Bill Hybels on
The Vision for The Global Leadership Summit

The vision for The Leadership Summit is a reflection of my heart for the importance of leadership development. Here’s how the Kingdom math works for me. If you change a church leader, you’ll be able to change a church. When you change a church, it will change a community. If you have a number of churches changing a community, you can affect a region, a city, a state, a country, and eventually the world. But it goes all the way back to that first domino. You’ve got to change church leaders in order to make the dominos start to fall.

Show me a prevailing, thriving church, and without exception I’ll be able to trace it back to some point where a leader or a small team of leaders gave birth to a vision and a mission and a plan that led to the involvement of more and more people and the advancement of a Kingdom cause. It all begins with leadership. So an increasing amount of my time these days is spent trying to inspire, and equip, and help, and serve, and love leaders. That’s because I believe a leader is the first domino in the line that leads toward world transformation.

For over a decade here in North America, we’ve hosted an annual event called The Leadership Summit. It started with just a few hundred leaders, and in 2007 more than 62,000 leaders were connected to this event across the U.S. and Canada. Originating from our Willow Creek campus near Chicago, we’re connected by satellite videocast to locations all over North America. We provide a world-class faculty, the best leaders and speakers we can find, to lecture and inspire. We do it annually so that it’s predictable for church and personal schedules. And we make it accessible and affordable to church teams. And we’re at a unique time in our history where the church leaders in North America get it. They really do. If we provide a world-class faculty annually, make it accessible and affordable, the leaders in North America just say, “Why wouldn’t I do that?”

But we’ve just begun to address the challenge of leadership development on the international church scene, which is much more challenging than here in North America. In many environments, it’s much more difficult to build a thriving church than it is in the U.S. While 42 percent of the people in the U.S. go to church on a weekly basis, it’s far less in almost every other setting. In the U.K., it’s substantially less. You go to Ireland, it’s way less. In Denmark, one percent of the population goes to church on a regular basis. That means when you walk down the streets there, 99 percent of the people think you’re clinically nuts for being a Christian and going to church. Pretty tough to build a church in that environment, agreed?

That’s why we’ve felt a growing sense of concern to help church leaders who are building churches in environments far more difficult than ours. In 2005, we took the biggest risk we had ever taken as the Willow Creek Association—to take the best sessions from the North American Leadership Summit, mix it with live programming in a conference experience, then videocast it via DVD to 22 cities in 9 countries around the world. We wanted to make it annual, accessible, and affordable—even in areas where church leaders can’t afford the kinds of fees that are doable for pastors here in North America.

A lot of people asked, “Are leaders really going to listen to talks by people up on a screen?” Well, that was the risk we took in order to get this kind of world-class input into cities around the world—to make it affordable and accessible. And I’m delighted to report that not only did it work—it worked more powerfully than we had dared to hope. Key to this success were multiple factors: World-class faculty, the highest quality of picture and screen size, local facilitation, enthusiastic volunteers, a shared experience of people from multiple churches across one city, and prayer.

Our learning curve has been tremendous, and now as we move into our fourth year, we do so with even greater faith and confidence that this kind of training is needed, welcomed, and making a difference in churches, cities, and countries around the world. We could never have completed this effort without the help of our band of City Builders—who took a step of faith themselves to fund leadership development for those they didn’t know in churches they’d never seen. They did so on behalf of the Kingdom. That’s the kind of group we’re asking God to gather together again to support The Global Leadership Summit 2008.