Responding to Willow Creek Community Church’s recent apologies for the way the leadership handled sexual misconduct allegations against founder Bill Hybels, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight argued that the victims had no choice but to go public and expose misconduct.
McKnight, who attended the South Barrington, Illinois, megachurch for 10 years, argued on his Jesus Creed blog that autonomy may be largely to blame for how the church’s leadership failed the women.
“What the power brokers think of first is protecting the institution, which is (sad to say) protection of the power at the top,” he wrote.
Willow Creek, founded by Hybels in 1975 in a rented theater, is an independent church with no affiliation to any denomination. “They are an island to themselves,” McKnight described.
“Autonomous churches therefore have autonomous pastors, and that means these pastors have no one to whom they answer other than the Elders/Deacons,” he noted. “When pastors become autonomous and authoritative and when they are as big as Willow, the church can easily become a top-down organization and become a centralized…
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