...The podcast series is not failure porn nor is too harsh. If anything it is too soft on Driscoll. Jason wants the church as an institution to deal with Driscoll but his argument assumes something that it must prove: that Mars Hill was a church. I think not. On sociological terms we we should describe Mars Hill (and its satellites) as a congregation but not church. It lacked the marks of the true church (see Belgic Confession, art. 29). It was not disciplined. Kim Riddlebarger has argued that Driscoll did not even have elders to whom he was accountable. Did Driscoll preach the pure gospel? Sometimes, perhaps but not consistently. Were the sacraments purely administered? No. Even Driscoll’s current congregation (more on this below) lacks the marks as defined by the Reformed churches. Mars Hill tried to discipline him and he defied them. Which ecclesiastical body would discipline him now? It certainly would not be his current congregation which is controlled by Driscoll and family members. He is not accountable to anyone but he continues to pose a danger to many.
Further, Mark did not merely sin as a private person. He abused the sheep and he often did it publicly. He made himself a pastor, though he was by his own admission, unqualified and then proceeded to use his position as well as those around and under him. According to a group from his current congregation, he continues to do these very same things in Scottsdale, AZ. As our Lord Jesus said, “to whom much was given, much from him will be required” (Luke 12:48). It is not too much to say that he is a false teacher and to be marked out as such. In this respect the podcast series and the several critiques published here and elsewhere perform a valuable service: warning vulnerable sheep about dangerous figures in the church. ...
I don't know if I'd say it was a mistake but I find myself having come to the twelfth episode profoundly ambivalent about the series. I think Clark is right to say that, if anything, Cosper went easy on Driscoll yet there's something else that's been nagging at me. A friend of mine from the Mars Hill years who has been listening to the series has mentioned that it seems as though Cosper has made two distinct criticisms of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll: 1) Mark Driscoll was/is a conservative/reactionary type in his theology and 2) Mark Driscoll was a celebrity and corrupted by celebrity. But the thing about those two distinct lines of critique is ...
My friend proposed that what Cosper seems to have done throughout the podcast is to collapse these two different kinds of critiques into each other when the two types of criticism don't necessarily overlap. Was Driscoll reactionary or conservative on matters of doctrine? Well, Eastern Orthodoxy is even more stringently conservative and yet Driscoll-type figures have a harder time emerging in Orthodoxy. Driscoll became popular because he was conservative or reactionary. He was peddling scripts of adulthood that said it was basically okay to want to go get a job, get married, start a family and become a conventional contributing member of "society" and that wanting to do so was countercultural in the context of Puget Sound. As an author at Mother Jones noted decades ago, Driscoll added a rebel sell element to simply telling people to "grow up". Things fell apart as it became clearer the gap between Driscoll's idealized script of adulthood manhood and his own conduct moved farther apart but early on people didn't realize the extent to which the man behind William Wallace II was renting out as many spare rooms as possible to people while living in a house he got on a lease to own deal.
Confessions of a Reformission RevMark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2CHAPTER FIVE, 350-1,000 PEOPLE[this season begins in early 1999]
page 120
A friend in the church kindly allowed me to move into a large home he owned on a lease-to-own deal because I was too broke to qualify for anything but an outhouse. The seventy-year-old house had over three thousand square feet, seven bedrooms on three floors, and needed a ton of work because it had been neglected for many years as a rental home for college students. Grace and I and our daughter Ashley, three male renters who helped cover the mortgage, my study, and the church office all moved into the home. [emphasis added] This put me on the job, literally, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as the boundary between home and church was erased.
It took time for people to work that out, however.
Had the people who in the earliest years thought Mark Driscoll had any fitness for ministry read anything he wrote while at Washington State University they might have wondered if he even wrote anything that inspired bomb threats and why Driscoll would have bragged about that. Driscoll has a history of appealing to people for pity and sympathy for the danger his wife and kids have ended up in without highlighting that it's not just that "I say things I shouldn't" but that stoking controversy has always been part of who he is in the public sphere. Cosper has arguably pulled punches on the most significant single question nobody has officially asked, why literally anyone on the planet would have ever thought Mark Driscoll was qualified for ministry of any kind to begin with.
A man who spent his ministry preaching a Gospel that summoned people to grow up and then presented himself as the outworking of his teachings was only going to be successful with his Driscoll exemplar ethos so long as the praxis was impeccable and above reproach. The controversies that surrounded Driscoll (from plagiarism to ResultSource to Mars Hill Global to the punitive approach to member discipline to potential controversy about pastoral counseling approaches) all revolved around the disconnect between Driscoll's prescribed scripts of adulthood for men and women and the extent to which Driscoll's own life in any way measured up to the standards he required of others. People may find a garden variety hypocrite annoying and unfit to teach but someone who wields punitive double standards is another thing entirely. Cosper's podcast only gets to the borders of that central discovery many a former Mars Hill member and staffer discovered over the years. Driscoll's conservative or even reactionary theological approach probably would not have even led to any problems if there weren't a series of crises of faith in the basic credibility of Mark Driscoll's character.
If we try to connect the issue of Driscoll's theology as pretext for prescribing scripts of adulthood to is celebrity we're still stuck with the kind of question Cosper's podcast doesn't even seem to ask. Maybe celebrity corrupted Mark Driscoll ... but what institutions and people made him a celebrity?
Although my friend didn't put it this way his comment has gotten me thinking that the conflation he may have been hearing was that Cosper seems to have been arguing that Mark Driscoll had the wrong kind of complementarian theology and thus was perhaps wrongly transformed into a celebrity even if this observation is only able to be formulated in hindsight. Cosper doesn't necessarily articulate this directly, or perhaps even on purpose, but it can seem implicit in people talking in different episodes about alternative celebrities to Mark Driscoll, whether the late Rachel Held Evans or the late Eugene Petersen.
So at last we're at Cosper's second line of critique, that Mark was a celebrity and celebrity corrupted him. The criticism would have more teeth, or sharper teeth, if the argument was not simply that the persona/person mask/human dichotomy were not brought up for just "this" celebrity, for Mark Driscoll but that the problem with Christian celebrity is that it is a low church Protestant variation of the cult of the saints or a network of lesser gods through whom people vicariously live. If people switch from a Mark Driscoll to a Rob Bell, a Nadia Bolz-Weber, or the late Rachel Held Evans "what" they are doing by way of living vicariously through their celebrity guides has not changed even if the "what" of what those celebrities espouse in social, cultural, political or religious convictions has changed.
Was celebrity a problem for Driscoll because of a problem inherent to American celebrity culture itself or because of what it "did" to Mark Driscoll in particular? Cosper's sprawling podcast doesn't so much as suggest either possibility clearly yet Cosper's sprawling account seems to land more on the second option. If so then this is a puzzle inasmuch as Cosper only seems to have been describing a problem with the narcissism of celebrity as an after effect rather than as a probable motivation for why people would seek to be Christian celebrities or in ministry in the first place.
If Cosper hopes his podcast can help prevent things like what happened at Mars Hill from happening in the future then the questions we should be asking shouldn't be "who killed Mars Hill?" but "who let Mars Hill happen to begin with?" Cosper has no answers of that sort because his history fixates on the ends rather than the beginnings. Moreover, the "Aftermath" episode features some thoughts from former members who like Quest Church because it replicated the feeling of the early Mars Hill, albeit in a different way. What I have wondered about since I left Mars Hill is whether those early feelings of community and belonging were necessarily good. I'm not necessarily saying those feelings were bad but I am wondering whether replicating the vibe of community from the early years of Mars Hill is something people should aspire to since, as Karen Schaeffer's story alone reveals, nasty behaviors were part of even those halcyon years.
As it stands so far, the twelve episodes and bonus episodes of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill seem permeated with a sense that Mark Driscoll became popular when he didn't necessarily deserve to be and celebrity corrupted him. Yet I sense a reluctance on the part of even people who have spoken critically of Driscoll in the podcast to say that celebrity itself was both a bad thing for Driscoll to aspire to and that celebrity as a status conferred may exert a corrupting influence even on the "worthy". Thus I come back to people talking with Mike Cosper about how Rachel Held Evans and Eugene Petersen were great people, that tilted the trajectory of the podcast by default toward an implicit case that Mark was just the wrong sort of person to be granted celebrity, probably without Cosper actually intending that implication. And this would be why at least some Christians who are more conservative would regard the podcast as defaulting to "woke" or progressive or liberal. Cosper gives just enough time to those who are not conservative evangelicals or complementarians that for those who subscribe to those views will be inclined, if only by way of confirmation bias and the halo effect, to conclude that Cosper is one of those egalitarian anti-complementarian types.
Yet I know of cases where Cosper fished for possible positive answers about complementarian church polities that aren't inherently abusive or that function in positive ways because I've been comparing thoughts with a few people IRL. If Cosper wanted to say that egalitarian celebrities can foster abusive cultural environments as he actually said to Preston Sprinkle months ago by way of mentioning revelations about the misconduct of John Howard Yoder and Bill Hybels then why not mention that within the Mars Hill podcast series itself if that was a point Cosper wanted to be sure to make?
Although I would not go so far as to say Cosper's project was a "mistake" it began with what I can't help but regard as a bad faith opening question in "who killed Mars Hill?" While Jessica Johnson's critique of the podcast was interpreted as an unhappy response from someone who wrote a book about Mars Hill if you wanted to see a truly mercenary attempt to use the podcast series as an opportunity to shill yet another book about the Apostle Paul you'd want to look at Cavan Concannon's silly piece. You might not have liked Jessica Johnson's book about Mars Hill but it is actually about Mars Hill, not some book called Profaning Paul. There's a difference between an academic producing a work that is genuinely useful for understanding the life and times of Mars Hill, as Johnson has done, and cravenly using the Christianity Today podcast as an excuse to shill yet another book about the Apostle Paul we probably don't need.
But the tendency in responses to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill to double down on whatever pet agenda a writer already has is something I've written about already. The "take trap", as a tendency described and criticized yet exemplified in the blogging of Samuel D James, can take at least two forms: the first is to use a podcast like Cosper's as a springboard to come back to a theme the writer might have gone to with any other conceivable pretext, and the second is to use the podcast as a springboard to sell something or someone. People have been so eager to skip past the sketchy to skeletal history of Mars Hill presented in the podcast to "what it all means" that nobody seems the least bit interested in stepping back to ask if Cosper's entire podcast even constitutes a history of any kind.
Paradoxically I could somewhat agree with Justin Dean that aspects of Cosper's over-arching narrative don't seem accurate.
Cosper may have been expecting people to follow anything and everything he's said and written so as to not misunderstand him as being somehow against complementarianism. Over time I have not gotten that sense but people have passed along links and interviews where Cosper's views are, if a bit hazy, clearer than they would be if all you knew about him were mediated by his Mars Hill podcast.
Still ... there's an irony afoot Justin Dean deciding to tell his own story in his own way. If Justin Dean doesn't trust Christianity Today, the flagship publication of evangelicalism to accurately tell the story of Mars Hill what's his alternative? To go by PR Matters the alternative is self-publishing a book.
Why I’m Self Publishing My Bookby Justin Dean | Jul 12, 2016 | Blogn October of 2016 my first trade book will be available, PR Matters: A Survival Guide for Church Communicators.After working with several different publishers to produce and distribute this book, I decided that the best option is to self-publish. This may not be the best option for everyone, but it has been for me.Ultimately, as a first time author, the offers from publisher’s were not very beneficial. Without any guarantees on sales, publisher’s simply don’t want to risk much up front.The options for a first time author are:A) The publisher covers all costs up front and usually retains some exclusive rights to the book. The author then gets anywhere from 5% to 20% of the book sales ($0.75 to $3 per book sold).B) The author and publisher split the up-front costs. The ownership of the book varies by publisher, and in these cases the author can earn as much as 50% of book sales but it’s typically 20% to 30%.In either of these cases there is no guarantee your book will sell in physical stores, only Amazon.com and the like. And it’s difficult to get a publisher to put additional marketing dollars towards your book campaign as well. They are very reliant on your own network and platform to get the word out.As it turns out at this stage I have more to offer them, so I’ve decided to go about it on my own.Having worked on about a dozen book campaigns already, I’m very familiar with the process and the costs.Because I’m self-publishing, that means I have to pick up all of the production costs on my own. Surprisingly this has been a fairly stress free experience, and costs a lot less than you’d expect. Finding uninterrupted time to write has been my biggest challenge.The upside is that I get to keep 100% of the profits from each sale, and I retain ownership of my work. Not a bad trade-off when you see the actual costs below.I’m sharing these expenses below in order that this might be helpful for other first time authors, and so that you are fully informed when making the decision as to whether or not you should pre-order my book now. I hope to recoup the majority of the production costs during the pre-sale of this book...
One of the old canards Driscoll would role out was bloggers were jobless guys writing in their momma's basement types and had no institutional credibility. This was a luxury Driscoll could afford because he had been made a celebrity by institutional media and because he had access to media and publishing resources. The irony afoot was that Mars Hill itself became a corporate entity capable of gatekeeping and media presence, not least through the information silos of The City.
Now has Justin Dean considered the double bind inherent to his approach? He doesn't trust Mike Cosper at CT to get the story right but he has been willing to self-publish ... but when he was at Mars Hill fielding PR issues one of the lines of defense he raised was bloggers and the media didn't do their homework.
In many cases local and regional journalism was subpar on fact-checking and reporting and that was why Wenatchee The Hatchet did so much between roughly 2010 to 2014 to cover things the mainstream and indie presses didn't always cover. I even took a week to go through the factual errors in an article about Mars Hill Valerie Tarico published with AlterNet/Salon years ago and got an assurance the errors were going to get corrected in the comments section. I have had my criticisms of Mark Driscoll and of Mars Hill over the years but, to borrow Mark's old joke, I have labored to do so in an accurate and proverbially footnoted way. So I get Justin Dean's distrust of journalists up to a point.
But in the wake of Mars Hill's corporate dissolution Justin Dean can't have his cake and eat it, too. He can't lambast the failures of Mike Cosper to get the story right after having spent years making any kind of argument that independent bloggers have no institutional credibility, vetting or accountability as he noted in PR Matters. Where does institutional credibility and accurate reportage come from in Justin Dean's world? I have a variety of concerns and even criticisms of what Mike Cosper has put together but Dean's reaction suggests that he doesn't think Cosper has been fair. When would Mars Hill leaders have thought coverage was going to be their idea of fair? If anything Driscoll probably mastered the art of leveraging hostile coverage to improve his own reputation among his followers.
Justin Dean may still believe the press did him and Mars Hill wrong but Mars Hill was dissolved. In other words, if it comes down to who is better at which job Justin Dean's claim to fame within public relations is having presided over one of the greatest public relations dumpster fires in the history of 21st century North American Christianity! Even though I get why Justin Dean might have personal reasons to be unhappy with the podcast Mike Cosper has done there's basically no reason anyone on earth besides Justin Dean and his family will think he's going to succeed where he thinks Mike Cosper has failed.
Me, I'd kind of like someone like Crawford Gribben (or even Gribben himself) to tackle the history of Mars Hill as a kind of spiritual follow-up to his book on survivalism and resistance in the Pacific Northwest but that's just me.
I think if I had to distill the criticisms I have of not just Mike Cosper's podcast series but of nearly all subsequent reactions and thinkpieces to it into a single observation it would be as follows--Cosper and his responders are too busy leaping to "lessons learned" to have bothered providing a substantial or significant chronicle of what actually happened at Mars Hill and who the people were, whether the leaders or the nearly altogether ignored rank and file members. Nothing comes across as less convincing a proposal to someone who was a member of Mars Hill than the idea that "we all did" as an answer to "who killed Mars Hill?" No, we didn't all kill Mars Hill and some of us were working to promote repentance and reform, if that were possible. I was willing to pray that if that weren't possible that God would crush Mars Hill and scatter it, which sure seems to have happened!
But as for who killed Mars Hill by voting to dissolve the corporation that answer is clearer: Michael Van Skaik, Larry Osborn, Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers seem to have made that decision. Thanks to "Aftermath" we know (if we didn't already know before) that Kerry Dodd and Caleb Walters presided over the dissolution of the corporation. While I wouldn't say that Cosper's series was a "failure" I would like to know what people think would constitute a "success". For my part a success would be a history of Mars Hill from the formative years of Mark Driscoll and the other co-founding pastors through to the institutions that vetted and sent out those leaders and what their aims and interests were (i.e. Antioch Bible Church and the late Hutch) and move forward in time via real estate acquisitions and significant structural changs in the corporation and corporate culture to get a clearer idea of what was going on, who was doing what, and why.
Unfortunately, for as many interesting moments as there are in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill you won't get that. Despite significant questions about his credibility Mark Driscoll's sermons and books constitute the starting place for a history of Mars Hill. Cosper "questioning the origin myth" accomplishes little if he doesn't walk us through as many of those actual accounts as possible to even establish if the origin stories changed. I have shown that prior to his resignation from Mars Hill in 2014 his stories about his conversion and calling largely didn't change.
I have also made a case that Cosper misunderstands or misrepresents the extent to which Driscoll had an influence from charismatic theology regarding spiritual warfare. Driscoll himself noted in 2008 that what scholars would identify as evangelical/fundamentalist ideas and charismatic/Pentecostal ideas about spiritual warfare had been converging in the post-Cold War era. Despite the claims Driscoll made to rely on prophetic dreams (i.e. dream divination) throughout his ministry it would be inaccurate to say Driscoll thought of himself as a charismatic, but Driscoll has been vague about the extent to which charismatic Catholicism was part of his family background on his mother's side until after he left Mars Hill.
Cosper simply declaring Mark was influenced by charismatic theology is a tendentious claim without supporting evidence and while Driscoll eventually admitted to having "some" charismatic influences if we go through the books he actually name-dropped he was more from the Dallas Theological/fundamentalist wing of spiritual warfare, which would make sense if he said some of his earlier influences were cessationists, conservative Baptists or the likes of Doug Wilson. Had Cosper been more fine-tuned in this area he could have made a case that Driscoll did not let on the extent to which his theology was a grab bag of fundamentalist, evangelical and charismatic theology but I am not sure Cosper has read at least ten of Mark's books over the last twenty years. Part of any historical scholarly enterprise is working with the sources you have even when you know with a great deal of probability the sources are both heavily biased and even inaccurate. As my journalism professor once put it, you'll inevitably run into sources who lie but even their lies can give you tips about where the truth resides.
So why have I said I'm ambivalent about the podcast? As I've said before, whatever the shortfalls of Cosper's podcast project this may constitute the first scattered (truly!) attempt to provide a story of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle that isn't mediated and curated from start to finish by Mark Driscoll. That has some value ... but as a former member who has spent years documenting and analyzing what happened ... it's still full of weird, baffling, mysterious, disturbing, infuriating but also, too, some amusing, inspiring and hospitable things. I can't say I regret making the friends I made during my years there. During the volatile stretch from 2012 through 2014 I in some ways got more support from people within Mars Hill than from people outside Mars Hill. It's not like people at Mars Hill didn't know who I was. I clearly have my convictions and biases but I have labored to be as fair-minded and as accurate as humanly possible and then pray that I can do better than that by the mercy of God. Whether I succeeded isn't my decision to make ... but I would venture to say that in terms of what I hoped could happen and what did happen, anyone who takes up the role of a watchdog blogger must be reconciled to complete and utter failure before taking up the enterprise.
But that is another topic for some other time.
7 comments:
The story form of This American Life/99% Invisible doesn't lend itself to drawing connections and conclusions.
That said, there's a variant of the two separate critiques that will fit together. The starting point is to ask *why* Driscoll is saying the things he said and the way in which he said them. Getting performatively angry over the same issue multiple times in a day might be a clue that something else is going on after all.
There's reasonably strong circumstantial evidence that 'evangelicalism' as sociological movement is very hard to separate from the economic and media environment in which it developed, and certainly being a reactionary celebrity is a well trodden path from Billy Sunday onwards. At the end of the day, without the reactionary clips that can circulate, he's just another mega church pastor like Chandler, Mason etc. I suppose the unique part of the approach was in the chosen audience (in generational terms) for this material, though again one thinks of Passion conferences etc. as an antecedents
oh yes, definitely. Mark getting PERFORMATIVELY angry was even something Cosper noticed in the "How dare you!?" sermon excerpt and went so far as to suggest was an attempt to replicate at a mass level what he had done as William Wallace II with "Pussified Nation". That was the brief moment where the two strands of critique successfully converged.
Of course having read Ellul's Propaganda my proposal has been that WW2 was agitation propaganda and Dead Men was integration propaganda. I think the author of the 1998 Mother Jones article was on point suggesting that leveraging generational resentment was an important part of Driscoll's sales pitch and it's something he necessarily has to distance himself from now that he's tweeting about his legendary dad Pops Driscoll because back in 1998 he was talking about how he and his crew wanted to avoid he chronic neglect of his parents' generation to people of his generational cohort.
BTW, a further note on the Wilson connection which I spotted recently on twitter while reading Daniel Kleven's series on Dabney, hadn't seen it on the blog so thought I'd share:
https://twitter.com/danieleleven32/status/1429958985319424003
So it seems that the connection goes back at least to the early 90s (presumably predating his involvement with the emergent scene and opening up questions about how influenced he was by Wilson and to what extent - if any - his involvement with that scene was a conscious 'march through the institutions' style strategy).
Thanks for finding that! I had meant to slog through the Daily Evergreen materials at some point to see if there was a connection between Driscoll and Wilson during his college years because I had a hunch there was at least some connection.
Anyone spot any coverage of the debate itself? I might have to see if that debate was covered.
So we've established that Driscoll and Wilson were on the "right" side of a debate about the arts circa October 27, 1992.
Can you post a link for the Kleven series on Dabney? I'm not sure if I'll be blogging a ton but I am taking the end of the year to do some reading and listening. I've got a pile of Jeremy Begbie books I'm hoping to make some progress on this week, for instance and, of course, I'm revisiting Didion since she died last week.
The Dabney series is here, and centres somewhat on Piper's references (though also covers other reformed figures like Iain Murray - which is where my interest came in originally):
https://biblioskolex.wordpress.com/
It looks like Kleven started this work prior to the current set of ructions at Bethlehem College, but it's obviously gained additional salience since. NSA alumni Joe Rigney is president of the college as of a year ago, so there's a Moscow angle too.
I didn't see anyone posting coverage of the debate, but the WSU Content Library seems to have been indexed really well, and I was able to dig this up from the following week with a simple search for both of their names:
https://content.libraries.wsu.edu/digital/collection/evergreens/id/122350/rec/2
("Volatile censorship..", the only Driscoll quote contains the kind of hyperbole that could well have originated with himself)
This video posted up-thread of the above tweet is moderately interesting, where Piper makes reference to Driscoll knowing Wilson (around the 1.55 mark)
https://youtu.be/b2X078_VDjc?t=115
It seems to me Mark’s “theology” was pragmatically chosen to further his goals or enhance his power at that point in time. The celebrity destroyed him argument I would reframe as, celebrity amplified his preexisting character flaws. Which leads to the question that Cosper ignores which is what is inherent in the evangelical system that avoids dealing with these flawed individuals early in their ministries to help mentor them and grow their character? Or why are we so blinded by church growth which we attribute to a special anointing on the leader which apparently means they should not be corrected?
Or even deeper has the church co-opted social Darwinism and replaced success due to “fitness” (see Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Gates, etc.) and replaced fitness with God’s special blessing?
if we cast the net wider than conservative evangelicalism to include progressive evangelicalism similar questions could be asked about why anyone would buy books by Nadia Bolz-Weber (who's more mainline) or even the late Rachel Held Evans.
The most plausible explanation is that American popular level Christianity has a cult of saints, whether for left or right, blue or red state civic religion, and that there's a root and branch problem with who gets to become a motivational-speaking celebrity in such contexts to begin with.
Yeah, I agree that Mark tailored his theology to fit his patronage base at different periods throughout his career. In other fields, I've been thinking about how many decades it took for Harvey Weinstein's conduct to become a topic for discussion. Even Joss Whedon, it seems, was not the same man behind the scenes to women as his strong-female-character writing would've implied. That celebrity amplified Mark's existing character flaws is definitely where I have landed over the years. It's too much to retroactively claim he was "always a grifter" which I've heard some people claim. Mark was always prone to self-aggrandizing claims and beligerence but he couldn't afford to let that flag fly full staff when he had less power and influence.
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