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Every year, a few dozen folks from Willow Creek Community Church make a pilgrimage to 121 Kellogg Place in Wheaton, Illinois—the home of Gilbert Bilezikian and his wife, Maria. The pilgrims pass a sun porch where Bilezikian, the theologian behind Willow Creek, spends most of his time in the summer and fall.

"We built that porch a few years ago, right where Bill Hybels drove his motorcycle the day he came to see me in 1975," Bilezikian says of his former student, who would become the church's senior pastor.

The Willow Creek pilgrims make their way to the backyard, past Maria's elaborate flower garden and the tomato and cucumber plants her husband tends ("I am better known for my salads than for any theological work I've ever done," he notes, only half in jest), to the spot where Willow Creek was born.

"Right here," says Bilezikian, standing in the middle of his lawn. There Hybels, then no more famous than any other recent college grad, roared up on his bike and said, "Dr. B., you and I are going to start a church."

Armenian surname notwithstanding, Bilezikian is a Francophone who occasionally lapses into French in the middle of a conversation. Born and raised in Paris, he has spent most of his adult life in the United States and was a longtime faculty member at Wheaton College.

Bilezikian's influence at the huge seeker-sensitive church cannot be overestimated. "There would be no Willow Creek without Gilbert Bilezikian," Hybels says.

Hybels was a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, during Bilezikian's two-year teaching stint there. At that time Hybels learned the most important word in Bilezikian's vocabulary: community.

That word was later on his tongue as Hybels explained to his former professor that no area church was yet devoted to building community. Bilezikian protested that he and Hybels lacked funds and a facility. Hybels simply repeated, "We are going to build a church." On October 25, 1975, a handful of unchurched seekers in the suburbs of Chicago attended the first Willow Creek service, held at Willow Creek Theater, a movie theater in Palatine.

"The moving picture for that week was Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)," recalls Bilezikian, the quaint locution betraying his 70 years.

After a year the theater was bursting, and Hybels and Bilezikian began conducting two services each Sunday. Two years later, the number of services grew to three. "It was an impossible situation," Bilezikian says. "We had to get the 8:15 service set up with the lights and so on, and our guys used to go there at 4 in the morning. We had to be packed and gone at 1, so we had to squeeze three services in there." Within three years, Hybels and Bilezikian were teaching and preaching to 2,500 people a week.

When evangelicals across the country think of Willow Creek, they think size. They think snazzy music, theatrical skits, and lots of converts. But church leaders take pains to de-emphasize the numbers.

"It's about community," Hybels says—a Book of Acts–based vision of community that Bilezikian has devoted his life to understanding and implementing. As Bilezikian writes in his book Community 101, "Without community, there is no Christianity." This emphasis on community has led to Willow Creek's embracing small groups, but community, as Bilezikian sees it, goes deeper than Bible studies.

"Christianity is not about being served, it is about serving," he says. Ministry—and he is insistent that everyone, not just the ordained, has a ministry—is about no more and no less than serving and empowering others to serve.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13