Confessions of a Reformission
Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
From chapter 7: Jesus, we’re
loading our squirt guns to charge Hell again (4,000-10,000 people)
Pages 164-165
In the fall of 2004,
Leadership Network brought together a handful of large-church pastors for a
meeting in New York. It was an honor to be among such successful and diverse
pastors as Wayne Cordero (Foursquare), Tim Keller (Presbyterian), Michael
Slaughter (Methodist), Walt Kallestad (Lutheran), and Matt Hannan and Bob
Roberts (Baptist). Each of them had timely insights that helped clarify the
plans I was making to grow our church to ten thousand people. During one of the
breaks, I grabbed lunch with Larry
Osborne, who pastors North Coast, a church of six thousand people in San
Diego, California. Our church had quickly blown through the three-thousand
mark, and we were expecting to crest at just under four thousand people a week
by the fast-approaching spring of 2005.
I was in the middle of putting
together a comprehensive strategic plan for the future of our church, with
plans to grow to over ten thousand people. Our two morning and two evening
Sunday services were all filling up, and we needed to decide what our next
steps would be. We searched diligently but once again could not find a facility
with three thousand seats or more to rent in the city. And we were unwilling to
relocate the church out of the city, where land was cheaper and more options
were available.
As I sat with Larry, I
immediately launched into a barrage of questions about growing the church,
hoping to maximize our time together. Larry had impressively grown his church
from a small congregation to a church of six thousand people while maintaining
sound doctrine and incorporating an effective small group ministry.
Larry proceeded to ignore all
of my questions and instead started asking me questions seemingly unrelated to
growing the church. He asked me how many children I had, their ages, the
condition of my marriage, and if being a good husband and father was more
important to me than growing a large church.
I was stunned. Over the years,
I had met with many successful pastors to learn from them. Not one of them had
ever asked anything about my personal life and my family or even if I was
morally fit to be a pastor. The only people who ever asked those types of
questions were my elders, because they love me and my family.
The first four pages of
chapter 7 are, in fact, a summary of Driscoll’s conversation with Larry Osborne
in the fall of 2004. It builds up to a
conclusion that is on page 167
… Simply, he [Osborne] was instructing me on the chief principles
of creating a mature missional church.
So I tried to begin with the end in mind. I sought to
plan for the church for as far down the road as I could see. I could envision a church of more than ten
thousand people and began working with Jamie to reverse-engineer a plan to
become that church. We drafted a strategic plan that was over a hundred pages
long, between plans and supporting documents and articles. We then presented
our strategic plan to the elders and deacons, who helped us make some changes
that greatly improved the plan. The deacons and elders also devised strategic
plans so that their areas of ministry could grow with the church. If all the
plans were put together, the total master plan would be hundreds of pages long.
Our strategic plan, which is sketched out in this
chapter, won’t be fully implemented until after this book is published. By that
time, we will know if we had a good plan or if we messed everything up and
reduced the church to a small group of people meeting in a phone booth and
grumbling about the strategic plan. I am hesitant to end the book with these
details because I have no guarantee that they will work. But it’s where we are at, going into another
season of great risk.
…
It would turn out that
the large building Jamie Munson scouted out and that the Mars Hill elders
purchased was not zoned for the uses that Mark Driscoll’s grand vision had
envisioned. The alternative to the
boondoggle that was outlined confidently as the plan for future growth for Mars
Hill was to embrace an older model that had been implemented in the history of
Mars Hill, the multisite model. The key
difference moving forward as that the new multisite model would have pastors as
administrative heads of a network of churches whose preaching content would
predominantly be Mark Driscoll’s preaching; gone were the days when Mike Gunn
preached in the south, Mark Driscoll preached in Ballard, and Lief Moi preached
in the University District. The new
paradigm of multisite was, famously, filming Mark and broadcasting him across
the campuses and times. Of all the
things outlined in the master plan in Confessions
that was what managed to get worked out.
What’s worth noting is
that as far back as Driscoll’s 2006 book he had emphasized how a meeting with
Larry Osborne in 2004 through a Leadership Network event informed his ideas of
what needed to be done to strategically grow Mars Hill to the size he
wanted. He insisted in print that he did
not care whether he pastored a large or a small church but this insistence
seems to have been belied by the recurrent reference to head counts of
attenders in the subheadings of every single chapter of Confessions. If he really didn’t care about the numbers in any
event why organize an entire book into chapters with subheadings that included
numbers of attenders? But what was, in
any case, made clear by Mark Driscoll himself was that it was a 2004
conversation with Osborne he credits with stunning him into a realization that
the way Mars Hill was organized would need to change. The closing chapter of Confessions of a Reformission Rev was presented as a summary of
what strategic plans were going to be implemented. Driscoll’s 2006 book was
published in April and the next two years would bear out that the gap between
what was confidently announced about the future plans for Mars Hill and what
actually happened in Driscoll’s efforts to reorganize the governance of the
church would throw up some discrepancies.
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