- that's not me, by the way!

Preaching: When you do a weekend you would take all four services?