the theme at Mark Driscoll's twitter feed this week is fear (update 9-4-22, toward a proposal that the Driscolls now use forgiveness teaching as a form of apotropaic magic)

Although he's known to block any number of people on Twitter from viewing or responding to his tweets, the fact that Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't even on Twitter and never plans to be means, paradoxically, that it's never been that hard to keep tabs on his tweets.

For whatever reason, since the August 26, 2022 Mike Cosper interview with Dan Allender in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill series came along ...

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/bonus-episode-conversation-with-dan-allender.html

...Mark Driscoll's tweets are full of talk about fear.

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1563601993246990336
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Fear will come upon you, but you can't let it in you.
11:59 AM · Aug 27, 2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1563964381196652545
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
There’s always something to fear. You can look out in fear or look up in faith.
11:59 AM · Aug 28, 2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1564327027188056066
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Faith and fear can't coexist.
12:00 PM · Aug 29, 2022·

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1564689660672184323
Sometimes fear does more damage to you than the person or thing you're afraid of.
12:01 PM · Aug 30, 2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1565052048160264193
When the spirit of fear oppress you it turns into false prophecy over your life.
12:01 PM · Aug 31, 2022

Other people can do the screencap thing if they like.  

POSTSCRIPT ... 9-1-2022

Still running with the theme as of 

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1565414436038479872

You need to stop worrying about the outcome and instead worship through the process.

12:01 PM · Sep 1, 2022

POSTSCRIPT 9-4-2022

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1566501851457019904

Forgiving others allows us to move on into the destiny that God has for us.

12:02 PM · Sep 4, 2022

In his post Mars Hill writings Driscoll has leaned heavily on a teaching that says we(you) need to forgive people in order to be free of demonic influence and that if you don't forgive you are saying you want Satan instead of Jesus to reign in your life. It's an idea he had back in 2008, too, for that matter but within a post-Mars Hill context via Win Your War and tweets there's a different element to it.  Some Christians approach spiritual warfare as a set of instructions about how Christians corporately and publicly give witness to the reign of Christ as having already conquered the powers and principalities.  This shows up in books by Esther Acolatse, Daniel K Darko, Robert Ewusie Moses and other pastors and theologians from Ghana and Kenya.  Acolatse has noted that in some African church movements there is a tendency for Christians to treat spiritual warfare as a kind of medicinal individual one-shot deal. Another way to put it, since I've seen this pattern in my life back in my Pentecostal days is that there are a lot of Christians who regard spiritual warfare instructions in Ephesians 6 not as instructions for how Christian communities bear public witness to Christ together so much as a kind of anti-magic that is paradoxically magical.  

In Driscoll's post-Mars Hill variant on teaching about the need for Christians to forgive it's hard for me to shake a sense that he prescribes forgiveness as a blanket "You need to forgive them so Satan doesn't have a ground to attack you".  Yet to go by Mark and Grace Driscoll's statements in Win Your War and comments from people who have left The Trinity Church the Driscolls seem to still experience what they regard as spiritual attacks. As I've discussed in the past looking at Judges 9 and the afflicting spirit the Lord sent to King Saul in the Hebrew Bible we don't even find "demons" as conventionally understood from medieval European Christian diabology moving forward--instead we find the Lord occasionally sent spirits to afflict corrupt, self-serving and wicked leaders to torment them or deceive their prophets.  

This is a commonplace element in the Hebrew Bible when it comes to leaders being afflicted by the Lord for abuse or misappropriation of power but in the Driscolls' writings they chalk up any spiritual attacks they face to "intense seasons of ministry". The possibility that they opened themselves up to spiritual torment because of their abuses and injustices has,  to the best of my knowledge, literally never come up once in their twenty years of being public ministry figures together.  If Mark doesn't publicly confess he wronged people and leans on a forgiveness doctrine that functionally works as apotropaic magic the purpose of forgiveness may no longer even be about relational reconciliation or repentance at all in any Christian sense of the term, but a kind of protective spell-casting that is expected to protect the person who prays from being attacked).  

Matt Chandler steps away from leadership at A29 and The Village Church for a leave of absence

There's a bit of coverage for this news

https://julieroys.com/matt-chandler-steps-down-after-admitting-inappropriate-online-relationship/

https://julieroys.com/tag/matt-chandler/

https://religionnews.com/2022/08/29/matt-chandler-megachurch-pastor-and-acts-29-leader-placed-on-leave-for-unhealth-instagram-messages-woman/

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/faith/2022/08/29/what-we-know-about-megachurch-pastor-matt-chandler-of-the-village-church/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/us/matt-chandler-village-church-leave.html

https://relevantmagazine.com/faith/church/matt-chandler-is-taking-an-indefinite-leave-citing-an-inappropriate-relationship/

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/august/matt-chandler-village-church-online-inappropriate-leave.html

Hard not to think of this old post looking back on the people who at one time endorsed Real Marriage.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/07/real-marriage-in-2016-looking-back-on.html

Of course Chandler didn't write an endorsement blurb for the book.  Back in 2016 it was impossible to know that Patrick would later die of a self-directed gunshot wound that was ruled a suicide.  

I'm not aware that Driscoll has commented on the Chandler situation yet but I'm reminded that at the time of Patrick's death Driscoll did post something to social media.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/10/there-was-it-turned-out-brief-comment.html

Between Darrin Patrick, Steve Timmis and now Matt Chandler (to say nothing of former leaders Mark Driscoll himself and, apparently, Scott Thomas) the top ranking leaders at Acts 29 have a track record of ... some kind.  Like there's a pattern of  being removed from leadership at some point for cause.

Sometimes I think that after months or years of not-much that this whole array of topics can be "retired" but, no, stuff comes up every now and then.  Last year it was the kick-off of the CT series and this year, well, the podcast at CT has continued and now there's news about Matt Chandler.  

POSTSCRIPT 9-1-22 5pm (ish)

I'm not going to try to wade into the swamp of stuff written and published about Chandler just yet.  It's enough in my wheelhouse I'll read what I can but it's difficult to assess A29 related stuff.  For longtime readers of the blog you may recall that between Scott Thomas, Darrin Patrick, Mark Driscoll and Steve Timmis the track record of Acts 29 top dogs has frankly not been great in the use of power and clear and honest disclosure stuff.  

Ethan Hein blogs on D sharp and E flat distinctions, it reminds me of a Haydn's Op. 77, No. 2 string quartet as discussed by Ross W Duffin

One of many reasons music theory and acoustics are valuable fields of study is because each of us who plays and sings and writes and studies music will often have conceptual constraints we may not be aware of as we are beholden to the limits of what our bodies can do and perceive and (crucially for those us who play instruments with fixed tunings, keys and frets) the in-built conceptual and physical constraints of the instruments we play.

Ethan Hein, a music theorist who is (like me) a guitarist, describes how D sharp and E flat are different; why they are different; and how guitarists can sometimes not fully or immediately appreciate the distinction.

If memory serves there are now microtonal fingerboards for guitarists who want to be able to play the difference between D sharp and E flat.  John Schneider shows samples in the updated and revision edition of The Contemporary Guitar, which is a beauty of a book you should pick up if you’re a guitarist of any style or instrument.  If you want to see what such a fingerboard looks like on a real guitar Paul Davids (with Adam Neely as guest) has a video for you.

But it’s been in the last half century such innovations have come about and they are generally only known to guitarists who want to play stuff by, say, Alois Haba (who wrote a suite for guitar in quarter-tones).  It has a teensy bit of an Ivan Wyschnegradsky vibe for me … .  Haba also wrote a guitar sonata.

But for those of us who don’t play microtonal guitar music, D sharp and E flat are totally the same. Which is a reality Ethan Hein notes in his post.

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/why-are-d-sharp-and-e-flat-considered-to-be-two-different-notes/

some thoughts on the Cosper interview with Allender, this is one of the episodes I think is both focused and helpful even if I remain ambivalent about the series overall

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.