Jennifer McKinney's Making Christianity Manly Again turns out to be ... her second book inside of 2 years on the same topic? A belated discovery

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-christianity-manly-again-9780197655795?cc=us&lang=en&

Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, and American Evangelicalism

Jennifer McKinney

Published: 03 February 2023

280 Pages

6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches

ISBN: 9780197655795

 

I have read, but have not felt much like reviewing, Jennifer McKinney’s 2023 book about Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill and American evangelicalism. 

 

It has nothing you couldn’t have gotten with far better citational practice from Jessica Johnson’s Biblical Porn. For that matter there’s nothing in McKinney’s book you couldn’t absorb for free (if you wish) by going to Driscoll’s websites. 

 

Now, if you wanted a history of how sermons from the Mars Hill years got redacted and purged, you’d probably want to come here to Wenatchee The Hatchet.  One of my concerns about McKinney’s book is that she’ll quote Driscoll without giving a date and timestamp for when and where from which sermon she quotes. That matters because Driscoll and company had an extensive history of purging and altering sermons in the 2013-2014 period.  I found it a regular occurrence that I would quote Driscoll down to the minute and second from a specific sermon preached on a specific day and then a week later it would be gone and there was no way to pull it up via The WayBack Machine because Mars Hill sites set up robots.txt to preclude archival retrieval. 

So, when you’re dealing with a megachurch that was habitually doing that, it’s just not good enough to say that “Oh, well, in a sermon called X Driscoll said Y”.  That’s it?  That’s not good enough, I know this firsthand. So even though I said there’s nothing in her book you couldn’t absorb for free I write this knowing that Driscoll has purged and redacted a lot of material. McKinney’s book is no help in helping you find out how extensively this has been done.  If all you wanted to discover is the stuff the man has said that can be construed as misogynistic and homophobic he’s tweeting all that on X for free.  You don’t even need to go buy McKinney’s book to find that out.

 

But there’s the other matter that only recently came to my attention.  It turns out the Oxford University Press book is really the second book inside of a two year period that got published by McKinney on what seems to be the same topic. 

 

Anyone heard of this one before?

https://pickwickbookshop.com/products/9781350100206

American Evangelicalism and Hypermasculinity: Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church

ISBN:  9781350100206

https://pickwickbookshop.com/products/9781350102682

 

https://books.google.com/books/about/American_Evangelicalism_and_Hypermasculi.html?id=w-iVygEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description

Bloomsbury Academic 2021

 

I hadn’t heard of it until this year and look …

https://www.amazon.com/American-Evangelicalism-Hypermasculinity-Driscoll-Church/dp/135010020X/

Amazon listed it as March 10, 2022 and as unavailable.  Bloomsbury is niche and academic so I realize they publish books where if you blink you missed their publication.  Has anyone who reads Wenatchee The Hatchet heard of this earlier book and read it?

 

The Oxford title goes for about $10 in Kindle and that’s cheap enough if you want to read it.  But I got to the end of McKinney’s sprawling and exasperating book (that piggybacks off of Jesus and John Wayne overtly and Biblical Porn in precedent) thinking that if you wanted to get a grasp of who Mark Driscoll is you’d be better off reading Mark Driscoll’s books.  If you wanted to read someone who is not-Mark-Driscoll you’d be better off reading Justin Dean’s PR Matters: A Survival Guide for Church Communicators.  I reviewed the book at length here at Wenatchee The Hatchet years ago back in 2018 with a 2021 follow-up post. 

 

Now it turns out that the OUP book could potentially be a reworking of an earlier book that was published in 2021? 

I sure wouldn't want to blow $100 on what might be the beta version of what I read in Making Christianity Manly Again. You could get the first half of the recently re-issued legendary Marvel comics run of Transformers for less money. You could likely get a box set of the works of Heinrich Schutz for less money, too! You could get every symphony Joseph Haydn ever wrote for even less!  You could get the films of Robert Eggers for less money, probably.

Now maybe I will get around to a more formal write-up on McKinney's second book but I haven't felt so inspired to tackle these kinds of things more than ten years after Driscoll's Dick Nixon resignation moment.  I do pay some attention to his activities.  The Lindell thing, for instance.  And I know he'll say that your family is your resume and that it doesn't matter how many books you've published or conferences you've spoken at if your kids hate you and your wife doesn't know you.  That's a great point, and when I consider the scope of the plagiarism scandal that covered every book with his name on it from 2002 through to 2012 I might ask this not-rhetorical question, "Dude, if your family is your real resume why do you publish books where you couldn't even get the footnotes right?" 

I slogged through McKinney's book and felt that I had actually wasted my time.  Little did I know it was apparently not even the first book she'd published on the exact same thesis.  

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. 

On lives and deaths and Mars Hill a year after Lief Moi's death; Mike Gunn in late 2022 on how there was good but "We were arrogant fools"; culture war breeding vs peacemaking in the month of "The Domino Revival"; and thinking about Mark's Irish kingly backstory and my Native American Calvinist part of my history

I should warn you up front that this is a blog post that is neither short nor focused. It does not just so happen that my friend Lief Moi died about a year ago; that that other co-founding elder of Mars Hill Church has shilled a book and a sermon series that reveals what an incompetent fool he’s become about reading biblical texts (no person worth functional matter in their brain pain can honestly claim that from Jeroboam of the northern kingdom to Ahab that there was a continuous father begets son series of relationships. The Omride dynasty supplanted Jeroboam’s dynasty and was itself wiped out by Jehu, whose own dynasty collapsed.  But in Driscoll’s fantasy-land to prove his point about father curses magic he needs all these kings of the northern kingdom in 1 Kings to be blood relatives to shill his self-help gimmick about fathers.  Ahem, I also have lost two parents in the last few years and have had some time to think about how Mark and Lief were always up front about presenting Mars Hill as a place where a Christian community would and could discover ways of being family together that would counter the neglects or misdirections Generation X got (or allegedly got, at any rate).

 

That’s not a small amount of stuff to think about.  So you’ve been warned, this is a long one even by the standards of Wenatchee The Hatchet.  It's after the break if you feel like reading 22,344 more words.  If you don't, I understand!  If you do read it, hey, thanks for reading. This will help to explain, if not always directly, how and why Wenatchee The Hatchet has been relatively or actually unproductive compared to earlier periods of the blog.

Jennifer McKinney's Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church and American evangelicalism, Oxford University Press just came out--a brief list of the small list of books WtH actually recommends on the history of MH so far

Jennifer McKinney's book is called Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, and American Evangelicalism

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-christianity-manly-again-9780197655795?cc=us&lang=en&

I've picked it up and will start reading it.  I must confess that, having written as much as I have about Mars Hill since maybe 2008 or so, I am not sure I'm going to see anything new in McKinney's book.  What's more I attended the little school by the canal and got a journalism degree there.  

I must confess I'm not holding my breath thinking there's going to be anything new in this book.  In fact I find the likelihood that it will have anything new to say compared to earlier works to be somewhere close to zero.  

I do want to take a moment to mention it because I'll be reading it and because I've got a list of stuff I've already that is thematically or directly related to Mars Hill Church that i do recommend.  I don't anticipate McKinney's book being a bad book but I'm about to share a list of books or dissertations I've read so far that touch on Mars Hill that will explain, I trust, why I don't anticipate any surprises in the new OUP volume. Books and thoughts on them after the break:

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.

Katelyn Beaty's Celebrities for Jesus--a solid core thesis that is stronger still if you've read Jacques Ellul on the danger of propaganda reducing Christian doctrines to political ideologies

https://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/celebrities-for-jesus/406890/

Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms and Profits are Hurting the Church

Katelyn Beaty

Brazos Press a division of Baker Group

Copyright (c) 2022 by Katelyn Beaty

ISBN 9781587435188

ISBN 9781493437030

ISBN 9781493437047

 

Celebrities for Jesus is a short read.  I read it in a single day. Beaty’s central thesis is that there are distinctions we should make between “fame” and “celebrity” and that while the former has been around as long as human history the latter is a recent innovation in parasocial relationships. There may be readers who might propose that Jesus was a celebrity but this would be to misunderstand celebrity.  Beaty’s core thesis seems clear and defensible enough but I couldn’t help thinking her delineation of celebrity as the product of the mass media era and broadcast journalism would have been substantially bolstered by reference to two books by Jacques Ellul whose titles might be too obvious. The first would be Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes and the second would be The New Demons.

some thoughts on the Cosper interview with Allender, this is one of the episodes I think is both focused and helpful even if I remain ambivalent about the series overall

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/bonus-episode-conversation-with-dan-allender.html

Yes, by implication I've suggested that some of the CT episodes of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill were neither focused nor helpful across the series as a whole by giving this post the title it has.  The new Allender episode, however, is one of the strongest in the entire series because it is shorter than average and by dint of having one subject who is recognized as an expert in counseling within evangelicalism the episode stays remarkably on focus.

Sutton Turner posts notes from the 2014 elder investigation of formal charges against Mark Driscoll, discusses his discussions with Cosper, and mentions conversation with Throckmorton in January 2022 posts

If you listened to Cosper's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill there wasn't much new in the January 7, 2022 post.  

https://suttonturner.com/blog/f/rise-fall-of-mars-hill-podcast—my-participation

Or at least, for me, there wasn't much new but then, you know, I have chronicled a lot of stuff about the former Mars Hill over the years.

But this post ... there's a lot of material to it, notes from the investigation of 2014.  

https://suttonturner.com/blog/f/investigating-the-formal-charges-mark-driscollmars-hill-church

Warren Throckmorton has noted the post and has left it at that for now.
https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2022/01/13/sutton-turner-releases-notes-from-the-2014-mark-driscoll-elder-investigation/

a couple of recent thinkpieces on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill from Carey Nieuwhof and former MH pastor Matt Johnson at Mbird

The Carey Nieuwhof piece is ... a bit boilerplate ... but then most of the thinkpiece responses to the Mike Cosper podcast have tended to be a bit boilerplate.  Exemplifying what Samuel D James exemplified as "the take trap" is common.

https://careynieuwhof.com/some-reflections-on-the-rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

His readers pointed out that ... he still kinda has to explain Episode 328, why he decided to give Driscoll a platform in which Driscoll said stuff.

https://careynieuwhof.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CNLP_328-%E2%80%93With_Mark-Driscoll.pdf

Stuff, as it turned out, that was not only easy to comprehensively debunk but to comprehensively debunk based on a combination of Mark Driscoll's own previous accounts and the accounts of other executive elders from 2020, with a few other accounts for good measure.  Thus ...

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/2020%20interviews%20on%20the%20late%20Ma

rs%20Hill

In other words, Nieuwhof has to account for, at some point, why he personally gave Driscoll time to tell his story having not done much diligence about what had happened previously.  I have wondered why Episode 328 got taken down and the reasons for that have not been explained.

Matt Johnson's piece is less of the usual boilerplate takes I've seen about The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill for the simple and obvious reason that Matt and his family were there for 17 years.

https://mbird.com/religion/church/17-years-at-mars-hill-life-after-disillusionment/

R Scott Clark visits the role of the PCA in formative years for Acts 29 and Mars Hill--there's still a pretty live question whether or not A29 and Spanish River were a tangential "accidental" role in the history of MH

https://heidelblog.net/2021/12/an-overlooked-aspect-of-the-story-pca-influence-on-acts-29-and-mars-hill/

https://presbycast.libsyn.com/deconstructing-2021-and-big-eva-media-wdg-hart

I have felt pretty alone in attempting to discuss the early Acts 29, David Nicholas, Mark Driscoll and what seemed to be a PCA connection (that last part was just not on my radar because I'm just me and only have so much energy and attention). 

I'd hazard a guess that from Driscoll's side of things his earlier influences were John MacArthur and Doug Wilson (clearly if the men served on a panel together representing a rightwing perspective on censorship and the arts in 1992 ... ). David Nicholas didn't seem to come along until a few years into the life of Mars Hill. Cosper seems to have shortchanged us by not saying just how many people he talked to who had accounts of how and why Nicholas and Driscoll parted ways within Acts 29.  What is clearer is Nicholas founded and bankrolled Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll kinda was there to take it over.

Brad Vermurlen's Reformed Resurgence, another book I recommend as providing some background on the rise and fall of Mars Hill

Many years ago Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, wrote about the coming evangelical collapse. 

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

https://imonk.blog/2009/01/27/my-prediction-the-coming-evangelical-collapse-1/

https://imonk.blog/2009/01/28/the-coming-evangelical-collapse-2-what-will-be-left/

https://imonk.blog/2009/01/29/the-coming-evangelical-collapse-3-good-or-bad/

 

Now, Brad Vermurlen has a book out that builds a case that in order to understand the rise of New Calvinism, real or perceived, we can’t  begin to properly understand that “Reformed resurgence” without understanding a dissolution of American Evangelicalism as a field rather than as any coherent, identifiable set of beliefs or practices.  Field theory doesn’t seem hugely difficult for me to understand but over at Mere Orthodoxy there were some jokes about how abstract the concept of relative growth of subcultures within a larger dissolving culture seemed to be.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/reformed-resurgence-with-brad-vermurlen/

"It's good to have you back" in Driscoll's accounts of crises of power and accountability as a public preacher, revisiting the 2007 Mars Hill trials of Petry and Meyer and Driscoll's post-MH resignation account of a family conversation

Something that has stuck with me about "The Tempest", the most recent episode of Christianity Today's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, is that while Driscoll has commented in some contexts about how it has seemed as though former elders at Mars Hill had some kind of script, careful consideration of Mark Driscoll's statements made during or after crises suggest at least the possibility that his sensitivity to people feeding him some kind of script might have something to do with his own propensity to fall back on a core script. For those who have heard the entire CT series so far you might recall Karen Schaeffer said there were times when Mark said it felt like his adrenals were shot and then, of course, later on Driscoll dismissed her from her position as executive assistant for being some kind of heretic. 

new episodes of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill have gone up and these are probably the more useful ones that get at something more like a cohesive chronological narrative

Although there was not a lot that was particularly new to me in the "Boca Raton" episode it was nice to hear that Cosper spoke with David Nicholas' widow and Rick McKinley down in Portland.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-driscoll-david-nicholas.html

Nicholas' widow saying Mark always had to be the alpha male in the room is not the least bit surprising to anyone who ever met Mark Driscoll.  Cosper said there were as many stories about how and why David Nicholas stopped being part of Acts 29 as there were people to tell them but that invites the obvious and never-answered question of how many sources Mike Cosper spoke with about the departure of David Nicholas from Acts 29, despite having founded, named and funded the network.

But what becomes apparent from the episode was that the Mark Driscoll who eventually took sole credit for start Acts 29 didn't found it any way.  By Confessions of a Reformission Rev in 2006 Driscoll was described as sole founder of Acts 29 on the back cover.  What scant information and statements have since come to light between then and now suggest that it is more probable that Mark Driscoll took over Acts 29 after David Nicholas and others, perhaps, did all the substantial work of founding the church planting network and making it viable. 

As for the newest episode, the gigantic 2.5 hour "The Tempest"
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/tempest-mars-hill-driscoll.html

It will take time to get around to writing about all of that stuff and it might take a while.  Ironically these two recent episodes are probably closer to actual historical accounts than anything else in the entire podcast series.  If you haven't listened so far and want to hear podcast episodes that give you a coherent chronological account of formative years in Mars Hill history when Driscoll needed David Nicholas' support and then didn't; and to then hear a lengthy account of the disastrous final two years of the late Mars Hill these newest episodes would be the ones to listen to.  That's all I've got for now but I may have other things to write later.  I will say that of "The Tempest" it would be hard to say that very much of anyone at all comes across well, which is part of what made the episode interesting.  

CT reports on a conciliator and ministry that was brought to Mars Hill in 2012 to deal with a small group situation and also spoke at Re:Train

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/november/judy-dabler-creative-conciliation-abuse-lapm-unfit-ministry.html
Of relevance to the late Mars Hill:

Mark Driscoll as King Jehu rather than King David, a Jacques Ellul-inspired reading of the man’s self-confessed vices and ministry history

I have revisited the various accounts Mark Driscoll has given over the course of his life on the topics of his conversion to some form of evangelical Protestant Christianity and his calling to ministry over the years.  One of the things that has stood out to me is how stable his accounts tended to be on both topics during the Mars Hill years, with significant variations and changes in emphases emerging after his 2014 resignation.  I have also looked at different accounts of that resignation, and at different accounts of Driscoll’s resignation in light of statements made for the record about that event from Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas in on record interviews in 2020. Some time ago I wrote:

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-recent-exchange-between-warren.html

 

If in Driscoll’s understanding of church governance and ecclesiology leadership is from the throne down and not the pew up, and if Justin Dean’s account is accurate that the Mars Hill Church governing board offered Mark Driscoll a restoration plan in which he would stop being in a managerial role and would preach, then the most plausible explanation for why Mark Driscoll resigned that takes all of his accounts as factual, face-value accounts is this: he decided that a church as a corporate entity in which he was not seated on the throne (as president and CEO) was not a church in which he would be a member. 

 

All of that is by way of introduction. I know we are down to the last two episodes of the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, not counting any possible bonus episodes that may emerge. I know that it has been popular among Christian bloggers, if from time to time, to compare Mark Driscoll to King David.  I find such comparisons to reflect a poverty of imagination regarding biblical literature.  If we’re going to compare Mark Driscoll to a king in the biblical literature who received a clear call and then was “released” (per Grace Driscoll’s remarks to Brian Houston in 2015) then it’s more probable that Mark Driscoll would be a King Saul figure than a King David figure?  Why?  David was never “released” from his leadership role the way King Saul and Eli were told by the prophet Samuel that they were dismissed from their leadership roles. Where Eli accepted the Lord’s dismissal of his household from leadership Saul did not accept the dismissal and tenaciously clung to power.

 

Yet, for all those potentially fascinating parallels there is still another figure among the kings of Samaria to whom Mark Driscoll might profitably be compared.  Jehu has a claim to being a potential parallel, if we’re going to entertain biblical parallels of rulers with whom Mark Driscoll might be compared.  So today I mean to consider Driscoll’s life in public ministry to Jehu with help from the work of Jacques Ellul.

 

A friend of mine once pointed out that Mark Driscoll often repeated the story that God told him to marry Grace, teach young men, plant churches and teach the Bible.   None of those things actually required that Mark Driscoll sought out starting a church.  Certainly there was nothing about that calling, if we assume it took place (and I’m well aware not everyone will) that requires us to suppose that what Mark Driscoll subsequently has done since 1990 should be construed as having always … or even ever … been the will of God.  It is here I want to make reference to Ellul’s work:

 

The Politics of God and the Politics of Man

Jacques Ellul

Copyright © 1972 by Editions de la Table Rondo and Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-798-2

ISBN 0-8028-1442-5

Translated from the French Politique de Dieu, politiques de l’homme, Nouvelle alliance, Editions Universitaires, Paris, 1966

 

Pages 98-99

… Now this employment of an intermediary has a result one might expect. The message is changed. In the same way the Word spoken by God in Christ is undoubtedly modified by the church, and not for the better,. What Elisha says to the young man is this: “Lead Jehu to an inner chamber, anoint him with the oil of kingship, and say to him, `Thus says the Lord, I anoint you king over Israel,’ then flee, do not tarry.” There is nothing more, no address. The message to Jehu is both radical and also very terse. But this is not the way the young man delivers it. Instead, fleeing at once, he gives an address (as the church often does), and he adds his own invention: “You shall strike down the house of Ahab … I will avenge on Jezebel the blood of the prophets … the whole house of Ahab will perish, every male, bond or free. … The dogs shall eat Jezebel … .” In sum, the young man outlines a program of action for Jehu, which is something Elisha does not do. Now the young man is undoubtedly using prophecies of Elijah (1 Kings 21:19-24), but Elisha does not tell him to do this.  It is on this false transmission that the whole career of Jehu is based. We are usually struck by the fierce and bloodthirsty character of Jehu, and this is clear enough. But another and no less decisive element should not be missed, namely that all Jehu’s work is done in a situation of ambiguity and misunderstanding.

 

He is anointed by God, but in the long run he does nothing but evil wherever he goes. He fulfils prophecies but he is condemned for so doing. He is a man of God, but he uses all the methods of the devil. [emphasis added]

 

We are faced again by a question we have investigated already, that of the coincidence between God’s design and man’s, that of God’s employment of what is bad in man to bring about what he himself wills. Here, for example, there is undoubtedly coincidence between the anointing of Jehu and the existence of a conspiracy among the generals of Joram’s army. In fact, the conspiracy probably existed already. This would explain the immediate support of the generals and their siding with Jehu.

 

The situation was indeed favorable for a coup d’etat. The army was in the field, the king was wounded and had withdrawn, and the generals had a free hand. Probably Jehu already wanted to seize power and the decision of God passed on by the young man seemed to him to be a sign for action. There is also an obvious coincidence between the work that Jehu is commissioned to do and the glimpses we catch of his temperament. He is clearly a bloodthirsty man, and this not merely by reason of his trade. He is at home in massacres, and we thus see God choosing as the agent of his judgment a man whose temperament corresponds to what is asked of him. …

 

Given that Hebrew narrative can be laconic we might take caution here. Perhaps Ellul assumes the young man added a great deal that was not in Elisha’s statement. Or perhaps the young man conveyed something of Elijah’s warnings that were preserved in Elisha’s community that Elisha did not need to add.  Still, Ellul’s proposal that a rambunctious young prophet interposed a great deal upon Elisha’s instruction is thematically interesting—either way the young man transformed Elisha’s simple command into a pretext for setting a violent and activist agenda. Jehu was a man of violence and treachery who was given the task to depose the Omride dynasty and this Jehu did! 

 

But how Jehu deposed the Omride dynasty is what interested Ellul:

 

Page 101

… Undoubtedly, Jehu is the man who executes what God has previously announced. In some sense he is the one who manages the important acts which accomplish the condemnation. But in the last resort he does it all in his own interests. [emphasis added] He takes part in the fulfillment of the prophecy, but he does so, one might say, within the order of political logic. The prophecy intimates this unfolding of political logic. Ahab triggers the movement. Jehu, the champion of Yahweh, uses the same weapons as Ahab, the weapons of politics and violence. …

 

Page 103

We see here another aspect of Jehu. He is cunning. He sets traps for men, as he will do later for the worshipers of Baal. Indeed, in the story of the massacre of the priests of Baal he goes further and lies openly: “ Ahab served Baal little; but Jehu will serve him much. … I have a great sacrifice to offer Baal” (10:18f.). It is on the basis of this promise and this profession of faith that he gathers together the priests and worshipers of Baal to destroy them. Here Jehu is shown to be a liar. …

 

Pages 112-113

The real question in the case of Jehu is that of the heart. Like Abraham, one may say, Jehu is set outside the morality which God established. But Jehu is not Abraham. In fact Jehu is a man who, faithful to God and knowing his will, commandeers this will and makes it his own. He identifies his own cause with God’s design. He thus sets out to shape history in the name of God  but also in the place of God. No doubt he does everything exactly as prophesied. No doubt he achieves what the Lord intends. But it is now his own affair. He has substituted his own will for God’s. It is he who does it, he does not let the Lord act through him. He puts a screen between history and the Lord of history. For man can always erect this barrier and achieve his own purpose. What was God’s purpose has become purely and simply the autonomous will of jehu. He seizes control of the prophecy. He makes it his own cause, confident that he is in the line of God’s will.  He himself has decided to fulfill the prophecy. [emphasis added] …

 

Wanting to put into effect God’s decision, he pays no attention to the great statement that it is not of him that wills nor of him that runs. Jehu is one of those in the Bible who want to fulfill and accomplish of themselves what God has said.  Thus Abraham wants to fulfill the promise of posterity by his own decision and at his own time, i.e., the means of Hagar. This is the whole problem. …

 

Page 115

… Jehu uses prophecy in the interests of politics while pretending to use politics in the interest of prophecy. …

 

Why mention so much about Jehu by way of Ellul?  Because Mark Driscoll once preached through the book of Ruth and mentioned something about himself he heard from Grace Driscoll: 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/09/back-in-2007-ruth-sermon-series-mark.html

http://marshill.se/marshill/media/redeemingruth/gods-hand-in-our-suffering
http://download.marshill.se/files/2007/01/07/20070107_gods-hand-in-our-suffering_sd_audio.mp3

Mark Driscoll

Ruth 1:1-1:22

January 07, 2007

01:00:20
...Elimelech is the guy--everything falls apart. It looks dark, it looks bad. He takes a poll he makes a plan. He decides Moab has a lower cost of living. Moab has more vocational opportunity. Moab has food on the table. I will make a plan, I will be the sovereign. I will take care of everything. Trust me. I know what I'm doing. He leads well. He plans well. He tries to be the sovereign (they're all going to die anyways). I am Elimelech.

I asked my wife, "Which one am I?" ... She didn't even breath, didn't even take a breath, "Oh, you're Elimelech." And his name means what? MY GOD IS KING! That was me. If you asked me, Jesus, sovereign, lord, king, God! And if I ever need Him I'll call him but I don't think I do because I've got all this taken care of.
...

And how many of you are Naomi-ish? You’re a bitter, moody, cranky, self-righteous, finger-pointing, brutally honest, frustrating person that God loves deeply, for no apparent reason. You want to know me? Here’s how I work. I start with Elimelech. If that doesn’t work, I go to Naomi. That’s me. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll make a plan. I’ll lead well. I’ll take care of everything. Give me the variables. I got it all figured out. It didn’t work? Well, God, did you not get the memo? I knew exactly what needed to be done! [emphases added] I’m not sure who to call to tattle.” And if we’re honest, we find ourselves at varying seasons in our lives identifying with each character in the story.

 

So by Driscoll’s own account he starts with Elimelech and if things don’t work out he goes to Naomi. He played it all for laughs in the 2007 sermon but you can potentially hear past the jokes that he confessed to being a Jehu, the kind of man who conflated whatever he thought he heard from God with his own personal agendas and desires.  What Mike Cosper has continually circled around in his podcast is why no one sense that this Mark Driscoll guy was a Jehu rather than a David. How did people not pick up that Mark Driscoll was a guy who, in his own accounting, had made an idol of victory?

 

http://download.marshill.se/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_sd_audio.mp3

http://download.marshill.com/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_en_transcript.pdf.

RESISTING IDOLS LIKE JESUSPart 22 of 1st Corinthians

Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 10:1-14 | June 18, 2006

...
Here’s the tricky part: Figuring out what your idols are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say for example, you define for yourself a little Hell. For you, Hell is being poor. For you, your definition of Hell is being ugly. For you, your definition of Hell is being fat. For you, your definition of Hell is being unloved. For you, your definition of Hell is being unappreciated. That fear of that Hell then compels you to choose for yourself a false savior god to save you from that Hell. And then you worship that false savior god in an effort to save yourself from your self-described Hell. So, some of you are single. Many of you are unmarried. For you, Hell is being unmarried and your savior will be a spouse. And so you keep looking for someone to worship, to give yourself to so that they will save you. For some of you, you are lonely and your Hell is loneliness, and so you choose for yourself a savior, a friend, a group of friends or a pet because you’ve tried the friends and they’re not dependable. And you worship that pet. You worship that friend. You worship that group of friends. You will do anything for them because they are your functional savior, saving you from your Hell. That is, by definition, idolatry. It is having created people and created things in the place of the creator God for ultimate allegiance, value and worth.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get incredibly personal. This will get painfully uncomfortable if I do my job well. I’m going to ask you some probing questions. We’re going to try to get to the root of your idols and mine and I am guilty. I was sitting at breakfast this morning. My wife said, “So what is your idol?” I was like, “Hey, I’m eating breakfast! Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about that.” I’m the pastor. I preach. I don’t get preached at. Eating bacon. Don’t ruin it. You know, it’s going good., And I told her, I said, “Honey, I think for me, my idol is victory.” Man, I am an old jock. More old than jock, lately, but I – I’m a guy who is highly competitive. Every year, I want the church to grow. I want my knowledge to grow. I want my influence to grow. I want our staff to grow. I want our church plants to grow. I want everything – because I want to win. I don’t want to just be where I’m at. I don’t want anything to be where it’s at. And so for me it is success and drivenness and it is productivity and it is victory that drives me constantly. I – that’s my own little idol and it works well in a church because no one would ever yell at you for being a Christian who produces results. So I found the perfect place to hide. 

And I was thinking about it this week. What if the church stopped growing? What if we shrunk? What if everything fell apart? What if half the staff left? Would I still worship Jesus or would I be a total despairing mess? I don’t know. By God’s grace, I won’t have to find out, but you never know. [emphasis added] So we’re going to look for your idols, too. Some questions. Think about it. Be honest with me. What are you most afraid of? What is your greatest fear? See, that probably tells you what your idol is. Sometimes your idol is the thing that you’re scared of not having, not being, not doing. What are you scared of? You scared that you’ll be alone? Are you scared that no one will ever love you? Are you scared that you will be found out that you’re not all that smart? Are you scared that you’ll be stuck in the same dead-end job forever? What are you afraid of?

And to this an Ellulian observation of the kind of man Mark Driscoll admitted himself to be would be to suggest that here is another Jehu.

 

Page 117

… As John says of himself: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30) Jehu, however, is a man who interposes himself while pretending to be accomplishing the purpose of God. …

 

Page 118

[Jehu] … is a type of the man who is unfaithful even in his faithfulness. He is both approved by God and also rejected by him. To be sure, he is always loved by God in spite of his lies, assassinations, and treacheries. But he is also rejected by God because of his commandeering of the Word and the harshness of his loyalty. [emphases added] The real tragedy, however, is that he is finally the reason for the rejection of the whole people, and the reference is very plainly to him in the extraordinary saying which Hosea speaks to Israel, “I have given you kings (a king) in my anger, and I have taken them away (will take him away in my wrath” (Hosea 13:11) …

 

Even if we suppose that Mark Driscoll had a sincere conversion experience and a genuine sense of calling to some kind of ministry literally none of that precludes interpreting his decades of pursuit of public ministry as partaking in the spirit of Jehu. Even if Mark Driscoll had a sincere conversion and calling process Jacques Ellul’s observation about Jehu was that Jehu ultimately regarded the word of the Lord as a pretext to do what he wanted to do. Deception and crushing enemies was just part of ruling.  Gaining and consolidating power through abuse and deceit was just part of Jehu’s deal.   Even when deceit isn’t involved there is, I suggest, a pragmatic streak in Jehu that may have been revealed decades ago when Mark Driscoll was talking to someone writing for Mother Jones.

 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/07/looking-at-mother-jones-feature-that.html

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/07/generation/

…

“There are gays all over our church and I don’t need to yell at them like the religious right,” Driscoll says. “You can be a gay or punk and we’ll treat you like everybody else. Even if you never become a Christian, we’re still friends.”
 
Mars Hill is all about acceptance. Compared to the religious right’s favorite son Ralph Reed, a vision of fundamentalist zeal in a blue suit, Driscoll seems downright countercultural. He’s unabashed about using the pulpit to discuss sex. “I speak very frankly about the reasons God made our bodies to experience orgasm, the Bible’s approval of oral sex between a husband and wife,” he says. “Once you’re married and as long as you remain monogamous, God tells his children to be unblushingly erotic and passionate.”
 
He offers classes at church on topics such as “evangelical feminism” (“the Bible is clear that men and women are both created by God in His image and likeness and totally equal in every way,” he says) and disavows any link with conservative politics. “I used to think it was part of Christianity to be conservative,” he says. “I was further right than Falwell and Limbaugh.” Now he says he doesn’t even vote. What changed? “It got boring,” he says with a shrug. “And I realized that politics didn’t change anything, that in the meantime, people were still starving.”  [emphases added]

 

Time has shown that Mark Driscoll may have just been saying what he believed was strategically necessary to ensure his church plant survived. Driscoll more and more, as time goes by, seems like he has been a Jehu rather than a David from the beginning.