• It was good to be with you and back in worship this week. Included are some comments on the Mark Driscoll/Mars Hill debacle.
• A good insight into the deterioration at Mars Hill can be found here by Ron Wheeler. It’s powerful. And there’s more than you’ll ever want to read at the Patheos website by Dr. Warren Throckmorton. As I began to read Wheeler’s post I was thinking, “this is what happened to Mark Driscoll” but eventually the piece becomes very humbling and you recognize your own sins are being described.
And I’ll add this if it seems I’m blindly following critics of MH: I recently met a woman who worked on staff at MH for several years. When I told her what I’d read online she gave me a wan smile and said, “that’s the tip of the iceberg.” But, again, it’s not so much about Mark Driscoll as it is about all of us, and how we lie to ourselves as leaders and followers.
• I’m going to say that I think the MH meltdown is about two things: discernment and a lust that has characterized Evangelicalism since WWII. They’re connected.
• By discernment I mean the failure of people enamored of Driscoll and MH to identify the character and work of the Holy Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness & self-control — are counter-cultural, but also counter to the temperament of successful male leadership in the world (which is part of the reason they can be easily recognized). All of us are charged with looking at any Christian endeavor and asking, “is this God working by his Spirit, and how do I know?” The ethos of Driscoll’s work was almost always power. It was power much more than gentleness, love, self-control and so on. His preaching was very much in the vein of Bill Sunday, the popular baseball player of the late 1800s who became a famous evangelist. Billy Sunday didn’t so much preach as rip into things. He loved to dismantle sacred cows in and outside the Church. He hated “weak” Christianity and wanted to get into people’s faces.
• This is the second failing: in the last 100+ years, Evangelicals have lusted for power in culture and society as opposed to laboring faithfully in God’s vineyard, with patience and longsuffering, trusting outcomes to God — trusting in the particular way in which God manifests his power. Malcolm Muggeridge has said that if power were our calling, Jesus would have taken the kingdoms of the earth when Satan offered them to him. But he didn’t. He taught, healed, shepherded and died. When it was all done, he had 120 followers. The real reaping began with Peter, whose failings were on public display, and who led as a profoundly humbled and necessarily self-effacing man. The irony in this is Peter was, literally, a muscular Christian. Imagine what your shoulders look like after a lifetime of hauling in nets full of fish. He was brash. He was outspoken. Yet, post-resurrection, it’s Peter who gives us, “Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing” (1 Pet 3:8ff).
– Pastor Eric