This month, the Willow Creek Leadership Summit will make landfall in 78 cities overseas, following the success of the North American summit in August.
"By all accounts, Summit '07 was rated the best ever," said Bill Hybels, senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. The Aug. 9-11 Leadership Summit was in its 12th year and beamed via satellite to 138 cities in the United States and Canada from the Willow Creek campus in South Barrington, Ill.
Now on DVD, the prominent summit will launch in global sites on Sept. 28 and run through Dec. 7 as the event schedule adapts to the cultural variances of different countries.
New sites added to this year's global summit include three cities in Russia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Malaysia, and Singapore among others, some of which were sponsored by church leaders in North America.
"These are exciting markets for us to be able to penetrate because the interest has been really high," said Paul Braoudakis, Communications Director for Willow Creek Association. The summit was hosted in 52 overseas cities last year.
Overall, over 100,000 pastors and church leaders will have been served by Summit '07 by the end of this year, according to Hybels.
This year's Leadership Summit featured interviews between Hybels and former president Jimmy Carter as well as British screenwriter Richard Curtis. The interviews were subject to controversy, considering one isn't popular among many evangelicals and the other isn't fully committed to the Christian faith, respectively. A few leaders cancelled their registration over the one or two speakers they disagreed with either politically or ideologically. And some satellite sites in North America opted not to show the Carter interview.
But according to Braoudakis, the interviews were "amazinglypositively reviewed" by summit attendees.
"We almost couldn't believe how positively they were being reviewed," he noted. "People weren't crazy about Carter, but [after seeing the interview] they said 'he did a good job' and 'I could see his heart.'"
Carter has been active in Habitat for Humanity and peace efforts. Willow Creek described Carter as having "done more since retiring from the office of president than most people accomplish in a lifetime."
Curtis is co-founder of the Make Poverty History campaign and the United Kingdom's Red Nose Day, which has become a national day of giving for the poor. He was also the leader behind the latest "Idol Gives Back" campaign on the popular TV program "American Idol."
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