It gets bigger and better every year, and this year's Global Leadership Summit is no exception.
Hosted by Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and put on by the Willow Creek Association (which is essentially the global nonprofit arm of the church), this year's summit will reach over 300,000 leaders in over 100 different countries, with over 130,000 of them watching live at host sites all over the United States.
This year's docket of speakers includes well-known figures such as Melinda Gates, Bishop T. D. Jakes, Patrick Lencioni and others, and is sure to be yet another incredibly impactful event.
Just last year, a story was shared of how one leader, reinvigorated and re-energized by attending the Global Leadership Summit, brought about a series of events that led to the public repentance of the President of Uganda on behalf of a series of disastrous leaders who had gone before him.
This one leader—who happened to be a pastor from Uganda—impacted an entire nation of people, and he was just one of hundreds of thousands of leaders who were impacted by the summit.
That's the beauty of impacting leaders—if you can impact one leader for good, you'll also impact every person they lead too, creating a sort of exponential ripple effect.
As Bill Hybels, convener of the Global Leadership Summit and senior pastor of Willow Creek, always says, "Everybody wins when a leader gets better."
How right he is.
Imagine what would happen if a high-level leader in an organization with an unhealthy work environment attended the summit and walked away with a better understanding of how to foster the kind of organizational health that allows employees to thrive.
Imagine what would happen if an untrained but influential senior pastor from a rural community in a third-world country received leadership development like he never had before and became better able to pastor his community well because of it.
These are the kinds of things that the Global Leadership Summit brings about every year without fail, and in ever-increasing doses of influence.
It's an event that brings together both church and business leaders from all over the world in an environment where both come ready to learn from each other, even though their values are quite different.
It's the kind of event that has an impact which far surpasses its already impressive attendance statistics.
It's the sort of thing that only a God who so loves the world could dream up, and one that he regularly uses to influence that world for the better.
And it all started with a church.
