Industry Focus If you had come across Willow Creek Community Church's enormous 40-acre parking lot in South Barrington, IL, on Father's Day this year, you may have wondered where church members were supposed to park their cars. That Sunday, not a single space was available for any of the church's 22,000 weekend attendees.
Instead, over 200 antique and custom-built cars overran the lot as Willow hosted its second-annual DadFest, a car show featuring free food, games, live music, and a pastor's blessing. But DadFest represents just one of thousands of yearly events Bill Hybels, the church's founder and senior pastor, created in his quest to "church 'Un-churched Harry'" — or those baby boomers and others who have strayed from the flock.
With such aggressive marketing, it is no wonder that Willow has become a beacon of megachurch success. In fact, Hybels has established a business that any CEO might envy. Aided by the guiding light of Greg Hawkins, a Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant who oversees the church's day-to-day management, Willow now grosses $27 million a year, ranks among the top 5 percent of the 250 most recognizable brand names in the country, and has been granted one of the greatest accolades in business: It is a Harvard case study. Not surprisingly, many pastorpreneurs have come to Willow in search of guidance. In response, Hybels created Willow Creek Association, the church's consulting arm, which is run by Jim Mellado, a steadfast Harvard MBA. (It now mentors more than 12,000 churches, and grosses $20 million a year.)
Willow Creek Association, and the many recently birthed church-consulting companies like it, are poised to make a killing. As traditional churches throughout the United States are forced to shut their doors, the number of megachurches continues to rise. There are over 1,200 megachurches throughout the country — up from 600 six years ago — and each boasts somewhere between 2,000 and 46,000 members. The average megachurch grosses about $6.0 million a year, while Lakewood Church in Houston, the country's largest, expects to make $77 million in 2006. As with all businesses, a surge in demand leaves many of these churches looking to find ways of managing risk as they expand, creating new marketing strategies to attract more "Harrys," and finding new ways to keep old customers happy. For some, this may mean creating more user-friendly places of worship; for others, more concerts.
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