It's still worth asking why Mark "I see things" Driscoll didn't see anything even possibly amiss about his wise counsel Robert Morris. It should be remembered it was Robert Morris who publicly took credit within days of Mark Driscoll's resignation from Mars Hill. for suggesting Driscoll step away from ministry for a season and heal up before getting back into ministry.
Transcript of Robert Morris and Mark Driscoll from the Gateway Leadership + Worship Conferenceon the evening of Monday, October 20, 2014, as broadcast live via DayStar Television:Robert Morris: Uh, it was publicized that we cancelled him; that’s not true, we did not cancel. I’m speaking of Mark Driscoll. We did not cancel him. He and I decided together uh that he was going to step out of ministry for a season and get some healing. [emphasis added]
Morris has been indicted. Indicted doesn't entail conviction. We'll have to see how things go. Driscoll has mentioned men favorably in the past who he doesn't bother to mention now and whether or not Morris is already one of those people could probably be established by people who are in Driscoll's orbit.
Obviously Wenatchee The Hatchet doesn't chronicle things about the life and times of the former Mars Hill as frequently as the period from about 2009 to 2016, but every now and then something comes up. The Lindell situation was one and the Morris development is another.
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There are so many stories of prominent Christian leaders falling into scandal that I was wondering how common it really was - was it just that those with scandals are the ones we read about, and those with clean records escape our attention? I thought someone should do some sort of quantitative analysis: Get a list c.2000 of the most significant US church leaders by some measure and see what the internet has recorded about each off them.
This morning I had a go. I asked ChatGPT to list the largest 25 or so megachurches in the US. It gave me a list of 25 prominent churches, naming most of their senior pastors. Six of them (Hybels, Coy, Jakes, Long, Hagee, Cymbala) had records of sexual misconduct (at least an accusation). With a few others (Falwell, Dollar, Flake) there had been investigations into financial dealings. One arrested for bribery. Not a rigorous analysis but gets a few numbers on the page.
My own country fares no better, with the most prominent leader in both the Protestant and Catholic churches this century (Houston, Pell) ending their careers in disgrace.
I've known a lot of pastors and scandals don't seem that common. It would seem that being a big-name pastor makes it harder to maintain Christian character.
"makes it harder" might veer toward "nearly impossible". I recall Jim West commenting about some CT articles grappling with issues about the ethics and conduct of Barth by pointing out that Barth's adulterous affair with his mistress/ghostwriter secretary had been known about in Europe for a generation or two but Anglo-American Christian journalists were apparently only "Just" learning about it in the 21st century. We could throw in John Howard Yoder. It can seem that it doesn't matter whether it's evangelical or mainline or liberal or fundamentalist, attaining celebrity ruins pastors and priests in many, many cases.
When I look back, ten years on, at various former pastors from Mars Hill there's a lot of them where, to be blunt, those men were never fit to be pastors but a mixture of cronyism and good old boy networking gave them platforms. That doesn't mean women can't be comparably elevated to star status without seeming to have any clear reason for it. The late RHE or the current NBW hardly seem to merit the celebrity granted to them but there can be an impulse for progressives to have their celebrities. Particularly in the wake of the resignation of Driscoll the Christian industrial star-making machine seemed to kick in to appoint the late Rachel Held Evans as a kind of anti-Driscoll. Some former Mars Hill folks turned to Nadia Bolz-Weber, whose work I regard as of the same shoddy gimmicky self-aggrandizing gunk as Driscoll. Sometimes there's no controversy at all because celebrity is more important than possible foibles.
Not many of you should desire to be teachers seems to be the warning from James that gets most ignored by contemporary celebrity clergy.
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