a 50th and a 10th anniversary this year, the resignations of Richard Nixon and Mark Driscoll

50 years ago this month Richard Nixon resigned from being President of the United States
10 years ago this October Mark Driscoll resigned from being pastor at Mars Hill Church here in Seattle and the institution went into its final death spiral, closing its doors by the end of the calendar year.  

When I started this blog in January 2006 the aim of blogging was to discuss contemporary classical guitar music, particularly repertoire that was not the usually well-worn paths of composers from Spanish-speaking lands or South America.  I also tried to write about animation in the United States and Japan with digressions into French animation (I commend Persepolis and The Long Way North).  I dug Pixar films up to about Inside Out and have more or less left Pixar in post-Disney acquisition behind. I didn't get to Death Note until last year or even get to InuYasha until a few years ago (and I've been a fan of Rumiko Takahashi's work for decades).  Why? 

Because from about 2010 to 2015 I was pretty immersed in chronicling the life and times of the former Mars Hill from roughly the peak of its prestige and attendance to its meteoric death spiral in 2014.  

I had a journalism degree that was mouldering away and in the wake of the 2008 financial crash I was jobless for at least three years.  I saw that the mainstream and independent press in Puget Sound were not really or seriously covering things that were going on, give or take a few exceptional stories.  I was (and am) a basically evangelical low church Calvinist Christian and so I realized that I had enough theological and biblical acumen to wade into the swamp of issues that would be involved in writing about Mars Hill.  While I was an attending member I made no secret of my amillennial partial preterism, for instance. If you even know what that composite term means you'll understand why I could have felt that journalists were insufficiently trained in the religious issues to wade fully into the kind of church culture Mars Hill had.   

I hoped that by documenting what was going on the leadership culture could repent and reform from what increasingly seemed to be abusive practices and teachings.  Obviously that did not happen, inasmuch as Mark Driscoll resigned and the church was dissolved as a corporation.  In that sense everything here at Wenatchee The Hatchet that was written about Mars Hill Church is a testament to failure, not of them, me.  I obviously completely failed to write anything that catalyzed in any way repentance or reform within the leadership culture of Mars Hill.  I wondered over the years if that was how things would go.  There were times I prayed, quite a bit in the 2013-2014 period, that if the leaders would not repent that God would strike down the corporate empire known as Mars Hill.  

Unsurprisingly inside Mars Hill its partisans presented most of the negative coverage as, to some degree or another, satanic resistance and spiritual attack.  Driscoll began to speak as though Mars Hill resources got hacked or attacked.  That is conceivable but that may be have been a flourish to paper over the extent to which people were leaking documents, information and leads to bloggers such as Warren Throckmorton or myself.  Mars Hill leadership either did not realize I at one point had access to The City or just didn't cancel my account until April 2012, at which point it didn't matter what they had canceled because I had by then come to know enough people across all the campuses that the leaks kept coming.  Attempts to find out who the sources were do not seem to have been successful and I have not volunteered information about sources because no one who got a journalism degree would consider that to even be a thing.  You don't sell out sources.  

 They in turn, as best as I know, didn't sell me out.  Even people who were not sources at all but who knew who I was kept quiet.  Someone I knew from the Mars Hill years told me "I must have had a hundred people ask me if I knew who Wenatchee The Hatchet was and I'd say `I'm not gonna say who it is'."  The identity of Wenatchee The Hatchet was probably an open secret and transparent to anyone who wanted to find out.  If anything it seemed almost miraculous (or actually so) that there were people in 2013 who couldn't figure it out.  Not that I'm advertising now.  If people don't know Batman is Bruce Wayne it's not like Bruce Wayne tends to just say "I'm Batman" when he's not in costume.  And to borrow a line from The Dark Knight Rises, "The mask isn't for you, it's for the people you care about."

 Here we are, a decade after the demise of Mars Hill Church and it's like there never was such a church.  At the time it seemed like Seattle was some kind of mixture of the shock jock fixations of Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll as conjoined twins of jerkitude but that era of Seattle has come and gone.  Mark isn't here to see how many Mars Hill marriages ended in divorce, or how many marriages that were probably healthy enough pre-MH have crashed and burned in the years since he quit.  He'll take credit for the baptisms and weddings but not for the apostasies and divorces.  

 Depending on who you were listening to and at what time Mark Driscoll's resignation was proof that "the bloggers won".  No, they didn't, certainly not this blogger.  I said before that I failed and I failed.  I admit that I decided that if Mars Hill wouldn't repent and reform that chronicling it to its end was a possibility.  Giving people the information they needed to make a decision to leave (or not) became the main goal.  Nothing I published here could be construed as anything like a real news scoop to mainstream, institutional journalism.  It wasn't all bad while I was there but it wasn't all good, either.  Even King David had Joab, for instance, and Joab was a bad, bad guy.  Mark was and is no King David, more of a Jehu figure so far as I can tell.  

 Maybe Mars Hill would still exist if he hadn't sacrificed the health and welfare of the church on the altar of his own celebrity by publishing Real Marriage; having it rigged a place on the New York Times bestseller list; and all for a book that turned out, in its first edition, to be chockful of "citation errors", which is colloquially known as "plagiarism". 

 Now since the subject of Driscoll has come at Mere Orthodoxy in the last few weeks and there's a newer piece about the distinction between faithful presence and owned space in how evangelicals engage culture, I am going to pivot into that set of topics to make a case for why it has been important to chronicle the life and times of Mars Hill Church.

 Jake Meador has a piece about the distinction between faithful presence and owned space, among other things, at Mere Orthodoxy. He mentions James Davison Hunter, for those who know of him, and I’m going to skip ahead to Meador’s following proposal:

 https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-presence-after-the-evangelical-fracturing

…

The Hunterian influence is important to understand here because you could read the dispute between these two school as basically being a dispute between varieties of Hunterians.

 

The older group, which still broadly holds to the vision articulated by my RUF pastor, is largely following in the footsteps of Keller. For Keller, a large part of good, careful cultural influence meant faithful presence in elite, pluralistic institutions. Christians would not always or often control these institutions, but they also had a seat at the table and were thus theoretically (and sometimes actually) able to steer them in better, healthier directions.

 

The other Hunterian tribe is not downstream of Keller, but downstream of Moscow ID pastor Douglas Wilson. Wilson agreed with Keller in as much as he felt that Hunter is correct in saying that culture is shaped in a disproportionate way by influential institutions. This is why Wilson's father, who also affirmed this view, originally moved the family to Moscow, in fact. Moscow ID is a small mountain town that is within ten miles of two large, state universities in the interior Pacific Northwest: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman, which is just eight miles away from Moscow across the state line into Washington. The idea, as with Keller, was to establish a presence within these large, influential institutions and, through that presence, accomplish real change over time.

 

There was one crucial difference, however: For Keller the point was to exercise faithful presence within pluralistic institutions, willingly recognizing that Christians were unlikely to ever exercise full control over those institutions. Wilson rejected this part of the strategy. This is why they set up in Moscow and not New York: New York is too big to ever plausibly be more or less "taken over" by Christians. But Moscow, a small town of 25,000 today and around 15,000 50 years ago, was "plausible" for such a strategy.

 

This, then, is the key difference: Keller's brand of Hunterianism is accepting of pluralism in a way that Wilson's is not. For Wilson, there needed to be some plausible chance of Christians coming to exercise something near total control over the institutions they would participate in.

…

Elsewhere I have suggested that Mark Driscoll’s success may have stemmed in part from jettisoning postmillennialism and other aspects of Wilson’s ideas so as to transplant the mere idea of cultural investment as a catalyst for cultivating owned space from the ground up, leveraging an indie start-up ethos and praxis so as to ensure the owned space would be collaboratively created.  The old fundraising film from 2012 was God’s Work, Our Witness, which was bound to be a more winsome title than if Mark Driscoll had insisted it be called This Church, My Project! The latter, in the long run, would have been a more honest title, I’m afraid. In any event, among those who self-identified as having been formatively influenced by Wilson hardly anyone gained more notoriety in his heyday than Driscoll.  And yet … 

While it may be useful to distinguish between faithful presence and owned space (for socially conservative evangelicals who write for and contribute to Mere Orthodoxy in some way)m  Meador’s reference to both Tim Keller and Douglas Wilson skimmed past the one prominent figure in New Calvinism who, at one point, was obviously affiliated with both men, the man who Jake Meador has said it is important for us to ignore, Mark Driscoll.

 We’re just supposed to ignore that both Keller and Wilson contributed to The Resurgence while it was operational from about 2006 to 2014? Not paying attention to Driscoll ten years after his resignation, with evangelicalism, is not prudent. Why? Because if there was anyone in New Calvinism and evangelicalism who potentially ruined the viability of “faithful presence” by, arguably, having used it merely as a front for pushing for “owned space” over the course of two decades, it was Mark Driscoll. 

 Then again, the guy who may have poisoned the prospects of faithful presence by using it as cover for owned space may not even be Driscoll.  Douglas Wilson could have some praise or blame for branding his project as a faithful presence (and really believing it is!) while Meador has designated it as “owned space”.  Who gets to decide the distinction between whether Wilson’s working with a faithful presence and an owned space as if these two are actually diametrically opposite options?  A Wilsonian might contend an owned space is the only real assurance of a faithful presence there is.  A Wilsonian could contend that bids at a mere faithful presence without owned space have been doomed to fail in the face of pluralism over the last 150 years and is there a rebuttal to that?

 A potential paradox (or irony?) is that Matthew Lee Anderson, the founder of Mere Orthodoxy, had nice things to say about Douglas Wilson’s Wordsmithy back in 2012. That writers and editors at Mere Orthodoxy have evolved regarding Douglas Wilson is something that happened, I guess.  Regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet since 2006 already know that I very obviously came to a different perspective on Mars Hill between 2006 and 2016 than the net positive with some lingering doubts I had in 2006 to the belief that the entire corrupt institution needed to die in 2014 and I write that as someone who met all three co-founding pastors of the former Mars Hill Church and regarded Lief Moi as a friend.  So, surely, there’s room for Mere Orthodoxy editors and writers to come to a newer and more negative appraisal of Douglas Wilson. 

But since among those self-identified students or proteges of Wilson’s approach to “owned space” don’t get more famous than the former lead pastor of Mars Hill Church it would be hard to see how we in evangelicalism would actually benefit from not paying attention to him and his history.  If anything, there has been too much eagerness in projects such as Mike Cosper’s The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill to ask “what does it all mean?” rather than the more basic journalistic and historical question of “What (actually) happened?” There’s probably plenty of time to ask “What does it all mean?” after you’ve figured out what actually went on in chronological order with all the pertinent who, what, when, where, why and how issues tackled more directly. At the moment evangelicals have ceded the questions about what actually happened to secular and/or progressive authors while carrying on as if there was nothing in what happened in Mark Driscoll’s cult of celebrity to give us any word of caution (Katelyn Beaty’s Celebrities for Jesus and Warren Cole Smith’s Faith-Based Fraud being the exceptions that prove the rule).

Having chronicled the peak and demise of Mars Hill Church in Seattle from 2010 through its corporate dissolution and into the 2015 post-mortem liquidation of assets I would say it is important to actually pay attention to Mark Driscoll; for those of us who observed him up close here in Seattle he reveals a problem in evangelicalism that an analysis like Meador’s could potentially miss—what looks like faithful presence to Christians is going to seem no less belligerent to secular progressives in Seattle than a bid at owned space.  Inside the fledgling Mars Hill Driscoll made no secret about his vision of a church founding a church planting network, a music label, a Bible college, and a publishing company; he would later claim none of that was necessarily in what he initially envisioned but his testimony against the truth of such a claim was too well and widely distributed for that claim to be taken at face value. 

But when talking to Mother Jones?  His stance was ostensibly, if to the author implausibly, more conciliatory.  Driscoll was more than happy to act as if he was just aiming for faithful presence when owned space had been his dream all along.

From 1996 through to about 2002 into 2004 (as noted by Dan Allender in his conversation with Mike Cosper) Driscoll’s rhetorical default was faithful presence, if only to outsiders.  It was as his personal brand and reputation became stronger and stronger he began to reveal what his swiftly suppressed antics as William Wallace II revealed about him in 2000 and, eventually, in 2014, that for all his formal obeisance to the rhetoric of faithful presence while Mars Hill Church was Mars Hill Fellowship, his real devotion was to owned space.  This became clear by 2012 when he bowed out of The Gospel Coalition.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/driscoll-steps-down-from-tgc-council
https://web.archive.org/web/20140525232248/https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/driscoll-steps-down-from-tgc-council

 

Driscoll Steps Down from TGC Council

Mar 28, 2012

Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle has recently announced he is stepping down from the Council of The Gospel Coalition. Mark let us know in advance of his intentions, part of a major reorganization of his priorities and a changing of the guard in Acts 29. We are saddened by his departure but understand that all busy people must establish priorities.

The Council is grateful to Mark for his contributions to TGC during the past decade. In the months and years ahead, we will certainly be praying for him, his family, and the ministries he influences.

Here is what Mark said about TGC with regard to his departure:

I was a founding member of The Gospel Coalition and to this day enjoy deep friendships and theological unity with the men. But I'm no longer going to be a Council member, as I seek to focus my energies on a handful of things. If I'm honest, with the continued growth of all the ministries in which I'm involved, it's not sustainable for me to keep up with all of them. So, this is a season of pruning for me.

For the record, no one has asked me to leave the Council, and I have no relational conflict with anyone and no disagreement theologically. The men remain friends who are welcome to speak into my life, and I'm transitioning for no other reason than I find myself at the end of my tether with time and energy.

I'm deeply thankful for the Council and have been deeply honored to be a part of it. Thankfully, Acts 29 fellow Board members Matt Chandler and Darrin Patrick are already on the Council to represent Acts 29, along with one of our network captains, Ray Ortlund.

 

That he was influenced by Douglas Wilson was no secret.  He announced it even as William Wallace II.  So it was not a long-term shock that he was aiming for owned space.  So eager was he for owned space even in intra-Christian media he announced Mars Hill was gunning to take over Christian music and radio with what turned out to be a dead in the water bid at Mars Hill Music 3.0 that morphed into a collaboration with Tooth & Nail Records.

But within the realm of evangelicalism Driscoll’s ties to the emerging church and his ostensibly “faithful presence” approach in his early career came across to some evangelicals as too liberal.  Douglas Wilson, for his part, always said he liked the guy and might even still like Driscoll now.  But Driscoll was affiliated with Keller via The Gospel Coalition.  When Keller spoke with Cosper in the sprawling podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill he commented that it was not so much that he platformed Driscoll or Mars Hill as they platformed him, Keller. Keller made reference to how he was not part of a young tech-savvy generation and, by contrast, Mars Hill had all the technological and social media resources to “platform” The Gospel Coalition.  Rather than merely be skeptical, as some have been, that Keller had to have platformed Driscoll, I take Keller’s point as given and that tells us that Driscoll and Mars Hill were sufficiently big enough that Keller (whatever flaws you impute to his memory) remembered that it was they who platformed The Gospel Coalition and not the other elder statesmen within it. If Keller wrong there needs to be proof and if he was right it makes it more dangerous to simply “not pay attention” to the influence Driscoll came to have within evangelicalism just because writers with an interest in exploring dualisms have already factored him out.

 Driscoll’s withdrawal from TGC in 2012 after Real Marriage had made the New York Times bestseller list for one week turned out to be telling, the more robust Mark Driscoll’s personal brand and reputation was the more at liberty he felt to openly push for the owned space paradigm.  Mars Hill was going to have its own music label, its own Bible college, its own publishing company with its own books. 

 Former Mars Hill biblical living pastor James Noriega, for instance, was willing to say that an aspiration of his was that Mars Hill Church would have a plethora of inside-church resources to help people with various issues so as to not be beholden to outside materials or resources. 

http://ballard.marshill.com/2009/03/17/meet-the-staff-pastor-james-noriega/
https://web.archive.org/web/20111018045238/http://ballard.marshill.com/2009/03/17/meet-the-staff-pastor-james-noriega/
…

What is your greatest joy while serving in this ministry?
To have front row seats when someone really gets who Jesus is for the first time, when the light really goes on for the first time. You literally watch their heart melt in the presence of God. It is an amazing thing to watch; I feel very blessed by God to have such a great job that I get to watch lives transformed before my very eyes.

What are you looking forward to seeing God do in this ministry?
Uncovering more of the enemies schemes, that the church actually becomes a real healing ministry, that we do not have to rely on outside sources to help our people, and that the church is seen by the secular world as a place where real change that glorifies God is going on. [emphasis added]

…

Even in 2011 the paradigm within Mars Hill had clearly shifted to an ethos of owned space as a matter of public rhetoric.  For those who already knew the aim was owned space this couldn’t have been a surprise but it suggests the wrinkle in Meador’s analysis, that it’s a bit too pat to regard faithful presence and owned space as opposed either in theory or in practice.  The history of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church could be a potential case study of the permeability and fuzziness of the dualism if Christian historians were willing to sift through the rubble. Progressive and secular writers were never fooled about whether or not Mars Hill constituted a faithful presence and saw the bid for owned space. If anyone wanted to see faithful presence in the early Mars Hill it was evangelicals and particularly New Calvinists who aligned with Mars Hill. Let's remember that Keller and Wilson were both connected to Driscoll at one point, so if Driscoll managed to reel in both the Tim "faithful presence" Keller and the Douglas "owned space" Wilson how useful is the dualism as an analytical tool to describe anything that transpired in recent North American evangelicalism?  I would be cautious about using this suggested heuristic absent a clearer history of how these three figures actually interacted with each other over the last thirty years.  I can't even pretend to know myself and I'm Wenatchee The Hatchet.