The Axis Avalanche
Willow Creek’s ministry to the postmodern generation continues to barrel its way down the mountain.
It’s late morning on a brilliantly sunny August day in the Midwest, but this large, open room thrives on the mood-creating, reddish-purple lighting permeating the overall darkness from its indistinct sources above and to the sides of the stage. Percussion-heavy music seeps into the quiet conversations of the young, casually dressed crowd, some of whom sip coffee as they settle into chairs nearly filling the gymnasium floor. Materializing in a computer-generated font, a key point from the upcoming message flashes on large screens above the stage, then disintegrates or melts as another appears.
As the band starts to take its place on the stage, an air of anticipation flows through the crowd, quickly augmented by fast, rough-edged, recorded music interrupted only by video footage featuring “postmoderns” voicing their disillusionment with life and skepticism regarding the church’s ability to change them or their circumstances. The band follows with an equally hard-edged instrumental, then an energy-generating song in which the singer cries out for a response to God’s love.
It’s a typical weekend service at Willow Creek Community Church; but then again, it’s not. This Axis service, designed to appeal to “20 somethings,” is held simultaneously with the regular Willow Creek weekend service, but you’d never mistake the two.
Speaking the language
The changeover in the way many people do church — from traditional to contemporary — has been dramatic, sweeping, and refreshing, and has brought many Baby Boomers back to church. However, some of these contemporary churches are realizing that they have a disproportionately smaller number of attendees between the ages of 18 and 30. This postmodern generation is staying away from church in droves all across the U.S., and some churches such as Willow Creek are responding by targeting this group with a ministry that involves a separate weekend service, small groups, and serving opportunities.
“Regular services at Willow Creek and other contemporary churches are not irrelevant by any means. It’s just that services such as what Axis offers are more relevant to many of the people we’re trying to reach today,” says Jarrett Stevens, a 28-year-old teaching pastor in the Axis ministry that serves well over 2,000 people. “We’re speaking the same language, we just have different accents.
“We’re teaching timeless truth in today’s language. For many of us, truth needs to be experienced before it’s believed. We don’t just hear something and then believe it. That’s why authenticity and sincerity are such huge values for us. So, we create tons of different experiences for postmoderns to connect with Jesus and connect with others in the community.”
The postmodern challenge
As Willow Creek has discovered in the five years since Axis began, there are many challenges associated with establishing and maintaining a ministry geared toward postmoderns. The journey has included identifying all the different people in the area who make up this group, creating and tweaking a weekend service, providing opportunities for people to serve, revamping the concept of small groups and incorporating the concept of community into every facet of the ministry.
“We need to know our people to serve our people,” Stevens said.
Who are these postmoderns that ministries such as Axis are trying to reach? They are a combination of Generation X (those born between roughly 1965 and 1980) and Generation Y (those born after 1980 and also known as the millennial generation). But belonging to this group may depend less on age than on a mindset. As a general rule, this is a group of non-linear thinkers who stick closely to their peers and value relationships above almost all else, but who are skeptical due to the high percentage of broken families from which they come. To most postmoderns, truth is purely relative, unless they can experience it first-hand.
“Axis began five years ago out of a need in the church,” Stevens said. “The church was doing great with students up to age 18 and with young parents in their 30s, but we noticed that there was this Bermuda Triangle with the 18-30 group. After six months of praying and dreaming and starting to build a volunteer corps, we decided to offer a different service and form a community that would speak to people our age.
“At first,” Stevens adds, “we tried to reach the tattooed, pierced poster people of Gen X, but then we realized that most of those people are in the city and we are in the suburbs. The turning point for us was when we thought about who we as a staff had relationships with in the area. We realized that we weren’t as connected to the people God had called us to as we needed to be.”
It wasn’t until the Axis staff became more intentional with where they hung out and who they befriended, that they truly began to put names and faces to the people they were trying to reach. This gave them a better focus and enabled them to reach out to people and give them a clear picture of who God is. The staff would also issue challenges by regularly asking each other who they were building relationships with and who they had invited to Axis that week.
“As a result, our Saturday evening services began changing stylistically in terms of music, atmosphere, and content of messages, and three years into Axis we were filling out our room,” Stevens said. “The growth was exciting, but we knew there were still so many more people to reach, so we prayed through adding an identical Sunday morning service.
“It was then that we realized we could reach a whole other group of our friends. Asking people who usually hang out at bars and clubs on Saturday nights to come to church instead didn’t always work. As a result of our Sunday service, we gained a whole new group of postmoderns who were new to Axis, and surprisingly, we also started attracting people in their 40s and 50s, and even some families who started bringing their kids.”
Sharina and Ryan, a 20-something married couple who has been involved with Axis for more than a year, said they feel very much at home there.
“The music is totally our generation, the messages are raw and everything is very real,” said Sharina.
“The people I’m trying to reach out to fit very well in the Axis service,” said Ryan. “The atmosphere and the music are what someone my age is interested in, and the talks are very practical and easy to identify with.”
Cultivating serving hearts
Another area of evolvement for Axis has been the transformation of its small groups. A number of typical small groups were developed early on, but this aspect of the ministry did not really begin to flourish until small groups were created within the context of medium and larger groups. Every Tuesday night, two groups of approximately 120 each meet at the church. “Encounter” is designed for college-age people, and “Summit” for post-college. Once trust is built in the larger setting, they break out into small groups for discussion. House groups have also become a large part of Axis, with 20-40 people meeting at a house for dinner and connection, followed by small group discussions.
“This radical change in the way we do small groups is very exciting,” Stevens said. “Actually, it’s nothing new. We pretty much stole the idea right out of Acts 2, which I think God is OK with. We’re in the process of planting a number of house groups geographically in our area and in the city of Chicago to reach as many people as we can.”
As Stevens is quick to point out, Axis is about much more than an alternative weekend church service and small groups.
“Axis is a community of 20-somethings who want to make a difference,” Stevens said. “That’s why we do six international trips a year to help people in need in places such as Costa Rica and Mexico, and that’s why every weekend we’re serving somewhere such as downtown Chicago with Habitat for Humanity, Feed a Neighbor, and the Illinois Youth Center. We’re sending a group of 20 people to Mississippi to work for racial reconciliation, and we’re serving the needs of the Hispanic population right here in Palatine.
“A couple of weeks ago, we had a guest speaker, Shane Claiborne, who lives with homeless people in Philadelphia. He spoke of the need for shoes and socks, and challenged those who could to donate some — right there in that moment. That weekend, we collected 1,700 pairs of shoes! To see that many people walking around the church barefoot spoke volumes about what Jesus is doing and how much Axis wants to be a part of it.”
Keeping it real
But this kind of ministry is never easy. Stevens and others on the Axis staff at Willow Creek know full well that every single message conveyed to postmoderns must carry honesty and authenticity.
“The reality senses are high here,” Stevens said. “Our people can sniff it out. We have to stay real. I do most of the teaching during our services, and I’m not going to fake it. I’ll tell them that this particular thing is hard for me, or I’m having a difficult time trusting Jesus with this issue right now. We’re communicating that the journey is the key, and we’re all sojourners trying to follow Jesus with our whole lives. This is the real deal for us.”
Stevens said that while other churches might want to consider a 20-something ministry that involves a separate service, it’s not something that should be jumped into quickly.
“One of my first cautions is, don’t assume that a service is going to create a community of postmoderns,” Stevens said. “If God allows and directs, let the community create a service. The first thing church leaders need to do is to lay down their preconceived notions and stereotypes, find some postmoderns and talk to them. An honest dialogue will probably produce some very surprising results. Talk to them about their lives and their spiritual questions. Be with them and find out what life is like for them. Then ask for God’s guidance on how to proceed. Believe me, everything positive that has come out of Axis came as a result of us getting to know our people.”
Stevens also said that if a postmodern ministry (and possibly a separate weekend service) does eventually become a reality, flexibility will be a key to its maintenance.
“This is a fun time to be involved with Axis right now, and it may sound strange, but part of that is because we have no idea where God is taking us,” Stevens said. “Just in the past few months, something is different here, and we can’t quite put our finger on it. That’s OK, though, because more and more people are finding Jesus here and being connected to the community. They’re joining this crazy, exciting, life-consuming adventure and following Jesus.
“Sometimes we compare it to an avalanche. We try and be as faithful as possible to put the dynamite where we think it should go, and then stand back and let God take us for the ride. It’s like how Jesus described it in John 3:8 — we’re all in this big boat called Axis and suddenly we sense the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing, guiding, and giving life to our sails. We can’t always see where it’s going, but we want to raise the sail as high and wide as we can and go where He wants to take us. We’ve had our seasons of rowing, but it’s a really fun time to feel God’s wind blowing.”
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