https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/bonus-episode-conversation-with-dan-allender.html
Yes, by implication I've suggested that some of the CT episodes of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill were neither focused nor helpful across the series as a whole by giving this post the title it has. The new Allender episode, however, is one of the strongest in the entire series because it is shorter than average and by dint of having one subject who is recognized as an expert in counseling within evangelicalism the episode stays remarkably on focus.
Having implied already that some episodes in the series have been neither focused nor very helpful I'm willing to name episodes. These episodes might be thought of as near-misses, however, rather than crash-and-burn failures.
The mini-episode on Mark Driscoll's apparent revisions of his origin stories is worth listening to but it is hamstrung by assuming what it set out to prove. Apart from early dramatic revision of what the audible voice told Driscoll by the Idaho river and the post-Mars Hill disclosures Mark Driscoll's origin stories about his conversion and calling were remarkably consistent at two different levels: first, in that so long as Mars Hill existed his public accounts tended to stay the same and second, he still displayed a consistent pattern of highlighting different emphases in a basically fixed narrative depending on what rhetorical/homiletic point he wished to make for public record.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-new-little-episode-in-rise-and-fall.html
But it was only after his celebrity hit its peak and Mars Hill seemed on top of the world he began to slip in statements about the charismatic Catholic elements of his upbringing. Back when he was getting financial support from more cessationist patrons he kept those elements more in the background. This could well underline a point Dan Allender made to Mike Cosper that apart from those involved with Driscoll in his struggles regarding power and other things many people simply did not really know Mark Driscoll the man. It has become apparent he has always meant to keep things that way.
I think that Cosper's attempt to show Mark Driscoll's revisionist approach to history over-implied the level of deceit Driscoll demonstrably engaged in. One of my friends from the Mars Hill days used to joke about "Driscoll double vision", how the farther away from an event he got the more Mark remembered himself being great and whoever was against him being stupid. The efforts behind the scenes to keep "Pussified Nation" from ever seeing the light of day that were not recounted in the CT series seemed proof enough that Driscoll was aware enough of his past public failures that, barring the introduction of robots.txt that got used prodigiously in the late MH years on their sites (trust me or, if you don't, review my history of blogging on Mars Hill Church and its use of robots.txt to suppress content from search engine results). All of that is to say that if Mark Driscoll misled people it was more often by strategic omission than outright deceit. It's not that he wasn't capable of outright lying on record, he did that claiming to Katelyn Beaty he and Grace Martin (Driscoll) were both virgins when they started dating in open contradiction to what the Driscolls wrote in the first dozen pages of Real Marriage.
As Allender told Cosper in the recent podcast, Mark Driscoll rarely let anyone get very close to him or really get to know him. Now as some longtime readers know Wenatchee The Hatchet has a reading list on exorcism and diabology and the evolution of spiritual warfare literature in trans-Atlantic Christianity up to and including books by pastors born and raised in Ghana. One of the tropes that emerges in spiritual warfare and deliverance ministry is an idea that you have to find out the name of the evil spirit, unclean spirit or demon that is possessing the subject.
Writers on spiritual warfare and exorcism differ significantly on the extent to which conversing with a demon to find its name is even a good idea but a broader point from exorcisms from the ancient Mediterranean world, whether Hellenistic or Egyptian or Roman exorcism is an idea that to know the name of a spirit is to be able to wield power to direct it, control it or cast it out. Graham Twelftree wrote in Jesus the Exorcist that charismatic exorcists who could cast out demons with a word were known in Greek cultures but these were rare. Generally exorcists did not just cast out demons with a mere verbal command. Instead they often relied on charms, amulets, potions, powders and implements. Litanies and spells were used. Often in the ancient world the remedy for black magic was white magic and within evangelicalism and fundamentalism and mainline Christian scholarship there has been a bit of debate whether or not deliverance ministry and some conceptions of spiritual warfare aren't forms of "white magic" using Christian jargon.
John Livingstone Nevius, in his treatise on Demon Possession and Allied Themes made a point in his posthumously published 1895 book that most evangelical Protestant authors have long since forgotten, that no serious or credible discussion of spiritual warfare and demonology on the part of pastors in the United States can be conducted without reckoning with the ghastly and gruesome miscarriage of justice that happened with the Salem Witch trials. Nevius proposed that in light of the scriptural testimony that the Devil lies, that demons lie, and that their goal is to discredit the Gospel of Jesus Christ, if we were to assign demonic agency to anyone in the Salem Witch trials history suggests it was the accusers and not the accused who displayed demonic tendencies.
All of which is a wind-up to concerns and thoughts I've written about on episode 8 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, "Demon Hunting".
To provide some context for why I have come to think of Episode 8 as a cavalcade of missed opportunities on Driscoll's invocations of spiritual gifts and demonology and recovered memory tropes in the demon trials there's a reading list that will give you some hints. I was planning, at one point, to study that range of topics had I gone to seminary or divinity school:
The list reflects a range of interests I have had as a student of biblical literature and theology since before I'd ever heard of Mars Hill Church in 1998. For that matter, a curiosity in and questions about what Christians call prophetic activity dates back to my Pentecostal days. Cosper, to be fair, has been trying to do broad and survey-level stuff rather than digging into the weeds of Driscoll's history of dream divination. That's something more along the lines of what I've done.
Driscoll had made a point of keeping things close to the vest. In his sprawling 2008 spiritual warfare instruction session he said he wasn't a freak but that he had a fair amount of experience with spiritual warfare.
I'm excerpting another page on this blog for sake of reference:
That Driscoll viewed womens' ministry like "juggling knives" was something I couldn't forge. I had to listen to the entire 2008 marathon as part of being on the Theology Response Team. I was never actually a leader in the sense of being on staff or officially recognized as a "leader" in any ministry at Mars Hill and I think Allender's conversation with Cosper has helped me realize some things about the significance of that.
I never sought out leadership and was not very interested in getting to know Mark personally or get close to him. My first impression of him was he was just some fratboy asshole who had a born-again experience. By contrast I liked Mike Gunn and Lief Moi. They also seemed like Spock and McCoy respectively to Mark's Captain Kirk. I was recruited to volunteer and serve in ministries and I helped in the launch of a ministry or two but was never "in" ministry and didn't feel any "call" to.
Allender talked with Cosper for a while about the powerful emotional and relational dynamics of working with and for Mark Driscoll and how Mark was and is a good groomer. That reminded me of someone who once shared that they did not think of themselves as cut out for ministry but that Mark regaled them with praise until they relented and went into ministry at Mars Hill.
PR Matters: A Survival Guide for Church Communicators
Justin Dean
Copyright © 2017 by Justin J Dean. Published by DOXA Media Group, L. L. C.
ISBN : 0692862676
ISBN-13: 978-0692862674
Library of Congress Control Number 2017909376
First Edition 2017
Pages 41-42
I will never forget my first official day on staff at a church. I had just left a great marketing position in the corporate world to now work for one of the largest and fastest growing churches in the world. When I signed up I was excited to be using my skills and experiences for such a great and worthy cause. I quickly realized I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
The position I had taken was the Public Relations Manager for the church, but the role evolved over the years, and I ultimately oversaw all public relations and communications for the church including content, social media, our websites, and more.
That first day was very revealing for me. As soon as I arrived at our cold, dank Seattle offices I was whisked off to meet with our senior pastor. He said something to me that helped set the tone for my role as the “Church PR Guy”.
He asked if I was ready to strap my boots on. Which made me incredibly self-conscience about the Converse shoes I was wearing at the time. He went on to tell me that what I signed up for was not a job – but, rather, it was a calling.
He said the office was full of people who worked nine to five and produced great content, but what we really needed were more soldiers on the frontline.
He told me I’d take a lot of hits. Not just for him, and not just for the church, but for God. That what we were trying to do was reach more people than ever with the story of the gospel, and that it was going to require risks, and would most definitely have its challenges. The only rewards we’d receive would be the satisfaction of seeing people’s lives changed as they came to Christ and got baptized.
And we sure did reap the rewards. Year after year we saw hundreds of people get saved and over a thousand people per year get baptized. Hundreds of people watched our sermons and consumed our content every week, and we captured as many of their stories as we could.
I walked away from the first meeting with an unbelievable weight on my shoulders that never went away. A glorious purpose that I had never felt before. I knew God had orchestrated everything in my life up until then so that I could serve in that role. [emphasis added]
If you want to be successful in helping your church reach more people, you can’t treat it like a job. If you feel called to this type of work, then the only thing left to do is to strap your boots on and start to hustle. It’s time to hone in on your skills and be the best you can be. People’s lives are at stake.
Dan Allender told Mike Cosper Mark Driscoll is a good groomer. If we want to get some sense of how effectively Mark Driscoll primed people he brought into his inner circle to believe he had a powerful ministry and that they would bear the risks yet reap the rewards of so great and special a ministry it might be hard to find a more vivid testimony summary than Justin Dean's. Dean wrote that he "knew" God had orchestrated everything in his life up until then so that he could serve in that role. What was that role? Well, anyone who even knows who Justin Dean is knows that role was at Mars Hill Church.
Dean, as has been established earlier via his social media, declined to talk with Mike Cosper. It may be Justin Dean's contributions might have been superfluous or it may be that PR Matters is sufficient a testimony to Dean's experiences at the former Mars Hill. My own impression over the years was that apart from Mark Driscoll himself no one did more to ruin the credibility of Mars Hill Church more than Justin Dean but that's my perspective and yours might be a different one. Yet Dean has testified clearly that his first day at Mars Hill (even if he did not or would not name the church) was an unforgettable experience.
Something to keep in mind if you heard Dan Allender describe how for a narcissistic leader you will feel that you're part of something amazing and rehearse that in your mind even if you should find your body physically tensing up or recoiling at things you hear and see said and done around you.
Years ago I had a disagreement with another former Mars Hill member. I pointed out that in my understanding of things people who were defending Mark Driscoll were not exactly defending Mark Driscoll's worst statements and actions so much as they were defending their own emotional investment of themselves into Mars Hill and its ministry. The other person said, "No, they are totally defending Mark". It suggested to me the other person had not and could not get the point I was making.
People will defend someone or something as a way of defending their sense of self. If people defend remaining in relationship or staying in relationship with someone who is abusive they "can" be seen as merely defending the abuser or they could also be viewed as defending their sense of self predicated on what they are used to, even if what they are used to is traumatic and traumatizing.
Dan Allender, I suspect, understands such a point even more profoundly than I did at the time I made it--that people attempt to rationalize their participation in abusive church cultures because they are defending their own sense of identity within it, perhaps as much or more than they are defending the formal leader. The value of being close to Pastor Mark outweighed seeing him at his worst.
It's something I have had to remind myself of lately. Because I was never a pastor, never a ministry leader and not even a community group leader (which could, arguably, have been thought of as the bottom-rung of formally recognized leadership in some way); and because I was just a volunteer who voluntarily declined to renew my membership rather than resign it, I was in many respects spared the mechanisms of shunning that many people experienced. I was also blessed to have had a campus pastor who had known me for years and gave me his blessing when I left, which some people told me was unusual. Maybe some would even say such a friendly no-strings-attached blessing send-off was miraculous.
I think back to how from 2009 to 2012 when I was in a rough spot in my life members and some staff helped me out despite knowing perfectly well who Wenatchee The Hatchet was and what was being written here. My departure from Mars Hill was providentially free of many of the worst elements I heard from friends and associates who left around the same time. So in hindsight I realize that there were and are some elements I don't entirely understand about the leaving Mars Hill process. Paradoxically I think I came to a fuller understanding of that sense of social abandonment after Mars Hill imploded and people I came to think of as friends from the Mars Hill years, having apparently gotten whatever they found useful from Wenatchee The Hatchet "moved on".
What if people who got used in a leadership culture like that learned to go and do likewise? I hadn't really thought about that as being a possibility but Allender's conversation with Cosper brought that possibility to mind. In the wake of the closure of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll has shown a penchant for what I regard as astonishing levels of self-pity.
Spirit-Filled Jesus
Mark Driscoll
Published by Charisma House
Copyright © 2018 by Mark Driscoll
ISBN 9781629995229 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781629995236 (ebook)
LCCN 2018029899 (print)
LCCN 2018034467 (ebook)
Page 146
… The cross, or possibly only the crossbar, was likely a roughly hewn piece of splintered timber weighing upwards of a hundred pounds. Dripping blood, sweat, and tears, Jesus was shamefully forced to carry His cross through town.
I’ve walked the path Jesus did, and it was a narrow path filled with people shopping. In today’s world it would be like being forced to carry your cross through a shopping mall during the busiest shopping season, weeping and bleeding while children stare in horror. Jesus was so beaten and His body so broken that He fell under the weight of the cross. …
That Allender can so regularly refer to Mark Driscoll in a conversation of narcissistic pastoral leadership doesn't mean a clinical diagnosis has been made, but at some point Mark Driscoll's own testimony about himself for the record cannot be entirely ignored. In the early chapters of Spirit-Filled Jesus Mark Driscoll claimed he had not come across books about Jesus living earthly life by the power of the Spirit.
Okay, so maybe Mark Driscoll circa 2002-2014 was too busy growing his brand to waste any time on Third Article Theology or read anything at all by Myk Habets in the last twenty years? The profusion of pneumatological theorizing has reached such a pitch in the last twenty years Ephraim Radner made a point of taking it all down a peg in the book A Profound Ignorance, discussing the potential dangers of extolling "the Pneumatic Man". Not that I'm against pneumatology, even if I'm an ex-Pentecostal.
The point I'm making, which I trust you get, is that for a guy like Mark Driscoll to claim "nobody" has written about Jesus being filled with the Holy Spirit as being crucial to understanding His life and ministry and telling his readers that is predicated on their profound ignorance of theology and of his own lack of engagement with even any evangelical, let alone mainline Protestant, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox discussions of the nexus in christology and pneumatology. Myk Habets' The Anointed Son: A Trinitarian Spirit Christology was published back in 2010. Then again, after Mars Hill collapsed I'm afraid it is probably not wrong to say that Mark Driscoll's audience is a largely self-selecting yet also captive audience. They don't know what he doesn't know about theology (such as, possibly, that his limited unlimited atonement can alternately be thought of as Amyraldianism or merely a retread of John Davenant), and he's not going to let them in on that if they haven't already figured it out.
Then again ... the more years go by and I keep an eye on both Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson the harder it is to escape the sense that Doug Wilson has taken the approach of never let your public catch on that you might actually have no clue what you're talking about when you can hold forth with confidence about whatever they ask about. Driscoll's accounts of conversion and calling him fix him firmly in the realm of the American Redoubt, one of those things even I didn't know about his history for some time.
But then Mark Driscoll has seemed coy about the extent to which is exposure to and consumption of pornography prior to his born-again experience "might" have influenced his views on sex, sexuality and gender. He has arguably been more open about his desire to escape his urban white trash background and it sounds as though he was candid with Dan Allender about his "pugilistic" background and disposition in 1998. Allender told Cosper that the Mark Driscoll he met in 1998 seemed different from the one he encountered in 2002-2004. I would venture that Mark had not yet mastered the power of the sob story like he would in the 2012-2014 period.
That would come later. Even in the period of 2002 to 2004 he may have had a capacity for empathy. Mark Driscoll never said "when" he drew upon the stories of members and attenders of Mars Hill that made up the material in Death By Love. Something that has haunted me from the sprawling and often frankly diffuse series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill was hearing Jen Smidt and Mike Cosper describe how Mark Driscoll wrote Smidt a letter that would later end up in one of Driscoll's books.
58:53
Part of what’s grotesque about the story came afterward. It started with a letter she received from Mark, a thoughtful, heartfelt pastoral letter about her story and about the power of grace in her life. Then, about a year later, without having asked or even told her, she found out he’d included it as a chapter in a book.
http://www.theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-09-19_its_always_something_at_mars_hill_church
https://web.archive.org/web/20061025035511/http://www.theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-09-19_its_always_something_at_mars_hill_church
October 1, 2006 is the ten-year anniversary of the church that I had the privilege of founding in Seattle when I was twenty-five years old. We started as a Bible study about the size of an average Mormon family. Over the years, God has been gracious to us in one of America’s least Christian cities, where there are more dogs than Christians.
For ten years we have gotten virtually nothing but very positive media coverage. I've worked hard behind the scenes to make sure we were presented as we are and not used for some subversive agenda. To date, we've gotten good press from ABC Television, NPR, Mother Jones magazine, Christianity Today, and others.
…
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. [emphasis added] 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.
We’re also moving as fast as we can to increase our ability to do biblical counseling. Our recovery groups for drugs, alcohol, and sexual addiction are maxed out and growing all the time. Perhaps our most encouraging ministry is happening with our Grace Groups for people who have been sexually abused. This is an epidemic in our church and the number of folks who have been molested and/or raped is almost overwhelming. Hundreds have been helped or are getting help and hundreds more need help from the sin that has been committed against them. Many of the most affected are dear friends and it has been quite a heavy-hearted journey to hear that the people I love as a pastor and friend have been so horrendously violated before coming to our church.
So "if" the book was Death By Love then this would mean that "about a year later" would have been somewhere between 2005 and possibly as early as very late 2004, plausibly within the time frame within which Dan Allender told Mike Cosper that the Mark Driscoll he encountered circa 2002-2004 was not the same Mark Driscoll he had met in 1998.
Perhaps Christian celebrity had already changed the man.
What has remained disturbingly consistent about Mark Driscoll over the last twenty years is his eagerness to wield the stories of vulnerability as a rationale for his most aggressive actions on the one hand or as a gambit to gain pity for himself, more often leveraging self-pity indirectly by appealing to stories about his wife and children (thus "Mark Driscoll and the Power of the Sob Story" written a few years ago). When I finally got around to reading Death By Love I was struck by what a pallid knock off of John Stott it seemed to be. Didn't Mark just preach a Cliff Notes variation on Stott's The Cross of Christ back in 2005? But what gnawed at me more was wondering whether a single one of the people to whom Mark Driscoll wrote those letters consented to their stories, even with changed names, being included in Death By Love. Since leaving Mars Hill Church I have heard pastors share personal stories and anecdotes but with the kind of explanation I have never once heard Mark Driscoll say in his entire ministry career that I can recall, something like, "I'm about to share a story and I want to make sure you know I have been given permission to share this story ... . "
In their alternately boilerplate to disastrously sloppy Win Your War Mark and Grace Driscoll claimed they learned a lot about Native American spiritualities living in the Pacific Northwest. If they had actually bothered to learn about spiritual customs and norms of Pacific Northwest aboriginal groups they might have learned, for instance, that a person's songs and stories are often thought to have been gifts given to them by a guardian spirit and that a person could not simply appropriate, let alone expropriate what was a spiritual gift given to the person. Not that I'm actually advocating for Native American religions as such, my Native American predecessors voluntarily converted to Christianity but I hope you understand my point, that Mark Driscoll's claim to have learned about Native spiritual beliefs pretty obviously did NOT include picking up anything like the idea that a person's story is not something to be commodified into a book without that person's explicit consent. You don't even need to be religious at all to get the idea, many a secular journalist understands what is known as "on the record". There have been any number of stories I chose not to share because people weren't comfortable going on the record.
Which, in a way, makes it ironic and funny that Allender only about the plagiarism controversy when Sealy Yates called to tell him about it. Had Allender or any other authors Mark (and Grace Driscoll) drew upon without citation decided to sue for copyright infringement could Mark Driscoll's reputation and Mars Hill Church have withstood that legal stress? It's something to keep in mind for anyone who may have heard recently that Driscoll has claimed to have a litigation fund to sue people. Had Mark been sued back in 2013 by every single author whose work he didn't properly credit in the first editions of his books where would Mark Driscoll be today?
Allender's comments on how refreshing the early Mark Driscoll's candor was for him may, potentially, give us a potential explanation. Even if it turned out to be a kind of mimicry of existing personae from Doug Wilson and Dan Savage, Mark Driscoll's shtick made him stand out. It presented what I would now regard as a facade of vulnerability that could spur people to be vulnerable with him and he could assess them for how useful they might be for his mission.
That's not to say that it was necessarily some grand conspiratorial grift. I think it is probably too easy for people to default to that and it may signal an unwillingness to admit, if they were part of Mars Hill, how much they bought in and bought "it". A relative once said that I am not dispositionally a 100% person. I am more of the temperament that I'll do something if I'm 70-90% sure about something being a good idea. That may be true and it may be something I have to think about when I consider how people who were 100% sold out have felt obliged to 100% repudiate everything about what they embraced and endorsed in their Mars Hill years. That, to me, has seemed like an epic-to-extravagant case of splitting. It can seem, to me, as an opposite impulse to what the aforementioned former Mars Hill member said was "they are totally defending Mark", in which Mark Driscoll retroactively becomes entirely responsible for being the grifter and con artist who inspired people to say and do the things they said and did as they followed him.
Part of looking back on Mars Hill involves looking back on what I chose to be involved with and how I chose to speak to, write to and treat people and there was a lot about that I came to regret even while I was still inside Mars Hill. As I wrote off and on over the years, I began to think that if my vices were a good "fit" for Mars Hill then it was not the fault of Mars Hill if I was a jerk to the extent people told me I was ... but Mars Hill surely was not going to be the community that would help me learn how to be less of a jerk if the top dog was Mark Driscoll. In that very qualified sense I would slightly dissent from Allender's suggestion that people are not guilty. It might depend on what they said and did to people trying to be "on mission". But then I never sought to be "in ministry" and so I don't have the burden people who were in ministry may struggle with about how they spoke to and treated people. I felt no shortage of guilt about what a jerk I came to feel I had been to people without being in ministry at Mars Hill. The guilt might have been more crushing had I been some kind of leader.
One of Allender's proposals was that Driscoll, via his persona and public speech, gave attenders permission to feel something. People who came to Mars Hill with different levels of emotional numbness or psychological fragmentation of reliance on left hemispheric thought processes to offset or counter emotional turmoil were given, by way of Mark Driscoll's public persona and theatricality, permission to feel individually and corporately feelings they might have accustomed themselves to not feeling safe to express. Cosper, I think, alluded to trauma-bonding in community groups where someone was asked about their entire sexual history in a community group setting. That ... reminded me that I tended to not attend community groups. I attended a handful of them but thought of them as ways to sustain friendships I already made incidentally within group contexts or out of friendship rather than devotion to the idea of a community group or small group as a principle unto itself.
Ever since I read Jacques Ellul's Propaganda I admit my skepticism about small groups as a post-Maoist form of social conditioning has ramped up pretty high! I admit I'm not the sort of person who is necessarily in touch with me feelings or even necessarily wants to be. When I was watching Eureka Seven I began to find it weird that I found it so easy to relate to Eureka in her somewhat icy, remote style of relating in the first half of the series. I began to wonder why I loathed "teasing" and found it despicable or why I noticed that the closer I feel to someone the less likely I am to make any jokes at all about them that might be "teasing". I admit I like Puritans at their most earnest. I think that humor from the pulpit should be minimal to non-existent because there are only two modes of humor (laughing with and laughing at) and a shepherd should avoid doing either and I began to realize during my years at Mars Hill circa 2005-2008 (I still had friends in CG from 2008-2009 despite refusing to renew membership) that Mark's preaching had turned into a lot of "laugh with me as I laugh at these stupid people." Some of the guilt people who went to Mars Hill can rightly feel, I believe, is realizing the extent to which Driscoll's public persona and rants gave them permission to laugh with him as he laughed at other people.
It feels weird to say that this is the first episode of the CT series since "Aftermath" that I honestly felt was worth talking about but that's how it felt. I stand by my thought that as diffuse and sloppy as it is as a narrative; and as much as I think there are dangling threads and missed opportunities; The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is the first attempt within the domain of an organ of the institutional press that has tackled the history of the church with a narrative that isn't curated down to the minute by Mark Driscoll.
But it still seems that a chronologically organized history of Mars Hill Church that covers the range of formative influences, people and institutions has yet to be written or published. All I can do that I've done at this blog is provide seeds for maybe someone else to write that kind of history.
Perhaps one closing compound thought, Allender said that with a narcissistic leader you will find that so long as your gifts and interests and work coincides perfectly with what the leader already wants to do the leader can be extravagantly generous but the second that stops being the case the leader turns on you. But what if what you wanted to do or were good at was never viewed as useful to begin with? That, I think, is a possibility that Cosper's series is simply incapable of addressing. Cosper's journalistic work is interesting and at times impressive but the nature of mainstream journalism is that it doesn't talk to the nobodies.
I've begun to notice in the years since Mars Hill was dissolved that the experiences of the leaders, from the lowest to highe st echelons, is not necessarily a reflection of the rank and file members. Allender told Cosper that those on the periphery likely see the most illusory form of the organization in an abusive church. That is likely true. Yet by that measure ordinary members who were not "plugged in" did not feel the same need to repudiate every dogma and doctrine at hand. Allender mentioned that narcissistic leaders tend to substitute dogma for ambivalence. I'll grant that yet the dogma becomes more crucial to insiders in leadership than to marginal insiders. In other words, to use Mark Driscoll's jargon, the higher the number you are assigned in his circle of trust the more necessary it is for you to be in total agreement with him on dogma.
A friend who has listened to the series so far mentioned that there was a difficult epiphany for them, that they realized that they didn't really even know Mark Driscoll like they thought they did. Allender nailed that observation! There are people who thought that, if they had to rank themselves in Mark's "circle of trust" would have put themselves in the zone of at least 7-9 who have discovered since Mark Driscoll and his family fled Seattle that they were, in fact, probably somewhere between 0-3 or maybe 4-5 at best. That has helped me realize something, that I felt my loyalty was to the people of Mars Hill I'd come to know and love, not some abstracted reified fantasy church in Mark's head but the actual flesh and blood people I met via Midrash (often through argument, I'm afraid) or at Sunday services or at film & theology events or volunteering in ministries. I don't regret meeting any of those people! I made friends there I could not have met any other way. They are all image-bearers of God and neighbors who are to be loved according to the teaching of Jesus. I have often failed to love them as best I could but that doesn't mean I have not loved them. I can't think of the former Mars Hill as a "shithole" the way some former members have. I refuse to think of the people I met as collectively being a "shithole". To do that would be no better than some president referring to "shithole countries".
If anything in the wake of Mars Hill I have found myself struggling with a feeling that former Mars Hill people I considered friends have had as easy a time leaving me behind as they may have felt Mark Driscoll found it easy to leave them behind.
Because I was not a leader of any kind I didn't feel a need to change my beliefs from complementarian to egalitarian views of ordination. I also felt no obligation to stop being a Calvinist. I began to see that there was literally no Christian doctrinal affirmation taken by Mars Hill or Mark Driscoll that required me to be at Mars Hill. I could be a moderately conservative evangelical Protestant at plenty of other churches and it was only some kind of cult of personality that would have led people to think there was nowhere else in Seattle were such religious beliefs were affirmed.
I wonder whether American discourse has a huge hangover from the Cold War where worldview vindication rules our collective imagination. I have sometimes heard former Mars Hill people say Seattle is a liberal city so that had ... something or other to do with Mark's demise. Justin Dean pitched that line for a while but it seemed self-pitying and later Dean conceded that Mark Driscoll was taken down by fellow Christians and the world just watched and enjoyed the show. Mark wasn't just taken down by fellow Christians. Some of the most ardent voices of criticism are from the practically super-Reformed old line Presbyterian wing. There were progressive voices, too, of course, and secular and Buddhist voices alongside conservative Christian voices. For a brief moment the arguments against the competency and goodwill of Mars Hill's leadership culture was a genuinely ecumenical movement that spanned the proverbial left, center and right.
I have found myself endlessly ambivalent. I used to pray that if the leaders of Mars Hill would not repent of how they treated people that God would destroy Mars Hill Church. Well, it seems that prayer was answered! But it does feel weird to realize that one of the prayers I've prayed in my life has been that God would, if need be, destroy a church down to its foundations. For people who still rave about "Pastor Mark" that might make me seem a literally satanic figure. That the Lord sent spirits of division and chaos to punish corrupt, self-serving and wicked leaders is not hard to find in the Bible. Judges 9. There's a whole chapter. David took a census because Satan inspired him to do it or also because the Lord incited David to take a census to punish Israel. That ambiguity runs throughout the scriptures. Mark Driscoll has apparently leaned on spiritual warfare tropes since leaving Mars Hill but there is a tension in the very idea of spiritual warfare that I have noticed in reading book after book starting from John Nevius' 1895 book to more recent work in this century. the tension is between two potential reasons for demonic attacks. Is spiritual attack due to a "difficult season of intense ministry" or because of people who claim to be God's people being so wicked God sends bad messengers against them?
People like Mark Driscoll don't seem to have answers for that. If Mark were to look back on his own life could he say how he has been the most harmful and dangerous person in his life? Or is that just a bromide tweeted out in the midst of a "difficult season"? He used to say, for those who remember he said this, that most of the women who wanted to befriend Grace were satanic. That was in 2008. A man who regards "most of the women" who wanted to befriend his wife as "stanic" doesn't sound like a shepherd. For all of Mark Driscoll's expatiation on spiritual warfare and the demons of other people (whether literal or metaphorical) he has seemed remarkably, durably and insistently resistant to addressing the possibility he has any demons of his own.
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