an apparent account of Mark Driscoll's resignation from Mars Hill from the 2021 book Pray Like Jesus, juxtaposed with prior accounts and Sutton Turner's published notes from the 2014 investigation of Mark Driscoll

Pray Like Jesus: Learn to Pray to God as Father

Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase

Charisma House

ISBN 978-1-62999-926-5

ISBN 978-1-62999-927-2 (ebook)

 

Before I (Mark) married Grace, I prayed a lot. She did the same. We also asked our Christian friends and family to join us. Since we were young, we did not want simply to ask God to bless our plan, but we wanted to ask God to give us His plan. Are you getting married? Sort that out with God first. Whom you marry is the second-most important decision you will ever make after whom you will worship. The same is true of any major life decision. One of our pastors, who has taught us a lot, walked with us through the biggest decision-making season of our life as a married couple. We took months to pray and asked others to pray with us and for us. We wanted God to tell us whether we should stay in a ministry, home, and city that we’d been serving for a few decades or if we should transition into a completely unknown future in faith.

 

After months of prayer God spoke to us both audibly at the same time. Grace was in the kitchen, and I was in the bed-room on the opposite end of our home. Grace came running in the bedroom to tell me that God had spoken to her, and stunned, I told her that at the same moment He spoke to her, he also spoke to me. He told us both we were “released”.

 

This word from the Lord led to the biggest faith step of our lives as we did not know what was next but knew that a season of our life had ended and we needed to step out together, in faith. In submission to the pastoral authority over us, we asked our overseers whether they agreed this was a word from God. They confirmed what God said.

 

Without months of praying together and God supernaturally answering this prayer, we would have been divided, and, as Jesus taught, our household would have fallen apart. Thankfully, because of prayer, we were united and able to lead our five kids through an incredibly painful and difficult time. We are now in the holiest, happiest, and healthiest season of our lives, doing ministry together because God heard and answered our prayers.   Pages 50-51

 

In this account Mark Driscoll mentioned that he and Grace prayed for months about whether or not to leave the ministry they had been in.  Because Mark Driscoll had not pastored a church prior to Mars Hill there is basically no room for misunderstanding the “ministry” identity. The Driscolls, Mark tells us, wanted God to tell them whether they should stay at Mars Hill or transition into a new unknown future. 

 

Mark Driscoll, obviously recounted that after months of prayers by him and his wife, God audibly spoke to both of them.  They were released. Now we’ll get back to other accounts of this moment before long but the most significant element in this newer account is what Mark Driscoll reports as having happened next—the Driscolls went to their overseers and asked whether they agreed God released them.  This seems to be a reference to the former Mars Hill Board of Overseers, a subset of the Board of Advisors and Accountability.  Driscoll’s account was that the Board of Overseers, apparently, concluded that God had, in fact, spoken to Mark and Grace Driscoll and that would entail that the board accepted Mark Driscoll’s resignation. 

We're about to get detailed so if that's okay with you read on.

links for the weekend, a new book out on the state of literary criticism as a profession and riffs on the states of the arts as mediated by, well, critics

The demise of criticism as the demise of civilization is a weary trope in criticism and it will always be with us.  It is axiomatic to observe that when old critics bewail the death of criticism or the death of the arts it is more probable, in our era that is well past the death of Freud, to assert that the critic bewailing the death of the arts or of criticism is simply facing down mortality and is handling it however he, she, they wish by projecting the mortality of the self onto the state of the art or the critical responses to the art.

Nathan Robinson says the anti-imperialism of Avatar should be celebrated despite trading on every ridiculous Native American cliche? Are we absolutely SURE about that?

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/the-anti-imperialism-of-avatar-should-be-celebrated

Now I still regard Mark Driscoll's absurd claim that Avatar was the most satanic/demonic film he'd ever seen as absurd. I didn't much care for James Cameron's Avatar.  Over at Slate someone remarked on how little a cultural footprint the film had whereas a ton of us remembered Joker's magic pencil trick. Forgotbusters had an amusing discourse somewhere on how Cameron's film was remaking Billy Jack in space.  I had mentioned how I thought Avatar is to hard-science-fiction what My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is to socialist realism (and I still enjoy that the associated movie beat mother! in domestic and global box office and Emily Blunt was clearly having a blast voicing Tempest Shadow).

James Cameron is, I have proposed, the Michael Bay of blue-state voters.  It's not that I can't or don't enjoy his films while I'm watching them, it's that they are no less trite and cliche-riddled than Michael Bay's films.  The tropes are merely different, not better or worse.  

That said, I was simply not won over the first time and I've got no incentive to go spend three hours or more watching a sequel that trades as much on white guy joins the Indian tribe and gets the Indian princess and saves the day stuff.  Call it a reflex borne from being half Native American because of my Native American dad but James Cameron's Navi are basically magical Indians in tune with nature. 

Local author Sherman Alexie has had maybe too much fun pointing out how most of those cliches had nothing to do with actual Native American tribes and everything to do with the overt fabrications of white progressives and liberals who reverse-engineered the kinds of American Indians they thought could popularize their ideas and leverage metric tons of white guilt along the way about the grisly treatment of Native Americans to give the ideas more traction.  Alexie was particularly amused to note how often white progressives acted as if Native Americans never owned slaves, never had a slave trade.  European/white imagination has had it that nomadic hunter-gatherers couldn't have had a need for slaves.  Well, Leland Donald wrote an entire book on how every tribe in the Pacific Northwest had slavery practices. That many a tribe abandoned the ownership of slaves by the 1920s is still worth noting, of course, but having been the son of a Native American for decades now I gotta say, it rankles me sometimes what cliches about Native Americans still pass muster in the reception history of pop culture that would not be the case for other groups. Are we going to see sequels in which different tribs of the Navi trade slaves?  

So, yeah, call me skeptical about James Cameron's whole approach.  If we're supposed to dig The Way of Water because it's against colonialism, imperialism and egregious whaling then all those stereotypes about righteous Native Americans in tune with nature and the cosmos is fine.

James Cameron launching a cinematic franchise that is to environmentalism what Uncle Tom's Cabin, was to the issue of slavery and the treatment of slaves ... Robinson thinks we should roll with the stereotypes and tropes?  Do we have to?  I don't see a reason to spend three hours sitting through Cameron's sequel to a movie I thought was meh and that didn't need sequels.  Not that I begrudge Zoe Saldana getting stable work or anything and Cameron does know how to make spectacles.  But I'm not rushing out to go see the new film.  

In his book Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff pointed out that despite all the objections to Uncle Tom's Cabin there's an awkward historical reality to the work, it "worked".  It got people to rethink their perspectives on how blacks were treated as slaves and about the ethics of slavery as it was defined and defended.  It can be far too easy for us in the 21st century to look down on the patent moralizing and stereotypes of UTC; even "great" works of art can be criticized for various reasons and there's no reason we shouldn't be critical of great works and less-great works.  But there is a sense, a very real sense, in which Uncle Tom's Cabin is up for criticism because it worked, it achieved its literary aim as protest writing.  Wolterstorff proposed, a bit delicately, that Baldwin and other authors who damned UTC did so perhaps because their own writings traded on similar appeals to moral outrage.  

Why mention that?  Because when a work of art trades so flamboyantly on what can be regarded as crude and morally simplistic characters and characterization to appeal to moral intuitions there may have to be a "it worked" element before we can pass a verdict.  The proof will be in the pudding here.  If Cameron really made a movie about how whaling is bad and we should save whales ... if that's a major take-away I'll stick with Star Trek IV, alright.  If you actually like Cameron's space fantasy I don't want to take that away from you ... but my comparison of Cameron's film to the legacy of Uncle Tom's Cabin is intended to provoke some thought about how worthwhile it really is that Cameron has traded on tropes about Native Americans to make a few points about colonialism and ecological issues.  

If James Cameron really couldn't think of any other way to make his moralizing points about ecology, colonialism and imperialism without trading on every cliche about Native Americans known to pop culture that, personally, cements my impression that he's a Michael Bay for blue state voters.  Your perceptions and mileage may vary. Obviously if you've read this far I think someone like Cameron should have been able to make his points about ecology, colonialism and imperialism without resorting to every cliche of the magical Native American communing with nature.  That he didn't and maybe couldn't is why I would argue James Cameron is a few notches below Stephen Spielberg and probably a bit on par with George Lucas (comparably terrible at writing dialogue, for instance). 

But as I said, your perceptions and mileage may vary. 

Len Oakes on the `career apostate' who was once part of a cult, from Prophetic Charisma

From Len Oakes’ Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities
Syracuse University Press
Copyright © 1997 by Syracuse University Press
ISBN 0-8156-2700-9
ISBN 0-8156-0398-3

From Chapter 7, “Followers and Their Quest” 

...  But charismatic involvement provides a confrontation with one's ultimate concerns. To fail therein leaves one damaged at one's core. 

Or perhaps it merely reveals an earlier damage of which one was previously unaware, a damage we all share. Perhaps there can be healing there, too. 

Leaving

Each of the groups studied had lost far more members than it had retained. And most of their original members had left. On average, less than 20 percent of those who joined, stayed on for more than five years, and fewer still stayed for ten or more years. Ex-members who still felt warmly about the leader were those who had succeeded in their great work. They had used the group for their purposes and moved on at the right time. Success gave them a new appreciation of the leader, gratitude for his help, and also pragmatism about his faults. They no longer needed to believe in him so intensely. [emphasis added] Usually by the time they were successful, they had witnessed some of the  leader's less  savory attributes-his  mistakes  and  excesses. They held few illusions about his nature but retained a fondness.  After success they felt restricted by the group and needed new challenges. The commonest pattern was to remain until the next group crisis (charismatic groups have lots of crises) and then move on.  Probably they never again joined a charismatic movement. 

Embittered ex-members tended to be those who had in some way failed at their great work. They felt conned, that they had been tricked into believing the unbelievable--and indeed some had, although most had contributed to their own miseries. [emphasis added] But there is a special pain felt by one who has deliberately chosen to abandon reason to follow another-in deep trust and love- into an unknown darkness, only to fall flat on his face. Typically, when such a follower confronts the leader over this hurt, the leader refuses to bear any responsibility for it, even mocking and rejecting the follower. Perhaps the follower did something unethical for the leader, and in the throes of guilt needs the leader to share the burden. When the leader laughingly admonishes, "Well, you did it, not me," and dresses the tragedy up as a spiritual lesson, the follower feels betrayed-"burned to the bone," as one described it--trust evaporates, and the great work is no longer possible in that situation. Now, rather than seeing the journey as the goal, the follower chooses to leave, blaming the leader when he finds out that the impossible ideal is, after all, impossible. The failed follower leaves when it suits him, sometimes with open hostility toward the group. However, there are shades of success and failure, and even in the most rigid groups there are degrees of membership. Some leave to join another charismatic group. Some leave, then rejoin and go through the previous stages again, and continue onto later stages. Some make several attempts to join a group, several attempts at a goal, each time achieving partial success; and so they come and go, remaining, ambiguously, a part of the group. 

Each stage may become a trap. Members may get stuck in one stage and lose themselves. If they don't move on, they become vulnerable to the excesses of the group.  If one doesn't find oneself in such a group, then someone else-usually the leader will possess one. Charismatic groups usually have some members who are stuck at various stages.  Leavers are sometimes those who have become stuck and withdraw rather than continue to go round and round. Lacking their old sense of purpose, they may forge a new one by opposing the leader and his group, becoming 'career apostates" (Foster 1984b).  These are disillusioned ex-followers who battle against their former group, often at great personal cost, by attempting to publicly expose every scandal associated with the group. Fortunately for them, charismatic groups usually have a lot of skeletons ln their closets and dirt under their carpets, so the "mission" of the career apostate can become a full-time vocation. [emphasis added]

After having spoken with several of these people, none of whom was necessarily "wrong" in his opposition--there genuinely were falsehoods and crimes that needed to be aired--I nevertheless gained the impression that they were driven by some need for absolution.  A common refrain ran something like "I ... was so hoodwinked while in the group that I, too, condoned or took part in these misdeeds." Hence it seems likely that career apostates are trying to make amends and assuage their own guilt through their actions. But that is not all, for there is a particular discovery that people make about themselves in charismatic groups that many find especially hard to accept. It concerns how easily one can sell one's soul, how shallow one's sense of ultimate concerns really is, and how readily one can perform the unspeakable. ...