on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast finally being over

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

After dozens of sprawling and frustrating hours the thing finally ended.  

I listened more out of a sense of obligation than pleasure.  At best only half of the podcast is worth your time and at worst even the half that is worth listening to is fraught with a lack of focus and a nearly abject failure to construct a coherent and comprehensible timeline of what happened.  Cosper and company are to be commended in precisely one sense, for the scattershot grab-bag podcast being some kind of account from participants in Mars Hill that was no curated down to the minute by Mark Driscoll himself.  That said, it probably needs to be said (if only by me) that Christianity Today is a publication whose cultural role has been to anoint worthy Christian celebrities within evangelicalism and to ask "who killed Mars Hill?" was a dubious opening question. Even to ask who made Mars Hill what it was would be to fall into the great person trope/trap.  

That Cosper got statements on record from the widow of David Nicholas was a great addition to a history of Mars Hill.  I have positive thoughts about aspects of the podcast but the second half of the series, a litany of bonus episodes tended to be little more than post-mortem promotional slots whether Cosper realized it or not.  Wanna here more music from someone who made that opening theme song?  Chad Gardner spot. Want resources on healing from spiritual trauma? Aundi Kolber spot.  Want to consider the ways celebrity corrupts public discourse beyond the realm of the church?  There's a spot for that, too.  Christianity Today even had a "reports on itself" episode, which a friend of mine once said seemed to be a requisite podcast, like the atonement episode that established that "we have to do this to ourselves because we did a dozen episodes about Mars Hill misdeeds".  Permeating the entire podcast is something that may just bug me and me alone but it's the "Did you like the content?  Hit the subscribe button!"  Yeah, yeah, I know that's how the age of the internet is and all of that but it gets to the core reservation I have about the star-making celebrity-anointing flagship of evangelicalism producing a podcast series that last 20 hours.  20 hours!  

I can't say that I have been much more positively impressed by negative appraisals of the podcast. Along conservative lines the complaint has too often been that the podcast reveled in taking potshots at Mark Driscoll; that Cosper was touting egalitarian views; that in place of the bad celebrities of new Calvinism we were peddled good celebrities from the "liberal" side.  Along the liberal/progressive line there have been laments that Cosper didn't look into the perspective of POC people.  That there have been black clergy in the new Calvinist movement is probably not what contributors to Christian Century were really thinking about.  Would progressives want a discussion of Eric Mason's Woke Church?  Anything written by Anthony Bradley?  Probably not.  

Bromides about how white Mars Hill was were commonplace and yet I did not get a sense while I was at Mars Hill that progressive journalists (themselves frequently white) were particularly interested in being immersed enough in Mars Hill culture to find the people of color who called Mars Hill the spiritual home.  Throw in centuries of inter-racial and inter-tribal marriages among Pacific Northwest aboriginal groups and people with Native American ancestry who "read" as "white" would not be read as anything else (me, for instance, being half-Native).  The reality that many people of color who are religious are at least as socially conservative as white churchgoers if not more is something that does not necessarily come up in white progressive coverage of Mars Hill.  Sherman Alexie lamented that the average Native American was more socially conservative than the most socially conservative white guy.  Anthony Heilbut observed in The Fan Who Knew Too Much that anti-gay animus is far stronger in black churches than in white churches.  Heilbut even singled out T. D. Jakes as a particularly striking case study of anti-gay polemic.  

Too much of the collective reaction to the podcast, which has many flaws, has been to react in terms of the podcast's failures to fit into culture war partisanship--Cosper was supposed to have highlighted how the reason X and Y happened was because of beliefs A, B, C, and D.  But I was not convinced Cosper even did a god job of elucidating or explicating what the views of the elders of Mars Hill were or where they got their ideas from.  Those demon trials, for instance?  Did anyone read Karl Payne's book, the one Mark Driscoll actually endorsed and said influenced his approach to spiritual warfare?  I did but enough IRL went on the last two years I didn't get around to writing about that.  What became clear was Cosper talked to a lot of people but it was not so clear how many of the books of not just Mark Driscoll but the other pastors of Mars Hill he read.

Yet somehow it has been impossible to shake the sense that the podcast itself was rambling toward a foregone conclusion and that reactions to the podcast did likewise.  The foregone conclusion was vaguely that celebrity is bad and small is beautiful but a platform like Christianity Today having anointed Mark Driscoll the darling of the New Calvinist movement?  Nah, forget about that.  What I hope can happen is that the podcast and its failures can inspire people who were actually at Mars Hill to write about their time there.  We never needed a podcast half as much as we needed participants to write about what they saw and heard and did.  I have probably written more about Mars Hill than most people but I am not at a place in my life where I feel like I want to be writing a book or books about it.  I probably have multiple books worth of material here but I am not sure I want to write a history of Mars Hill.  I was thinking of it while Lief Moi was alive but now he's dead.  Lief's death wasn't the only death I have been dealing with in the last six months for that matter.  

Let me put it this way, for all the praise heaped within Christian media on Mike Cosper's project how many people can answer the following question, "who concluded that Mark Driscoll was genuinely called to pastoral ministry, competent to pursue that ministry, and served as funders and mentors in the formative years of Mark Driscoll's early 1990s path to pastoring?"  Can you answer that question based on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill?  What church retreat did he go to that had him by an Idaho river and which pastors and churches hosted that event?  Can you get an answer to that question based on the CT podcast?  

But what of alternative voices?  

Well, if those alternative voices are ultimately shilling books and podcasts and content that is more progressive or conservative than Christianity Today's sprawling and finally middling podcast then they are simply part of the same muddle.  Holding up the late Rachel Held Evans or Nadia Bolz-Weber or maybe a Eugene Petersen or a Peter Rollins or a Tony Jones as an alternative to Mark Driscoll is to offer no alternative at all.  Holding up a Doug Wilson or a Jordan Peterson or a Stephen Wolfe or a John MacArthur alternative to Mark Driscoll is doing more of the same.  Mark Noll wrote decades ago that the scandal of the evangelical mind was there wasn't much of a mind and this has probably not exactly changed but an upshot of that observation bordering on a punchline is that it should be a warning to us that exvangelicals will not pick up a life of the mind merely by being exvangelicals.  There is unfortunately probably nothing an exvangelical in 2022 would say about Mars Hill doctrine and culture that couldn't be said better by someone steeped in mainline denominations at any point in the last half century.  

To put this as starkly as possible, anyone who was a self-impressed hipster striver within the halls of Mars Hill Church didn't stop being a self-impresed hipster striver after becoming an exvangelical or a paleo-Confederate or whatever they became when they decided they weren't part of Mars Hill any longer.  My brother once told me that when the powerful families in China began to realize the communists were going to win they switched to communism but the core power-broker families stayed in charge.  Something comparable may have happened in the wake of the demise of Mars Hill, people who were striving to be movement-makers and movement-figures within Mars Hill may have gone more blue-state or red-state or may have decided to go tech-savvy this or podcast that but having become fire-and-forget weapons in the culture war 3.6 environment of Mars Hill they didn't stop being that after the church dissolved--they just found new ways to keep being what they were and perhaps convinced themselves that because the "what" they were stumping for changed the "how" was different.

When I left Mars Hill I was persuaded that the people who said I was a cold-blooded argumentative jerk were basically right and that I wasn't going to get better about being different by staying in a church where what people said were my vices were things that made it easy to fit in.  Some of my friends have said they have literally never seen those sides of me ... and I think of how the friends who have said that have never read me online.  :)  I have said this before but I have gotten a strong sense that for people who left Mars Hill it can be much, much easier to blame the teaching of Mark Driscoll for them being assholes than to admit they are, in fact, assholes and that Mars Hill teaching was the pretext they used for being assholes.  

On a more friendly note, one of my friends who was openly moderately progressive when I first got to know him at Mars Hill is still a moderately progressive sort now and it's always great to talk with him. 

That there were progressives within Mars Hill is basically never something that comes up in coverage of Mars Hill because progressives don't want to believe there could have been progressives at Mars Hill and conservatives don't want to believe that either but in the headier and earlier years of Mars Hill before it really devolved into the Driscoll show, back when Gunn and Moi and Driscoll were all preaching at separate campuses, there was a period where some actual political diversity existed.  Come to think of it, Gunn clearly didn't opt to participate in the podcast and a history of Mars Hill that doesn't even chart Mike Gunn's trajectory in ministry or the history of his churches was probably doomed to be incomplete.  Incomplete but not made by Driscoll is better than nothing but my fear is that Cosper's ramshackle day's worth of podcast has been received as though it were more than a ramshackle starting point that could potentially inspire other people to write far more lucid, cogent and coherent accounts of the former Mars Hill Fellowship/Mars Hill Church.

And, as I've said before, I've figured out that whoever that person or persons may be I don't feel like it's going to be me.

I had planned to be off the topic of Mars Hill blogging a year or so ago and even now but I have never pulled an "I'm done" post.  That strikes me as a stunt.  I'm on a bit of a Neville Figgis spree lately and the historian John Neville Figgis once remarked that historical events and figures are never as simple, coherent or consistent as historians almost invariably want them to be.  

Far too much of what has been written about Mars Hill has attempted to make the people and events of decades of history far, far simpler than any of those flesh and blood people have ever been.  The CT series is in some ways no exception.  I can appreciate that half of it could be the foundation for better, future accounts, but I would also say if you haven't bothered to listen to the 20 hours of podcast by now you are not missing out on anything at this point and it frankly will probably not help you understand amything about the church I was once part of nearly as much as it will give you soundbite quips from a plethora of people whose minds by broadcast were already made up.  It's harsh, but that's my take at the moment.  There are written accounts of Mars Hill I've recommended elsewhere and I won't waste your time on that score since I've got other posts on that.