on the Christianity Today podcast mini-episode questioning the origin myths of Mars Hill, a long-form review of Mark Driscoll's stories of conversion and calling from 1992-2019, the most significant revisions have been post-MHC accounts

PART ONE: MARK DRISCOLL’S ACCOUNTS OF HIS CONVERSION PROCESS AND CALLING

 

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-driscoll-origin-myth.html

 

A sixteen minute podcast episode that is called “Questioning the Origin Myth” may do too much and too little and this particular mini-episode has gnawed at my thoughts since it was released.  It attempts to do too much by overtly questioning the alleged origin myths surrounding the founding of Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll’s accounts of his conversion to Christianity and his calling to ministry.  Yet it simultaneously does too little in that a podcast, let alone such a short podcast episode, cannot possibly cover the sheer mass of written and preached material Mark Driscoll has published recounting his conversion process, his calling to ministry, and founding of Mars Hill Church stories.  That there is a core set of founding myths is easily established but Cosper didn’t really successfully make a case that Driscoll or others significantly changed the stories that became the founding myths of the former Mars Hill Church.

 

If anything, a review of a variety of published materials, chiefly from Mark Driscoll’s writings spanning from the early 1990s through to the present suggests that Mark Driscoll’s overall set of origin stories has stayed robustly on message.  If there are cracks in some proverbial façade they show up in what kind of man Mark Driscoll claimed he was planning to be before he had his conversion process.

 

Notice I keep referring to his “conversion process”. Cumulatively I do not think he had what could be called an evangelical moment-of-crisis conversion experience, nor do I think he really needed one but within the context of evangelicalism and its literary and homiletic conventions Mark Driscoll probably thought and maybe even more strongly felt that he needed to have a narrative of some time with a robust contrast between the before and after of his process of conversion to what he thinks of as evangelical Christianity. 

 

Rather than assume, as could be done, that Mark Driscoll’s accounts of his conversion and c calling experiences were changed, we should go through the accounts and consider them as literary and homiletic works.  Driscoll has demonstrated that he has always been acutely sensitive to questions of status and perception. He is also, if you appreciate this figure of speech, always closing a sale. Generally Mark Driscoll has not published a story about how he came to faith or felt called to plant a church without that story explicitly serving as a self-authenticating witness of Mark Driscoll’s self-perceived fitness for ministry.

 

Cosper has some reason to wonder about the degree to which Driscoll changed key elements in the story of conversion and calling that shaped the foundation narratives associated with mars Hill.  On the other hand, that Mark Driscoll kept changing his accounts of conversion and calling does not in itself suggest that Driscoll necessarily made drastic changes.  Mike Cosper was himself a pastor, right? Don’t pastors tailor stories to fit into the over-arching point of a sermon?  This seems to be, pretty clearly I believe, what Driscoll has habitually done with his biography. There are reasons to wonder whether strategic changes or omissions occurred.

 

But before we ask whether or not it seems that Mark Driscoll changed his story we should  never forget that because he’s always pitching his idea of the gospel or making a homiletic point that the given point will suggest possible reasons for the inclusion or omission of biographical details. Too much of the journalism and social media commentary and blogging I have seen that discusses Mark Driscoll rushes to assess whether he’s really a Calvinist or a charismatic or how he fits into a taxonomy of doctrinal or political categories rather than do the more laborious work of trawling through the primary source statements Mark Driscoll has poured out on the page and in sermons. 

 

So let’s start with the earliest published account of Mark Driscoll’s conversion process that seems to be available, an op ed he wrote for The Daily Evergreen when he was attending Washington State University.

 

1.   THE EARLIEST CONVERSION NARRATIVE, 1992

The earliest written account of his conversion process was published in late 1992:

 

https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/evergreens/id/118047

The Daily Evergreen, Monday October 19, 1992

“The makings of a lunatic” by Mark Driscoll, On the Mark column

 

Chatting with staff members in the newsroom, the million dollar question surfaced: “Have you always been this nuts or is it a recent phenomena?”

 

Good question. Actually, I was not raised in a fundamentalist Christian home and did not own nor read a Bible until my first year of college. In fact, I was not brain-washed as a child and now view most issues much differently than my parents.

 

Throughout high school I was probably a moderate Democrat and one of only three people who voted for Dukakis in 1988 (the other two being his mother and wife). Studying the major governments of the world I found Socialism appealing.

 

I was pro-abortion, feeling a woman’s right to choose was of supreme value. I had respect for organized religion but felt the church had no business meddling in public or private affairs.

 

I prayed before meals, went to church, believed there was a God and no matter what name you gave him, you would go to heaven by being a good person and acknowledging he existed. I admired other religions and hated frothing Bible-thumpers who always told other people what to believe.

 

As president of my high school, I pressed for a clinic in the school which would distribute condoms to students because I believed students would have sex anyway and should be protected.

 

I did not approve of homosexual acts but did have gay friends who I respected and weren’t bothering me so I felt no one’s sexuality was anyone else’s business. I also felt premarital sex between heterosexuals was acceptable, providing they were in a loving, committed, monogamous relationship.

 

Knowing how many of my peers did drugs I supported drug legalization to end the fierce gang battles which hold our inner cities hostage.

Funding my own way through college I came to WSU because my scholarships were only good for in state schools. Going through formal fall rush in 1989 I moved into a house but left a short time after. After moving into a residence hall, I met the most rabid Bible thumper ever. He drove me crazy. We agreed on nothing and argued about everything.

 

One day I got fed up, told him I was a Christian, and hoped he would stop trying to convert me. He was one of those high strung guys who memorized the entirely Bible and quoted it freely to defend his points.

 

During one of many heated arguments I told him to never again support his arguments with Bible verses lest I wring his fundamentalist pencil neck. I said, “the Bible is not 100 percent true: everyone interprets it different and you cannot believe every part you read.”  Big mistake. He said, “prove it.” And so I tried.

 

I read numerous Christian and non-Christian books trying to prove him wrong. Figuring he had twisted the Bible to meet his own needs, I decided to read the entire New Testament for myself, just to shut him up. I had never read much of the Bible but I knew he was screwed up.

 

I was wrong.

 

As I read, I discovered he was usually right on the mark. The more I researched the authenticity of the New Testament and read it, the more frustrated I became. Everything I had believed was wrong. I determined I was either the stupidest Christian in the world, or I didn’t know God like I had thought.

 

My life was at a crossroads. I was stuck between two options. The first consisted of continuing in my old ways and rejecting the truth I had found. The other was a frightening alternative, dying in a very real way to the Lordship of Christ.

 

My conscience would not let me rest. No one forced me, no one beat down my door. My mind changed against my will; the Spirit of God convinced me submission to Him was long overdue.

 

From that point on my world view changed. Slowly my mind was opened to thoughts and perspectives I had never considered. I have determined one cannot separate themselves from their world view. Politics, economics, religion and morality all flow from the same source – one’s world view. As my world view changed so did everything else in my life … for the better.

 

As an imperfect man I continue to make mistakes and interpret things wrong but my conscience is clear because I attempt to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and his grace covers me when I fail. Today that frothing Bible thumper is one of my dearest friends. I hope one day, through a similar course of events, you too will consider me a friend.

 

This fits into a fairly standard evangelical narrative trope, the “I tried to prove Christianity wrong and became a Christian” trope.  Even if we would later hear that Mark Driscoll had actually been an altar boy for a while as a child (or in his youth), in this story Driscoll’s emphasis was that he functionally did not have the religious views in his earlier life that he came to be known for while attending Washington State University. Driscoll was not non-religious but professed a dislike of Bible-thumpers.

 

In this account Driscoll said he met a Christian in the residence hall he was staying at and that they disagreed on many things. It was in trying to argue against this Bible-thumping fellow resident in a residence hall that Driscoll began his effort to prove Christianity was wrong and ended up an evangelical Christian.

 

Let’s notice that completely absent from this account is Grace Martin and the Bible she gave him. We may guess that the Bible Mark Driscoll was reading was the one Grace gave him after suspecting he was not really a Christian after all like he claimed he was, but her role in his having a Bible of any kind is obviously irrelevant to the conversion-by-trying-to-disprove-Christianity account.  The youthful Mark Driscoll was likely savvy enough to realize that if he even once mentioned that part of his becoming a Christian had anything to do with having a pastor’s daughter girlfriend that the entire narrative he was presenting could seem less effective as a work of rhetoric. 

 

It is equally clear that Driscoll presents his conversion as a process rather than a single moment of emotional crisis.  Now, let’s turn to the next account he would share and there is something that seems a bit trippy about it compared to the 1992 account.

 

2.   Seasons of Grace, circa 1999-2000

 

The next published account of Mark Driscoll’s conversion, call to ministry, and plan to found what became Mars Hill Church comes from the old marshill.fm website. 

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

Our history
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. [emphasis 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.

 

In the second season, Grace and I began attending Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, where we volunteered our time working with their college ministry. We then located in Seattle to be closer to students and after a few months I was brought on staff as a part-time intern to oversee the college group. [emphasis added] I served in that position for nearly two years and learned a great deal in my first position of ministry leadership in a church. At that time I met Mike Gunn who had moved from a pastorate in Southern California to begin a ministry to athletes at the University of Washington. I also met Lief Moi, a local radio show host, who came in to teach a class for us. These two men and their wives and children became like family and together we began dreaming about the possibility of planting an urban church for an emerging postmodern generation in one of the least churched cities in the U.S. We began praying, studying the scriptures, reading a great deal on postmodernity, and dialoging together to formulate a philosophy of ministry appropriate for our context. Helping us formulate our launch plan was Dr. Greg Kappas, who graciously mentored us and provided wise insight and counsel.

 

In the third season, we began a small Bible study in graciously loaned space from Emmanuel Bible Church in Seattle. The original small core of about a dozen people was a Bible study comprised largely of twenty-somethings from the college group, the Gunn and Moi families, and Chris Knutzen who had joined the Campus Crusade for Christ staff at the U.W. We began meeting weekly in an extremely hot upstairs youth room, and after a few months outgrew the space and began meeting in the sanctuary. It was during this season that the rest of our current elders - the Browns, Currahs and Schlemleins - and some singles and families joined us. It was also during this season that Pastor Ken Hutcherson and our friends at Antioch Bible Church began their generous financial support to cover my salary to ensure that I would not be a financial strain on the young church.

 

In the fourth season, we launched the church in October 1996 at 6pm with an attendance around 200, which included many friends and supporters. [emphasis added] The attendance leveled off shortly thereafter, somewhere around 100 adults, and we continued meeting until the Christmas season.

 

In the fifth season, we moved to a church building in the Laurelhurst district one mile east of the UW. We had been searching for space in the University District with no luck, but this move got us closer to our desired area. The location afforded us an opportunity to launch small groups, classes, dinners and other events throughout the week. We also opened a small office at the church and hired some office staff to begin formulating more infrastructure to organize our continued growth.

 

In the sixth season, I was invited to speak at a national conference in October 1997 with Leadership Network. Pastors from around the U.S. came to discuss the issues of postmodernity and emerging generations. My sermon at that session opened a great deal of national opportunities and media coverage that propelled Mars Hill into the national spotlight as a model church for emerging ministry paradigms. Since that time our church plant has been featured in such publications as Mother Jones, the Washington Post, Seattle Times, Worship Leader Magazine, Current Thoughts & Trends, Arizona Republic, Vineyard Cutting Edge, Christianity Today, etc. We have also been featured on local radio programs, as well as the east coast affiliate of NPR, and on TV with the 700 Club. We now provide consultation and teaching for an enormous number of churches and denominations, a number of Christian colleges and seminaries, as well as numerous national ministry conferences.

 

In the seventh season, we began to organize the church by adding elders, deacons and members. This step was an attempt to identify the core and heart of our church by distinguishing those committed to us as a family versus those coming to consume goods and services.

 

In the eighth season, our worship ministry was in great disarray and I had a dream that Brad Currah, who had been a member of our core group before the launch, was leading worship. I repeatedly informed Brad that he was to be our worship leader and after numerous conversations he began volunteering time overseeing the worship and arts ministries. Brad had spent a few years playing the club scene with his band Springchamber, but was quickly overwhelmed with the demands of his first time pastorate and quit his job at Microsoft to free up time for ministry and hoped to live off of his wife Devonna's salary. But, she soon became pregnant and needed to quit her job. I then got a call from a pastor in Florida who had a network that funded church plants. Grace and I met with Pastor David Nicholas at Spanish River Church, and his church planting network agreed to help us financially. This gift allowed us to bring Brad on full-time, which has culminated in a fantastic independent worship album, multiple worship teams, and an aggressive set of new songs written by some of our many gifted artists.

 

In our ninth season in the beginning of 1999 we were forced to move from our Laurelhurst location. Five days before the end of our lease we still did not have a location to meet in and were dreading the move. Then, pastor Rick Hull and First Presbyterian Church in downtown Seattle graciously welcomed us in. So, we shut down the 7pm service, and ran the 5pm service in their 1300 seat sanctuary. The move was nothing new, in three years we have had services in four locations and at four different times, and the office has had six different phone numbers due to all the moves. It was also during this season that we launched our first daughter church, The Gathering, one hour north of Seattle in Mount Vernon. A family, the Tackels, I had met while teaching at a conference purchased an RV to begin taking their children and their friends to our church. Their 23 year old son Ron Wheeler had returned from a one year missions trip in Africa and resonated with much of our ministry philosophy. He began a Bible study in his community that continued to grow until they launched their church at 6pm on Easter of 1999 in a beautiful old brick church in downtown Mount Vernon. Funding for Ron was generously given by Dr. David Nicholas and our Acts 29 church planting network, and funding for his worship leader Micah Kelly was given from Ken Hutcherson and Antioch Bible Church. It was also at this time that we hired Janet Sawyer and Eric Brown, both members of our church, to come on staff full-time as administrators who have very much helped organize and stabilize our chaos.

 

In our tenth season, amidst the chaos of our homeless wanderings, I was approached by Stan Scholl, transitional pastor of Christ's Bible Church in the Ballard district of Seattle. Serving under the auspices of Northwest Independent Church Extension, he was helping the church of aging but faithful saints to contemplate options for their declining ministry. The CBC congregation adopted a plan whereby we were able to inherit their 8,000 square foot church building as a base of operations, and location for a young, new Bible church to serve the Ballard area. After six months of negotiations, the deal was closed. When basic renovations were completed, we moved in. We plan to launch a morning church in the building in October of 2000.

 

We are now upon our eleventh season as we begin to realize a dream we have been praying for over the past three years. One of our elders, Lief Moi, purchased an old theater on 55th and University Way (walking distance to the University of Washington) that we are currently renovating. The 200-seat theater is now host to a 7pm Sunday night church plant, a Wednesday night church service run by interns preparing to plant churches, and the only all-ages concert venue in the city of Seattle. Lief is also building out a broadcast booth for the national radio show, Street Talk, that we host on Saturday nights from 9 to midnight. Live bands will be performing while we broadcast the show around the U.S. and dialogue with people in their teens and twenties about the Gospel.

 

In our twelfth season, we are seeking to press forward with church planting in hopes of planting 1000 churches in conjunction with the Acts 29 Network. Pastor Bill Keogh launched Harbor Fellowship in Kirkland at 6pm Sunday, September 19. We launched our 7pm University District church on Sunday, November 7. Pastor Rick McKinley will launch his Portland church on Easter 2000, and we hope to launch our Sunday morning Ballard church in the spring of 2000.

 

Here we get Mark Driscoll mentioning that he read Augustine and Aquinas.  Which works and how much of those works by Augustine and Aquinas Driscoll never clarifies.  What’s salient here is that Driscoll invokes two of the heaviest heavyweights in Catholic scholastic traditions. I am willing to guess that Mark Driscoll was not reading Augustine’s De Musica, and he probably read Confessions and City of God because those seem most likely to be assigned to undergrads (the latter in a probably highly abridged form).  Driscoll here has leaned hard on his conversion process entailing his engagement with some of the most formidable writers in the tradition of Western Christianity.  He didn’t just read his Bible and convert in this account, he was struggling against God’s calling but simultaneously steeping himself in Christian writers.  Think of this as a variation of Augustine’s notorious “Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet” prayer.  Driscoll seemed clearer about wanting to be a leader of men than being any kind of Christian while leading them. 

 

Since I remember attending the Laurelhurst sight for a while I realize that I may have started attending Mars Hill earlier than I have often thought. I thought I began attending some time in 1999 yet the fact that Mars Hill had moved out of the Laurelhurst site by early 1999 means I had to have started attending some time in 1998.  Janet Sawyer was one of the first friends I made at Mars Hill so I realize that I had to have attended earlier than the later 1999 I have misremembered as the earliest times I attended Mars Hill when I think of church services.  Maybe it was because the church services themselves were forgettable I don’t remember attendance as clearly. I more clearly remember the writers’ group that Janet and I were part of with some other people at Mars Hill. 

 

Now what jumps out in this late 1990s account is that Mark Driscoll was still describing a conversion process but clearly claimed he told a friend that God was going to make a pastor of him and that the friend laughed and was unsure if Mark was mocking him or not.  Why would that be?  We can only speculate.  This man was not necessarily the same one to whom Mark said “I’m a Christian” to shut up the Bible-thumper from the 1992 account.

 

It’s an obvious point but Driscoll telling a friend that God was going to make a church planter of him to the friend’s disbelief comes before the 1990 audible call incident. In this 1999 era account Mark claimed God told him, “Mark, I have called you out from among many to lead men.” Driscoll has often told this story as if he didn’t know what he was doing or was surprised that he’d have an audible call experience but as we go through twenty years of Mark Driscoll accounts it becomes clear that even before his conversion Mark Driscoll regarded himself as a leader among men and the conversion and call narratives are Christianized variants of stories that the man embraces that assure him of a divinely given destiny to be a leader among men, a man set apart for great things. 

 

Let’s take note of a few things.  By later 1999 Mars Hill was getting support from Antioch Bible Church, some Leadership Network connection was established, and Acts 29 was taking shape.  Mark Driscoll had begun to gravitate into the realm that has since been identified as New Calvinism but he was not necessarily a Calvinist, let alone a New Calvinist back in 1992.  His conversion and calling narratives don’t have any particularly monergistic element to describing Mark Driscoll’s soteriological moment. At some point he stops resisting God. He stops resisting his own conscience.

 

It is possible, I think, to point out that Mark Driscoll may have learned early to distinguish between his personal doctrinal stances and what he was willing to say he stood for in relationship to his patronage base.  It’s not a particularly big leap to propose that a Mark Driscoll who never identified as charismatic or Pentecostal and yet had various accounts of prophetic dreams and kept coming back to his audible calling moment would still “lean cessationist” as he told me he did circa 2001-2002.  Why?  Because it would be a pragmatic, sensible decision to lean cessationist if the church leaders and churches who were bankrolling your church and the payroll of its staff were cessationists that you wouldn’t go on and on in public about how much you relied on dream divination to inform your leadership decisions. Driscoll seemed to wait until Mars Hill needed no funding from Antioch Bible Church before he began to share profusely how much he relied on prophetic dreams to make leadership decisions.

 

At great length we’ll eventually see that Mark Driscoll would be selective about what his inculcation in cessationist forms of Christianity implicitly failed to prepare him for later.  We’re still going through the early accounts and we’ll see that there’s going to continue to be a thread of thought in which Mark Driscoll becomes a Christian despite himself.  Rather, he becomes a born again evangelical kind of Christian after having, by his accounts, mistakenly believed he was already some kind of believer. 

 

If there’s an ambiguity in the accounts so far it’s not about the core of Mark Driscoll’s conversion process, it’s just how not-really-a-Christian he was and on what grounds that was claimed. It’s not necessarily mysterious why Mark Driscoll, in his telling, began to regard Christianity of the Catholic variety he grew up with as unmanly.

 

3.   Stories in sermons from the 2001 era Proverbs series

 

http://download.marshill.se/files/2001/10/28/20011028_men-and-masculinity_sd_audio.mp3
MEN AND MASCULINITY
Part 5 of Proverbs
Pastor Mark Driscoll | October 28, 2001
...
You know why schools, Christian schools, Christian churches, Christian ministries are primarily female? Because the church is feminine, and masculine men don’t feel comfortable there. It’s true. The church has adopted, I would say, inordinately the bride metaphor from scripture. Women are very comfortable from that. Men don’t understand that. It’s very hard for a man to think of himself as a bride, wearing a white gown and walking down the aisle. If he’s very comfortable with that, he has significant issues. He has much to work through. And so, there are different metaphors in scripture that men and women will gravitate toward in regards to their relationship with God. For me, this is – this is a very important issue. I was raised in south Seattle, in the ghetto, behind the Déjà vu, next to the airport. Okay? If you’ve been there, you can repent and don’t go there anymore. [emphasis added] But, for the rest of you, if you don’t know where it’s at, that’s fine. It’s – it’s an interesting neighborhood. Gang-banging, drive-by’s, drugs, prostitution, the green river killer was there, the whole thing. One of the local elementary schools would have to go out on Monday and take the used condoms and the syringes off the playground before the kids came. And so, I was the oldest of five kids. And I grew-up in a blue-collar, hard-working, union family. My dad’s name is Joe, and he hangs drywall. Okay?
…

My dad’s a guy. My brothers are guys. I’m a guy. We love each other. Things are good. I come from a decent home. And one my biggest fears in high school was becoming a Christian, because I thought immediately I would have to become very feminine. ‘Cause all the guys I knew who were Christians were just very – very soft, very tender, very sort of weak guys. And I thought, “That’s just not gonna work.” So, I wouldn’t go to youth group. They tried to drag me to – I was in a Catholic church and our priest was gay, and I didn’t get this guy at all. He would wear silk shirts and silk pants, and he would wear low – basically, like, bathroom slippers all the time. [emphasis added] And he would tan all year. So, he had a nice bronze glow.

And I didn’t relate to this guy at all, not in the least. I don’t – I don’t – silk? Just – I don’t get that. And so, he – he was this very, very feminine guy. And they tried to – I tried to go to church with my family and I didn’t get it. So, they tried to take me into this youth thing, and it just didn’t work. So, I just left. I said, “That’s it. I’m gone. There’s no men here.” [emphasis added]  ‘Cause it was all older ladies, women and children. You couldn’t find a guy anywhere near it, and that’s not unusual. When I came to Christ in college, reading the Bible, and realized the gospel, and I went looking for a church; and a few of the first churches I went to were just completely uncomfortable. It was like walking into Victoria’s Secret. The décor, at first, it’s like fuchsia and baby blue, and there’s pink, and it’s just like, “What in the world has happened here?” And then the songs are very emotive, and it’s like love songs to Jesus, like we’re on a prom together or something. And I didn’t get that at all, ‘cause that made me feel real odd. And then – and then the guy preaches, and he’s crying and all this stuff, and trying to appeal to my emotions. And I was just like, “This didn’t work.” So, I kept looking for a church. So, I found a church where the guy got up and he said, “This week I was out bow-hunting.” He used that as an illustration. So, I became a member of that church. True story. I didn’t have any theological convictions, but if a guy killed things then I – he could be my pastor. [emphasis added]

 

I’ve discussed Mark Driscoll’s gospel of escaping his white trash urban upbringing in the past. His working class Irish Catholic background is clear enough. Driscoll may have decided that that form of Christianity was unmanly by the time he reached adolescence and he wanted nothing to do with it. It’s clear here that Driscoll openly said he had no theological convictions but gravitated toward pastors who fit his ideas of what a manly man ought to be. We’ll come back to how nominal his Catholicism really was later. Driscoll may have bailed on Catholicism because he was sure his priest was gay and unmanly. In this account we get an intimation that Mark Driscoll rejected his family’s Catholicism despite some efforts on the part of his family to keep him connected to it.  We can also see that during this period Driscoll explained what it was he was aspiring to do instead:

 

http://download.marshill.se/files/2001/10/28/20011028_men-and-masculinity_sd_audio.mp3
MEN AND MASCULINITY
Part 5 of Proverbs
Pastor Mark Driscoll | October 28, 2001

 

starting at 54:45
Proverbs 29:21, “If a man pampers his servant from youth, he will bring grief in the end.” These guys are pampered; totally pampered. Okay? And again, this is not a boasting on me. This is a – this is actually a tribute to my dad. I was eleven years old. I was going out for the little league all-star team, and I needed a new glove. My dad said, “Good. Go make some money.” I said, “Hey, dad, I’m eleven.” He said, “Well, you’re taller than the lawn-mower. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.” True. So, I get the lawn-mower, and I go and I mow lawns to get my glove. And I come back and my dad says, “You owe me gas money. You used my gas.” It’s the nicest thing my dad ever did. Up until that point, I didn’t know gas cost money. Now, I do. Now, I appreciate gas.It comes to the point where I’m 15 and I wanna get a car. I said, “Dad, I need a car.” He says, “Good. Go get some money.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So, I falsified my birth certificate, I lie about my age, and I get a job at a 7-11 selling lotto tickets and liquor and cigarettes to people that are twice my age. I was not a Christian, so – I shouldn’t have done it anyways, but I wasn’t a Christian. And so, I’m 15, working at a 7-11 selling stuff. And I make a decent living, and I buy my first car, a 1956 Chevy that I should’ve never sold. That’s a whole other sermon. And – and so I’m 15, driving myself to work without a license, because I gotta go make money to pay for my car. [emphasis added] Okay? And again, I was not a Christian. Okay? So, I’m not saying, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”

 

And I realize that, since I was young and I was strong, I could make more money. And so I started dinking around trying to figure out where to make more money. And I find out that guys in unions make a lot of money. And – at least compared to me working at the 7-11. And I got tired of getting robbed and held-up, too. ‘Cause if you run a 7-11 behind a Déjà vu, somebody’s gonna put a gun at your head. And after a couple of those, you realize, “For minimum wage, I’m not taking a cap. You know? I’m not gonna get shot for, like, a pack of cigarettes. I’m not gonna do that.” So, I lied about my age. I falsified my birth certificate again, and told them I was 18. Got a job working long-shoring down on the docks in Seattle. And I would go throw 100-pound sacks of peas, and unload trucks, and work hard. And they paid me tremendous money. [emphasis added] At the time, it was like $10.00-something an hour. This was, like, in 1986 or ’87 or something. And I’d work 40 hours a week, and over-time was double-time. And none of the guys would wanna work over-time. Usually it was on Friday, ‘cause they had to get containers out, and those guys all wanted to go to the topless club.

And so, I would work all the over-time at $20.00 an hour as a 16 year old kid. This is in the mid-‘80s. Right? So, I’m loaded. I have money, money, money, money. So, I buy a car, and I start saving for college, doing my stuff. And with my dad – I thank God for my dad. My dad’s like, “You’re a guy. You work. You pay your way. Good. It’s good for you.” And you know what? He’s right. He was totally right. Thank God for my dad. My brother and my other brother and myself, we’re all doing great, making good money, doing fine. My brothers are all in management leadership running companies or businesses. It’s great. You pamper a guy from his youth, and he just – he gets this course of action. All of the sudden he feels like if his hands are dirty, or his muscles are sore, or if he put-in a long day, or thought something was tough, that’s unusual; that’s abnormal. And so, he avoids it.

 

So far Mark Driscoll’s account of his life before and after his born-again conversion process seem relentlessly consistent at their core.  Even though Driscoll seems to finesse details to fit specific homiletic points there’s not a strong sense that he dramatically altered the core story.  It would be more accurate to say that Driscoll scrupulously avoided mentioning anything in a specific narrative that would hinder the rhetorical force of whatever point it was he was trying to make in his specific argumentative context. If Mark Driscoll wanted to make a point in a sermon that he really thought of himself as a good guy and even as being a Christian before his born-again conversion process that’s exactly what he’d do, which is how we come to a 2002 account of his conversion in one of his sermons.

 

4.   The drunken frat boy who rocked his world, from a 2002 sermon, on Driscoll’s conversion

http://marshill.se/marshill/media/galatians/faith-and-works
FAITH AND WORKS
Part 4 of Galatians
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Galatians 3:1-14
June 02, 2002
...

11:23

And my misunderstanding was this: I thought that as long as you believed in God and you were a good person, then God would love you and you would go to Heaven. That’s what I thought. And if you would have asked me, you know, when I was up until the age of 18 or 19, “Are you a Christian?” I would’ve said, “Yes, and a Christian is someone who believes in God and is a good person.” And that’s what I thought. Until a drunken frat guy shattered my world with one decent question, and God uses anything. He used a drunken frat guy, who was like a seventh year sophomore to absolutely upset my theological worldview. [emphasis added]

I did not drink because I made a list of rules to declare myself self-righteous. So, I said, “Why, I’m gonna be a good person.” I made this little list of things that I thought a good person should be. I won’t lie. I won’t steal. I won’t cheat. I won’t drink. I won’t smoke. I won’t, you know, beat anyone up who doesn’t deserve it. I won’t – I had this list of things that I would do and not do, and I would declare myself “good.” That is the essence of works and self-righteousness. That was basically my worldview. “I make my rules, and I live up to them. I’m a great guy.”

 

So, I had these rules, and one of my rules was I won’t drink because then God will look down and say, “Well, I’m going to pick Mark for my team because he’s such a great guy.” After all, I was.

 

So, what happened was I was at a frat party in college, which is not the typical place that God shows up in powerful, illuminating, theological acumen. But this drunken frat guy came up, and he said, “Here. Drink a beer.” And I said, “No, I don’t drink.” He said, “Why?” I said, “I’m a good person.” (Laughter)

 

And he said, “Well, why do you want to be a good person?” I said, “Because I believe in God, and I’m a good person.” He said, “Well, Jesus drank,” which is about the only part of the Bible he really knew. That and, “Thou shalt not judge.” He put those two verses together, and he’d come up with alcoholism. But anyway. (Laughter)

 

I said, “No, I’m a good person.” He said, “So, how do you know you’re gonna go to Heaven?” I said, “I know I’m gonna go to Heaven because I’m a good person.” And he asked this question that shattered my world. He was basically mocking me, trying to get me to drink. And he said, “Well, how good do you have to be to go to Heaven?” I thought, “I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t know.” And he said, “Do you have to be good all the time? And if you’re not good some days, does that cancel your bad days, and who makes the rules, and how do you know what’s good and bad?” He was just sort of in a drunken stupor rambling, but it was a really good question, I felt, particularly considering his condition.

I said, “I don’t know,” and I started thinking about that. How good do I have to be? How moral do I have to be, and who determines the morality? Do my good days cancel my bad days, and did my sins cancel my obedience? And I started getting really muddy about where I was at. Up until this point I thought, “I’m a good guy. I’m a great guy.” And then I realized, “Well, maybe I’m not good enough.” 

And so, what I decided was, “I’ll read the Bible to get all the rules, and then I’ll do them to make sure that I’m a good guy.” Okay. Now my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time. Moral of the story is if a woman gives you a Bible, give her a ring. She gave me this Bible as a graduation present from high school, and I started reading the Bible. 

I started reading the New Testament, and the first time through I hated it. It made no sense at all. It sounded like everyone was bad, and I kept looking for the good people to figure out what they were doing. And even the people that I thought were good at the end of it ended up killing God, and I didn’t think that necessarily proved that they were good people. 

So, I kept reading and reading, and I got through the whole New Testament and I couldn’t find any good people. And I couldn’t find any way to declare myself good, which really troubled me.

 

So in this account, Mark Driscoll said he would have said he was a Christian because he was a good person. Remember that back in 1992 he’d said he considered himself religious but not a Bible-thumper. He had defined himself as Christian across these accounts on the basis of what he would later call “borrowed faith”.

 

What is different here from the earlier accounts is that this time around Mark Driscoll didn’t start questing to prove some guy in a residence hall wrong about whether the Bible was 100% accurate and there was no process of relenting in his resistance of God’s calling. Instead, Driscoll claimed he thought he was a good enough Christian whose world was rocked by a frat boy’s question.  This is, however, not necessarily a story that contradicts any of the other stories?  Consider the title of the sermon, “Faith and Works”.  Driscoll was clearly running with a theme that works by themselves do not effect salvation, so Driscoll’s narrative has to be seen as subordinate to the preacher’s point about faith and works in an evangelical Protestant dogmatic argument.

 

So Driscoll thought of himself as a Christian and of a kind who objected to rabid Bible-thumpers like the guy he met in the residence hall who quoted Bible verses to prove every point. Although I’m an evangelical myself I think it’s necessary to step outside that idiom and point out that Mark Driscoll never has a version of his story where he’s anything other than a lapsed or nominal Catholic who loathed evangelical Christians who ended up becoming one of them. His was not a conversion from an outright secularist to evangelical Christianity.

 

We will see that as his stories progress the conversion process remains stable but sometimes he will tailor the account to include things that he neglected to mention in earlier accounts.

 

5.   From Mark Driscoll’s first published book

Radical Reformission: Reacing Out Without Selling Out

Mark Driscoll

Copyright © 2004 by Mars Hill Church

Zondervan

ISBN 0-3310-25659-3

First edition

 

Pages 11-14

Culturally, I am Irish, which means I have two emotions: angry and asleep. I was raised as the oldest of five kids in a hardworking, blue-collar Catholic family near the airport in Seattle, Washington. It was a Norman Rockwell-Precious Moments kind of neighborhood just up the hill from the strip clubs and the hunting grounds of the Green River Killer and Ted Bundy.

 

Growing up, I thought that as long as I believed in a nebulous Sky Fairy named God and was a decent, moral person outperforming those below me on the ethical food chain, I would end my life hearing the old theme song from The Jeffersons television show and be “movin’ on up” to heaven with all the other good guys. So I worked hard through high school and graduated Most Likely to Succeed and student body president. I was very proud to have never drunk alcohol, smoked a cigarette, tried a drug, or voted Republican.

 

Upon graduation, I was awarded a few scholarships that enabled me to be the first person in my family to go to college. So, wanting to get out of the city and try something new, I moved about three hundred miles away to Washington State University, which is tucked away in the wheatfields of eastern Washington. The university was far away from big city life, complete with cows, instead of prostitutes, standing around like dumb meat.

 

Without a car and majoring in boredom, I began reading a nice Bible my high school girlfriend had given me as a graduation present. She was a pastor’s daughter who, in retrospect, should not have been dating me …

 

After a bad few weeks of a frat experience that landed me in the freshman equivalent of purgatory—a dorm—I sat down to read the Gospels. Frankly, they seemed boring because they kept saying the same thing. I wondered if the Bible wasn’t written by an old man with dementia, or by a young man who had gone to my “publick skewl.” As I continued to read, Jesus seemed okay, but the guys I really liked—because of their self-control and strength—were the denominational leaders of that day: the Pharisees. They were about the only guys in the cast of characters with any guts. I identified with them and was convinced they were the good guys in the story … until they killed Jesus. I wasn’t much of a theologian at the time, but murdering Jesus did seem like a bad move.

 

Moving on, as Peter says, I found the writings of Paul hard to understand. His obsession with sin reminded me of a DEA dog at the airport sniffing around for drugs with tail-wagging enthusiasm. My problem was that I thought sin was something you do, not understanding that sin is something you are, like being French Canadian. To me, sins were terrible things that very bad people do, such as rape, murder, drug dealing, and what my construction-worker dad called being antiunion. Consequently, Paul seemed to be going after bad people. And since I was a good person, I skipped Paul and started reading John’s Revelation. It sounded eerily similar to the revelations an altar-boy buddy of mine had reported seeing while assisting our priest with a Mass, shortly after smoking lots of marijuana.

 

In my first college philosophy class, I read Augustine, who said that sin naturally flows from our polluted hearts like sewage out of a culvert. He explained that the root of sin is pride and that the worst sins include things like false morality and autonomy from God. This was, I believe, God’s extending to me the right foot of fellowship.

 

I then read the entire New Testament over the course of the next few weeks. God opened my eyes to the fact that I was a Pharisee and that the worst sinners were often the most moral and spiritual people who, like I was doing, pursue righteousness apart from Jesus. As I was sitting on my dorm bed, the words of Romans 1:6, “And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,” sound in my head like an alarm. I realized that God had been pursuing me and was, in that moment, screaming into the three pounds of meat between my ears that I belong to Jesus.

 

That week, I started teaching my first Bible study. …

 

It then dawned on me that I had been a Christian for only a few days, had never been in a Bible study, and did not really know anything in the Bible other than the fact that I sucked and that Jesus is God. So I told the guys they could ask me any question about the Bible and I would take the following week to research the answer, since I didn’t have any answers yet. This was my first ministry and it inspired me to begin buying commentaries, reference materials, theology texts, apologetics books, and the like, which were more interesting by far than most of my classes. For example, I had a class in women’s studies in which I learned that men are a plague running the world and that I needed to get in touch with my feminine side, which made about as much sense as telling a dog to get in touch with its feline side.

 

Driscoll viewing himself as better than other people below him on “the ethical food chain” is a recurring theme across his conversion accounts. This is a guy who consistently thought he was better and smarter and tougher than most people in the room, whatever room he was in. His conversion accounts cluster around a process of realizing that however good enough he thought he was, if he took the Bible seriously, the Bible revealed he was at least as bad as the people he so often looked down on. 

 

Here there is neither the Bible-thumper in the residence hall nor the drunken frat boy asking Mark Driscoll how good enough is good enough for Mark Driscoll to deserve to go to Heaven.  Driscoll presents his conversion account as a process of being confronted by one of the great minds of Catholic theology and realizing his own assumptions about himself were wrong.

 

What does persist, however, is Mark’s clarity about what kind of man of God he ought to be learning from and it is here we come back to Mark Driscoll’s account of praying by a river in Idaho:

 

Pages 14-15

Shortly thereafter, I found a good church that met my criteria. First, the pastor was a man who had been in the military and knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught through the Bible verse by verse, so that I could learn to trust the Scriptures and to love Jesus without feeling like we had a thinly veiled homosexual relationship. I attended their men’s retreat in Idaho with other hairy mage-bearers of God, and spent a weekend talking about things such as sex, pipe tobacco, and monotheism. It was about the best weekend I could remember having in my life at that time.

 

Late one night during the retreat, I went down to the river and was compelled by God to kneel for some time in prayer. Then it happened!  He spoke to me and told me what to do with the days between my birth and judgment—in other words,  my life. He told me to lead men, preach Scripture, plant churches, marry Grace, and trust Him. So I married Grace, began studying Scripture with the enthusiasm of a glutton at a buffet, and started preparing myself to become a pastor who does not go to jail for doing something stupid. To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats—which was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life.

 

After graduation, Grace and I moved back to Seattle and began visiting churches. We finally settled into a large suburban church where I felt at home because it met my criteria. First the pastor (who looked like Mr. T) had been an NFL linebacker and knew how to kill people in self-defense. Second, he taught the Bible verse by verse in a real way, one that enabled me to have a relationship with Jesus that did not feel like he was my lifelong prom date.

 

Driscoll had a very clear idea of what sort of man was going to be able to teach him how to be a man for Jesus.  We’ve seen earlier that Mark Driscoll joked that he had no theological convictions but he was sure what kind of man he would trust to teach him the Bible.  This pattern reveals a tendency running throughout Mark Driscoll’s career that doctrinal and confessional points within the history of Christian thought often seem to take a backseat in Mark Driscoll’s theology to scripts of manhood for which theological claims are frequently, if not inevitably, pressed into service. Whether or not you “really” believe in Jesus and affirm hypostatic union or perichoresis in relationship to the Trinity or Christ’s incarnation may be important in Mark Driscoll’s idea of Christian life and practice depending upon whether you are his idea of a manly man or a womanly woman. 

 

So far it seems that once we factor in that Mark Driscoll is always “closing the sale” with some moralizing instruction, the inclusions and omissions in his stories are strategic but have not risen to the level of any kind of deception. There may be all sorts of reasons to dislike or distrust Mark Driscoll but as I’ve gone through his accounts of his conversion process I have not detected anything I would call a 180 degree turn.

 

What is also striking, and which has generally gone without remark, about the stories of Mark Driscoll’s conversion process and early years as a Christian is how firmly situated he was in what scholars have called the American Redoubt region.  Crawford Gribben’s recent book Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest strikes me as a timely and valuable contribution to exploring evangelical enclaves in the Pacific Northwest in the last fifty years. In fact I would say that anyone who wants to understand Mars Hill as part of a broader conservative evangelical movement should read Gribben’s work.  There are substantial divergences between Mark Driscoll’s views and what often is presented in the American Redoubt movement but it seems clearer over the last two decades that people who have attempted to understand who Mark Driscoll is and where he’s said he’s come from have paid too little attention to the influences he’s consistently name-dropped for decades.  If he’s said he was influenced by Doug Wilson then by all means we should actually try to compare Mark Driscoll’s work to Doug Wilson’s work on gender, marriage and sexuality to see what similarities and differences there are.  If Doug Wilson turns out to be a self-ordained minister even that could be a parallel to explore when considering the career trajectory of the self-ordained Mark Driscoll.

 

Now, let’s get back to Driscoll on his place in the foodchain after his conversion. It turns out that just  as Mark Driscoll said he was focused on outperforming everyone beneath him in the ethical food chain before he considered himself a born again evangelical, he would show himself concerned with where he was in the food chain of Christian ministry status after his conversion.  Observe this passage from his first book:

 

Pages 31-35

As a newer Christian, I was the plankton in a conservative suburban megachurch food chain. My hope was to get called up to the big leagues and be a full-time pastor, and so I attended a solid Bible-teaching seminary, volunteered at the  church, and labored to buid a good reputation as a morally upright man. I did not drink, smoke, or do anything that could give others the impression that I was a bad sinner.  

 

Then I got a phone call from an old college friend whom God had used to bring me to faith. He was a zealous charismaniac type who had relentlessly chased me around campus the first few months of my freshman year, trying to get me to pray the Sinner’s Prayer. After my conversion, he became a Christian friend. But in the years since college, I had lost touch with him. So I was now happy to hear his voice on the phone, and we scheduled a time to get together.

 

Over lunch, he informed me that he had been a closet homosexual throughout college, had joined the military after graduation, and had recently been discharged for having sex with fellow soldiers. He was presently frequenting public bathrooms throughout the city and having anonymous sex with various men. He shared that he was wrestling through whether he believed that he was a sinner and whether he still believed in God. When I invited him to attend church with me, he declined, saying that it was unfair for me to expect him to come into my Christian subculture, since I was unwilling to go with him into his homosexual subculture.

 

And he was right. So, feeling convicted to be like Jesus, I told him I would be happy to go into his world if he would come into mine. Seeing an evil dervish grin emerge on his face, I knew I was in trouble. He invited me to a gay country and western bar he frequented. At the time, I did not drink and disliked no one more than limp-wristed gay men and cowboys. I could not conceive of a worse purgatory than the one awaiting me.

 

I went home to inform my lovely bride about the mess I had gotten myself into, discovering that she was both supportive and good humored. The following week, I went out with my skinny, feminine gay buddy, who dressed up in tight jeans, goofy boots, and a big hat for a night of country line-dancing. Walking through the front door of the queer cowboy club, I was hit with the shrill sound of country and western music and the sight of a set of skinny men sporting tight jeans, well-groomed mustaches, and boots, even though we were in the middle of downtown Seattle and at least an hour’s drive away from the nearest horse.

 

My friend took me to the bar and introduced me to a number of his gay buddies, who were drinking—of course—light beer. Feeling like I was wearing someone else’s underwear, I stood there and tried to be inconspicuous, praying that no one would recognize me. Then someone I had graduated from high school with approached me with a surprised look. She asked, “What are you doing here?” And I quickly blurted out, “I’m married to a woman and here with a friend, but I’m not a gay guy, so please don’t tell anyone I’m a queer.” She laughed and we chatted for a few minutes until a song she obviously liked came on, and she then shuffled off to the dance floor with her girlfriend.

 

Then a guy introduced himself and hit on me. Stunned, I did not immediately respond but instead stared at the poor guy, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar, how he could mistake me for a gay guy, and if I was really good-looking. It then hit me and I asked him, “Are you my mailman?” He replied, “Yes, I am a mailman.” Suddenly, I wanted to kill myself and never get mail again.

 

My buddy had abandoned me at the bar, and I frantically searched for him in hopes that if I was with him, no one else would hit on me. I found him drinking a fruity drink and flirting with an enormous man. I asked him how long we were staying since the first five minutes in this hell were about all I could handle. But he said, “Mark, I have to go to a special room upstairs for about an hour, so you are welcome to come up with me or stay down here until I return.” I asked what they did in that room, hoping I would not throw up my dinner after hearing his answer. Here’s how he responded: “It’s not an orgy. It’s a meeting for the gay rodeo committee.”

 

Gay rodeo?

 

Those were simply the last two words I had ever anticipated hearing together. He explained that the queer cowboys were hoping to have a rodeo and that he was on the planning committee. Not wanting to sit at the bar for an hour getting hit on, I chose to go to the planning meeting with a few dozen other guys. We all sat in a circle like we were in a home Bible study. The meeting opened with introductions, everyone giving their names and vocations.

 

I had prided myself on aspiring to the pastorate but now found myself in an awkward position. My buddy leaned over and whispered in my ear, “What are you going to tell them you do for a living?” Unsure, I said, “I have no idea. Maybe I’ll tell them I am a teacher or a spiritual director.”

 

When it came to my turn, I tried to avoid the inevitable conflict and lied to them by saying I was a spiritual something-or-other, hoping the queer cowboys would smile, nod, and ignore me. But one of the cowboys asked what my religion was. So I came out of my closet and told him I was a Bible-thumping, old-school Christian preacher, causing some of the guys to laugh, thinking I was kidding. The rest of the meeting went well and was not all that different from the boring staff meetings we had at the megachurch, where people who hadn’t done much tried to appear as if they had.  The guys were very nice, so afterward when we returned downstairs, I ended up buying some of them beers. However, I did not drink that evening because I wanted to respect the church’s authority aver me, which forbade alcohol consumption.

 

One of the guys asked if I was actually a real pastor and began explaining how his lover and many of his friends had died of AIDS. Actually, he began discipling me, articulating with great pain the loneliness and death that filled his community and explaining why he feared death. He asked what happens when someone dies and wanted to know what would happen to him, in particular. He was attentive as I sought to relate the gospel to his life: sin causes death, but Jesus is God who became a man and died—when he was about the same age as this man—in order to rise from death, forgive sin, and give eternal life to those who repent of sin and trust in him. I explained that only Jesus can take us through our own deaths and comfort us after the deaths of others, because he alone has been through death and come back.

 

The man was not converted during our chat but in many ways, I was.

 

As I left the bar, God convicted me about my proud addiction to morality and my attempt to look like a decent guy so that others would like me. I was so insecure that I feared not only that my Christian friends would see me walking out of a gay bar with queer cowboys but also that the queer cowboys would reject me for being a Bible thumper who, deep down, believed they were running headlong to hell in their cowboy boots.  I cared more about how I appeared to people than about whether I shared the passion of Jesus for those who are lost.

 

That night, I learned that reformission requires that Christians and their churches move forward on their knees, continually confessing their addictions to morality and the appearance of godliness, which does not penetrate the heart and transform lives. In the end, I learned that God’s mission is not to create a team of moral and decent people but rather to create a movement of holy loving missionaries who are comfortable and truthful around lost sinners and who, in this way, look more like Jesus than most of his pastors do.

 

A man who claimed God told him “I have set you apart from among many to lead men” was clearly unhappy that he wasn’t already leading men.  This was the guy, Driscoll told us, whom God used to bring him to faith.  The same Bible-thumper Driscoll mentioned in his 1992 op ed? It’s not entirely certain but it seems a possibility.

 

By now it’s really hard to shake the impression that Mark Driscoll has always been obsessed with status and appearance and that even though he claimed he was confronted with his addiction to morality (i.e. needing to view himself as morally superior to others) it’s tough to know to what extent he has really shaken off that “addiction to morality”. If anything it is possible that the more entrenched Mark Driscoll has been in a career of public ministry the more his “addiction to morality” may resurface or have, if you will, a resurgence.

 

Ironically Mark Driscoll’s account here has revealed that he believed himself better than the moralists in the pulpits addicted to their morality by being willing to go to a gay bar.  But notice the conditions he presented in the agreement—Mark Driscoll was willing to go to the gay bar so that he could have a response to his gay friend’s observation that it was unfair of Mark to invite a gay friend to church when there was no reason to assume Mark would ever accept an invitation to go to a gay bar. In other words, the context here is a bet, an implicit one, and Driscoll accepted the challenge and shared that he accepted the challenge to validate his fitness for ministry in contrast to the implied moralist pulpiteers he’s better than.  Driscoll was paradoxically revealing his addiction to morality even in his putative stance against moralism. 

 

Now we finally get to the 2006 book in which Mark Driscoll wrote a history of Mars Hill Church that came in the form of “here’s how I did it” manual:

 

6.   From Mark Driscoll’s 2006 history of Mars Hill

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

Chapter One: Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 and I Want to Use it to Buy Bullets (0-45 people)

 

Pages 38-39

It was the first half of 1996 and I was twenty-five years of age chronologically, six years of age spiritually, and trying to gather enough people to launch Mars Hill Church in the city of Seattle.  …

 

I had spent the previous two years as the college ministry intern plankton at the bottom of the food chain at a multiracial megachurch and had used the youth room to run a college group in Seattle. College ministry soon started to feel like hanging out with an ex-girlfriend, so I hit the eject button because life-stage ministry was a vocational dead end.

…

So I decided to start a church, for three reasons. First, I hated going to church and wanted one I liked, so I thought I would just start my own. Second, God had spoken to me in one of those weird charismatic moments and told me to start a church. Third, I am scared of God and try to do what he says.

 

Page 53

So in an effort to clarify our mission, I wrote down on paper the first of what would eventually be many strategic plans. I shot for the moon rather foolishly and decided that our church that was not big enough to fill a bus would plant multiple churches, run a concert venue, start a Bible institute, host conferences, and change the city for Jesus.  …

 

It is at this point that we can detect a tension. If Mark Driscoll “really” hated going to church and started one so he would like one then what happened to Doug Busby? Busby gets an acknowledgment at the start of Confessions, in fact, so Busby hasn’t exactly been erased. Jon Phelps got a nod.  What has changed is not necessarily the specific men and women Driscoll cited as inspirations and influences but what a friend of mine once called “Driscoll double vision”, in which Mark Driscoll looks better to himself and others look worse compared to him when he looks back on his life.  By 2006 Mars Hill was firmly established as one of the fastest-growing churches in the United States and Mark Driscoll’s accounts of how and why he started Mars Hill seem to start excising all of those people who, however essential their roles to his conversion, calling or training may have been in prior accounts, are just not as important as Mark Driscoll telling us how he did it, how he and Jesus started this amazing thing that was called Mars Hill Church.

 

But what he absolutely had to tell us was that he had been plankton on the ministry food chain. Life stage ministry was a vocational dead end.  Driscoll was sure God had set him apart from among men to lead many and that sure wasn’t going to happen if he stayed as an intern handling college ministry at Antioch Bible Church.  Driscoll’s careerist ambitions and his eagerness to learn-by-doing get the better of any potential impulse to slow down, study to show himself approved, and demonstrate that he’s done the work of study and spent time developing the character to be considered what people would conventionally call a pastor. 

 

I think we’re starting to see a pattern emerge that for Mark Driscoll his entrepreneurial drive is, to him, the surest sign of his calling to pastoral ministry and at no point has he been willing to reconsider the possibility that whatever voice he heard out in the land of the American Redoubt might not have been God as much as the voice of his own ambitions.  We’ll eventually get to some accounts he shared of the kind of man he hoped to be before he converted to evangelical Christianity and they’ll show us, I believe, that careerist ambitions to leading the masses has always been in Mark’s character.

 

That Mark Driscoll wanted desperately to escape his urban poor upbringing is something that keeps coming back in his accounts. Thus we get the following:

 

7.   From Real Marriage, an early 2012 thumbnail sketch of the Driscoll clan

 

Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0

 

Pages 5-6

I (Mark) was raised in a very rough neighborhood near the airport in Seattle before it was incorporated as a city. Without a local police force, it resembled the Wild West. There were multiple strip clubs, seedy massage parlors, and hourly rate motels down the street from my home. The prostitutes walked the streets openly and were brazen enough to even walk up and knock on my car window, seeking “business,” as I waited for the light to turn green. Some of these young women attended my high school; and serial killers murdered some of them. Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer picked up many of their victims in my neighborhood, even dumping at least two of their bodies at my Little League field.

 

The men on my father’s side included uneducated alcoholics, mental patients, and women beaters. This includes an uncle who died of gangrene and his sons, roughly my age, who have been in prison for beating women and were supposedly on the television show Cops. One of the main reasons my parents moved from North Dakota to Seattle was to get away from some family members when I was a very young boy.

 

Growing up, my goal was to get out of my neighborhood and enjoy a new and better life. I did not want to get trapped by gangs, drugs, alcohol, crime or manipulative women. I wanted to get an education; make some money; live in a better neighborhood; marry a nice beautiful woman; and be a father. This was my vision from a very young age.

 

I did not drink and to this day have never done any drugs or taken a puff of a cigarette. I did well in sports and school. By fifteen I had lied about my age, falsified my birth certificate, bought a car, and drove myself to work at a 7-Eleven (near the strip clubs), where I sold liquor, condoms, porn, and rubbing alcohol for freebasing drug addicts who lived in the low-income apartments next door.  Around this time I also started having sex with a girlfriend.

 

I was the “good guy” in my high school. I graduated high school “Most Likely to Succeed,” student body president, Man of the Year, editor of the school newspaper, and a four-year letterman in baseball. I was part of a bond campaign to renovate our school and was active in a state political campaign. I was a moral, religious boy from a Catholic home who, for the most part, stayed out of trouble, despite a short wick, a foul mouth, and bad temper that resulted in doling out more than a few beatings to various guys—usually for what they were doing to women and children.  In short, I was a good guy and a tough guy, so I thought.

 

At seventeen I became smitten with a cute girl named Grace who was a grade older ins chool.  A friend in common introduced us, and before long we were going out on our first date.  Grace was a pastor’s daughter, and although she was a Christian, she had fallen into drinking and partying. Underneath the “fun girl” image, though, she was hurting. It was a lonelyplace for a young woman to be. She was the youngest of three girls and was very shy and naïve, not understanding the world around her.

 

Innocence in a child is normal and healthy, but naivety is when you believe things or trust people without ever questioning them, and it leads to a lack of discernment.  … For example, Grace used to walk alone at night around a dark and dangerous campus and would unknowingly put herself in dangerous positions with guys.

 

That the Driscoll clan in North Dakota was full of men who were alcoholics who beat their women is clear enough.  In the 2012 book we get another variation on Mark’s conversion account and we’ll notice that the subtractions are substantial.  It is at this point that I think we have a firmer case that Mark has excised nearly all the people who he had mentioned in earlier accounts of his conversion process. I think Cosper’s overall implication that Mark kept changing his conversion story is a solid intuition but I think, as I trust I have shown, that it’s necessary to slog through as many of those accounts as possible to start seeing patterns. So, here we go again:

 

Pages 7-8

 

Not long after, God saved me while I was sitting in my dorm, reading the Bible Grace had given me. Back in high school, once she suspected that I was probably not a Christian, she did not break up with me as she should have. Instead, she bought me a nice leather Bible with my name on it. I had not really read it up until that point, but it kept it around as a sort of a good-luck charm. That day I finally picked it up. I was not going to church, had not heard a gospel presentation or read the Bible, and no one lead me to Christ. In Romans 1:6, I read, “You also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ” (NIV). God highlighted that statement in my soul, and it seemed evident o me from that moment forward that my life was not my own. I belonged to Jesus Christ like a tool in His hand for whatever He wanted.

 

I soon went searching for a church, unclear of what I was even looking for and afraid that I might end up in a cult. By God’s grace, I ended up in a solid Bible-teaching church, where I was taught about Jesus, marriage, sex, and family. I absolutely loved my first church; the people were invaluable in teaching me about life as God intended, without pretention or legalistic rules. I often thank God that my first church was a wonderful church and one of the highlights of my entire life.

 

In the spring I attended my first men’s retreat with the church. The pastor told us to spend some time in prayer with God. I went for a walk and asked God what He wanted me to do with the rest of my life. Uncertain of what would happen, I was basically just walking along a river in the Idaho woods, talking aloud to God, when He spoke to me. I had never experienced anything like that moment. God told me to devote my life to four things. He told me to marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches. Since that day in 1990, that’s what I have been pursuing by God’s grace.

…

Ah, so in this account he dropped the “I hated going to church and started one I liked” account. He loved his first church, which apparently was the one pastored by Doug Busby. Then we get the walk along a river in the Idaho woods and the audible calling.  Driscoll had long since omitted the “I have called you out from among many to lead men” part and emphasized the four things to do. Since in each case Driscoll’s account has it that God audibly designated him with a special destiny and purpose there isn’t really a contradiction between any of these accounts. What is more slippery is whether or not in God reportedly calling Mark Driscoll to do these things where Mark “needed” to be audibly told by God to do what, across the accumulated accounts of his conversion process, he had been telling people he was sure God was going to use him to do anyway!

 

By 2013 we start to hear a little more about Mark Driscoll’s family history and get some signs that the Catholicism of the Driscolls may not have been all that nominal after all.  When Driscoll stops talking about himself and how gay his childhood priest was and how he didn’t wanna be that guy kind of pastor and talks about his family it turns out the maybe the Driscolls weren’t entirely nominal Catholics after all.

 

8.   From 2013, Charismatic Catholic background emerges

A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future
Mark Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2013 by On Mission, LLC and Mark Driscoll
ISBN 978-1-4143-8362
ISBN 978-1-4143-8948-6

Pages 17-18

 

… I was raised in an Irish Catholic home. My family is from Country Cork in southern Ireland, and we have been devoutly Catholic for as far back as any history can be traced. (My father and I ventured to the homeland to investigate the Driscoll heritage for ourselves.) My paternal grandmother was a staunch Catholic who preferred Latin Mass and was not enthusiastic about the changes adopted at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Despite her emphasis on tradition, it is my sincere belief that my grandmother did possess saving faith in Jesus and was born again by the Holy Spirit rather than being just born into the church. My mother was also born into a Catholic family but she was born again during the Catholic Charismatic Renewal of the 1970s, when she started attending prayer meetings and Bible studies with evangelical charismatics.

 

So I was born into a Catholic family with a believing mother and grandmother. I was baptized as an infant, went to Catholic school for a few years, and served as an altar boy. By the time I was a teenager, however, I attended church only for holidays, weddings, and funerals, mainly because that’s what my family did. I enjoyed traditions such as sitting under stained glass by candlelight during midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but beyond the aesthetics I had no interest in church. I professed a faith that I most certainly did not possess and hardly ever practiced.

 

In my junior year of high school I met an evangelical pastor’s daughter named Grace (who is now my wife, my best friend, and the mother of our five children). Smitten with her, I asked her out. She responded by asking me if I was a Christian, to which I replied with a confident yes. After dating me for a while, however, she began to have her suspicions I had no innate zeal for Jesus or Scripture and showed no evidence of new life in Christ. She gave me a nice Bible as a gift, and by God’s grace I was saved while reading it during my freshman year in college. 

 

Now here, we see, that the entire conversion process for Mark Driscoll from nominal Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism has been transformed into he read the Bible Grace gave him and boom!  Conversion.  But we learn that he regarded his grandmother as truly saved despite her conservative Catholicism and highlights that his mother was born again after contact with a Charismatic Catholic Renewal enclave.

 

These are the kinds of details Driscoll was not in a rush to mention back in the years when Mars Hill’s survival depended on the patronage of Antioch Bible Church or when Mark Driscoll was working on his degree from Western Seminary.  This does not strike me as some kind of conspiracy on Mark Driscoll’s part to lie to anyone about his messy and in some respects fairly conventional personal spiritual history—he has shown himself savvy and strategic about what to say to audiences. Among cesssationists whose checkbooks he needed to keep his church afloat he “leaned cessationist” and became a charismatic with a seatbelt when he no longer depended on their support and now, post Mars Hill Church, with friends in the charismatic scene, he’s embraced his apostolic gifting.  It seems a bit mercenary and even opportunistic, yes, but it’s not necessarily dishonest.  I suspect Mark Driscoll became precisely as Calvinist as he felt he needed to be to in good faith accept patronage from the Presbyterian minister David Nicholas and Driscoll still self-identifies as Reformed.  Since one is not obliged to be a Calvinist by being Reformed there’s simply no deception as such here.  If Driscoll has lied he’s lied about other things in other ways. 

 

By 2016 Mark Driscoll was highlighting his Catholic background again to show that he had an arty side.

 

9.   From 2016 at markdriscoll.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20161202180532/http://markdriscoll.org/4-ways-artistry-can-become-idolatry/

…

An arty, jock, altar boy

 

I was raised Catholic and served for a few years as an altar boy while attending Catholic grade school. I’ve got an artistic bent. I like architecture, interior design, music, visual arts, etc. Growing up I was an odd mix: a jock who played a lot of sports, a fighter who got in more than a few brawls, and an artist who liked to sketch, draw, and experiment with various mediums. I appreciated the artistry of the Catholic Church. Stained glass, paintings, colors, icons, statues, candles—it was all quite beautiful.

 

Some Catholics are born-again, Jesus-loving Christians. I was not one of them. I was a spiritual religious guy until Jesus saved me at the age of 19. At that time, I started attending an evangelical Protestant church. The first thing I noticed is that it was very plain in comparison to my Catholic upbringing. No icons. No paintings. No candles.

 

Pretty soon, I started reading up on the history of the Protestant Reformation. I learned that Protestants were intentionally plain in the building and furnishing of their church worship spaces. They feared that some people had started acting like pagans worshiping created things instead of the Creator God, as if art was a mediatorial conduit between us and God, bringing God near to us. This made sense to me as I had seen people pray to saints, leave gifts at the statues of saints much likes pagans do their own false gods, and let the focus of worship deviate from the Creator to things created.

 

Now as we have shifted from Mars Hill era accounts to post-Mars Hill accounts we begin to see something else.  As Driscoll has pivoted into a season where his books are published by Charisma House we see a corresponding pivot in how he presents his previous theological education and experiences.

 

By now we’re getting a more streamlined story from Driscoll where it’s just him and his Bible.  Now that his books are published by Charisma House references to Augustine dwindle and references to Aquinas all but vanish. There’s no struggle on the part of a nominal or lapsed Catholic but there is one guy reading the Bible his girlfriend gave him. Driscoll has expunged the entire process he’d recounted earlier during his Mars Hill years.  It may be tempting to think that Driscoll altered his stories of his conversion, calling and founding of Mars Hill Church as Mars Hill Church evolved, but it seems as though the real revisionism has taken place

10.From Driscoll’s first Charisma House published work in 2018

Spirit-Filled Jesus

Mark Driscoll and Grace Driscoll

Published by Charisma House

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Driscoll

ISBN 9781629995229 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781629995236 (ebook)

LCCN 2018029899 (print)

LCCN 2018034467 (ebook)

 

Pages xxi-xii

… When I was eighteen in 1989, a pastor’s daughter I was smitten with gave me my first Bible. She even had my name embossed on the front. (Eventually I bought her a ring, so for any single guys reading this, the moral of the story is: if a nice Christian girl buys you a Bible, you should buy her a ring!) I took that Bible to college with me, started reading it out of curiosity, and became a Christian simply through Bible reading—something I had not done much before. I then found a great church that helped me further learn the Bible. [emphases added]

 

At a Bible study class I brought my Bible and a big book on systematic theology. I asked my pastor if the theology book was a good one. He pointed at my Bible and asked if I’d read all of it yet. I told him I had not. He took the theology text out of my hand. It was like a stickup without a gun. My wise pastor then told me I needed to read the entire Bible before I read anything else.

 

I went home and started reading my Bible. I read the whole Bible in a short time—weeks or maybe months. I went back to my pastor to report my finished assignment, fully expecting him to tell me to start reading the theology text. Instead, he told me I needed to read a short book in my Bible, to study it until I had committed much of it to memory and could explain it from my heart, and to continue this process until I died. That’s what I have been doing ever since. 

 

I’ve also been doing four other things I was instructed to do early in my Christian walk. At the time, I had barely started going to church, and I impulsively signed up for a men’s retreat, a first for me. On a crisp weekend a group of us drove toward the Washington/Idaho border, stopping at a camp set amidst a rugged landscape of big mountains and rocks.

 

Being a city kid, this was not the kind of place or crowd where I usually hung out. There was nothing for miles and miles, and the bearded brothers got together to study and sing. They belted out old hymns as if they meant them. Toward the end of a meeting the pastor announced, “I want each of you to schedule some time with God just to talk to Him.”

 

“A meeting with God?” I thought. “OK, I don’t know what that means.” I just decided to go for a walk.

 

A big river flowed through the camp, splitting the trees and creating a beautiful sound as the water rushed over the rocks raging with whitecaps. I walked upstream alongside the river, enjoying the quiet and sun and raw beauty. I hiked out and back for maybe an hour, talking to God conversationally. “God—like—well—I’m supposed to schedule a meeting with You.” I talked out loud. I didn’t know if that was a good idea. I didn’t know how to do this. “SSo it’s me—Mark—and You know—I—um—what do You want me to do now that I’m a Chrsitian?” After a pause I added something like, “I’ll do whatever You want.”

 

I waited all by myself.

 

And God spoke to me audibly.

 

He said, “Marry Grace, preach the Bible, train young men, and plant churches.”

 

God had just told me to do four things, but honestly I had no idea what any of it meant. I had just met Jesus. Grace and I weren’t engaged. I didn’t really know what pastors did since I grew up catholic and the only pastor I knew was or priest, a poor virgin who lived at the church and walked around in a bathrobe (or at least that’s’ what I thought as a kid). I hoped maybe there was another kind of pastor.

 

Imagine where you were at nineteen, just trying to figure out what comes next. I wasn’t sure what God had in store, but it sounded like an adventure. I just wanted to obey God—whatever that meant.

 

So it’s in the post Mars Hill Church narratives that Driscoll seems to have undertaken the most substantial revisions of his story of his conversion process and calling.

 

It is in the Charisma House publication era of Mark and Grace Driscoll’s careers as public ministers that we get some indication from Grace Driscoll of a point I’ve made elsewhere that Mark Driscoll’s earliest exposure to spiritual warfare writings didn’t come from charismatic or Pentecostal groups at all but more from the Merrill Unger wing of evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

 

11.Mark and Grace Driscoll share their respective family doctrinal milieus

Win Your War: Fight in the Realm You Don't See for Freedom in the One You Do 

Mark and Grace Driscoll 

Charisma House (2019) 

ISBNs 9781629996257 and  9781629996264

Pages xxvii-xxviii

 

… Long before we met in 1988, got married in 1992, and started planting our first church in 1995, we grew up in very different families with different levels of awareness of the spiritual realm.

 

I (Grace) grew up in a Christian home with two older sisters. My dad was an Evangelical pastor who graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary. My parents planted a church before I was born and served there for over forty years. My dad did his share of counseling with his gift of mercy, so he began a recovery ministry for addicts that brought him face to face with demonic activity.

 

Growing up, I remember stories of people who manifested demonic activity. Some were tormented until they experienced emotional deliverance. Others suffered physical torment until they were healed by the removal of the unclean spirits. Dad told me stories of people who manifested superhuman strength, even throwing him across the room. At other times, demons would inflict pain upon him when he touched a person. It all seemed kind of crazy to hear as a child, but I knew Dad was confident of God’s power over the demonic, so I was too.

 

I (Mark) grew up in a Catholic home with a mom who was saved and healed at a prayer meeting with Charismatic and Pentecostal women. I did not know the Lord until age nineteen in college, reading the Bible that Grace bought for me. But I did have some encounters with the demonic.

 

My most vivid memory is from high school. I was coming down the stairs at a friend’s house and felt a strong force pressing against my chest, prohibiting me from coming down the stairs. I pulled myself forward on the handrails and, letting go, found myself suspended in midair parallel with the stairs. When I told my friend about this experience , his mother explained that a priest had lived there. The house had an office as well as a confessional where people came to have meetings with the priest until the day he killed himself in the house. Then my friend’s family moved in, and the father was very involved in the occult. As a result, unusual things were common in the home.

 

In spite of these encounters with the supernatural, neither of us came from a background where we learned how to engage in spiritual warfare. Grace had experienced an attack on her family through sickness and nightmares, but her dad was more involved with battling against it. I was a new Christian who slowly worked through a master’s degree at a seminary with Conservative Baptist roots. In addition I interned at a church where the senior pastor believed that the supernatural gifts of the Bible had ceased and that Christians could not have much influence on demons.

 

So when demonic things started happening in our ministry, we did not know what to do. We began reading books on the issue and meeting with godly pastors who had some insight. More than anything we prayed and studied the Bible a lot, even looking up every single occurrence of Satan and demonic activity in the Bible. The Lord was gracious, and we learned about such things as discernment, effective prayer, and how to see people liberated from spiritual oppression with the principles of Ephesians 6:10-20

 

By God’s power we saw people delivered from spiritual oppression. Many people stopped taking medications because their tormenting voices and panic attacks went away. Some people were also miraculously healed. We did not speak much about these things so as not to detract from our focus on Jesus or confuse our young people who were just learning the basics of Christianity.

 

Mark Driscoll’s account does some theological heavy-lifting by implication in this Charisma House publication.  The implication latent in this account is that because his formative theological training was at a Conservative Baptist seminary and the church he was at early in his ministry path was cessationist that, somehow, there was no set of resources to help him and Grace navigate spiritual warfare.  Merrill Unger’s Biblical Demonology was a book based on a treatise that Unger did on the topic in the 1940s. I propose that Mark Driscoll here is pandering to a Charisma House audience by implying rather than ever saying that he was unprepared for the realities of spiritual warfare because those Baptists and cessationists don’t understand spiritual things.  In fact, Unger’s treatise on demonology goes back more than half a century and there is no inherent reason for fundamentalists and evangelicals who reject all forms of continuationist pneumatology to not have mountains of books on spiritual warfare.  The slippery movement here is less in what Mark Driscoll says or doesn’t say than in the kinds of inferences he’s willing to let his readers make about the inadequacies of his theological education on the topic of spiritual warfare.

 

But that is a larger trope in Driscoll’s accounts, how he has had to hit the ground running and learn by doing while all those people with more degrees than Fahrenheit in their ivory towers are busy doing nothing. 

 

Here’s the thing, looking up every single instance of a satan or a daimon or an unclean spirit in the Bible is not the same as exegeting every single text to find out if those biblical passages affirm the systematic theological diabology developed since the medieval period. In other words, the first satan in the Bible isn’t the serpent in Genesis 3 but the messenger from Yahweh sent to dispatch Balaam.  But Mark and Grace Driscoll do not seem to have engaged very seriously with any of the biblical scholarship on the questions of how and why various strands of demonology and diabology evolved in the Persian exilic era onward in Jewish writings. Instead what Mark and Grace seem to have done is read as much of the self-help popular level spiritual warfare manuals available within evangelicalism and maybe charismatic theology. What this means is that the version of spiritual warfare they have imbibed could run the risk of being a kind of Christianized anti-magic rather than a reading of spiritual warfare texts and traditions within a larger context of apocalyptic imagination, millenarian impulses and responses to exile and foreign imperial occupation that you would actually need to engage with in order to understand all of those passages throughout the Bible that Christians have frequently taken to refer to what we colloquially call “demons”.  

 

Ironically biblical scholars in the last forty years have taken for granted that spirit possession and exorcism were commonplace in the ancient near east.  In his book Jesus the Exorcist Graham Twelftree even pointed out that the probable reason the author of John never presented exorcisms is because itinerant exorcists were so commonplace in the life and times of Jesus there would be no compelling case to present Jesus as the Christ by showing that he was, like countless of his contemporaries, an itinerant exorcist!  If Mark Driscoll believes that spiritual warfare and demons are “tremendously controversial” and “people don’t want to talk about this” it’s probably because he hasn’t bothered to even remotely keep up with the last forty years of biblical scholarship on those topics.  He’s been too busy shilling self-help books in a genre he claims doesn’t help people.  Well, okay, if self-help books don’t help people, Mark, why do you keep writing and publishing them?

 

Now we have, at long last, taken a tour through a few of Mark Driscoll’s accounts of his conversion and calling stories.  Now we need to backtrack and take a look at some passages from a 2008 book in which Mark Driscoll told the world not who he was but he claimed he hoped he would be had he not had his conversion to evangelical Protestant Christianity.

 

PART TWO: HINTS OF THE LIFE HE ONCE HOPED TO LIVE BEFORE HIS CONVERSION EXPERIENCE

 

We can establish clearly that the majority of Mark Driscoll’s book Death By Love was completed by 2006.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061025035511/http://www.theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-09-19_its_always_something_at_mars_hill_church

…

We are still giving 10 percent of our money to help lead the Acts 29 Church Planting Network. I’m still writing a lot, including a book titled Death by Love on the subject of the cross that is nearing completion. This week we did a free training about preaching for nearly a hundred pastors in our area and the guys ate a lot of meat for lunch. We captured my lecture on preaching and will vodcast it in chunks here on this site free of charge, as always, before too long. We’ve also upgraded our cameras to high-def so that the free stuff we do give away through Resurgence and Mars Hill will be as high quality as possible in an effort to help equip as many people around the world as possible on our dime.

…

 

The book, however, was not published until 2008. Given how much was going on inside Mars Hill during the 2006-2007 period with its governance changes it may have been Driscoll had planned to publish the book earlier than 2008 but that’s not something we can sure about.  What we can see from the book is that it was a series of letters written by Mark Driscoll to people within Mars Hill or its history to expound upon different models of atonement.  Driscoll basically did a more popular-level riff on John Stott’s The Cross of Christ.

 

In the book Driscoll dropped hints at what kind of man he was planning to be before, as he so famously and often recounted, Jesus got ahold of him.  So we get this:

 

DEATH BY LOVE
Copyright (c) 2008 by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Published by Crossway Books
PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0423-5
ISBN-10: 1433501295
ISBN-13: 9781433501296

From Chapter Two:

Lust is My God: Jesus is Thomas’s Redemption

 

Pages 67-68

What scares me most is that I am so very much like you. We both grew up poor. We both grew up as highly competitive jocks. We both grew up smarter and tougher than most of the people we knew. We both saw our first porn magazine at an early age. We both had sex with our first girlfriend in our teens. We both had violent tempers that intimidated other people. We both graduated with honors as good students and respected leaders. We both went to college intent on fighting, partying, and having a lot of sex with hot girls. [emphasis added]

 

Yet, unlike you, Jesus grabbed me by the neck and redeemed me from the life I was pursuing. I thought I would get married some day, have a few kids, make a lot of money running some company, commit adultery and look at porn on the side (but seek to manage it so that it did not affect my family), lose my temper now and then and then to cuss out my wife and kids, and still attend church occasionally, because I considered myself a good spiritual person. [emphasis added]

 

Since Jesus redeemed me from the life I was headed for, things could not be more different. To be honest, I am actually quite surprised that I have been faithful to my wife since I met her in 1988. I’m equally surprised that I have not been in a fight since Jesus redeemed me.

 

The truth is that you and I are exactly alike in every way but one. Despite the fact that I have not lived in sexual sin as you have, the Bible says that regardless of all the “good” things I did as a non-Christian, I was corrupt and dominated by sinful desires at the core. By redeeming me from one way of life and redeeming me to another way of life, though, Jesus has done something remarkable for me and has saved me from myself. My life is going well; much better, in fact, than the life I had planned for myself. He has given me a new heart so my deepest desires are like his. None of it, however, is the result of my own doing. Because I am not a great guy; rather, Jesus is a great God.

 

It is at this point that it seems very hard to escape the fact that what Mark Driscoll tells people about his life story is so inextricable from the literally doctrinal points he wants to make as a preacher that it’s not possible to ignore this tendency in his work.

 

But how does this fit with Mark Driscoll’s numerous claims that he thought of himself as a good guy, as a guy who was better than other people who were lower than him on the ethical food chain? 

 

Let’s keep in mind that Driscoll said he was largely done with the book by later 2006 so this material could have been written anywhere between 2005 and 2006. Yet for those who have read all of the timeline at Joyful Exiles what are we to make of Driscoll’s saying how great and happy his life had been in the letter to “Thomas” when in 2007 Mark Driscoll claimed his life had become so stressful and miserable he was thinking of bailing on being a pastor?

 

https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf

 

A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll

November 8, 2007

Dear Mars Hill Church Members,

 

I grew up in Seattle not knowing Jesus. Thankfully, Jesus saved me when I was nineteen years of age while a college freshman. Shortly thereafter He led me to my first church, where a humble and godly pastor was used of God to change my life by teaching me about Jesus from the Bible. While attending my first men’s retreat with that church, God spoke to me for the first time in my life. He told me to marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches. It was then, at the age of nineteen, that I began preparing to devote my life to obeying His call for me.

 

I studied speech in my undergraduate work to prepare for preaching. I joined as many as six Bible studies a quarter to learn Scripture. I began reading nearly a book a day, which continued for many years. I married Grace while still in college. In addition, I began recruiting college friends to one day be part of the core group for Mars Hill Church, which I intended to see planted in Seattle. Following graduation from college, Grace and I moved back to Seattle where we got jobs and started settling in as a broke young couple trying to figure out how and where to plant Mars Hill Church.

 

By the age of twenty-four we were gathering the core group for the church plant while I was working part-time at Antioch Bible Church and a Christian bookstore that was open in Greenwood at the time. Joining me in the plant were two godly men named Mike Gunn and Lief Moi who were very much devoted to the work and, although young and inexperienced, I praised God for the support of those men who remain friends to this day by God’s grace.

 

At the age of twenty-five I had the privilege of preaching the opening sermon at Mars Hill Church and I have remained the primary preaching pastor ever since. I have learned a lot over the years. Much of that learning has been through mistakes, failure, and pain. The early years of the church, chronicled in my book Confessions, were very difficult in every way. In more recent years, our fast growth has been a wonderful blessing but also fraught with difficulties.

 

For me personally, everything culminated at the end of 2006. Despite rapid growth, the church was not healthy and neither was I. [emphasis added] 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. [emphasis added]

 

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 1 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.

 

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.

 

By 2006 Driscoll was getting offers to be at other churches and after ten years of giving his life to Mars Hill he found it troubling that such offers would even be intriguing.

 

So what are we to make of Mark Driscoll’s claim to “Thomas” in the Death By Love chapter he may have finished some time in 2006?  Can we really believe that whenever he wrote that chapter he was being honest when he wrote, “My life is going well; much better, in fact, than the life I had planned for myself”? If what he wrote in 2007 to members of Mars Hill Church about his health and the state of the church really had been in the 2006-2007 period, and maybe back in 2005, it’s impossible to see how Mark could have been honest in what he wrote to “Thomas”. But then if we consider that the whole point of Mark’s writing to the man was to expound upon a theory of atonement then Mark was maybe not exactly “lying” as still, perhaps as ever, using his own life and the lives of others as teachable moments to expound what he regarded as good doctrine.

 

Now did Mark Driscoll really think that before he became a born-again evangelical Christian in 1990 that he, “…would get married some day, have a few kids, make a lot of money running some company, commit adultery and look at porn on the side (but seek to manage it so that it did not affect my family), lose my temper now and then and then to cuss out my wife and kids, and still attend church occasionally … “? Is that a reflection of who Mark Driscoll really aspired to be had he not had his conversion process or was this possibly a rhetorical flourish Driscoll made when writing to a specific person making a specific doctrinal point? If Driscoll was aspiring to do what he claimed he wanted to do then his moral compass with respect to how good a person he claimed he thought he was prior to his conversion process may have been far more broken than he imagined it was. On the one hand his accounts of his conversion process suggest that in reading the Bible and engaging the work of Christian authors he was confronted with precisely how bad he really was. On the other hand, how nominal a Catholic did Mark Driscoll have to be to have thought that if he aspired to the things he claimed to “Thomas” he wanted to do in life before Jesus got to him to believe that all of that kind of aspiration meant Mark Driscoll was a “good person”?

 

Driscoll let slip in passages that pornography was something he was exposed to farther back and more frequently than he seems to have subsequently let on. This motif comes up again later in Death By Love alongside  Mark’s account of how pervasive alcoholism and domestic violence against women was in the Driscoll clan: 

 

From Chapter Eight:

My Daddy is a Pastor: Jesus is Gideon’s Unlimited Limited Atonement

Pages 164-166

…

My wife, Grace, and I love Gideon and thank God for him often. My wife is petite, and I have a big head, which resulted in C-sections with the birth of each of our children. Having endured one miscarriage and four C-sections, Grace was ready to be done with pregnancies. But I was not yet ready to do anything to prevent God from giving us ac hild. So, we left it in God’s hands and were given Gideon, whom I affectionately refer to as Guppy, for being the youngest, and as Flip Flop, because at a very young age he decided he only wanted to wear flip-flops on the wrong feet for the rest of his life.  To her credit, Grace often gives mea  hug and thanks me for not stopping at four children, because Gideon has been an absolute blessing and a joy to our family.

 

Grace and I first met at the age of seventeen in high school. By God’s grace, Jesus saved me and made me a Christian when I was nineteen, and at age twenty-one Grace and I were married. I do not believe I would have been a good father before my salvation because I was prone to moments of rage.

 

My upbringing included violence and, not knowing Jesus, I began to adopt some of the very same sins, such as anger and violence, that surrounded me. Had Jesus not saved me from myself, Satan, sin, and death I am certain that I would not have married a Christian woman like Grace. Without the cross I am also certain that I would not have had an enduring and forgiving marriage, and I would be prone to outbursts of anger and rage toward my children. However, because of Jesus’ powerful transforming grace, Gideon’s dad is a Christian with a marriage in which the gospel is doing its work every day.

 

I am no longer an angry, violent man, but rather a daddy who is very physically affectionate and likes to wrestle and snuggle with his kids, including Gideon.  …

 

Pages 166-167

…

For example, before I met Jesus I was guilty of sexual sin. I was sexually active prior to marriage and also occasionally looked at pornography. [emphasis added] But because Jesus died for those sins and saved me from them, I have been able to put those sins to death. As a result, you were brought into a family where your mom and I truly love one another and have been faithful to one another in every way. We know that apart from Jesus dying for our sin, sin would have killed our marriage. You would have been either raised by a single mother or trapped in a home of sin and bitterness, marked by unrest and hostility between your mother and me, if it were not for Jesus’ death on the cross.

…

Jesus has been at work in our extended family. Your grandpa Joseph, from whom you get your middle name, has been used by God to change the entire course of our family. His family history included a lot of drunken domestic violence, and, because Jesus died for the sins he has committed and those committed against him, your grandpa has been able to put to death the sins that have plagued men in our family for generations. In many ways your grandpa is a bit of a patriarch, and our family history has made a great transition because of Jesus’ work in his life in recent years.

 

Were it not for Jesus, it is certain that the sins of previous generations of men would still be at work. I likely would have been a violent daddy whom you feared, and you have would grown up too be a bitter and angry man yourself, who simply repeated the cycle of sin and death with your own wife and children. Thankfully, Jesus died so that we could live new lives. [emphasis added]

…

Because I did not grow up with a Christian father or as a Christian, I am deeply aware of the difference Jesus has made in our family and how blessed you are to have been born into a family where Jesus has already been so diligently at work to forgive and cleanse sin. My fear is that having lived only in a family where Jesus has already worked, you will not fully appreciate or even recognize the many benefits that come to you through his death and resurrection. I am writing this when you are little in faith so that one day, when you are old enough to understand it, Jesus will use it to help grow you in your love and appreciation for who he is and what he has done for you.

 

Page 176

After four children, we thought we were done having babies because your mom suffered through painful C-sections with each birth, and we feared for her health. Yet, as I prayed, I believed that someone was missing from our family. Your mom prayed a lot and trusted me to lead our family. Out of our love you were conceived, and we were both thrilled because we believed that God had chosen you to be a blessing to our family and to the world in some way. Throughout the pregnancy, your mother and I and your siblings prayed daily for your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. 

Here is a proposal for people who have observed Mark Driscoll to think about, and particularly for those who are supportive of him in the present day. We have seen that Mark Driscoll’s accounts of his conversion and calling stayed remarkably stable during the Mars Hill era. There were strategic omissions and inclusions depending on what audience he was writing to and what point he was trying to make to that audience but the core “origin myths” that Mike Cosper alluded to in the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill remained remarkably stable.  By contrast, we’ve seen that the most significant revisions to the stories of Mark Driscoll’s conversion and calling stories have come after he resigned from Mars Hill.  There were two elements to the changes: first, Mark began to present his conversion as a story of him just reading his Bible and not engaging any of the Christian intellectual traditions he was so eager to reference in his Mars Hill era accounts, particularly early on; second, Driscoll also demonstrated a habit of belittling his evangelical-but-not-charismatic influences during his don’t-call-it-Mars-Hill ministry years while simultaneously bringing more to the fore the extent to which his previously nominally Catholic family turned out to be possibly less nominal and more charismatic Catholic than he had let on previously.  

It wasn’t uncommon for people I met within Mars Hill to just declare that their family weren’t Christians and yet when I’d hear that this person had parents who were United Methodist  or that person had parents who were Lutheran what I took that to mean is  not that these people who had parents were not even Christians but that these members or attenders of Mars Hill did not believe their family were really Christians based on criteria they were introduced to or adopted within Mars Hill Church. Mark Driscoll is prone to extremist rhetoric and has attracted extremists.  I suggest that people keep that in mind when talking to anyone who was part of Mars Hill Church, especially if they were ever involved in leadership—I’m trying to put this respectfully and delicately but I think it has to be said for the record that not all of the extremist views that emanated from within Mars Hill necessarily came from Mark Driscoll himself—I met a few people over the years who were themselves such rabid extremists I think they brought their own extremist views into Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll’s own extremist tendencies were tacitly or explicitly invoked by other extremists within Mars Hill as a rationalization for ideas that did not originate with Mark Driscoll. 

Which gets me roundaboutly to another observation I want to make, which is that something we keep seeing in Mark Driscoll’s defense of himself as “not perfect” is that he seems to defend himself by grading the real Mark Driscoll on a curve in which he compares himself to the Mark Driscoll he could have been in his alternate fantasized future from whatever he wanted from his earlier pre-born again days.  This is a pattern that is most easily observed in Death By Love.  Whether writing to “Thomas” or to his own son Gideon, Mark Driscoll makes a bit too much of who he thinks he would have been without Jesus to show that “I’m not perfect now but compared to who I would be without Jesus I am a sinner saved by grace.”  

But let’s look at the arc of Mark Driscoll’s career of being “called out from among many to lead men”. Let’s even look at how he told someone before he considered himself born again that God was going to make him into a church planter and this before the audible calling account by an Idaho river.  It’s hard to completely shake a sense that the stuff Mark Driscoll has claimed God told him to do was stuff that he wanted to do anyway. He fell in love with Grace Martin back when he considered himself some kind of Christian, after all. He planned to do some corporate thing and make a lot of money and surely he did that over the twenty years that Mars Hill Church was incorporated before it finally dissolved.  Mark Driscoll may think he’s born again but it can seem, as I look at the decades of his ministry career, as though his born again conversion process brought with it a kind of retroactive sanctification of a careerist status-fixated quest for power and influence, a quest to redeem what in other men and women Mark Driscoll might regard as vices but that within himself are signs of divine appointment.  This doesn’t make him a liar or a grifter, though it may signal that Mark Driscoll has had delusions of grandeur about the course his life ought to take since before he became a born again Protestant rather than the somewhat nominal Catholic he previously was. 

I have argued at some length that we should think of Mark Driscoll as a propagandist rather than a pastor. I have relied on Jacques Ellul’s work to explore the proposal that Mark Driscoll is a propagandist and that it is as a propagandist we should understand his activities at Mars Hill. What I think has happened since 1995 is that Mark Driscoll has come to believe his own hype and is a propagandist who has long stopped being able to distinguish himself from his own propaganda, his persona from his person, and may have vanished into the Mark Driscoll he has presented himself as being in his contributions to media and social media. He is, I am sure, still a loving husband and a doting father but even Mark Driscoll once preached that this could be said of Haman. Driscoll may believe that what he has said and done throughout his years at Mars Hill was bad, maybe, but that he’s not unfit for ministry even if forty former pastors of Mars Hill have since said he is.  Why?  

To attempt to understand how and why Mark Driscoll might sincerely think he’s still fit for ministry we have needed to go through a lot of his stories of how he became a born-again low church Protestant rather than a nominal Catholic. There’s a pattern that emerges, ironically within his own polemics against Pharisaic moralists.  Mark Driscoll lets himself off the hook for two basic reasons: 

1.    He goes back to his remarkably stable origin myths about his conversion and calling. Any strategic changes in these origin stories tend to be tailored to specific polemical and homiletic agendas without compromising much of the core narrative.

2.    He grades himself and finds himself superior to others on the ethical food chain by grading on a curve in which he comes out better than anyone who, for instance, finds anything the least bit useful or interesting in critical theory, per his recent ebook.  

But this was, as the Mark Driscoll of old told us, the deception he was prone to fall into, finding himself righteous enough to deserve Heaven because, however bad he could be on this or that moment, he was at least better than “them” on the ethical food chain.