A Crawford Gribben-inspired proposal, seeing the history of Mars Hill Church as a variation on American Redoubt minus theonomy; on Mark Driscoll being at WSU during the initial rise of Doug Wilson's Moscow cultural project

In order to set up my proposal I need to present to you a few key quotes from Mark Driscoll across the course of his career as a public figure doing ministry.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/pussfied-nation-page-7.html

William Wallace II

Member

Posted 01-20-2001 01:34 PM 

Good question.

One, don't spend all your time with single people. Get some good married couple friends to observe and dialogue with. This is one of the biggest problems with segmented ministry in churches, married and unmarried people are separated.

Two, spend some considerable time in Scripture about marital matters so that you know why, how, and what a wife and children are for. A good place to start may be in the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs.

 

Three, some good books are helpful. On male sexuality I'd recommend "Fidelity" by Douglas Wilson. On male headship I'd suggest "Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood" by John Piper. "The War on Boys" and "Fatherless In America" are great works by non-Christians.

 

Four, be in a good solid church with qualified male elders who can have frank biblical discussions about male issues without blushing.

 

Confessions of a Reformission Rev

Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006

ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4

ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

Chapter 5 "Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter and Meaner?"  350-1,000 people

[This corresponds to the period between autumn 1999 and just before winter 2002] 

Page 130

This season was messy and I sinned and cursed a lot, but God somehow drew a straight line with my crooked Philistine stick. I had a good mission, but some of my tactics were born out of anger and burnout, and I did a lot of harm and damage while attracting a lot of attention. I was justifiably angry, but did not faithfully head Paul's command not to let anger led me into sin (Eph 4:26). 

Some of the fired-up young guys went too far and started acting like young bucks in rutting season, wanting to lock horns with me and the elders. Many went into extreme forms of Calvinism and wanted to debate things like theonomy and other dumb things that only white guys with high-speed Internet connections to bizarre websites could get into and were causing division. If you don't know what theonomy is, don't worry, because you aren't really missing anything. Basically, it is the belief that the church should rule the world, including the banking system, government, and so on, and enforce Old Testament law like Israel did. The young rabid Calvinists who were pushing for this doctrine did not yet own homes, most did not even have wives, and some still lived with their mothers. I tried to set them straight by telling them that to get dominion over their room before they took over the world, but like most fools, they were not deterred. 

Pages 130-131 

There were too many guys to fight individually, and I needed a way to fight them all at once. So in an effort to clean up the mess, I started a weekly men-only meeting, which I named "Dead Men" and which ran for a few months. I paired guys up to debate about an assigned theological issue, and other guys in the audience would chuck things at them and mock them if their study was not good or their argument not cogent. At the end of the debate, we would vote, declare a winner, and give them a mock prize and crown him with a Viking helmet.  The men liked the competition and got into the studying and debating theology. 

When the hyper-Calvinists realized we weren't going to baptize their babies or talk about stupid stuff that detracts from mission, many of them left, which was a good thing because they were getting to be deadweight. Over the years, I've just accepted that if I do not quickly open the back door when God is trying to run people out of our church, I am working against God by keeping sick people in my church so that they can infect others. Indeed, the church is a body and one of the most important parts is the colon. Like the human body, any church body without a colon is destined for sickness that leads to death.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/mark-driscoll-if-you-get-young-men-you.html

uploaded August 14, 2006

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lex6orNNzTs&feature=youtu.be

about 3:00 in

...

The question is, you know, if you want to be innovative, how do you get young men? The whole war, all this nonsense how to grow the church and how to do this, one issue, young men. That's it. That's the whole thing. They're gonna get married, make money, make babies, build companies, buy real estate, they're gonna MAKE the culture of the future. If you get the young men you win the war. You get everything. The family, the money, the women, the children, the businesses, everything. You don't get the young men you get nothing. Nothing. Most churches are built to cater to 40-something-year-old women and their children and the guys are nowhere to be found. We built this church going after young, single, non-Christian perverted, educated, technological men. ... 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/driscoll-told-houston-we-felt.html

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/ 

03:57ish
... We went into the urban core and we felt, specifically, called to go after young, college-educated males. That was really my heart. I wanted everybody to meet Jesus but I felt particularly if we were gonna make in the city and the legacy of families and, you know, the way that women and children and culture treated, that getting young men to love Jesus would be paramount. [emphasis added] So that was really the focus and I didn't think the church would amount to much. The first three years we didn't collect a salary; it was very small; we met at night; we moved a lot because we kept losing our rental location; the offices were in our house, so it wasn't a big deal and we didn't anticipate that it would become what it ultimately did.

37:26
... young men aren't going to church. Young men aren't going to college. Young men aren't marrying women. Young men are not raising their children and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men--you know, 1 Corinthians 13--I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I acted like a child. When I became a man I put childish ways behind me--I want, I want to compel young men to grow up, to take responsibility. And sometimes, in doing that, I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that's not helpful and that's not right. In the grace of God I need to repent and be better about that  but I still want, I mean no one would say young men are, in the Western world, highly impressive and we're all encouraged. There's a lot of work to be done. [emphasis added]

And so I regret the times that I have not communicated in such a way that, in trying to compel the men up it seemed like I was pushing the women down and that's my fault.

Mark Driscoll was born in 1970, he graduated from high school in 1989 and attended Washington State University, graduating in 1992 (age 22). For those who don’t know, Washington State University in Pullman, Washington is not a long drive from Moscow, Idaho. Why mention this? Because, as we saw above, Mark Driscoll, as William Wallace II, endorsed one of Doug Wilson’s books back in the day. 

Driscoll presented postmillenial theonomists who were at Mars Hill in the 1999 through 2002 period as guys who were rapidly becoming dead weight.  Driscoll also summarily dismissed the entire realm of theonomist ideas as stupid fantasies by guys who imagined Christians were going to take over the entire world and rule it for Jesus. Yet for all that open contempt and dismissal, Mark Driscoll’s message was steady that a church needed to get the young men because in getting the young men a church would get the people who would make future culture.  There would be a generation of people who would get married, have kids, buy real estate and generation by generation eventually, functionally, own the city—this is something sources in the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill mention across the first five episodes. 

Taking a cue from the work of historian Crawford Gribben, consider this possibility, that Mark Driscoll and the co-founders of Mars Hill may not have set out to start a Puget Sound variation of American Redoubt but the idea of formulating a counter-culture that would have lasting roots and influence in the Puget Sound could be construed as a kind of urban American Redoubt in a place Driscoll regarded as one of the most godless cities in the nation.  The kicker would be that whether intentionally or not, Mark Driscoll’s vision of a church that started a publishing company and a record label and a church planting network and a Bible college resembles Doug Wilson’s work since the later 1980s to do much the same kind of thing. My proposal is simply that the meteoric rise of Mars Hill might be explicable as an attempt to accomplish the desired goals of American Redoubt theonomists by a group of Christians who ironically poured open contempt on the doctrines that have historically been invoked by theonomists as the motivation for an American Redoubt project, chief among them Mark Driscoll, within the history of the former Mars Hill. 

Now is not really the time or place to tell you what theonomy is or postmillennialism is if you are not already familiar with the terms.  The terms are, in fact, more vague than they are made out to be but Gribben has specialized as a historian in the evolution of millenarian views (I’m starting into his book The Puritan Millennium) and his book Writing the Rapture is a fascinating overview of crappy End Times novels spanning from the 1890s through to the Left Behind series. Gribben has also got a biography of John Owen I’m going to tackle.  In summary, Gribben has studied enough of the Puritan millennialism and Anglo-American approaches to eschatology since 1600 to be a pretty good guide for us.  Frankly, now that I’ve read a few of his books he’s the kind of historian that I wish could or would write some kind of history of Mars Hill.  There, that’s a pitch that I’d run by him or one of his students.  

Gribben has recently published a book on Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest.  Now that I’ve finished it (I think I read it in a week because it’s so fun!), I’ve been reminded of how much open contempt Mark Driscoll poured on theonomists and postmillennialism. I’ve quoted him showing contempt for theonomy already. Yet in terms of what Mark Driscoll wanted to do, it’s like he was setting out to do a Doug Wilson thing but on steroids. 

There’s a kind of evangelical pessimism that has fueled a lot of cultural angst in the United States in the last half century (or several centuries).  Theonomists have had a particular version of this dread:

 

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest

Crawford Gribben

Oxford University Press

Copyright (c) Oxford University Press 2021

ISBN 9780199370221 (hb)

ISBN 9780199370245 (epub)

LCCN 2020032350 (print)

LCCN 2020032351 (ebook)

 

Page 2

... Theonomists have long predicted that a new America would emerge out of widespread social crisis. Perhaps they are making their own predictions come true. With a more professional presentation, with its ideological edges rub bed smooth, and with significant intellectual centers and increasingly viable communities in the Pacific Northwest, the movement of Christian Reconstruction may never have been as important as it is today. ... 

But there is an irony Gribben has noted about evangelicals in the United States, that their imagined marginal role in American culture may be a myth they cling to when they are actually at the peak of their influence:

 

Page 4

... Amid continuing debates about gun ownership, evangelicals and their critics share a common concern about the lengths to which some believers will take the new emphasis upon resistance to broader cultural trends. For the situation is complex. These observers are not dealing with a simple case of cause and effect, as if believers are growing more radical as their cultural status declines. Instead, believers are more growing radical as their culture power increases, as the Supreme Court has begun to move in a more conservative direction. They are embracing marginality at precisely the moment when their cultural power may be at its height. ... 

Gribben has argued that where some scholars have claimed theonomy died out and is no longer relevant, he believes that what has really happened is theonomy has been revised across a three generations or so of Christian thinkers who have modified the core beliefs. He also highlights that within the modified forms of Christian Reconstruction the key adversary is critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School.  I’ll let Gribben explain that in his own words:

 

Page 6

Of course, despite the recent revival of modified forms of Christian Reconstruction, these themes of survival, resistance, and reconstruction are not foreign to the long history of evangelical political thinking, and believers who represent themselves as existing on the social margins are well within the historic mainstream of American religion. For much of their history, whether in creating or in losing the mainstream--if that is indeed what they achieved--born-again Protestants have reiterated the tradition of jeremiad that was developed in Puritan New England, reinscribing its moralistic dualism in the changing contexts of the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Born-again Protestants were certainly important in the emergence of modern conservativism in the suburbs of Gold War California.  ...  Since the late 1960s, a small number of conservative evangelicals have been discussing the need to survive and resist an impending crisis in American society, while hoping for, if not always actually planning for, the reversal of the ideology that some of their most prominent writers have described as "secular humanism". Reflecting the sometimes considerable intellectual capital of their thought leaders, these believers have constructed secular humanism in terms of the ideology and political practice that were popularized by critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, and are more confident than most of their evangelical brethren that t the dogmas of what they often describe as "cultural Marxism" will implode to precipitate the establishment of a Christian nation.  ... 

Gribben’s summary might be a bit too terse when he says on Page 9 of the diffuse strands of Christian Reconstructionists that, “From their base in the Pacific Northwest, reconstructed Christians expect to witness and participate in the recovery of America.”  Still, I admit I found his summary persuasive.  I am also thinking, obviously, about how Mark Driscoll’s vision of getting the young men, giving them a vision of a future legacy they can participate in, and going “upstream” to capture the culture may retain the general mission of theonomy despite the fact that on paper Driscoll has denounced theonomy is idiotic. 

Gribben, however, makes a point that once we get outside academic treatments of the influence of Rushdoony, popular level treatments of theonomy tend toward overblown fears that can skip over the fact that Rushdoony himself was against the kind of top-down institutional conquest later thinkers in theonomy would consider.  Rushdoony’s influence may well be to the left what “cultural Marxism” is to the religious right, a fantasy opponent based on willful and witless misunderstandings of the ideas due to a lack of serious engagement with primary source materials. 

Page 26

... Rushdoony's theology shaped the ideals of the Religious Right (and not just because of the hugely influential evangelical culture warrior Francis Schaeffer may have extensively borrowed ideas that had been developed by Rushdoony with other Reconstructionists). This is one reason why Christian Reconstruction has become such a source of controversy, both within and outside evangelicalism. While most historians of modern evangelicalism offer brief but sober observations of Rushdoony's influence, popular warnings against the Religious Right offer shrill warnings that its advocates may be fomenting a coup, forgetting that Rushdoony was entirely opposed to a top-down restructuring of secular society, any idea of revolution, and, necessarily, any attempt to use his ideas to justify violence.  America would not be changed through politics, he argued, but through transformed individuals, and as these transformed individuals impacted families, towns, and eventually cities.   ... 

We do eventually get to Doug Wilson in Crawford Gribben’s book. Wilson made a point of distancing himself from Gary North while espousing comparable ideas:

 

Pages 49-50

... In the 1980s, as Douglas Wilson became increasingly influenced by Reformed ideas, he and a number of colleagues began to work together on a magazine. First published in 1988 Credenda Agenda featured wry and often satirical articles that popularized elements of Rushdoony's political and eschatological vision while emphasizing the value of Reformed theology, life in community, and the importance of the liberal arts. The magazine was made available free of charge, and by the late 1990s had grown to establish an international subscription base of around 22,000. One of its regular columns promoted postmillennial eschatology, along with the "preterist" reading of Revelation that understood the book to refer to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the consequent "end of the old covenant" --ideas that until that point had been most fully developed among evangelicals in books published by Gary North's Institute for Christian Economics.  Despite this intellectual debt to theorists of Christian Reconstruction, issues of Credenda Agenda maintained a critical distance from the movement's leaders, often criticizing or making fun of North, who, Wilson observed, "has written much that is truly outstanding, along with other things that are, to use a theological phrase, `more than a little odd.'" ...

 

... But this criticism of North might have been an example of the narcissism of small differences. This strategy reflected an effort on the part of the magazine's authors to maintain a critical distance from the broader Christian Reconstructionist project, precisely because their goals and presuppositions were in many ways so closely aligned with it. ... 

I suggest that Mark Driscoll’s criticism of theonomy as the idea embraced by silly young twenty-somethings who didn’t have mastery of their room was another narcissism of small differences.  It was easy for a pastor in 2006 to retroactively pour contempt on the theonomists he saw as dead weight when he was past the 2000 to 2002 period where he lived in fear that Mars Hill would be homeless without a solid real estate site and might die an ignominious death.  

Of course Mars Hill did die an ignominious death in 2014 and its death rattle lasted through 2015 as real estate and other assets were sold off. While it existed the meteoric rise of Mars Hill Church could be considered a kind of experiment.  Driscoll was at Washington State University during the initial run of Credenda Agenda.  Driscoll openly cited Wilson as an influence on his views of masculinity and marriage. Driscoll’s dream of the church he planted starting a Bible college, a music label, a church planting network and having an influence that would incrementally transform Puget Sound culture and eventually the world might not have been postmillennial or theonomistic but Driscoll has long since shown the world he’s not a very original thinker.  Mark Driscoll could be seen as an example of how far a Doug Wilson could have gone if he had 1) abandoned postmillennialism and 2) moved to an actually significant American urban center rather than trying to stake out an influential role within the American Redoubt geographic region. It’s little wonder that when Doug Wilson sounded off on Mark Driscoll he was generally always approving, Driscoll was showing that he and the co-founders of Mars Hill Church were functionally doing the kinds of things Wilson was setting out to do.  

Driscoll, unlike Wilson, seemed incapable of a truly long-form game. Attempts at a Mars Hill music label crashed and burned at least three times.  The Resurgence Training Center shuttered with no real coverage or fanfare (if J-st-n H-lc-mb is okay with discussing that on the record Mike Cosper should do everything he can to get in touch, the demise of the Resurgence Training Center was one of the mysteries of Mars Hill history Wenatchee The Hatchet has been curious about). 

Long ago when I was part of Mars Hill I liked the idea of a school being started but I thought that would take three generations to get started as I did not think anyone at Mars Hill really had the scholastic standing or resources to start a school.  It was not a surprise that the venture with Corban University foundered in the final year of Mars Hill.  By wanting to see so many elements of his envisioned legacy realized within his own lifetime Mark Driscoll may have pre-emptively doomed Mars Hill to be incapable of realizing his dreams by expecting to see them fulfilled in his life time when a person really considering legacy would have planned for Mars Hill to last enough generations to get those goals reached.  Wilson, by contrast, has been more successful in doing and sustaining the things that Mark Driscoll has dreamed of doing … and may, despite any possible eagerness on the part of the fans of the two men to concede this point, have been the inspiration for Mark Driscoll’s ambitions in some way. 

Near the end of Gribben’s book he points out something that seems echoed by Brad Vermurlen’s Reformed Resurgence about the New Calvinism, saying that the real world influence of the Christian Reconstructionist movement in the Pacific Northwest may be more a figment of journalistic, scholarly, and media consumer imagination than a reality that is reflected in the flesh and blood world we actually live in. 

Page 117

.. But blogs, novels, and other media products identify links between Redoubt communities that, in reality, may not exist. The ready availability of these media products allows readers to fashion a consumptive bricolage, an individual and virtual experience of migration that confirms their religious and political predilections, inventing social networks that have yet to be established on the ground. ... 

Both the theonomists and the New Calvinists may exist more as a self-reinforcing feedback loop of self-regarding hype than a genuinely significant or influential movement, even if Gribben credits the Pacific Northwest theonomy 3.0 of Doug Wilson and company as having actually accomplished some impressive things.  The trouble is partly that Wilson and Christ Church have also made headlines for their failures in pastoral care (and that is something that may parallel the newer and now defunct Mars Hill Church, that had a legacy of pastoral counseling and care that I personally found mostly tilted toward the disastrous with some shining but very rare exceptions). 

Interestingly, Gribben draws his book to a close observing that the Christian Reconstructionists and their progressive critics in the United States have a mythology in common:

 

Page 144

... After all, the foundational myth of the programs for action that this book describes is that human society can be improved, and that "a city on a hill" can be created. The vision is as old as America--and it is shared by the program's critics. For both the advocates of this program for action and its critics share the assumption that America should be leading the way to a better world. The "paranoid style" that is shared by the subjects of this book and their critics parallels their shared and almost utopian conviction that the experience of Americans will herald the future of humanity. This is a distinctly American vision, and it suggests why neither the program nor the critical response it has provoked will be easily transported elsewhere. 

This would be a point at which Mark Driscoll’s intra-Midrash declaration that the United States was not some new Jerusalem but Babylon and that no Christians should ever expect that they “capture culture” would fly hard in the face of postmillennial utopianism, whether in its revolutionary or incremental forms.  Why, then, did Mark Driscoll still commit so firmly to a vision of getting the young men and through them going upstream and influencing culture?  Why did Mark Driscoll abandon King County, Washington for Maricopa County, Arizona if he’s really serious that you don’t go “culture up” but “kingdom down”, whatever that means?  What if Mark Driscoll’s move to Arizona signals an attempt to try a variation of the American Redoubt evangelicalism has embraced over the last fifty years in the literally sunnier region of Scottsdale, Arizona? 

Gribben’s work is well worth reading and it is, somewhat to my surprise, a book that I think scholars and historians who might want to dig into the history of the former Mars Hill will want to read.  It remains to be seen how robust and sustained Doug Wilson’s influence on Mark Driscoll has actually been and I admit that as a longtime chronicler and former member of Mars Hill this is all an educated guess, but a guess that some others might at least find helpful. 

A warning from Gribben by way of D. G Hart about the danger of presuming a uniform evangelicalism seems worth repeating:

 

Page 146

... As D. G. Hart has argued, the idea of a unitary evangelical "movement" is an extraordinary confidence trick, in which both is participants and critics are victims. The trick has been played by pollsters and religious leaders, as they have sought to simplify, control, and project the influence of the complex and contradictory worlds that they seek to describe. But in simplifying and controlling, they have created a monster.

 

Now, of course, the "paranoid style" that Hofstadter observed among the postwar Right has become typical of a great deal of discourse and analysis across the political spectrum. The radical Right is certainly on the rise, enjoying growing confidence if not yet in America enjoying political power, and descriptions of born-again Protestants as participants in a new American fascism are becoming very effective click-bait. This form of social messaging reinforces within mainstream media some very unhelpful stereotypes of the "repugnant cultural other," and works against the kinds of mutual understanding from which the collective temperature of the commentariat might eventually decline.  ... 

Now that Mars Hill has been dead for about seven years it might be worth remembering that although the spin-off campuses are reportedly mostly stable, Mars Hill itself died a miserable death that was largely brought about by Mark Driscoll himself. His legacy has been one of the more spectacular failures in the age of the internet savvy celebrity preacher, a figure that Mark Driscoll epitomized earlier than most in the type.  An internet presence is ultimately not the same as a real institutional and cultural legacy. People in Puget Sound have in many respects moved along as if Mars Hill never even happened, even though it did.  Crawford Gribben’s overview of the history of American Redoubt evangelicalism in the Pacific Northwest makes for fascinating reading because his account provides a current against which Mars Hill Church in its rise and fall over about twenty years can be seen as foam on a wave flowing in a larger current in evangelicalism in the United States. 

postscript 7-31-21 11:28pm
I do plan to get back to musical stuff and other topics but I wasn't anticipating the CT podcast to be as thorough in digging into Mars Hill history as it has turned out to be.  At the same time my own studies have spurred me to share things I think might help people who want to understand this movement I was part of at one point more clearly.  Mars Hill was overtly anti-theonomy and I've spelled out my distrust of postmillennialist views on personal and doctrinal grounds before.  Yet it seems that to understand Mars Hill it's important to consider it as a spin off within the American Redoubt, at least on the plausible grounds that WSU is geographically situated within the American Redoubt Gribben describes in his work and it could also potentially explain what many regard as the most reactionary tropes in Mark Driscoll's thought and where he might have picked it up, especially since he made a point of telling us in his books. 

Mars Hill may have been an example of how explosively the cultural project of an American Redoubt ambition could get if the co-founders never bothered to make use of the explicit doctrinal or political rationale for an American Redoubt project.  Had Mark, Mike and Lief actually embraced any theonomistic ideas and shared them up front there probably wouldn't have been a Mars Hill to even talk about.  Even a theologically and politically conservative sort such as myself views postmillennialism and theonomy as dubious for reasons I touch upon elsewhere indirectly by referencing Native American history in the Pacific Northwest.  I trust no one will be shocked that the son of a Native American man might have a low view of the historical legacy of applied postmillennialism in the United States. 

Crucially, such a formative influence is plausible in geographic and chronological terms and could explain what seems to have been Mark Driscoll's slow and steady lurch to the political right as he gets older.  An early exposure to ideas in the American Redoubt, which Gribben has pointed out is not even remotely monolithic, could explain how and why Mark claimed that at one point his political views were to the right of Pat Buchanan.  As Mark gets older he may revert to ideas that he picked up in the geographic region of American Redoubt.

But if you're a reader who's wondering "When is Wenatchee going to write about animation or music again?" I feel you!  I want to still get to those topics!  

POSTSCRIPT 8-1-2021 

To further confirm that Driscoll was in the American Redoubt region:

http://web.archive.org/web/20001210191200/http://www.marshill.fm/who/our_history.htm

Seasons of Grace: The Story of Mars Hill
By Pastor Mark Driscoll
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven..."
-Solomon

Mars Hill has breathed the grace of God through many seasons. 

                                                  

In the first season, in the fall of 1989, God was in the process of drawing me unto Himself. While attending Washington State University I began reading such classics as Augustine and Aquinas, and read through the New Testament in less than two weeks from the Bible my girlfriend Grace gave me as a high school graduation present . Aware of what God was orchestrating, but still unyielding in my heart, I had one Christian friend who asked me over a burger one late night what I was planning on doing for my career. I told him that God was going to make me a Christian and send me out to plant churches like I had read about Paul. He laughed, unsure if I was mocking him, being serious, or trying to discourage him from giving me any more goofy tracts. Within a month, my lingering struggles with the Gospel disappeared and I began teaching a Bible study and attending a solid church pastored by Doug Busby. In the spring of 1990 I attended my first retreat and after a late night of worship with a few hundred farmers and college professors I knelt down by an Idaho river and prayed. It was at that time that I quite unexpectedly received my call. God told me, "Mark, I have called you out from among many to lead men." I then began to serve in leadership for a ministry, and also became the editor for the opinions section of the campus newspaper; an adventure that included bomb threats, protests, and a handful of heated public debates. [emphases added] Grace transferred to WSU and we were married in the summer before my senior year. Upon graduation Grace and I moved to Seattle without a place to live, jobs to pay the bills, or a church to attend, but determined to somehow begin planting churches.