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.
