Mark Driscoll urges his followers to "differentiate"; the post-Mars Hill Driscoll books reveal an undifferentiated Driscoll clan voice, a brief compendium from the post-MH co-authored books

In Leave and Cleave: A 21-day Family Systems Journey Mark Driscoll introduced his audience to the work of Murray Bowen, a psychologist who developed the family systems approach to counseling.  I am not going to attempt to describe Bowen’s ideas in much detail.  I have only a passing knowledge of them.  What I do know, at least, is that Bowen concluded that Freud’s approach was hamstrung by focusing on the individual patient at the expense of exploring relational dynamics in families as social and emotional organisms. Bowen developed ideas about how families have a group identity and that problematic relationships in a family, particularly in responses to crises, can lead to a failure on the part of individuals in the family to differentiate.  Differentiation is the capacity to have your own ideas and thoughts and feelings and arguments within your family while still being a part of the family is one way to define the term. 

 

In Mark Driscoll’s definition of the concept, to fully differentiate is, unsurprisingly, to leave your father and mother and get married and build a family of your own.  Whatever the complexities and nuances of Bowen’s theoretical and practical work as a psychologist may have been, in the hands of Mark Driscoll it becomes a basis for Leave and Cleave.  You are invited to learn how to differentiate yourself from toxic family members and repent of anything that is sinful and, if need be, establish boundaries with family and build a new, safer, healthier and more spiritually fulfilling life with your new family (your wife or husband and children).  In a setting like The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, that might involve some “cut off” from family members who don’t fit Mark Driscoll’s conception of healthy family life.

 

Understandably many people don’t actually know who this Mark Driscoll guy is or they do know who he is and have probably already made up their minds about him.  Rather little work has been done to analyze or discuss Mark Driscoll’s post-Mars Hill resignation writings.  Mike Cosper’s sprawling podcast explicitly ignored all of Mark Driscoll’s post-2014 activities because The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill was just that.  It had some interesting elements to it here and there but it was a literal day’s worth of listening and sprawled.  My general verdict is that it was too fixated on “what does it all mean?” rather than do the more elementary and, honestly, tedious work of establish “What happened?”  It wasn’t really a history so much as a metanarrative and in that sense I’d say I agree with Jessica Johnson that Cosper’s podcast had the strengths and weaknesses of its subject, because Mars Hill leaders were way better at the big picture panoramic vista view than paying attention to potentially significant details. 

 

But there is a paradoxical, rich irony to a guy like Mark Driscoll having this workbook of his for married people where he urges them to differentiate.  It’s an irony you couldn’t possibly catch if you weren’t paying attention to the post-Mars Hill Driscoll books.  I’ll have to show you and not just tell you, of course.  If we go by the books Mark Driscoll and his family members have published since his resignation from Mars Hill, as literary works, we might have to guess that there is only one literary Driscoll voice and that the Driscoll clan constitutes a kind of undifferentiated ego mass, where every voice has a parenthetical insert to tell you who is speaking but the ultimate head-of-household/tribal elder voice is still, finally, Mark Driscoll’s. 

 

Prepare yourself for a small marathon of quotes because this gets (and stays) literal.

 

I have slogged through Spirit-Filled Jesus; Win Your War; Pray Like Jesus; and I even bothered to get Real Romance.  Let me show you what happens.

 

We’ll start with Win Your War since that’s the first co-authored publication since Mark Driscoll’s resignation from Mars Hill.

 

Win Your War: Fight in the Realm You Don’t See For Freedom in the One You Do

Mark and Grace Driscoll

Charisma House

Copyright ©2019 by Mark and Grace Driscoll

ISBN 9781629996257 (hardback)

ISBN 9781629996264 (ebook)

 

I (Mark) was a nonpracticing Catholic who did not know Jesus when I met Grace. We started dating in high school, at which time Grace bought me a beautiful leather-bound Bible with my name engraved on the front.  I became a Christian reading that Bible in college, and before long Grace transferred so we could attend the same college and church. At my first men’s retreat God spoke to me and told me to marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches. We were married in college, and after graduating, we started officially doing ministry by leading college students roughly our age.

(page 49)

 

That parenthesis tells you that Mark Driscoll is writing the material you’re reading just now. A few pages later we get this:

 

During the writing of this book, several different times when Mark was away preaching out of state or the country, I (Grace) was suddenly awakened by dark, fuzzy shapes moving in our bedroom. One even flew at me, seemingly to attack. I immediately spoke Jesus’ name to command them away. I continued to pray against fear and the enemy and pray for protection of our home and family until I was able to fall asleep again. Sadly this is not uncommon, particularly in seasons of intense ministry.

 

Like most people we have both experienced nightmares and the terror they bring. Your heart races, reacting to the dream as if it were a real event, until you eventually wake up, disoriented and unsure about what is really happening. Our children have had the same experience, and this is not uncommon.

…

Job describes a night terror, saying, “Amid thoughts from visions in the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still but I could not discern its appearance.” Sometimes a night terror is demonic as Job describes; sometimes it is simply our minds playing tricks on us. Science still seeks to understand everything about the ways our body works while we sleep.  (pages 56-57)

 

This passage is remarkable because the parenthetical “Grace” is so obviously superfluous to the passage.  In a book co-authored by Mark and Grace Driscoll does anyone need to be given that parenthetical clarifier?  Who else was going to be writing about times when Mark was away preaching but Grace?  But the parenthetical indication that this is Grace Driscoll writing is there anyway.  There is a possibility that the entire book was written by Mark Driscoll with some instruction that this or that passage should get a parenthesis indicating Mark or Grace is the voice of a passage.  That could explain the literary cohesion.  

 

Alternatively, if these passages are really different because different authors wrote them then I am forced to consider the possibility that Mark and Grace have one single undifferentiated writing style such that the parenthetical indicators are necessary to indicate which Driscoll is saying what.  This pattern is going to keep showing up.

 

You know, even if I weren’t reading books about The Book of Job by Carol Newsom and Choon-Leong Seow’s commentary on Job 1-21 lately, I would still have to make a comment about Grace Driscoll’s (?) use of Job 4:13-16.  She says that Job describes an encounter with a spiritual being, a demon.  If she had said The Book of Job describes such an encounter, fine.  The problem is, as published, Grace Driscoll describes Job as having had a demonic encounter.  The problem is that literally everyone who has ever read Job 4 already knows that it is Job’s friend Eliphaz who described the encounter he had, not one that Job had.   Archie T Wright pointed out, in his book about the devil, that textual scholar David Clines suggested that this spirit that visited Eliphaz might have been Satan.  Whether or not it was actually the satan, Seow pointed out that the perspective of the spirit that humans are not faultless before God is in line with Satan’s view of Job and not God’s.  What is clear, regardless of scholarly discussions on the nuances and ambiguities of the poetry, is whose speech it is we’re reading in Job 4, Eliphaz’s and not Job’s.

 

It doesn’t matter whether it was really Grace Driscoll or her husband Mark who wrote the passage I quoted, the problem remains the same, a basic Bible literacy failure in citation. In my more sarcastic moments I admit that one of my jokey life verses has been Job 12:2-3.  If you don’t know it off the top of your head, here it is,  by way of the New International Version:

 

“Doubtless you are the only people who matter,

    and wisdom will die with you!

 But I have a mind as well as you;

    I am not inferior to you.

    Who does not know all these things?

 

Next, we get to Pray Like Jesus, which was co-authored by Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase (nee Driscoll)

 

Pray Like Jesus

Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase

Copyright (c) 2021 by Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase

ISBN 978-1-62999-926-5

ISBN 978-1-62999-927-2

Charisma House

 

... You're not going to shock God or catch Him off guard.

 

To me (Ashley) and many people I have known, this is an incredibly comforting fact. I once shared the gospel with a girl who felt that she couldn't tell God what she had done or what had been done to her, and she hadn't even told her best friend or parents due to the overwhelming shame. She knew the situation wasn't entirely her fault, but she felt so blameworthy that she kept it to herself and was emotionally crippled in fear. of someone finding out.  I gently explained to her that God already knew about everything she was holding inside and He wanted to heal her if she would let him.

 

She started bawling in disbelief that God didn't want to punish her or look at her as damaged goods. But she also struggled to understand why God didn't prevent her from being harmed in the first place, which I later discovered was partially due to her irresponsible dad, who didn't protect her or impart much wisdom about men. She allowed me to pray for her at that moment and slowly opened up to the idea of praying on her own the more we got to know each other and were able to separate her earthly experiences from her view of the heavenly father.

 

My kids often tell me (Mark) things that I already know, but their telling me is about talking to me, experiencing relational intimacy with me, and inviting me in to be with them. It's about the experience of me loving them, serving them, helping them, instructing them, and caring for them. Conversation is key in all relationships.

pages 26-27

 

Now perhaps you, dear reader, could tell me that these literary voices are quite distinct and explain to me how it is that Grace Driscoll, Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase have very different writing styles but I confess to seeing a strong, let’s just call it a family resemblance.  In the passage I cited above we could fairly easily tell that there’s an abrupt shift from daughter to father simply because, at the time Pray Like Jesus was published, Ashley and Landon Chase weren’t parents whereas here in 2024 they are.  Mark Driscoll has tweeted about stuff like this, so the whole world that reads X can know. 

 

The Driscollian voice seems steady here both in terms of literary style and also in substance.  What is striking about this passage is that Ashley Chase described an encounter with a schoolmate, it seems, and as her story reaches its close we get an observation from Chase that the woman who had suffered wrong was badly treated but, well, Chase later discovered that the awful things that happened to this woman were partly due to the woman’s irresponsible dad who hadn’t protected his daughter or imparted much wisdom to her about men.

 

It's a troubling passage, I’ll be honest, because whether it’s Mark Driscoll the father or Ashley Chase the daughter it seems there’s nothing so terrible that can happen to a woman that a member of the Driscoll clan won’t find an opportunity in relaying the story to opine about how that woman’s dad dropped the ball and that is a variable in the terrible things that happened to the nameless woman of affliction.

 

It’s creepy.  I’m not going to soft-pedal this element of the clan’s propensities in doling out advice.  Would the Driscolls want to be used as an object lesson in how all of their pointless suffering and feeling the need to move up and leave Washington state could have been avoided if Mark Driscoll had simply proven himself to be a man actually fit for pastoral ministry and hadn’t managed to have citation errors in nearly all of his published books up through 2014?  When 40-some former Mars Hill pastors say Driscoll is unrepentant and unfit for ministry that apparently counts for nothing to Team Driscoll for the obvious reason that a kid doesn’t want to just conclude that her parent is a spiritually abusive guy who may be a doting father and a loyal husband but who is not, dare it be said, competent for pastoral ministry in 2024. 

 

Let me be clear, this is not really a question of Mark Driscoll’s sincerity or status as some kind of religious believer.  John Goldingay pointed out in his commentary on The Book of Jeremiah that Hananiah was a false prophet for prophesying lies and not because he didn’t love the Lord.  Mark Driscoll could be exactly that kind of false prophet, a sincere Christian who is self-deceived as to his fitness for public ministry. 

 

One of the reasons I personally doubt his fitness for ministry is precisely because of his penchant to transform the lives of others into object lessons of what not to do.  His daughter’s anecdote suggests the possibility that she can continue in her father’s path of relaying stories of horrors women have been subjected to where, somehow, Dad’s at least partly to blame.  Eliphaz was expressing an orthodox view in saying Job couldn’t possibly be sinless before God and that once trouble hit him he stopped being able to practice what he preached.  Maybe there’s some kind of providential irony in the Driscolls making use of The Book of Job in their teaching because there may yet be a sense in which they resemble Eliphaz, orthodox on paper and not without some valid insights but a bit too eager to transform the misery of others into a teachable moment.

 

Now we get to the spiritual sequel to Mark and Grace Driscoll’s Real Marriage, which is Real Romance. Back in 2012 Grace Driscoll wrote whole chapters herself, such as chapter 7, which I’ve discussed extensively in the past for her failure to give thanks to Dan Allender for his work which influenced that chapter.  Warren Throckmorton has noted that in a later edition of Real Marriage Allender’s work has gotten a credit.  This book was released on Valentine’s Day (clever, yes?) and within the first few pages we see another example of the steady literary voice punctuated by merely parenthetical indications of change of voice.

 

Real Romance: Sex in the Song of Songs

Mark and Grace Driscoll

Copyright © 2023 by Mark & Grace Driscoll

XO Publishing

ISBN 978-1-950113-934 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-950113-94-1 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-950113-958-8 (Audiobook)

 

God used the Bible to save our marriage.

  We met when we were 17 and in high school. We had both been in unhealthy dating relationships previously that were sexual and sinful. When we met, we had little to no clue about how to have a healthy romantic relationship. So we did what most people do—we rushed into a deep, emotional connection too quickly, started sleeping together, and did not seek wise counsel or anything that would resemble godly help. We cared for one another but were clueless about how to take care of one another.

  I (Mark) was a non-Christian; raised a Catholic, but I had no personal relationship with God. The only Bible I can remember was our giant family Bible that sat on the coffee table in our living room covered with enough dust to write “fornication” on it with your finger.  Grace was a pastor’s daughter who knew the Lord but was in a prodigal daughter season and was not walking with Him (which explains why she was walking with me). As we headed off to different universities, we were heading for the same misery.  Thankfully, the Lord not only saved us from going to hell, but He also saved us from ourselves and from making hell of our lives.

 

The Bible Saved Our Marriage

 

I (Grace) had enough conviction left to know God’s plan for me was not to be dating a non-Christian. I should have broken up with Mark, but instead I bought him a Bible as a gift. I wasn’t spending much time reading my own Bible, but hypocritically, I thought he needed one. I knew the Bible would tell us what we should do. Despite my lack of wisdom, God showed incredible Grace to Mark and me. We feel very humbled to be able to teach what we learned the hard way so that others don’t have to go through the same experience. The Bible has been a foundational part of anything good in our marriage. We are excited to help you learn from a book of the Bible, as we study Song of Songs.

(pages ix to x)

 

That may well be the story of Mark and Grace Driscoll as public figures in a few paragraphs.  They are here to tell you how to do it the right way according to the Bible, which they didn’t necessarily bother to do themselves early on but, well, God was so gracious as to give them each other.  If Grace should have stopped dating Mark Driscoll because he wasn’t really a believer then everything from that point forward could be, if you’ll pardon the expression, making the best lemonade you can from a big lemon.

 

But this doesn’t seem to be how the joys and miseries of life actually works in the real world.  Have Mark and Grace Driscoll thought about how this might come across to their kids?  Think about it, to say that you shouldn’t have been dating your now husband of decades can’t avoid or evade the matter of whether, by extension, you should have birthed those five kids. 

 

If my mom told me that marrying my dad was a mistake she wished she had never done I would not have taken that well (I didn’t and it was imprudent on her part to tell me that when I was about eight or nine years old, she attempted to cover for that gaffe by saying she wished she could have found some way to have had me without having married my dad but … ).  Sure, sure in some ideal world imagined by Mark and/or Grace Driscoll she should have broken up with him because he wasn’t really a Christian.  But, hey, decades of ministry later and at least a dozen books they’re here to tell you how to live a good Christian life of precisely the sort they couldn’t be telling you about if they had actually bothered to have lived by the advice they are doling out in their books.  I don’t think the problem with Mark or Grace was that they were hypocrites because as I understand hypocrisy anyone and everyone can fail to live up to their best ideals. 

 

No, when they use the term hypocrite I think their usage is closer to the idea of having different weights and different standards, double standards, even.  There isn’t something so awful that’s been done to a woman that it can’t turn into a teachable moment in sermon or print about how her dad was partly to blame by not having protected his daughter.  But on the conference circuit when Mark Driscoll was sharing the woes of his wife and children he mentioned that and not the parts that came to light later of how former Mars Hill elders concluded that he had an abusive leadership style and needed to submit to a restoration plan before he was going to be considered fit to return to the pulpit.  As he recounted several times, God told him he was free to leave.  Driscoll can plead with an audience for sympathy about the indignities his wife and children were subjected to but there has been little from post-2014 Mark Driscoll to concede that it was because he was such an abusive leader that these things befell them. 

 

So even when, as we have just seen, Mark and Grace can be easily differentiated past those superfluous parenthetical indicators (and as their books proceed the distinctions become blurrier), we can also see that the trajectory of the public ministries of Mark and Grace Driscoll came about because, if we take them at their word, they managed to never be held accountable to and found wanting by the criteria they have used to judge other peoples’ marriages and parenting approaches to have been subpar. 

 

The Driscolls have, to be sure, been through a lot of stressful situations together but that is, so family systems counselors have sometimes said, how family units become undifferentiated ego masses.  A family can go through a lot and they can draw together in times of continual stress and in that drawing together that can be how the family gains a group or organism identity at the price of the lack of differentiation among family members.  I have taken the trouble to read Mark Driscoll and family’s post-Mars Hill books and it has been a bit of a slog.  Even they aren’t foisting howlers on a possibly unsuspecting reader that Job encountered a demon in Job 4 when anyone who can read could see that that chapter is a poem by Eliphaz, they’re doing something else like erroneously claiming that when Jesus taught people to pray “our Father” this was new and bold and nobody had done this before.  John Calvin pointed out in his commentary on The Book of Acts that when Paul quoted the didactic poet Aratus he conceded that in imagining all the humans of the world had a kind of divine paternity this showed an inchoate grasp of an element of truth.  In other words, John Calvin and The Book of Acts showed by the citation of the ancient poet Aratus that Mark Driscoll and Ashley Chase were wrong to claim that when Jesus taught his disciples to pray “our Father” this was new and revolutionary as though nobody on earth had thought of God or gods as a father.  Kings being the sons of gods was a veritable cliché in southwestern Asian empires for centuries. 

 

Decades ago Mark Driscoll said he was a confrontational guy, not some pansy-ass therapist.  Here in 2023 and 2024 he has written a workbook drawing on ideas from Murray Bowen to tell you how, if you’re married, you can truly leave and cleave.  Mark Driscoll can tell you how to differentiate from your toxic family by precept and he can even roll out stories from his own life where he’s sure he’s laid out a Driscoll exemplar.  In his telling if you don’t have Jesus and you don’t have the Holy Spirit you can’t even be a good parent or a husband. 

 

Yet does the Bible itself even say that much?  No, because the parents of Samson are not described as having done or said anything wrong and yet Samson was a brute and a fool.  King Saul’s son Jonathan is portrayed as a good, sincere and honorable man even if his father was a mixture of deranged, fickle or even evil.  Did King Josiah turn out as he did because he had a good daddy?  The way the Driscolls tell things about parenting there couldn’t even be a king like Joash in 2 Chronicles 24 who started off well and ended up promoting idolatry and was assassinate by his retinue.  There couldn’t even be a Uzziah who became vain and struck down by the Lord with disease in 2 Chronicles 26. 

 

Ashley Chase has written that she’s read the Bible cover to cover no less than six times, so she’ll know where these stories are.  If the prophet and priest Samuel’s sons had actually been chips off the old block and not as corrupt and venal as the sons of Eli then Israel wouldn’t have asked for a king.  There’s no way the Driscoll’s don’t know that story and yet in book after book they tell us that the Bible shows us the right way to parent kids and be married when that was not, to put it mildly, the primary aim of the biblical authors.  There’s way more eisegesis than exegesis going on in the Driscoll Social Gospel, and a Social Gospel is what it is.  

The Good News of Jesus has been transformed, in the hands of the Driscoll clan, into the Good News of Scripts of Adulthood, extrapolated with a few liberties, from the canonical text.  And if that entails importing and imposing gently modified concepts from Murray Bowen’s theoretical and counseling work, so be it.  Mark Driscoll can now tell you that the Bible says you need to be differentiated from your mother and father and that means getting married and starting your own family.  After decades of chronicling the life and times of Mars Hill and the public statements and writings of Mark Driscoll he has shown that he is one of those bros who “learns by doing” but for you, dear reader, you need him to teach you by precept, if you’ll be humble enough to accept that.

 

How differentiated the Driscoll family actually is, that I am not sure I really want to know but my reading of the post Mars Hill Driscoll books suggests to me that we’re looking at what a family systems counselor might dare to suggest is a profoundly undifferentiated ego mass, with Mark Driscoll at its center.  If Mark Driscoll can find it in his heart to let his kids differentiate that will mean not just that they all marry off and have their spouses and kids as he obviously hopes, it should also mean that they can all decide that they don’t need or want to have anything to do with continuing the Mark Driscoll brand of public ministry. 

 

That will be real differentiation indeed.