Near the end of his first book post-Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll shared an extensive description of something he’d seen in his twenty years of ministry, a process of disillusionment that often happens, especially in the life of a leader. Which leader?
Well, you’re going to have
to guess who it is since Driscoll prefers to use the word “you” rather than “I”
for the following passage, a passage that’s a few pages long and which I feel
obliged to share (with all Fair Use precedents and considerations in mind
because I’ve been surprised at how seemingly no earlier reviews or journalistic
discussions of Spirit-Filled Jesus
have discussed this passage at all). There’s a not at all subtle pivot from “I”
to “you” in this passage:
Spirit-Filled Jesus
Mark Driscoll
Published by Charisma House
Copyright © 2018 by Mark
Driscoll
ISBN 9781629995229
(hardcover)
ISBN 9781629995236 (ebook)
LCCN 2018029899 (print)
LCCN 2018034467 (ebook)
Pages 208-211
From Desire to Death
After spending
most of my adult life in ministry as a senior pastor, I have observed a pattern
of the flesh. There is a process of disillusionment that often happens,
especially in the life of a leader since they tend to have greater desires than
other people due to their visionary nature. What starts as perhaps even a good
and godly desire leads to death. And the bigger the vision, the bigger the
pain. This cycle is doubly true of motivated young Christians filled with
ambitions to change the world for Christ. A godly desire can end in
disappointment and death when it progresses along the following seven steps.
1. Desire
There is a longing for
something that is often godly and good. What are your most ambitious plans,
biggest dreams, and highest goals? Are they godly and wise? Are they for the
glory of God and good of others, or mainly your own greatness.
2. Demand
When something you desire
becomes something you demand, things grow dark, and you are on the path to
death. Have your desires started to make the dark turn toward a demand? Are you
now finding yourself angry or depressed because your desires have not come to
pass? Have you started to feel any hint of entitlement that others—such as the
Lord, people, or your family—owe you what you desire to any degree?
3 Disappointment
Once your
desires go unmet, disappointment sets in as you sense a loss for something you
felt entitled to but did not get. Have your efforts to achieve your desire met
failure and disappointment? If your dreams are big or your passion for them is
intense, then the likelihood of disappointment is greater.
4. Disappointment
The thing you
wanted so badly is now not going to happen, so you become disillusioned with
your life efforts, lose motivation, and feel robbed. How have you handled your
disappointment in the past and the present? Have you become jaded,
disillusioned, or started to lose heart? Have you begun to question why you
tried to pursue your desires in the first place, starting to lose motivation to
press forward, or even just started going through the motions and dreaming
about quitting and giving up altogether?
5. Demonize
You then have
to blame someone (maybe even God or an entire group of people or organization)
for “robbing” you of what you had coming to you, you end up demonizing them. Have you started
to refer to someone, or a group of people, by a pejorative nickname? Is there
someone, or a group of people, who you are struggling to forgive as they
dominate your mind and emotions? Which hurtful or even harmful thoughts haunt
your mind? Have you started to blame “them” for the pain, loss, and grief in
your life and allowed bitterness and hate to root in your heart?
6. Destroy
Since you feel
that you have been ruined, you then seek to destroy the person, group, or
organization that you think caused your disillusionment. You may even make this
a moral crusade where you become the righteous victim-turned-savior who will
protect others from the harm you received. People often do this in the name of
some God-given ministry, which is honestly just another mob in the never-ending
fools’ parade of angry self-righteous, and dangerous people. Who have you
started to speak ill of and find yourself angry and emotional about in an
unhealthy way? When the names of certain people come up, does your blood begin
to boil, do you feel a bit sick to your stomach, and wish that they would
suffer as they caused you to suffer? Has your hurt started to turn into hate?
7. Death
This cycle,
like all sin, kills relationships. It leads to the death of friendships,
families, companies, organizations, and ministries. In its most demonic forms,
it even harms you as you become self-destructive, not only hurting others but
also yourself. Where has death come to your ministry, family, household,
organization, or heart? Where has death in one area of your life started taking
away your joy, caused you to withdraw from
safe people who love you, and even caused you not to be emotionally
present with your own family but rather distracted, discouraged, and
despairing? How did you get from what you thought (and likely was) a God-given
desire to death?
The flesh
refuses to surrender to God’s will and instead prefers death. What is your
story? Have you taken the time to consider it, journal it, ray through it,
rejoice in it, and lament over it? Are you ready to turn from the death of the
flesh to the life of the Spirit?
When I read this I thought, “This could have been a powerful
confession if he had stuck with first-person pronouns instead of putting
everything on `you’.” Here’s a thought
experiment, take all of the above from Spirit-Filled Jesus and transform Mark
Driscoll’s second person pronouns into “I” and “my” so that the entire passage
became, in this thought experiment, about him.
The other thing I thought was that there is a lot in this passage
from Spirit-Filled Jesus that can be
connected to Mark Driscoll’s earlier writings, whether in Real Marriage or in the letter he wrote to Mars Hill in
2007 in the wake of
the controversial firings of Petry and Meyer chronicled at Joyful
Exiles.
For me
personally, everything culminated at the end of 2006. Despite rapid growth, the
church was not healthy and neither was I. My workload was simply overwhelming.
I was preaching five times a Sunday, the senior leader in Mars Hill responsible
to some degree for literally everything in the church, president of the Acts 29
Church Planting Network which had exploded, president of The Resurgence, an
author writing books, a conference speaker traveling, a media representative
doing interviews, a student attending graduate school, a father with five young
children, and a husband to a wife whom I have adored since the first day I met
her and needed my focus more than ever. I was working far too many hours and
neglecting my own physical and spiritual well-being, and then I hit the
proverbial wall. For many weeks I simply could not sleep more than two or three
hours a night. I had been running off of adrenaline for so many years that my
adrenal glands fatigued and the stress of my responsibilities caused me to be
stuck “on” physically and unable to rest or sleep. After a few months I had
black circles under my eyes, was seeing a fog, and was constantly beyond
exhausted.
Nonetheless,
the demands on me continued to grow as the church grew. We added more campuses,
gathered more critics, saw more media attention, planted more churches,
purchased more real estate, raised more money, and hired more staff. It was at
this time that I seriously pondered leaving Mars Hill Church for the first time
ever. I still loved our Jesus, loved our mission, loved our city, and loved our
people. However, I sunk into a deep season of despair as I considered spending
the rest of my life serving at Mars Hill Church. I simply could not fathom
living the rest of my life with the pace of ministry and amount of responsibility
that was on me. Furthermore, the relational demands of the church and its
leaders depleted me entirely. In short,
I had lost my joy and wanted to lose my job before I lost my life. Tucking my
children in bed at night became a deeply sorrowful experience for me; I truly
feared I would either die early from a heart attack or burn out and be left
unable to best care for my children in the coming years. I have met many
pastors who have simply crossed the line of burnout and never returned to health
and sanity and that was my frightful but seemingly inevitable future. [emphasis
added]
One of the
problems was that Mars Hill had essentially outgrown the wisdom of our team and
needed outside counsel. The church had grown so fast that some of our elders
and other leaders were simply falling behind and having trouble keeping up,
which was understandable. To make matters worse, there was a growing disrespect
among some elders who were jockeying for and abusing power. The illusion of
unity our eldership had maintained over the years was kept in part by my
tolerating some men who demanded more power, pay, control, and voice than their
performance, character, or giftedness merited. While this was a very short list
of men, as elders they had enough power to make life truly painful. At the same
time I began receiving other lucrative job offers that would allow me to study,
preach, and write without all of the administrative duties and burdens for
which I am not sufficiently gifted to be responsible for. For the first time in
my life, the thought of leaving Mars Hill sounded very relieving. Since I had
given ten years of my life to the church and love the people desperately, it
was obvious to me that something was deeply wrong that such offers would even
be intriguing.
…
When later in the letter Driscoll wrote:
… Furthermore, my physical, mental, and
spiritual health are at the best levels in all of my life. Now having joy and
working in my gifting I am beginning to see what a dark and bitter place I once
was in and deeply grieve having lived there for so long without clearly seeing
my need for life change. My wife and I
are closer than ever and she is the greatest woman in the world for me. I
delight in her, enjoy her, and praise God for the gift that she is. She
recently brought me to tears by sweetly saying, “It’s nice to have you back,”
as apparently I had been somewhat gone for many years. Our five children are
wonderful blessings. [emphasis added] I love being a daddy and am closer to
my children with greater joy in them than ever. In short, I was not taking good
care of myself and out of love for our church I was willing to kill myself to
try and keep up with all that Jesus is doing. But, as always, Jesus has
reminded me that He is our Senior Pastor and has godly other pastors whom I
need to empower and trust while doing my job well for His glory, my joy, and
your good.
We know that Driscoll couldn’t have gotten a
“It’s nice to have you back” unless he was, as he noted, “apparently I had been
somewhat gone for many years.” Driscoll went on in the 2007 letter to say:
The past
year has been the most difficult of my entire life. It has been painful to see
a few men whom I loved and trained as elders become sinful, proud, divisive,
accusatory, mistrusting, power hungry, and unrepentant. It has, however, been
absolutely amazing to see all but one of those men humble themselves and give
up what is best for them to do what is best for Jesus and our entire church. In
that I have seen the power of the gospel, and remain hopeful to eventually see
it in the former elder who remains unrepentant but to whom my hand of
reconciliation remains extended along with a team of other elders assigned to
pursue reconciliation if/when he is willing. Furthermore, sin in my own life has
been exposed through this season and I have also benefited from learning to
repent of such things as bitterness, unrighteous anger, control, and pride. As
a result, I believe we have a pruned elder team that God intends to bear more
fruit than ever. This team of battle-tested, humble, and repentant men is now
both easy to enjoy and entrust.
Apparently what was needed was not stepping
away from ministry as such but consolidating more power to a centralized
executive elder board so that no important decisions would be made by a
plurality elder vote of two dozen elders; instead, all the key decisions would
be made by three to five executive elders in a new set of bylaws that
centralized and consolidated power but the sprawling history of how that
happened is pretty thoroughly documented at Joyful Exiles and there’s little
need to discuss it in more detail here. What seems ironic in 2020 is that Mark
Driscoll referred to the elder team that took his side as battle-tested, humble
and repentant men. Seven years later Repentant Pastor would go up
in which eighteen pastors from the 2007 era Mars Hill
repented of taking Driscoll’s side in the 2007 governance battle.
What is important is that around that same
“season” Mark Driscoll shared, by way of Real
Marriage, that he was bitter toward Grace. For those who haven’t read Real Marriage, Mark Driscoll wrote that
he resented his wife for a while and felt he had been good enough in not
cheating on the girlfriends he’d had sex with so God “owed” him:
Real Marriage:
the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark
and Grace Driscoll
Thomas
Nelson
copyright
© 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN
978-1-4041-8352-0
Pages 9-10
To be honest, fornicating was fun. I liked
fornicating. To stop fornicating was not fun. But eventually Grace and I
stopped fornicating, got engaged, and were married between our junior and
senior years of college.
I assumed that once we were married we would
simply pick up where we left off sexually and make up for last time. After all,
we were committed Christians with a relationship done God's way.
But God's way was a total bummer. My
previously free and fun girlfriend was suddenly my frigid and fearful wife. She
did not undress in front of me, required the lights to be off on the rare
occasions we were intimated, checked out during sex, and experienced a lot of
physical discomfort because she was tense. [emphasis added]
Before
long I was bitter against God and Grace. It seemed to me as if they had
conspired to trap me. I had always been the "good guy" who turned
down women for sex. In my twisted logic,
since I had only slept with a couple of women I was in relationships with, I
had been holy enough, and God owed me. I felt God had conned me by telling me
to marry Grace, and allowed Grace to rule over me since she was controlling our
sex life. [emphasis added]
Pages 14-15
Although
I loved our people and my wife, this only added to my bitterness. I had a church filled with single women who
were asking me how they could stop being sexually ravenous and wait for a
Christian husband; then I'd go home to a wife whom I was not sexually enjoying. [emphasis added]
... We still disagree on how often we had sex (I [Mark Driscoll] was
bitter, and she [Grace Driscoll] was in denial, which skews the perspective),
but we both agree it wasn't a healthy amount to support a loving marriage.
page 164
...
As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I came to the
conclusion that the cure for a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex
with my wife, I simply told her. Yes, it's that simple. For years when I would
endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural inclination
was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each other, and I know
that connecting with her like this is important. But sometimes I was just too
frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her feelings. The truth
was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my wife, and we needed to discuss
how that could happen.
... For a wife, sex comes out of a healthy relationship, whereas, for a
husband it leads to one.
In his 2008 spiritual
warfare marathon of teaching Mark Driscoll talked about the ordinary demonic
and the extraordinary demonic. One of
the first categories of ordinary demonic he discussed was “not enough sex in
marriage”.
As for demonizing people,
let’s revisit Mark Driscoll’s 2008 spiritual warfare teaching session.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_16.html
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-1-part.html
I
think one of the great myths that has come about (it's a demonic lie) is that
myself, the executive elders, the senior leaders we don't care about people. [emphasis
added] I was the only one who did ANY counseling until we had 800 people. We
still do tons of shepherding, counseling, spiritual warfare, conflict. But we
try to do so in a way that is humble, that isn't "and here is who I served
and here are the demons we cast out and here's the list of people that I've
healed." That's demonic. The truth is I love the people as much--actually,
more than anyone in this church. And the senior leaders, the campus pastors,
the departmental leaders, the executive elders love the people in this church
as much or more than anyone else in this church. And one of my great concerns
is not just, "Can you hold hands and help sheep?" but "can you
also flip the staff over and defend against a wolf?" You HAVE to
have that discernment, that courage, and that ability to tell someone:
"You are in sin. That is false doctrine. You are not qualified to be
a leader. If you do not repent you are not welcome here. And I will speak
truthfully to those who want to follow you because my job is for the well-being
of the sheep."
During the post-2007 bylaws
changes it had become apparent that Driscoll regarded distrust of the executive
elders as something to be described in demonic terms. He also regarded women who wanted to
befriend his wife in demonic terms.
He could say that he’s more
a prophet than a politician now but by now there’s an extensive case to be made
that when it comes to statements about his life and times he might be more
politician than prophet.
But that extensive passage
from Spirit-Filled Jesus could have been a forceful and memorable confession if
Mark Driscoll had transformed every “you” into an “I”. Driscoll has said since Mars Hill Church
collapsed that all it takes is one person’s bitterness to ruin a church and
that invites an unavoidable question that has seemingly gone unasked since Mark
Driscoll resigned, if he thinks that all it takes to wreck the life of a church
is one person’s bitterness then which one person’s bitterness would he guess
destroyed Mars Hill Church?
All of these things,
whether his history of demonizing dissent on ecclesiology, or regarding women
who wanted to befriend his wife as satanic, or telling irreconcilably different
things about whether he was a virgin when he met Grace promoting Real Marriage, or regarding not enough
sex in marriage as demonic, all these things must be considered in light of the
Result Source contract that secured a No. 1 place on the New York Times
bestseller list for Mark and Grace Driscoll that has been discussed elsewhere,
and in light of the plagiarism scandal that occurred. Now we’ll get to Sutton
Turner and Dave Bruskas on the plagiarism scandal in time but it is important
to establish the decade and a half of background needed to begin to understand
the significance of Mark Driscoll’s casually tossed off line to Carey Nieuwhof
about how there was an internal struggle about transgender-ism and same sex
marriage as if by any insinuation or implication that was the reason Mars Hill
Church in Seattle fell apart.
It’s important to remember
all of this so as to consider the pages I’ve quoted from Spirit-Filled Jesus where Driscoll’s seven stages from desire to
death could have plausibly described the birth and death of Mars Hill
Church. Instead of writing “I” about how
desire can lead to death, Mark Driscoll wrote “you”. When
Carey Nieuwhof gave Mark Driscoll a chance to directly address the late Mars
Hill Church, the response was to share stories about what the kids went
through, how many times the family moved and how ultimately there was this
internal struggle about transgender-ism and same sex marriage. These are things to keep in mind as we turn
to statements made by the other former executive elders of the late Mars Hill,
Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas.
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