Mega-church conglomerate Willow Creek, envied and emulated by countless evangelical communities across North America, has recently disavowed its core philosophy of ministry. Analyzing the data from a comprehensive, multi-year study, undertaken to determine what programs were most effective in nurturing Christian discipleship (and which ones weren‘t), the church’s leadership has concluded: “we made a mistake.”

For years, Willow Creek has applied (and touted) the “program-participation” model for producing mature, Christian disciples: if you create good programs, they will come; if they come, they will “develop spiritually.” Now, senior pastor Bill Hybels acknowledges that slick programming, underwritten by vast sums of money and a sophisticated publicity machine, does not a faithful disciple make.

But while the honest self-scrutiny is welcome (and rare in the world of high-powered evangelicalism), the proposed corrective is troubling: “What we should have done,” says Hybels, “when people crossed the line of faith and became Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their Bible between services, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.”

It’s disappointing that Hybels has traded one problematic strategy for another--that he and others at Willow Creek assume that the path toward Christian discipleship and congregational maturity must be traveled alone. Even long-time critics of the Willow Creek way of doing church don‘t seem to pick up on the troubling irony of Hybels‘ assessment. Diana Butler Bass has observed that what has been lacking for years in Willow Creek’s approach is “intentionality, practice, and vitality,” (an arguable point, I think); she is silent, however, on Willow Creek’s new plan to encourage “self-feeding” and privatized Bible-reading.

In my own church, this very evening, we celebrated the abundant harvest of our garden’s first season. We worshiped together and then shared a simple meal of dishes prepared with the garden’s bountiful produce. There were 20 or so of us around the table (6 or 7 of whom were small children). In a church our size (1500+ members)--a community quite enamored of the “program-participation” model of discipleship--we looked like a pretty dismal failure: Where were the big crowds? Where was the three-point video presentation, the moralistic scripture lesson?

For us, the practice of gardening together over this past year has been life-changing--literally. We eat differently, we shop differently; we regard migrant laborers differently. Those in our group who would not consider themselves theologically sophisticated have eloquently articulated deep connections between economics and discipleship that now inform their daily lives.

Some in our church call our efforts at gardening a “program.” We know, though, that as we dig beds, stir compost, harvest sweet potatoes, and prepare for honeybees in the spring, we are practicing the kingdom of God, and each of us is a faithful disciple in the making.