Mo' Members, Mo' Scandals: Willow Creek

Deconversion Therapy

deconversiontherapy

Religion & Spirituality, Documentary, Religion, Comedy, Society & Culture

4.9 • 585 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Once you build a 73 million dollar sanctuary, what could go wrong? Willow Creek church in Chicago was the first mainstream mega-church.From keytars and dry ice machines in the 80s to megatrons and coffee shops now, Willow Creek has been rocked by a...wait for it...sex scandal. Bill Hybels founded the church in 1975. The church has 7 locations and averages 24,000 attendees. Yes, we get most of this from Wikipedia. So do people like to go to large churches to hide and blend in? In 2018 the whole leadership resigned because they mishandles allegations against Hybels for sexual misconduct. Hybels was big in with James Dobson and they were anti-porn. So Hybels said it was his job to "research" porn by watching it WITH his hand-picked secretary while he wore only a robe. More things happened through the years, but...gross. Karen and Bonnie then reminisce about their big church and it's biggest time of the year--The Singing Christmas tree. Weeks upon weeks of strict rehearsals, a huge scaffolded tree you stood in, and most recently livestock that comes in for authenticity and then falls on the ticket-holders. Send in your funny, true stories for us to read on the podcast. Also, please subscribe, rate, and review. Sign up for your free Audible Trial HERE for a free 30 days and free book. Our recommendations for the week are Educated by Tara Westover and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Deconversion Therapy. This is Karen.
0:16.0	This is Bonnie.
0:17.2	And we've known each other since we were one years old.
0:20.6	And now we are becoming friends with you, whether you like it or not.
0:26.2	We grew up in the evangelical church, and both of us are out of it now.
0:31.3	But we love us a good story and something interesting.
0:35.2	And I, frankly, get asked stuff a lot. I don't know about you, but people
0:41.4	who... Ask stuff. Yeah, people like always saying, okay, do you really believe this and that as a
0:48.7	Christian? Did you, um, do churches really meet that many times?
0:55.3	Where do churches get all their money?
0:58.2	So people who had never gone to church?
1:01.1	Where are you hanging out and meeting these people?
1:03.1	Everyone I meet goes to church, takes communion.
1:07.2	Well, one time I backslid and went up north.
1:13.6	Well, I did that too.
1:15.5	And that's really where it was.
1:17.1	When I went to graduate school up north, that's what everyone was really curious about everything up there.
1:25.2	So, yeah, so that's what we talk about. So this podcast, we have listeners of all
1:31.2	beliefs and all phases in deconstructing their beliefs or whatever you want to say,
1:41.6	wherever you are. You can just join in. You can join in the community we have on
1:46.4	Facebook too at Deconversion Therapy. It's a closed one so you can say all your secrets in there
1:52.9	and post pictures of your pets. But today's podcast is brought to you by Audible, which we're
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from deconversiontherapy, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of deconversiontherapy and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.