today Mark Driscoll tweets that livestream isn't church and your pastor isn't online but in the spring of 2009 he was excited to announce week-delay DVD rebroadcast of his sermons to Mars Hill satellite campuses

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1700547651056640348

Church isn’t a building, it is the gathering of saints—usually in a building. Livestream isn’t church. Your pastor isn’t online. Go to church this weekend.

9:32 AM · Sep 9, 2023

 

IF there’s anything I’ve observed about Mark Driscoll over the span of 25 years it’s that he has a pragmatism as principle streak. While he’s got a single building as a church campus in Arizona he’s set on the idea that livestream isn’t church. Back in 2009 he was excited to announce to Mars Hill Church that his preaching would stop being live satellite simulcast and would start being rebroadcast at non-Ballard campus via DVD. He was so excited he spent several minutes explaining the change.

In all the decades there have been transcripts of Mark Driscoll sermons this didn’t seem to make the cut.  I had to go dig up the sermon audio myself and transcribe it. It’s a useful testament from Mark Driscoll himself that his views on the relationship between pastors, their audiences, and technology could evolve on the basis of pragmatic brand development considerations.  I documented this material back in March 2014 and Mars Hill has long since dissolved; with the media library being a bit tricky to find if you haven’t kept tabs on it since the dissolution. What’s worse is that, as anyone who has tried to follow links from the old Mars Hill days will have found out, many former Mars Hill domain links skew toward gambling and pr0n sites so if you’re reading Wenatchee The Hatchet posts  in 2023 it’s advisable to not just click away on links. Given the history Mars Hill had of deploying robots.txt to preclude archive.org being able to, you know, archive, Wenatchee The Hatchet has had the sometimes tedious task of preserving material for the public record as it was getting purged by Mars Hill public relations.

What you are about to be able to read is from the guy who just tweeted that your pastor isn’t online and you should go to church this weekend.  Back in later 2009 if you went to Mars Hill Church and weren’t at the Ballard campus where he preached, you were not only not going to see him in person, you’d be hearing him preach on a screen a sermon he preached the previous week.  Does “that” count as more of “church” than a pastor who livestreams a sermon or homily in real time?  So let’s revisit what Driscoll said about the week delay procedure Mars Hill introduced in the spring of 2009.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-start-of-week-delay-broadcasting-at.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20111010010057/http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/

http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads

https://web.archive.org/web/20111019054549/http://cdn.marshillchurch.org/files/2009/05/03/20090503_humble-pastors_sd_audio.mp3

http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads

 

Prophets, Priests and Kings

Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter

May 3, 2009

1 Peter 5:1-5

 

starting about 5:30

This leads to an enormous change in how we do things. You may know that today we use satellite television technology where we live satellite the sermon to our various campuses but (you may have noticed, as well) we're on the Left Coast, left in EVERY way. We're over here on the Left Coast and on the Left Coast we're behind the other time zones.

 

So we need to find a way to sync up the sermon with every time zone so we're going to a week delay of the sermon beginning this month. Here's how it'll work.  I'll preach Sundays at Mars Hill Ballard as I always do.  We'll take the best sermon--and, yes, they're not all good. Some of them aren't good at all, and some of them, SOME weeks there's a good one.  Some weeks, you just take what you get.

 

And sometimes, you know, one sermon's better than the other. We'll edit it. We'll take out the technical difficulties, things that I said that could get me picketed, we'll fix it, for Jesus, and then we'll send it out to the campuses. They'll play it back and once it's played back at all the campuses on week delay THEN we'll put it online.  It won't go on the internet until it's played at all the campuses. And that's how it will work.

 

There are eight reasons for this. I'll tell you why.

 

Again, different time zones. To go to different states, potentially different nations we need a different delivery method.

 

Number two,  it does allow the bust sermon.  Currently over half of the church is on video. The majority of Mars Hill is on video, not at Ballard where I preach live. Going forward, if we attain our goal of reaching 50,000 only ten percent MAXIMUM will be at Ballard hearing the sermon as I speak it.  Ninety percent of the church will be watching it on week delay on video so I want to get the best sermon to the majority of our people.

 

Number three, campuses get a better preparation timeline. By getting the sermon in advance they can put together their music for Sunday, kids ministry, small group discussion questions, pastoral care and follow-up. Right now they have no idea where the sermon is going because I have no idea where the sermon is going. They keep asking, "Tell us what you're going to talk about."  I don't know! Preaching happened. That's how it works, I just go and sometimes they're having a really hard time putting a service and following it up and I understand this and that will help.

Number four, it's cheaper. Right now the television satellite technology requires a lot of gear that we're able to sell to turn some profit. It requires the renting of satellite time, downlinks, dishes on campuses.  All of this can be eliminated it saves, literally, over the course of our history, will save us millions of dollars. It's a big savings and it makes facilities much easier.

 

Here's what's happening. Our new campus which we're hoping to launch in Federal Way needs a facility. Olympia needs a permanent facility. Shoreline needs a bigger facility. And as we expand it becomes very difficult and limiting to do satellite. It requires a permanent installation.  Schools, community centers, theaters, they don't allow that because it's their building and they don't want the infrastructure of their technology adjusted in any way and rightfully so. By going to week delay it allows WAY more flexibility to use innumerable facilities and move quickly from one to the other.

Last few reasons why we're doing this.

 

Number six, technical simplicity. Right now it's like a dish on your home and your cable. If the wind blows hard and it shifts we lose signal.  Also, if it snows we have a real problem. We call them interns. We put them up on the roof with a broom and they're literally dusting off the satellite dish hoping not to fall off the church and meet Jesus prematurely. You can always tell who the interns are who do the short straw. They're the ones on the roof during the snow storms. This makes it more simple. It's easy playback technology.

 

Number seven, it allows translation and close caption. Right now I THINK my sermons are on TV in Korea. They translate the redneck jokes into Korean. I don't understand this.  Apparently there ARE redneck Koreans and what this allows, this allows us to translate to different languages and also potentially to do closed caption for those who are hearing impaired. It allows us

more flexibility.

 

Now this leads to the last question. Some have asked, "Why not do a Wednesday or Thursday night service, capture the service, and then play it back?" Couple of reasons. One, I travel during the week.  I've got book deadlines, media deadlines. It really would be a big imposition on the Ballard campus.  Additionally, I don't have as much time to prepare the sermon. It won't be as good and if I don't do a good job the majority of the church is stuck with the worst sermon. Also, some have asked, "Well, why not do Saturday night?"  And I won't.

But, after he said all that in 2009, now he tweets that livestream isn’t church and your pastor isn’t online.  Since Puget Sound was practically a ground zero for covid-19 outbreaks and Gov. Inslee locked down on a lot of gatherings livestream church was often the only way to keep church going. Driscoll, of course, relocated to Arizona and has his own take on various issues but I’m setting all that aside compared to his own self-accounting regarding technology and homiletics. Is livestreaming a full church service “not” church? If it’s not church what would Driscoll say about his own preaching rebroadcast at the U District campus a week after he preached a sermon at Ballard? This is an obvious case of the pot calling the kettle black if Mark Driscoll were attempting to stake out a coherent and consistent position.

 

As Mike Gunn said in a vodcast in late 2022, Mark’s been the kind of guy who would say childrens’ ministry would not be the tale wagging the dog at Mars Hill before he had kids … and then when Mark Driscoll became a dad it was as though suddenly having a great childrens’ ministry was hugely important.  (47:10 is where you want to be for this statement)  Amen, Mike!   Yeah, we’ve met this guy.  He is “present”. 

This means for those of us who pay attention to the past as well as the present and future Driscoll’s present-ism means he means what he says at exactly the moment he says it but he has a demonstrable history of doing 180 degree turns on issues and acting and speaking like either his old position didn’t matter or he just saw the light.  He’ll berate the “seed of Chucky” interpretation of Genesis 6 during his Mars Hill years but then he’ll read, what, a couple of books by Michael Heiser and endorse the view he scoffed.  Some of us have kept in mind that there have been a range of interpretations of Genesis 6 and not make fun of the views we don’t subscribe to. Augustine pointed out that the angel/human hybrid take was normative in early Christian doctrine but few subscribed to it.  If you want to get into how and why that interpretive shift happened there are academic monographs on the topic but I’m not going to bore you with those. I have a reading list for that if you want to get into that.

If livestream isn't church then I don't see how recording your sermons on DVD and rebroadcasting them a week later at satellite campuses counts as a preacher preaching to his congregation. At least in a livestream the pastor or priest is directly speaking to the congregation in the flesh and via internet.  For those who don't know this, the week delay rebroadcast Mark Driscoll described in the 2009 sermon quoted above was the norm from about May 2009 through to the December 2014 dissolution of the corporation known as Mars Hill Church.  If livestream "isn't" church was what Mark Driscoll did for half a decade to the campuses of Mars Hill where he didn't preach in person actually preaching? 

POSTSCRIPT 9-10-2023

Back in his Mars Hill years Mark Driscoll sometimes joked that it was a fertility cult.  I couldn't laugh at jokes like that because it seemed like the kind of joke that was made in earnest.  There have been secularist and progressive writers who as far back as the 1990s pegged Driscoll as waging culture war but in postmodernist branded terms. Driscoll's old Daily Evergreen rants from his college days are what he seems to have ultimately come back to in his fifties.

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1696544485281292535

Have kids. One of the best ways to affect the culture is to overwhelm the future with who you're sending into it. The rainbow people don't multiply much (besides STDs) with their Romans 1 lifestyle.

8:25 AM · Aug 29, 2023

He did used to say he had himself a fertility cult.  Admitting it via tweet is just what it is.  Kids whose parents "sort of" planned for them to be born may be better off in the long run than kids who were brought into the world by parents who took (or take) their cues on reasons to parent from the Mark Driscolls of the world.  After all, even Nazi stumpers could say one good boy of Aryan stock could impregnate twenty willing girls were it not for the problematic dogma of monogamous pairing.  That's the thing about breeding to win culture wars, its history is not particularly distinguished in any good way, last I checked. 

POSTSCRIPT 9-13-2023

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1701015652583276853

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

Why is it always the KJV guys who send me self published books on the apocalypse

4:31 PM · Sep 10, 2023

If self-publishing your book on a book of the Bible is supposed to be a sign of incompetence what are we supposed to make of Mark Driscoll self-publishing New Days, Old Demons?  Or has Mark Driscoll's legacy of double-standardized testing ensured that when he self-publishes it's timely and prophetic witness for a pathetic age and not equivalent to the implied ravings of KJV guys who self-publish their books on the apocalypse. 

After all, at the relevant Amazon page it says:

New Days, Old Demons is a prophetic study of sex, gender, woke politics, and how progressive Christianity is just a rebranding of ancient paganism. The same demons that were active in the days of Elijah are active today castrating the men, mutilating the children, closing the churches, and silencing the Bible teachers.

We’re fighting back by self-publishing this book when nobody else would because it’s a prophetic message for pathetic times. This book reads like the book of Revelation meets a death metal band in a cage fight on Halloween.

Maybe those KJV guys sending Driscoll self published books on the apocalypse have simply come to understand him as a fellow prophet and traveler.  Sure, they're not G. K. Beale or Richard Bauckham but, hey, they can self-publish as well as Mark Driscoll can.