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Community, Bilezikian emphatically notes, is not a question of numbers. It is qualitative rather than quantitative. You can have community with three or 3,000.

Just what does community look like? Bilezikian says there are two main components. The first is servanthood. Ask those who know Bilezikian, and they will tell you that he practices what he preaches—he is wont to wash coffee cups and other dishes even when there are others around who are paid to do so. John Ortberg, one of Willow Creek's teaching pastors, says that understanding Bilezikian means understanding his zeal for servanthood.

"Once we were at the Wheaton College cafeteria, and a kid dropped an apple on the ground and left it there," he says. "Gil was so bothered that he leaned down and picked it up. The kid assumed he was a janitor, but Gil the eminent theologian didn't mind."

Hybels tells a similar story, this one set in Germany during a Willow Creek seminar. Bilezikian had taught all day after spending the night on an airplane. But he was ready when Hybels realized they needed to move all their equipment from one auditorium to another.

"I called for volunteers to help, and there was Gil, then in his mid-60s, taking off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, and carrying lighting equipment like a high-school kid," Hybels says.

Most Christians will not argue with the primacy of servanthood. But out of Bilezikian's concept of community has come another teaching, more controversial in its outworking: gender equality.

"I am not a feminist," Bilezikian says. "Feminism is about power, and I am about servanthood. I'm not pursuing equality for its own sake; there is no mandate in the Bible to pursue equality. But there is a mandate to establish community. And authentic community necessarily implies full participation of women and men on the basis of spiritual gifts, not on the basis of sex."

Bilezikian was one of the proponents of mutual submission long before it was fashionable in evangelical circles. "Mutual submission is a biblical concept," he says. "The words are used specifically in a number of texts but especially in Ephesians 5:21, where it says be mutually submitted to each other." The wife submits to the husband just as the church does to Christ, but there is a reciprocity, he says: "Christ submits himself in-depth to the church, and the church submits itself in service to Christ. But then the husband is also under submission because he has to love his wife as he loves himself, even to the point of self-sacrifice as Christ loved the church."

Both men and women, then, desire to serve the other rather than to control the other, Bilezikian says.

"Our natural tendency is to compete or take advantage of," he says. "The Bible says lay down your arms and instead extend your hands toward each other to help each other and to support each other; and for the relationship to be one of partnership and mutuality rather than one of hierarchy."

Bilezikian says he tries to live out these principles in his marriage, and they are also evident at his church. Not everyone at Willow Creek initially agreed with Bilezikian's position on women's ministry: among others, Hybels himself taught the traditional view of male headship. After months of study and debate, the church decided that it would support women in any position of leadership—teacher, preacher, elder.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13