I confess to ambivalence about the Christianity Today podcast. As I noted previously, it is impossible to reconcile Scott Thomas' claims in 2021 with literally anything he wrote by email or written statement to Mars Hill members in 2007. When Tim Smith claimed that if a man in pastoral ministry at Mars Hill had a wife who worked outside the home that would be considered grounds for church discipline it was impossible not to think of pastors who were ostentatious counter-examples, men whose wives worked outside the home and who never seemed to come up for church discipline. To put the point starkly, Cosper's advantage of being an outsider to the Mars Hill scene lets him contextualize Mars Hill within the larger scene of North American evangelicalism but at the potential price of not being able to quickly pick up which sources are more reliable or, more bluntly, credible than others.
Having said that, the reason I think it's a net positive that Christianity Today is doing anything at all is because, Justin Dean's laments noted and with standing, he might want to take stock of some other , academic, writings that have mentioned Driscoll over the years that I've read and complained about here.
Dale E. Soden's Outsiders in a Promised Land collapsed 20 years of Mars Hill history into the chapter "The Christian Right Strikes Back", if academic treatments of the history of Mars Hill stay at this level academic discourse the future is going to be restricted to the celebrity rather than the community
So if Cosper decides it's time to question the origin myths associated with Mark Driscoll's ministry and the founding of Mars Hill someone like Justin Dean might consider that egalitarian/progressive/liberal but Cosper's work is more carefully researched than Dale E Soden's.
So if Cosper decides it's time to question the origin myths associated with Mark Driscoll's ministry and the founding of Mars Hill someone like Justin Dean might consider that egalitarian/progressive/liberal but Cosper's work is more carefully researched than Dale E Soden's.
Longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet have likely read already some of what Cosper has discussed here in such posts as ...
annotated copy of "Seasons of Grace" by Mark Driscoll, his dawn-of-the-millenium history of Mars Hill Fellowship
Mark Driscoll's art of narrative omissions, looking at a 1992 op-ed for the Daily Evergreen in which Driscoll recounts his conversion to Christianity in a way that completely omits his girlfriend
Mark Driscoll shows us the hat and not the cattle, part 2: Driscoll takes on editorial duties and plugs his journalistic credentials in the wake of the Mefferd interview
... but the new episode is well worth listening to because Cosper talks about how Driscoll mentioned being spurred to consider Christianity and regard himself as called to ministry through a friend with an in-the-closet gay Christian friend; Cosper noted in the earliest accounts of his Christian conversion Driscoll didn't mention Grace Martin at all and in the earliest accounts of how and why Mark Driscoll felt called to ministry and church planting divine directives also don't appear. That seems of a piece with Mark Driscoll saying he sought wise counsel in 2014 before deciding to resign from Mars Hill and then only in 2015 publicly saying he heard from God and, for good measure, beginning to tell stories about how The Trinity Church was started because of his kids and not his own ambitions to continue in public ministry.
Thanks to commenter chris e for highlighting the new little episode of the CT series just arrived.
Justin Dean's response on Twitter has been to clarify he won't be talking with Mike Cosper
I'm not really interested in doing podcasts myself so I'm not going to blame Justin Dean for believing that a podcast by its nature is not a very efficient medium or genre through which to discuss Mars Hill and its history. Let the record show that Justin Dean and Wenatchee The Hatchet do sometimes actually agree. I have made a point of sticking to writing things here.
I've written at some length about Justin Dean's book PR Matters ...
Those who have not read it won't know that Dean described Mark Driscoll telling him he was an ideal fit for the work he was being given. Dean joined Mars Hill Church around 2010, a point at which the origin stories of the founding of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll's story of his conversion and calling were completely consolidated. Dean can be understandably committed to the origin myths that were completely solidified previously. For those of us who attended from 1999 through about 2009, however, the seams in the accounts had bit by bit begun to show so Dean might benefit from slogging through the podcasts. He may be tempted to think that because egalitarians and feminists are given so much time and space that harms the credibility of the Cosper project. But something that Driscoll claimed to Carey Nieuwhof was that Mars Hill fell apart due to internal leadership battles over LGBTQ issues, a claim so patently untrue it took about fifty pages of extensive writing cross referencing Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas and Mark Driscoll's comments to show that Mark's claim in 2020 about the demise of Mars Hill doesn't hold water. I'm not doubting the honesty, integrity or credibility of Justin Dean himself, mind you, but that of his former boss.
PART TWO: 9-2-2021 6:53PM
One of the things people might mistakenly think from Cosper's recent podcast is that the fact that Mark Driscoll's story changed might be a "tell" that he has lied a lot. Now there are cases where Driscoll told lies and the deception could be backed up; and Driscoll has never explained why he'd call a post "We Even Lie About Our Lying" that presupposes literally everyone lies. Brutal honesty is a phrase in the English language for reasons.
Something that I have dealt with in the past is how Driscoll does share different stories about how he became a Christian and how he got an audible call to marry Grace, teach the Bible, train young men and plant churches. The thing to keep in mind is that Driscoll has been a preacher, maybe a self-ordained and self-anointed preacher in a lot of ways but he's still a preacher. I would suggest that in any and every given story he has told or written about his conversion or calling keep in mind the literary and homiletic context. Mark is never not selling an idea in what he says. So he didn't mention reading the Bible his wife Grace gave him in The Daily Evergreen op ed he wrote.
Think about the audience and author. A young man with anxieties and ambitions about manhood and marriage who wanted to present an apologetic for why he became a Christian would not lead with "because I read the Bible my girlfriend gave me" even if he wasn't in a sexual relationship with said girlfriend. Why? For the obvious reason that such an apologetic would be dismissed by non-Christian readers (and Christian readers for that matter in many a case). But within a church and church cultures saying you became a believer because you read the Bible given to you by the woman who became your wife is acceptable because of tropes about the redeeming love of a good woman and other tropes.
This would be the Captain Obvious moment in which I point out that spinning stories to suit target audiences to whom you're making an overt and obvious homiletic or apologetic point is not necessarily the same as constantly changing your story in a way that is "I'm lying". It "could" be but it isn't necessarily the case. Even if you wanted to put it in the sharpest and harshest way possible, Mark Driscoll has not so much demonstrably changed his overall story so as to lie as much as he has presented, emphasized and spun different elements of a generally steady pair of stories about his conversion and sense-of-calling experience depending on what audience he is pandering to.
That last part is the most significant part to keep in mind assessing Driscoll's stories and it is the part that Cosper omits altogether in the recent podcast. He gets to if he decided it's not germane to the question of Driscoll's changing accounts and the nuances of those accounts. But then Wenatchee The Hatchet has done that over the years and it doesn't strike me as exactly a "gotcha" moment. Some of the people who would be most in a position to confirm or deny details to any degree are dead or have never spoken on record that I know of about Mark Driscoll. We'll obviously be unlikely to get an account from Hutch and as yet nobody has contacted Doug Busby that I know of. There's no indications either Gunn or Moi have been or are necessarily willing to talk to Cosper but that has not been discussed to the best of my knowledge in any on record statement.
What I've been seeing is that partisans are willing to use the podcast as a springboard to talk about the kinds of issues they would tend to talk about independent of any knowledge of Mars Hill Church. So far the level of discussion about the podcast has not been inspiring. If Cosper wants to raise questions about how reliable Driscoll's accounts are that's a legitimate question but questions about how reliable all of his sources may be and what their connection to Mars Hill even is get opened up or are up for consideration at some point. What Joshua Harris has to do with Mars Hill history is beyond me, for instance and I've been in the orbit of Mars Hill and related people and topics for twenty years.
10 comments:
https://twitter.com/justinjdean/status/1432504925838249993
That said, if I wanted the truth to out, I simply wouldn't keep changing my story.
Ironically my concern with the CT podcast is possibly opposite Justin Dean's. Justin Dean seems to think the problem is that Cosper lets feminists, egalitarians and liberals have opinions that are presented as fact when the other side doesn't get to talk. My concern has been that former MHC leaders like Tim Smith and Scott Thomas make claims that are not only close to impossible to back up but that can be easily disproven by drawing upon the written materials published in and by people at Mars Hill but Cosper's podcast is necessarily constrained by its genre from being able to address questions about the reliability and credibility of sources on a source by source basis.
I mean, I am still listening and I think there's an overall benefit to the project moving forward but I think it's a start. Compared to earlier evangelical approaches of just moving on and acting like there wasn't even a story Cosper has at least changed that default within evangelical publishing and that's not bad. If evangelicals want there to be "not liberal" perspectives on the history of Mars Hill they might actually need to do some work, though. I am still an evangelical myself and I gotta say, it has felt pretty lonely chronicling the life and times of Mars Hill when I was wanting this blog to be about other topics.
My initial impression on hearing the podcast was that it was - whether consciously or not - affecting the house style of Radiolab/This American Life. Obviously both podcasts have been very influential, but as a format it lends itself to open endings ("only you the listener can decide ..")
This is trivially true of any investigatory approach, but the end effect is more 'shaggy dog story' than - say - the Boston Globe.
I think it raises the question as to how we investigate and then document our failures properly. Obviously there is some value in making these accessible and clear, but given the shortcomings of the podcast so far I'm wondering how much someone without a lot inside baseball knowledge would glean anyway.
As to Dean, he strikes me as someone who has succumbed to posters brain, and the spectacle of him engaging all and sundry is not a particularly edifying one, even if it is enlightening in its own way.
LIked:
"Compared to earlier evangelical approaches of just moving on and acting like there wasn't even a story Cosper has at least changed that default within evangelical publishing and that's not bad."
chris e, I don't tend to listen to podcasts because I prefer print to radio/podcast for stuff but I am taking your word for it about the constraints of the medium that have been driving me up the wall for reasons I haven't always been able to explain. :) I think it's great Karen Schaeffer was consulted because she was a significant early member. Actual audio from Paul Tripp was also illuminating. Johnson was and is a must-have person in a discussion of MHC. To date Biblical Porn is the only book I've read that deals with Mars Hill that's worth taking seriously with a possible addition of Brad Vermurlen's Reformed Resurgence as a distant but respectable second.
Dean seems to have been genuinely torn between thinking the liberal media took down MHC with constant hostility and thinking that MHC fell apart due to its own hubris and it can seem to depend on what social media debate he's in that influences his posters brain approach.
Yeah ... the sheer metric tonnage of insider baseball knowledge people need to have any clarity about the podcast is daunting. Nobody who wasn't actually there in a dedicated way across the last twenty years is going to be in a good position to know which sources to take seriously and which to take with a tablespoon of salt.
Mara Reid, welcome back to the comments box. Hope you're doing well!
I'm kind of torn between wanting to wade into a bunch of the podcasts with some specific concerns and props and wanting to just enjoy an uneventful Labor Day weekend.
I will add that a few of us are thoroughly convinced that Jamie Munson's apology statement at the end of episode 7 is sincere. That means that among the elders from the 2007 trials the names of the folks who haven't publicly recanted their roles in that kangaroo court seem to have been Jennings, Clem, and obviously Driscoll.
But I've had reservations and concerns about the series from episode 5 onward. The single biggest flaw in a podcast is not cross-referencing to the sea of published written materials or transcripts. No one who doesn't already know the swamp of historical minutiae about the 2007 trials will be able to understand why I find Scott Thomas' 2021 account so impossible to reconcile with his written 2007 statements, for instance. Let's just say Cosper is right that people had probably better go read through the sprawling Joyful Exiles Timeline themselves. Or they could comb through blog posts here.
Changing the story isn't necessarily lying...
But "this is the bible Grace gave me back then" could well be.
"chris e, I don't tend to listen to podcasts because I prefer print to radio/podcast for stuff but I am taking your word for it about the constraints of the medium that have been driving me up the wall for reasons I haven't always been able to explain. :) I think it's great Karen Schaeffer was consulted because she was a significant early member. Actual audio from Paul Tripp was also illuminating. Johnson was and is a must-have person in a discussion of MHC. "
I don't think it's an issue with podcasts per se, rather than the sub-format they have chosen.
The average piece of investigative journalism will tend to quote selectively and judiciously in service of a particular argument, it may run to around 20K words. Essentially doing the equivalent of 'raw dumps' of your source material in a podcast mean that you won't be complete and/or you'll never come to a conclusion, unless every episode is several hours long.
So all that's left is a selection of interviews with a weak bow tie wrapping the whole thing up. Ironically the Josh Harris episode was arguably more complete on this front, but it centred around the state of one particular individual and wider impact was considered mainly in the service of that aim.
Eric, yeah, the "this is the Bible Grace gave me" could be a straight up lie without qualification. The ESV wasn't published in the years Mark and Grace were initially dating and it makes no sense why he'd have a Bible that couldn't have been an ESV re-bound with the cover of an ESV.
I probably have to listen to the Harris episode at some point but I've not been in a rush. Even on the topic of the courtship fad at Mars Hill Harris is just not relevant. I've been given permission to share at least one story from the peak of the MH courtship fad circa 2002-2007 but Harris did not figure prominently in courtship discussions that I can recall.
It is still ironic that Wenatchee The Hatchet and Justin Dean agree that Mike Cosper seems to be swimming on the matter of which sources to regard as reliable. Dean seems convinced that Cosper and company are committed to a narrative that feminist/egalitarian/liberal criticisms of Mars Hill were right but I have to admit I have no idea where Cosper and company are going.
Whatever Justin Dean writes or publishes on his end I'll try to keep track of it. PR Matters was in its way a kind of document of the PR death spiral of Mars Hill even if it was about how good PR can help your church as a thesis, a kind of inverted double to Mark Driscoll's Confessions of a Reformission Rev which was described by Mark within MHC as a book that would be a history of Mars HIll but turned out to really be a "how I did it" manual for Driscoll's fans in ordained ministry. The publication of THAT book and my thought that "Hey, this isn't a history of Mars Hill at all, but what might an actual history of Mars Hill look like that isn't Mark Driscoll shilling himself?"
I'm trying to stay on hiatus here ... at least I'm not posting blog posts. :)
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