of the writing of (manly) books there is no end and the prospect of reading them is weariness to the soul: why does the world need Mark Driscoll's book on manliness when he sang the praises of Douglas Wilson's books on manliness the last 25 years?

In his recent book Why the Bible Began, Jacob L. Wright pointed out that in wisdom literature in southwestern Asia (and other places, for that matter) it was commonplace for the sage to refer to students as children, for the sage to be the father advising and admonishing the pupil as “my son”.  It’s a small but significant detail to keep in mind when reading, say, Qoholet in Ecclesiastes issuing the following warning:

Ecclesiastes 12:12 RSV

My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

So, let’s suppose for sake of conversation Solomonic authorship is a given (even if it’s not the advice still stands, though, and Martin Shields referred to how in some rabbinical traditions it has been held that Ecclesiastes was authored not by Solomon but Manasseh and that this could explain the lack of reference to the Torah on the one hand and for the fact that there’s never any tradition in Jewish interpretation indicating, as is strongly implied by the text of Ecclesiastes, that the king who wrote the book abdicated the throne).

Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes the arning is, son, there is no end to making books and if there is a take-away from such a warning it is most likely this, you don’t need to buy one of those new-fangled books by megachurch preachers in the United States telling you how to be a man.

Which book might I be thinking of?  Well, if you’ve read Wenatchee The Hatchet any time between 2006 and 2024 you don’t have to wonder too long.

Wendy Alsup at Modern Reformation on "The Model for Christian Manhood", the farmer in contrast to the soldier

https://modernreformation.org/resource-library/web-exclusive-articles/the-model-for-christian-manhood/

When I used to lead women’s ministry at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, I helped organize our yearly Women’s Retreats. The men, however, never had Men’s Retreats. They had Men’s Advances. Retreats, as they saw it, were for sissies. 

Nevermind that the larger church adopted the concept of retreat from Jesus’s example in the Gospels. Jesus withdrew/retreated on several occasions, the Greek word meaning to make space away, to retire to make room for something else. In contrast, the men at Mars Hill Church were not discipled to withdraw to make room for Jesus. The Men’s Advance had quite the reputation for being a boisterous weekend filled with conversations about sex and UFC fights. Perhaps the men did spend some quiet time in prayer and Bible study, but if they did, no one talked about that aspect of the Men’s Advance when they got home. 

Since the release of Kristin du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith, evangelicals have been buzzing about her portrayal of the recent history of conservative evangelicalism. I didn’t need to read Jesus and John Wayne to believe the author’s main conclusion—that American evangelicalism has had a long affair with warrior masculinity, to the point that evangelicals are willing to sacrifice character for leaders who are willing to kick some butt. My experience of American Evangelicalism from the independent fundamentalist churches of my youth to Mars Hill Church as an adult fit the one du Mez described. I was caught up in the warrior model of Christian manhood for a while. I looked to marry that kind of man for myself.

The warrior mentality that has emerged in the last fifty to seventy-five years of evangelicalism is not new in Church history. It was bred, for example, in actual warriors during the Crusades, to devastating effects. It has been used metaphorically to describe Machen and his warrior children or in the popularization of the warrior as the model for Christian manhood among Baptists on the heels of the rise of dispensationalism with Scofield and Ryrie. In Scofield’s end times scenario, Christ raptures a marginalized church valiantly holding off secular opponents. The gates of hell are biting at the church’s heals, with liberal wings falling left and right. Only those who valiantly fight to the end will be found holding on to the fundamentals of the faith.

I would like to argue that the warrior mentality is not the Biblical paradigm for Christian manhood, or womanhood for that matter.

After the implosion of Mars Hill Church and a divorce I didn’t want, I moved from Seattle, Washington to my grandparents’ farm in South Carolina. My elderly father still shares crops with the farmer who rents our land. For the last six years of my life, rocking on my screened porch overlooking the fields, recovering from both my divorce and the cancer diagnosis that followed two years later, I have been detoxing from the poor discipleship around sex and gender I received at Mars Hill and the warrior mentality for Christians, particularly Christian men, of my upbringing. The fog has cleared in my brain, and the true model for Christian manhood and womanhood has become as clear in my head as it actually is in Scripture. I stare at it every day.

Land. Seed. Work. Harvest.

The model for Christian manhood isn’t a warrior. It’s a farmer.  ...

I went to, I think, one mens' retreat (advance, whatever).  I have not been a fan of mens' retreats.  I talked with a friend of mine who also went to the same retreat and we both considered how depressing it was.  We were given homework modeled on the Jon Phelps "Reverse engineering your life" paradigm and we were supposed to write down if we'd be married or not; how much we would weigh; how often we'd have sex; how many kids we'd have, how much money we'd be making and ...

postscript on the blog post about Dale E. Soden's Outsiders in a Promised Land book, revisiting what Driscoll wrote about the Dead Men/boot camp era and his explicit dismissal of theonomistic/Christian reconstructionism in 2006

Having mentioned earlier this weekend that Soden's description of the history of Mars Hill in general and Mark Driscoll in particular was refracted to its detriment by focusing and fixating entirely on Mark Driscoll, without so much as a serious mention of other figures in Mars Hill history, it seems worth mentioning that one of the other problems in Soden's account of Mars Hill within a chapter called "The Christian Right Strikes Back" is that it failed to mention the numerous instances in which Driscoll lambasted people whom scholars and historians would, in too casual a reading, consider co-beligerants with a Mark Driscoll in a culture war for socially conservative values.

Mark Driscoll's most infamous fusillade, "Pussified Nation" mentioned Promise Keepers and James Dobson within the first sentence as example of homoerotic failures as men, for those who actually read the whole thing.  However, it's important to remind readers that Mark Driscoll went back and referred to this era of Mars Hill history as a touchstone in the formation of the collective character of the men.  I've blogged extensively about aspects of "Dead Men" in the history of Mars Hill; about how the "Pussified Nation" phase constituted the beginning of a shift on Mark Driscoll's part into what I now call "markulinity", through which Driscoll implicitly and explicitly set himself up as the model of manhood to which Mars Hill men ought to aspire; how the William Wallace II persona could be seamlessly shifted out of by Mark Driscoll into his Pastor Mark voice without any observable shift in tone; and, in a topic I believe has been under-discussed, how we can draw upon Jacques Ellul's taxonomy of agitation and integration propaganda techniques as a way to understand Mark Driscoll as a nascent propagandist whose objectives were to incite and thereby discover which young men were eager to invest in the mission of social formation at Mars Hill and willing to join into the integrative rites of passage Driscoll had in mind.  What makes this lacuna of scholarly discussion so ridiculous is that for anyone who read Confessions of a Reformission Rev when it came out a decade ago, Mark Driscoll was actually pretty clear in delineating the basic points about all of that.

But what may be easily overlooked is that, whether or not we now consider it an entirely accurate account, is that Mark Driscoll formulated his narrative of how the "Dead Men" phase was formed on two grounds.  The first ground was that he began to notice what he called hyper-Calvinistic young guys who were fans of theonomy wanting to, as Driscoll implicitly frames the narrative, hijack the mission of Mars Hill Church.  The second ground was that since Driscoll recounted that he couldn't possibly take them all on at once he formulated a rite/ritual process by which they could be ridiculed for not coming up with sufficiently carefully argued cases for their positions.

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
copyright (c) 2006 by Msark Driscoll
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10: 0-310-27016-2
[bold emphases added]
page 130
Some of the fired-up young guys went too far and started acting like young bucks in rutting season, wanting to lock horns with me and the elders. Many went into extreme forms of Calvinism and wanted to debate things like theonomy and other dumb things that only white guys with high-speed Internet connections to bizzare websites could get into and were causing division. If you don't know what theonomy is, don't worry, because you aren't really missing anything. Basically, it is the belief that the church should rule the world, including the banking system, government and so on, and enforce Old Testament law like Israel did. The young rabid Calvinists who were pushing for this doctrine did not yet own homes, most did not even have wives, and some still lived with their mothers. I tried to set them straight by telling them to get dominion over their room before they took over the world, but like most fools, they were not deterred.

pages 130-131
There were too many guys to fight individually, and I needed a way to fight them all at once. So in  an effort to clean u pthe mess, I started a weekly men-only meeting, which I named "Dead Men" adn which ran for a few months. I paired guys up to debate an assigned theological issue, and other guys in the audience would chuck things at them and mock them if their study was not good or their argument was not cogent. At the end of the debate, we would vote, declare a winner, and give him a mock prize and crown him with a Viking helmet. The men liked the competition and got into studying and debating theology.

When the hyper-Calvinists realized we weren't going to baptize their babies or talk about stupid stuff that detracts from mission, many of them left, which was a good thing because they were getting to be deadweight. Over the years, I've just accepted that if I do not quickly open the back door when God is trying to run people out of our church, I am working against God by keeping sick people in my church so that they can infect others. Indeed, the church is a body, and one of the most important parts is the colon. Like the human body, any church body without a colon is destined for sickness that leads to death.
...
page 131-132
...
We also began "boot camps" for our young men, teaching them how to get a wife, have sex with that wife, get a job, budget money, buy a house, father a child, study the Bible, stop looking at porn, and brew decent beer.  The buzz hit just as we opened the 7:00 p.m. Paradox service and the 10:00 a.m. service at the small church building, in addition to the 5:00 p.m. downtown service. I chose to preach on the most controversial practical life issues, such as dating, gender, work, kids, sex, money, and the like, in a long topical series from the book of Proverbs to continue fanning the fire that was burning in our church among the young men who had caught the vision to become patriarchs.
In other words, when I have proposed that what Mark Driscoll did with "Pussified Nation" and the subsequent "Dead Men" sessions and boot camps was a one-two punch of agitation and then integration propaganda to assimilate willing participants and to deliberately alienate people whom Driscoll considered "off mission", this is not me speculatively pulling ideas out of thin air because I happened to read Ellul.  This is actually stuff Mark Driscoll pretty explicitly laid out for us in narrative form a decade ago that happens to be explicable in terms of the concepts regarding the nature and use of propagandistic techniques Ellul articulated half a century ago. 

And if Mark Driscoll repudiated theonomistic/postmillennialist ideas in the most dismissive possible way it would be difficult to make a compelling or competent case that Mark Driscoll in particular, let alone Mars Hill in general, is explicable in terms of more conventional concerns from some scholars or members of the press about what they call the Christian Right.  It's also impossible to take at face value any suggestion that Mark Driscoll could be understood in explicitly Christian reconstructionist terms because even if he explicitly said young men were interested in being patriarchs and even if he proposed what could be considered conservative or retrograde gender politics, Mark Driscoll's own views may be too idiosyncratic and personal to be explicable on the basis of other categories of thought like theonomy or Christian reconstructionism.  Driscoll's own self-understanding had his views as being more moderate because while he was opposed to women being pastors he was not opposed to women serving as deacons. 

For that matter, when Mark Driscoll recounted how he became resentful of Grace for neglecting him in his 2006 book it wasn't about the lack of sex he would recount in his 2012 book.

Instead, Confessions gave us the following:
page 101-102

During this season my wife, Grace, also started to experience a lot of serious medical problems. her job was very stressful, and between her long hours at the office and long hours at the church, her body started breaking down. I felt tremendously convicted that I had sinned against my wife and had violated the spirit of 1 Timothy 5:8, which says that if a man does not provide for his family he has denied his faith and has acted in a manner worse than an unbeliever. I repented to Grace for my sin of not making enough money and having her shoulder any of the financial burden for our family.  We did not yet have elders installed in the church but did have an advisory council in place, and I asked them for a small monthly stipend to help us make ends meet, and I supplemented our income with outside support and an occasional speaking engagement.

Shortly thereafter, Grace gave birth to our first child, my sweetie-pie Ashley. Up to this point Grace had continuously poured endless hours into the church. She taught a women's Bible study, mentored many young women, oversaw hospitality on Sundays, coordinated meals for new moms recovering from birth, and organized all of the bridal and baby showers. Grace's dad had planted a church before she was born and has remained there for more than forty years. Her heart for ministry and willingness to serve was amazing. But as our church grew, I felt I was losing my wife because we were both putting so many hours into the church that we were not connecting as a couple like we should have. I found myself getting bitter against her because she would spend her time caring for our child and caring for our church but was somewhat negligent of me. [emphases added]

So by Mark Driscoll's account, there was a period before and after Ashley Driscoll's birth during which he resented his wife Grace and being bitter against her because she was so busy being a mother and operating in service and hospitality to people in the church she was neglecting him.  If there was some ambiguity or vagueness about what kind of neglect this included back in 2006 all possible room for doubt got removed in the 2012 book Real Marriage, where Mark Driscoll explicitly said Grace was "not enough" for him sexually.

The other element that had to have been exasperating for Driscoll was that on top of all this, Grace Driscoll, with her background in public relations, was more the functional breadwinner of the Driscoll household than Mark himself was.  Driscoll repented of not making as much money as his wife by negotiating for more income, although if Driscoll took his own interpretive approach to the pastoral epistles seriously he should have considered himself disqualified from ever serving in ministry.  Had he actually lived consistently with his own stated convictions on those issues he would have resigned ministry at Mars Hill around 1999.  Obviously that's not what his practical definition of repentance looked like. Not all of us who consider ourselves moderately conservative Protestants even think his take on that passage in 1 Timothy is a competent or responsible reading of the text.

The other detail about the 1999-2002 period of Mars Hill history to keep in mind is that during the season in which Mark Driscoll was working to integrate the willing and alienate the contentious with his fusillades against unmanly men, he was also renting out space in his home to a few single guys.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/pussified-nation-in-context-of_29.html

The tension between the ideal striven towards and the reality literally on the ground is something that scholars and historians may never catch up to if they stick with the kinds of boiled down pre-built narratives Soden brought to the history of Mars Hill when Soden got around to mentioning it.


asdf

Mark Driscoll Ministries has added 2015 Ecclesiastes talks to the sermon roster, not the 2003 Ecclesiastes sermon series in which Driscoll shared stories of starting a brawl on his own high school baseball team

http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/11-ways-of-the-wise-ecclesiastes-71-14/
from October 12, 2015, apparently

Mark Driscoll's advice, in reflecting upon Ecclesiastes 7:11 in an October 2015 presentation, is that you can't move forward if you're looking back to the past.  This axiom couldn't be more ironic since Mark Driscoll talked about how early in his preaching career he preached through Ecclesiastes and that it was like performing brain surgery on yourself.  1 John was a book of the Bible he went through in the earliest days of Mars Hill.  For a man who is set on not looking back it could seem as though all he knows how to do is recycle stuff he preached through a decade or more ago.  The forthcoming Ruth sermon series will cover material he preached through already in 2007.

But what's interesting about the Ecclesiastes sermon series is that it's an entirely new take on stuff Driscoll's already preached multiple times.  Why not just keep bringing back the old sermons Driscoll preached from 2003? 

Well, let's consider one sermon from the 2003 period.  What you're going to find, if you can dig up the PDF transcript of the sermon is that the narrative aside that appears at minute 40:00 isn't in the transcript.  But if you go over here and download the sermon you can hear that the following story is in the sermon.

Remember this anecdote isn't something you'll read in the sermon transcript and you have to download the audio from the marshill.se site to be able to confirm that Mark Driscoll did in fact say this stuff from the pulpit for the record:

http://download.marshill.se/files/2003/06/01/20030601_good-bad-days_sd_audio.mp3
GOOD BAD DAYS
Part 10 of Ecclesiastes
Pastor Mark Driscoll | Ecclesiastes 7:1-14 | June 01, 2003

40.00
How many guys, honestly (you don't have to raise your hands), how many guys in their teens or twenties (I'm in my thirties now so I'm at that place where I WOULD fight but it seems like a lot of work). But especially when I was in my teens I would, just all full of myself, I would just, I liked to fight.  I would LOOK for fights. Certain guys are like this. 

I actually beat up a guy on my OWN baseball team during a game. Usually, usually, you know, in a baseball game people why--baseball players are all wussies.  They never fight.  They all just run out to the middle of the field and look at each other which is, I dunno, like prom or something. They're all gazing into each other's eyes. I'm not sure what they're doing.  They hardly ever fight and they NEVER take the bats which, to me, seems like the most OBVIOUS thing.

I love baseball and I can remember when I was playing ball. A guy on my own team in the dugout says something so I attacked him.  Now very rarely do you see a bench-clearing brawl with just one team. Usually the other team's involved. I was a total hothead. I would fight through high school. I fight quite a bit.  Guys would say something, give a cross--you got a problem? That's what he's talking about [the author of Ecclesiastes]. Especially you young guys. Some of you young guys, you're LOOKING for a fight. You want to legitimize it, you want to justify it. Some of you married people are looking for a fight. Provoke. Provoke. Provoke. Boom, off they go like the Fourth of July.

Within the same sermon Driscoll shared another story about coming to a new sense of discovery about who he was through one of the great catalysts for personal insight and epiphany bestowed upon parents since the dawn of parenthood, the reflexively emulative behavior of one's own child:

42:16
... How many of you, driving, really, is where you see your true self in its purest form?
It is for me. Driving for me--I think Jesus intentionally puts other people of certain mental acumen around me when I'm driving just to continually teach me the same lesson. I knew I was over the line when my daughter--she's five now. She's beautiful and brilliant--but, she was about two or so, and I was driving and I hit the brakes. And I hear from the backseat my glorious little daughter say, "Idiot!"
My wife looks over at me. My wife is very sweet, very kind, very patient. She looks at me and says, "You've discipled her." I said, "Yeah, I know, I gotta--" My two, three-year old daughter's beaten me to the "Idiot!" blow. So, I, okay. Slow to anger, abiding in turn signals. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it.  Fools just blow.

In a story in connection to discussing Ecclesiastes 7:11 in his 2003 sermon, Mark Driscoll said:
45:47
I went to my ten-year high school reunion a couple of years ago. Everybody was talking about the good old days in a public high school.  Unless you've taken a ball-peen hammer to your own head you know it wasn't that great.

I was there. I remember. It wasn't that great. I had a mullet. I wore pastels. I loved my wife so much I took her to a George Michael concert, for the love of God.  I was trying to court her and she liked George Michael and I was sitting here going, "This is not, these are NOT good days." These are terrible days!  These are arduous, painful, toilsome days.  I am in the house of mourning, listening to "Jitterbug". This is terrible.

You know, fools try to go back.  Wise people, they go forward.

This next sermon excerpt is really long, but it features some interesting stories about Mark and Grace Driscoll's marriage as mediated through tales about the struggles to find and sustain workable automobiles. In keeping with the earlier jocular observation about how driving can reveal to you your true self, Driscoll shared the following:

54.05
...
He goes on to explain. This is what he means. “When times are good be” what? “Happy. When times are good, be happy.” “Hey! I gotta job!” “Hey, I got married!” “Hey, I got kids!” When times are bad, “Oh, man, I gotta job.”
(Laughter)

“Oh, man. Have you met my spouse?” “Have you seen my kids?”
(Laughter)

When times are good, be happy. When times are bad, consider this. God has made both days. God has made the one, as well as the other. Therefore, a man cannot discover anything about his future. What he says is this. People wanna be on mission. They wanna know everything and they wanna be sovereign. They wanna control everything. So, they’re trying to set up their life in such a way that they never have a bad day. And no matter what you do, you get bad days. I have had cars, okay? I’ll give you an example. My first car was a 1956 Chevy.
(Laughter)

I was driving it and it had an electrical fire that came out through the steering wheel.
(Laughter)

I was so happy. It was a good day. “I got a car!” Bad day? “The car is on fire.”
(Laughter)

That’s a bad day. I got rid of that car. I got a 1966 Volkswagen. It was a little two door wagon, lowered with Porsche hubcaps. I thought it was cool. I pushed it more than I drove it.
(Laughter)

I thought, “Cool. I have a cool car. I look cool.” I’m 16. You know, you gotta give me a little rope here. “I look cool.” I drive the car, a little Volkswagen, 1966 square back. It never, ever, ever ran. I pushed it all the time.
(Laughter)

I’m gonna get rid of it. I’m gonna get another vehicle. I got a little, tiny pickup truck. Kept breaking down. Got rid of it. Got a Volkswagen Rabbit. Exploded. My dad, put a new motor in it, rebuilt it. It still ran rough. Got rid of it. Then, I decided, “I will get a truck.” I got a huge man truck. The tires were like this high.(Laughter)

I traded my wife’s car in for it. We were newly married. I didn’t ask her permission. It was the worst thing I ever did.
Response: Awww.

[emphasis added, and that's not audience approval, for those who haven't downloaded the sermon!]

It was so high, she couldn’t even get in. I didn’t even think about that.
(Laughter)

The gas mileage was so bad. It had two tanks, but I loved it ‘cause it was huge. And we drove it to college first time, and something went wrong and the gas tanks leaked all over the road and we spent a couple of days in the Tri-Cities.
(Laughter)

We ate Chinese food. It was not good Chinese food. Bad things happened. Never practice Chinese food in an unknown restaurant. After that, I decided I needed a different truck, so I got a 1966 Chevy pickup long bed. Happy day! Lowered it, Tonneau cover, mag wheels, redneck, Cadillac gorgeous.
(Laughter)

My wife was going through an intersection. Some guy ran it. She t-boned him. Gone. Just totaled.
(Laughter)

Out goes the front end. Dohhh.
(Laughter)

Got my wife in. I said, “I love my wife. We’re gonna get a decent car. Got her a little Nissan. The thing kept breaking down. Got rid of it. Got her a Subaru wagon. Ran terribly. Got rid of it. Every day, I’d buy a car, happy day. The day I’d drive it the next day, bad day.
(Laughter)

I’m also not a mechanic, so I don’t even know what’s going on. My poor dad’s been under the hood of my car so much. I mean, it’s been crazy. So, then, that’s it. I’m gonna get my wife a good car. An SUV. Something nice. Got her a black Jeep Cherokee. Leather, cruise, air, tilt, great. Drive it. All
the fuel injectors go. There’s gas all over the engine.
(Laughter)

You don’t need to be a mechanic to know that gas all over an engine is bad. It’s just bad.
(Laughter)

Bad things happen. Got rid of it. Got my wife a Toyota Landcruiser. She loved it. A nice, old one. It was like an ’88. Cruise, air. It was nice. Really sleek. It was perfect condition. The motor exploded.
(Laughter)

We put a new motor in it and I said, “That’s it, honey. I’m gonna get you a Suburban ‘cause I love you as Christ loves the church.”
(Laughter)

“I’m gonna get you a Suburban with a TV for the kids, leather. It’ll be a big Victorymobile. Anybody who runs a red light, you just go right over ‘em. You’ll win.”
(Laughter)

Good day. Good day. Good day. We get it, first week, this light comes on, “Service engine soon.” We’ve had it a year. It’s got a warranty, but we’ve spent a total of over $5,000. Much of it’s gone to the warranty. Finally, got it all fixed. Good day.

Yesterday! Yesterday, we’re driving it up a hill and it starts shaking all over.
Like, “What is up?” “Service engine soon.” Bad day. Now, Solomon would tell me, “When days are good, be happy.” “Hey, I’m driving! Praise Jesus, I’m rolling! This is incredible!”
(Laughter)

When days are bad, consider this. God made both days. I can’t get out and just yell at the car demon. It ultimately comes from the hand of God. Wise people accept that. Now, I’m not saying I’m wise and I’ve fully accepted it.

But, what he says is this. “Don’t think that the good days are from Jesus and the bad days aren’t. Every day’s from Jesus. And you can’t bend it back and make it straight, if he’s made it crooked. But, wisdom will help you navigate through it. Don’t get angry. Don’t surround yourself with stupid friends who let you sin and never rebuke you. Don’t go just get a lot of food to eat and a lot of alcohol to drink and listen to country western, and try and avoid it.”

You would potentially get the impression from Real Marriage that Mark Driscoll found his wife's issues with sex and sexuality to have been his primary point of frustration within the marriage.  But for those who were attending Mars Hill for years and can remember to look up some stuff, it becomes easier to see that the kind of newlywed (by Driscoll's account in the above-quoted tale) to trade in his wife's vehicle without her knowledge or permission so he could get the truck he dreamed of could be a newlywed guy with some communication issues.

It seems probable at this stage that Mark Driscoll will keep trying to move forward as if the last twenty years of Mars Hill basically didn't happen.  It may be that he'll continue to present his wife and children as intrinsically bound up in this new church plant that, as an homage to the church that Grace's father Gib Martin used to be pastor at, is an homage that is intrinsically backward looking in its disposition down to its very name.

If the key to moving forward is not looking back it's hard to be sure the future is looking rosy for Team Driscoll if so much of the church, ranging from the litany of recycled Mars Hill-era content to the explicitly filial homage to Gib Martin's church, is so steeped in conscientious nostalgia.  If Mark Driscoll had taken his own axioms seriously it seems none of this would have played out as it has.  But then for those who have been keeping track of these things the history of Mark Driscoll as a public figure in ministry has been full of moments where he's felt at liberty to instruct others by expounding upon principles he didn't live out in his own life.

from July 13, 2011, Mark Driscoll on "The Issue Under a Lot of Issues"

http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2011/july/much-ado-about-mark-driscoll.html
This week the Christian blogosphere worked itself into a frenzy over a Facebook status posted by Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. The status, which was later removed, read, "So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you've ever personally witnessed?"

There was the internet reaction.  At that time Driscoll responded at The Resurgence.  While robots.txt precludes access to the original link somebody who got access to Resurgence stuff seems to have decided to

http://resurgencecdn.com/resurgence/

Although you'll never see any stuff by John Catanzaro over there you can go read this:

http://resurgencecdn.com/resurgence/2011/07/13/the-issue-under-a-lot-of-issues
The Issue Under a Lot of Issues
Mark Driscoll

Gender. Is it a socially constructed reality or a God-given identity?

That’s a significant question, and how you answer it has massive implications. The question of gender underlies many current cultural conflicts and theological controversies that go beyond even the long standing debates about whether or not a woman can be a pastor and whether or not a man is to function as the head of his home.

 

In Theology, Publishing, Parenting, and the Church

In theology, there is a raging debate around Bible translations regarding the translation of gender terms such as God being our Father, whether we should be called mankind or humanity, and whether or not we have all (men and women) been adopted as sons of God or children of God.

In publishing, a popular book a while back portrayed some members of the Trinity in feminine terms, which lead to yet another debate about what constitutes being both biblically faithful and culturally creative.

 

In parenting, a recent article made the rounds on the Internet about parents who have chosen to raise their child genderless and allow that child, named Storm, decide which, if any, gender it wants to choose.

 

In the church, there is a raging debate about whether or not active homosexuals should be pastors, including multiple mainline denominations recently, in effect, breaking with a few thousand years of consistent Biblical interpretation to say, “Yes.” And another denomination outside of the US also recently decided that someone who is by identity and public declaration gay, yet abstinent, can be a pastor in good standing. Once again, the debate rages.

 

God the Father or Mother?

Outside of the gender debate, other debates about such things as God judging people, punishing them, and pouring out his wrath in the conscious, eternal torments of hell are in some ways asking if God is more like a Father who defends his children from their enemies or a Mother who loves everyone until they inevitably and eventually decide to join the family.

 

The mainstream media has also picked up the gender issue in a cultural context. In recent months The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have run major stories chronicling the fact that young, single men are not growing up as quickly, attending college as frequently, or assuming responsibility as maturely as their female counterparts. As a result, many women simply expect to not marry and are preparing to become mothers and live life on their own because they struggle to find men stable and dependable enough to share life and its responsibilities.

 

Big Issues

Not only do the debates rage about gender in the church, but increasingly, the least likely person to be found in church is a twenty-or-thirty-something single male. So, it’s important to ponder, how can believers speak to the gender issue, which is the issue under many issues raging in the church and culture? How can the church compel men to rise up without pushing women down? And, does the Bible have wisdom for us today about such things as women and men dressing and acting in ways that are specific to their gender, as Paul tells the Corinthians, or is that culturally-outdated misogyny that inhibits the progress of our spirituality as we purchase clothes at American Apparel? 

 

These are big, tough, far-reaching issues.

 

Too big, tough, and far-reaching for things like Facebook and Twitter, I’ve recently learned. 

 

Some Backstory

I had a recent conversation with a stereotypical, blue-collar guy who drives his truck with his tools, lunchbox, and hard hat to his job site every day. He said he wasn’t a Christian, but he was open and wanted to learn what the Bible said. In that conversation, he told me he’d visited a church but that the guy doing the music made him feel uncomfortable because he was effeminate (he used another more colorful word, but that one will suffice in its place). He asked some questions about the Bible, and whether the Bible said anything about the kind of guy who should do the music. I explained the main guy doing the music in the Bible was David, who was a warrior king who started killing people as a boy and who was also a songwriter and musician.

 

I then put a flippant comment on Facebook, and a raging debate on gender and related issues ensued. As a man under authority, my executive elders sat me down and said I need to do better by hitting real issues with real content in a real context. And, they’re right. Praise God I have elders who keep me accountable and that I am under authority.

 

Real Issues in a Fuller Context

So, we are working on a new website where I can speak to these real issues in a fuller context. Lord willing, sometime in September, after my trip to Europe with my family and a lot of other people, and then some recovery time, we will launch a new website. 

 

In the past, I’ve not had a regular place to work out personal commentary on social issues, and so I’ve erred in sometimes doing so in places like Facebook, Twitter, and the media, where you can have a good fight but don’t have the room to make a good case.

 

The first content on the new website will be about gender, and much of it will be around a book my wife, Grace, and I have completed together called Real Marriage: The Truth about Sex, Friendship, and Life Together, to be published by our friends at Thomas Nelson in January. 

 

Both Grace and I will be blogging at the new site on issues related to gender and marriage, including mistakes we’ve made, sins we’ve committed, and convictions we agree on. And, we’ll have lots of other content on other issues as well. Until then, have a great summer, and a sincere thanks to all my critics who sometimes have good wisdom that helps me out. 

Tokumitsu of Jacobin's "In the Name of Love" talks to the Atlantic about work mythology, cf Ribbon Farm on the difference between inconspicuous vs conspicuous production in the contemporary workforce (i.e. chimneysweep vs bard)

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/do-what-you-love-work-myth-culture/399599/

...

 

Tokumitsu: So in my book I have my theory about where it came from. I really feel like it comes out of post-World War II prosperity. The Protestant work ethic is work, work, work—work is a calling, work is virtuous. I felt like that was with us for a long time, but pleasure never factored into that much.

 

But then come the Baby Boomer generation—you have the wars seemingly over and there’s a lot of prosperity, though it’s been spread pretty broadly throughout society. And that gave people the opportunity to indulge themselves a little bit. And within the U.S. particularly, there arose a culture of self: thinking about what makes me happy and how to improve myself. [I argue that the] virtue strain of work and the self strain of work combined in the late 1970s and 1980s, and in a way pleasure-seeking became the virtue.

Tokumitsu: ... I feel like this whole culture of feeling good too is just really kind of hedonistic. And I also feel like it’s a little bit dark. There’s almost something in it to me that speaks of like addiction or something. We can never be at just baseline contentment. [emphasis added] We always have to be relentlessly seeking these “good feelings.”

 

 

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/10/you-are-not-an-artisan/

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We  look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names.  This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder. [italics original, bold emphasis added]

We can think of this as conspicuous production, by analogy to conspicuous consumption. First-world artisan tendencies take this to a logical extreme.

When you subconsciously think of work as something you consume for pleasure, you end up with a possibly irrational (economically speaking) attraction to artisan work. Even those who don’t actually end up as artisans choose work the way they choose cars, jewelry or handbags, over-valuing things like resume-value and exposure-value.

The result is a misguided analysis of the impact of computers and automation that makes us think the future of work is much darker than it is.

What’s the difference between a tradesman and  an artisan?  Think chimney-sweep versus bard as the extremes of the spectrum. Both are archetypes that mostly disappeared with late industrialization in the early twentieth century, thanks in part to automation, but there the similarities end.

One fulfilled a critical economic function by engaging in unpleasant and inconspicuous production. The other fulfilled a non-critical economic function in the economy by engaging in pleasurable and conspicuous production.

One generated a higher, less volatile income, but with little potential for upward mobility, the other generated a lower, more volatile income, but with more potential for upward mobility.

The median chimney sweep did better than the median bard, but the best bards did better than the best chimney-sweeps (by finding favor with a king for instance). Since this was before mass media, bard reward distribution was not as skewed as it would become, but it was still skewed.

The emerging future of work does resemble pre-modern patterns of labor organization in a few key ways, but most of us are going to turn into digital-era chimney sweeps rather than bards. And this is a good thing.

The difference between bard work and chimney-sweep work is that it far easier to convince yourself that a relaxing hobby is actually real work. It is a kind of gollumizing effect: behavior that makes you atrophy psychologically.

What makes it worse is that in an economy based on a fiat currency, shareholder value maximization and deficit spending, the capacity to generate an income does not necessarily imply that meaningful work is being done, either in a subjective psychological sense (it helps you evolve rather than atrophy) or economic sense (net wealth is being created rather than consumed or harvested). You might even end up having to pay to do real work.

 

For those who read this far and note the tag at the end of the post, all that pre-amble is a way to frame the above quotes as an observation about Mark Driscoll's taxonomy of manhood.  Driscoll spent years warning guys to not get "joe jobs" without necessarily defining what those joe jobs were.  Driscoll also spent a few years joking about how much he loved his "job". The implication in that attempt at humor might have been that he loved his job and that it was as though it wasn't really work for him.

 

... and then we got the Result Source controversy and the plagiarism controversy and that revelation about the extent to which ghostwriters could ghostwrite at Mars Hill and research assistants helped and ...

 

it did begin to seem as though Mark Driscoll could represent a production mill of occasionally recycled work rather than the production of anything particularly new or useful and at times even anything particularly interesting.  There was, to borrow Venkat's phrasing from ribbon farm, this conspicuous production thing with Driscoll.  The irony of this could be best framed by invoking Mark Driscoll's old standby about those who might object to what he said from the pulpit, he was just delivering the mail, you know.  Don't shoot the mailman.  Now, sure, he invoked being a postal worker but it's arguable the average postal work, even the average ineffectual postal worker, conveys more directly relevant and useful information to the average person in a day than Mark Driscoll ever did.  If you got your electric bill in a timely manner that was information you could literally act upon as soon as you found out about it if, you know, you get your utility bills by mail and all that.

 

It seemed like Driscoll was against jobs that were inconspicuously productive sometimes, while his own "job" was conspicuous production that turned out to have some problems with it.  First, we couldn't be sure how much of it was really his, secondly, we couldn't be sure to what degree the people who were actually getting the work done were acknowledged for it. 

 

Then again if people will buy Star Wars movies over and over again Mark Driscoll can recycle sermon ideas, too.  What the market will bear, perhaps.

 

Given the extent to which Mark Driscoll's returning to Ecclesiastes (again) it doesn't seem he's doing an real work at all so much as reconsolidating his branding.  He is, to borrow his old analogy about postal work, aiming to deliver the same mail he delivered ten and twenty years ago.  Driscoll now comes across like a bard who has spent his public career telling chimneysweeps they need to be bards. What may benefit Driscoll most is to go back and be that bread delivery truck guy, to be what Venkat at ribbon farm has dubbed the chimney sweep, who does the thoroughly unsexy scut work that produces something people can use.

 

Now maybe after nearly two decades doing the public speaking/motivational speaking/entertainment/ministry thing Mark Driscoll doesn't know how to do any real-world work but that seems unlikely.  It's more probably that he knows how to do real work but may not WANT to do work that has no prestige. He said last year that if he had to choose between being a pastor and being a celebrity he'd choose being a pastor.  Then he quit being a pastor in 2014 and only in 2015 on the charismatic leadership conference circuit scene has he seen fit to explain that, oh, yeah, God totally gave me audible verbal permission to go against everything I told everyone they ought to do in general and that I intended to do in particular.  So Mark Driscoll is no longer any kind of pastor but he is still a celebrity, a celebrity recycling his old material.  The transformation of Mark Driscoll into almost everything he warned Mars Hill against has seemed alarmingly complete. The tragedy and comedy of it seems to be that he seems completely ignorant of this transformation over the last two decades. In the lexicon of work types presented by ribbon farm Driscoll has clearly chosen to be a bard rather than a chimney sweep and time will tell whether the song remains the same as it ever was (seems like a fairly safe bet there).

The Evolution of Markulinity: seed of implosion, a blue collar Jesus for a white collar male? Driscoll's quest to get the college-educated establishment of tomorrow was going to cost him his blue collar base in the end

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp4

03.00ish
I've made a lot of mistakes and one of them was going too fast. There's the Lord's calling and there's the Lord's timing and I should have waited longer. I should have been under godly spiritual authority, for Grace and I to be under a godly couple, that was [a] senior pastor, so that we could learn and grow. I, I, my character was not caught up with my gifting and I did start to young. And I believe God called us to start the church and he was very, very, very gracious to us, uh, but had I to do it over again I would not look at a 25-year old and say, "Do what I did." :

03:57ish
... We went into the urban core and we felt, specifically, called to go after young, college-educated males. That was really my heart. I wanted everybody to meet Jesus but I felt particularly if we were gonna make in the city and the legacy of families and, you know, the way that women and children and culture treated, that getting young men to love Jesus would be paramount. [emphasis added] So that was really the focus and I didn't think the church would amount to much. The first three years we didn't collect a salary; it was very small; we met at night; we moved a lot because we kept losing our rental location; the offices were in our house, so it wasn't a big deal and we didn't anticipate that it would become what it ultimately did.

37:26
... young men aren't going to church. Young men aren't going to college. Young men aren't marrying women. Young men are not raising their children and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men--you know, 1 Corinthians 13--I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I acted like a child. When I became a man I put childish ways behind me--I want, I want to compel young men to grow up, to take responsibility. And sometimes, in doing that, I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that's not helpful and that's not right. In the grace of God I need to repent and be better about that  but I still want, I mean no one would say young men are, in the Western world, highly impressive and we're all encouraged. There's a lot of work to be done. [emphasis added] 
The interview with Brian Houston has inadvertently highlighted another tension within Driscoll's approach toward men, masculinity and evangelism.  Let's consider how long and how steadily he formulated his blue collar version of Jesus, the guy who grew up in a dumpy rural hick town with a dad named Joe who swung a hammer for a living.  Mark leaned on that plenty and also leaned on that being his own background.  Even if we set aside the potential and latent (or the neither potential nor latent) self-importation involved in the narrative, let's look at Driscoll's words "young, college-educated males".  That would fit with what Bent Meyer described as an interest on the part of Mars Hill leadership in getting the young men who would be the future establishment and make the culture.  Driscoll's use of "upstream" has been prevalent enough.  But at some point there was going to be a fracture point between the blue collar dude Jesus Mark Driscoll kept using to appeal to the masses (and for the moment we'll just do nothing more than allude to "Masscult and Midcult" there on that) and the actual target demographic he's been saying he was going for. 

Something that Wenatchee The Hatchet has observed about Mark Driscoll's responses to insiders and outsiders in controversy is that for the inside group he leveraged his blue collar ghetto narrative and for outsiders, particularly from 2012 controversies, he was more apt to highlight his credentials, whether academic or professional.  Most notably he leaned on his college education and journalistic credentials (though he never managed to prove he ever had the latter) when blogging about the Justin Brierley interview.  When the Liberty University "kerfuffle" happened he also leaned on his formal credentials.  When the plagiarism controversy erupted Driscoll mentioned he'd be taking over editorial duties at Resurgence. During that stint he mentioned having written a few things. The controversies of 2012 inside and outside Mars Hill seemed to show us that for insiders Mark Driscoll emphasized his blue collar street cred and when it came to controversies that either involved outsiders like Justin Brierley Driscoll leaned heavily on his white collar, "upstream" credentials. 

At the time that rhetorical savvy regarding audience was pretty shrewd but in a more long-game sense it revealed a weakness--ultimately the kinds of future Establishment college-educated dudes Mark Driscoll most wanted to get were not the same guys who maybe only finished high school and were working at dead end joe jobs working on cars or construction.

As popular as it has been for those who were never part of Mars Hill to write about Mark Driscoll and Driscoll alone, those who were at Mars Hill circa 1995-2002 will likely still recall how necessary Mike Gunn and Lief Moi were to the formative years of the church.  If we revisit Driscoll's modes of markulinity in light of what can be observed and (we can hope) be further shared by those who interacted with the early founders, we can see that whether blue or white collar, Mark Driscoll's persona depended in some ways on Gunn and Moi.  Moi had construction companies and the radio program Street Talk. Mike Gunn had an M. Div and worked with Athletes in Action over at the University of Washington, if memory serves.  In other words Gunn and Moi had local school cred and street cred that the newcomer Mark Driscoll didn't have on either front, but he had their interest and trust in the viability of planting a church and a nascent Christian community interested in the arts and in interacting with people in the Puget Sound area. As mentioned earlier in this series (maybe?) Driscoll was Kirk, and Kirk needed Spock and McCoy to complete his role, so to speak. Or we could say that Blossom needed Bubbles and Buttercup ... actually ... that analogy sounds cooler to Wenatchee The Hatchet at the moment. Anyway ...

If a person were able to survey a majority of public testimonies about the shifting ideas and conduct of Mark Driscoll as a public figure there seems to have been a shift past 2002 when Mike Gunn departed and Lief Moi's role began to recede.  Driscoll's blue collar manly Jesus could work as a rhetorical approach and a persona for as long as it could be embodied but by 2005 with the videology approach Mark Driscoll was no longer accessible to the vast majority of people at the church he helped start. 

By 2012 he'd pulled up stakes and forsaken King County altogether, though he scrupulously avoided mentioning that he'd moved to Woodway (it seems) when he was writing in 2013 about the travails of his family in "The Hardest Part of Ministry".  Driscoll's church had become Driscoll's church, and by that point it had mutated into the kind of "God box" he warned Mars Hill about back in 2004 or so.  He had by this time isolated himself from even much campus leadership, let alone rank and file members.  In contrast to an obscure figure such as Chaplain M. S. Evers, whose clean, manly evangelicalism was very compelling for soldiers in World War I because he lived it out in the trenches, very literally, with them, Mark Driscoll's blue collar Jesus had long stopped being incarnated in any kind of life shared with the men he claimed he cared to reach. 

By 2012 he had also symbolically disconnected himself from being plausibly identified as Reformed by claiming T. D. Jakes was Trinitarian and a brother in Christ in spite of having never addressed what to say about Jakes' alleged word-faith teaching--let's remember that in 2007 Driscoll himself had denounced T. D. Jakes as a word-faith wingnut to church leaders. By 2012 he'd made nice overtures about Joel Osteen and shook hands with T. D. Jakes.  The men he'd denounced as false teachers or heretics or those teaching dangerous doctrines had by turns become part of a "tribe" he now seems to be grooming himself to join.  And with that he jettisoned any meaningful connection to the Reformed traditions he's alleged he endorses. It seems more accurate to say that under-educated religion reporters mistook Mark Driscoll's posturing and name-dropping as being the same as endorsing Reformed ecclesiology, soteriology, and the like. 

And then we get to the 2013-2014 plagiarism controversy and the Result Source controversy.  If Driscoll's aim was to reach college-educated young men, any realistic shot he had at connecting to them was going to run into trouble when he was confronted and accused of plagiarism.  That's the sort of thing that can get a young guy failed out of a class.  As Driscoll apologized in one or two isolated incidents it went largely unremarked upon by members of the press that an early reaction on the part of Mars Hill to the plagiarism controversy was to shift blame to Driscoll's research assistants from the past.  Driscoll claimed Janet Mefferd was being "accusatory and unkind".  But Thomas Nelson ended up changing Real Marriage. The fact that nobody opted to litigate over copyright infringement was not a sign that nothing had gone wrong.  Newer editions of the 2012 book have acknowledged a debt of influence to Dan Allender that was not acknowledged in the first print edition of the book. 

Beyond the problematic story of a Driscoll marriage almost perpetually on the rocks until Mark could convince Grace to put out more sex, there was by 2013 and 2014 the problematic revelation that to the extent that Mark Driscoll had original ideas they were weak ones that could not be supported by a thorough exegetical or historical method, and to the extent that the Driscoll book conveyed any actually good ideas, research by authors like Janet Mefferd and Warren Throckmorton revealed that even Driscoll's good ideas turned out to be second-hand. Whether by the measure of blue collar or white collar manhood, Mark Driscoll was turning out to be a very bad joke. 

So now we come to 2015.  Driscoll hasn't had any plausible connection to the blue collar Jesus from a dumpy rural hick town whose dad Joe swung a hammer for a living.  But Driscoll's never competently or convincingly passed himself off as a scholar of any merit, either.  The plagiarism controversy of 2013-2014 revealed he was at most a second-rate hack who appropriated the ideas of others second-hand and sometimes didn't remember to give credit where it was due.  He also agreed to have one of his books rigged a spot on the New York Times bestseller list, to boot. If Driscoll had hoped to reach young men he had by 2014, when he resigned, reached a point where he revealed he was willing to resign rather than stay on at the only church he was ever a member of. There's no indication at all he's a member of a church now.

The one plausible shot Mark Driscoll might have at turning things around seems the thing he's least likely to do.  Driscoll should forsake any public ministry and any ministry.  He should become a member of a church and just be a rank and file tithing guy for at least five years, submitted to the spiritual authority of whomever he'd be willing to actually submit to.  Then if the elders in spiritual authority over him consider his life to merit the suggestion, maybe he could be reconsidered for some kind of ministry within the confines of the existing church structure or denominational apparatus in which he decides to submit himself. Who knows, he might actually be considering this.

But it seems like a long shot Mark Driscoll would do such a thing. After having spent decades advising others to submit to spiritual authority and have regard for their discipline he pulled a "God told me" move that gave him the occasion to quit the only church he was ever a member at, the church he planted.  Driscoll's credibility has been destroyed by his own arrogance and domineering approach.  Driscoll has also at length revealed that whether the blue collar or the white collar, he has failed to live up to the ideals of masculinity he has admonished other men to live by. It may also be proposed that he never lived up to them to begin with. 

For as long as there was a mostly impermeable boundary between what insiders at Mars Hill could read or hear and what outsiders could be aware of, Mark Driscoll could keep employing the blue collar rhetorical style internally while selectively employing a white collar style for outside scandal in 2012.  The trouble was that by 2012 a controversy had erupted for which it turned out The City had no walls.  So when Mark Driscoll declared to Mars Hill via The City "we're not a wealthy church" it was not difficult to raise the question of what it was about a roughly $30 million dollar annual budget that made Mars Hill poor.

Over time, whether internally or externally, the gap between the ideal and the rhetorical style on the one hand and the economic and social realities of Mars Hill on the other, became too significant to ignore. If everything within Mars Hill was precisely as advertised inside and out would anyone have leaked anything? What if 2012 was a turning point because between internal and external controversies it became a year in which Driscoll's previously separable rhetorical styles for insiders and outsiders became easier to compare and contrast.  Eh, that's just proposing an idea for consideration, it's not necessarily the best one. But what we're discussing here is the gap between the image and the actual, as well as the tension inherent in a blue collar and a white collar approach to manliness.

It is not without cause a Lutheran could say of Mark Driscoll he has a whole lot of Law but lacks the Gospel. We can see the plausibility of such a proposal in what Mark Driscoll told Brian Houston in this year's interview, " ... I want to compel men to grow up, to take responsibility ... ." But why should they?  Why should they be compelled to grow up and take responsibility on the basis of a "how dare you!?" from a Mark Driscoll?  The man could not even live out his own preaching and teaching in the way he chose to resign membership and eldership from his own church in 2014. As with his marriage, so with his church leadership and approach to membership, his words and actions seem to say "Do as I say the Bible says you should do, not as I have done or as I'm doing right now." If that's the case neither a blue-collar nor a white-collar version of manliness should do him any good.

The Evolution of Markulinity: seeds of implosion, biological determinism with double binds, straight guys gotta marry and straight wives should get babies from their fearful husbands

What may be most difficult for those who have always been outside of Mars Hill to appreciate about its history and Mark Driscoll's taxonomy of gender, sexuality and adulthood is that there have been some insoluable double binds inherent in his approach.  The most striking problem is what Wenatchee The Hatchet has described as a heteronormative biological determinism.  The crude way of putting it is that guys were in a cultural idiom in which, so long as they were straight and ever had erections and were not called to smuggle Bibles to non-white people overseas, then they were basically morally obliged to get married as fast as they could manage.  That basic idea was touched upon tangentially here:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/sex-as-god-gross-or-gift-mark-driscoll.html

Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)
page 121
When we got married, I (Grace) didn't understand the physical and emotional aspects of sex for men. It seemed with his high sex drive that was all Mark wanted from me and that he didn't appreciate anything else I did. His drive seemed to get stronger the less we had sex, and I wondered if it was an idol to him or if that was normal for me. I later realized it was partially a real physical need, [emphasis added] not an obsession, since he wasn't masturbating  or getting relief some other way, which I am thankful for. I read somewhere that if you have sex more, it actually decreases the necessity for frequent sex over time for most men. I tried that but it didn't seem to change anything for Mark.

page 164

As with many things in marriage, communication is key. When I came to the conclusion that the cure for a lot of my moodiness was having more frequent sex with my wife, I simply told her. Yes, it's that simple. [emphasis added] For years, when I would endure depression, I tried to talk to Grace about it. Her natural inclination was to want to have long talks about our feelings toward each other, and I know that connecting with her like this is important. But sometimes I was jsut too frustrated and ended up blowing up and hurting her feelings. The truth was I wanted to have more frequent sex with my life, and we needed to discuss how that could happen. 
 
To make matters worse, seemingly every book I read by Christians on sex and marriage sounded unfair. Nearly every one said the husband had to work very hard to understand his wife, to relate to her, and when he did that to her satisfaction then, maybe, she would have sex with him as a sort of reward. After many years I finally told Grace that I needed more sex. I asked if we could have sex more days of the week and try a variety of positions. She'd be the one to decide exactly how we would be together> Grace said that helped her think about our intimacy throughout the course of the day, which helped prepare her mind and body. To our mutual delight, we discovered that both of us felt closer more loved and understood, and were more patient with each other if we were together regularly in some way. And whether my depression was testosterone-induced or not, I just generally felt happier.

For a wife, sex comes out of a healthy relationship, whereas, for a husband, it leads to one. 
Part 8: 1 Timothy 4:1-8
February 22, 2004

You guys should aspire to get married.  You guys should aspire to get--you gotta get a job first. You gotta get a job, not a job where you wear a uniform and ask people fi they wanna supersize something. You gotta get a job.  You gotta get a job so you can get a wife so you can get kids.  And it's a great, glorious thing to be a husband and a father, and only a demon would tell you otherwise.  Only a demon would tell you otherwise. [emphasis added]

And if you're a guy in this church, c'mon. I mean look around.  It's like fishing in a trout pond. I mean, any woman that is in this church and endures me as her Bible teacher is obviously patient, kind, forgiving and loyal, right? She's just--she's got all this stuff to be a wife. She does.

Part 8 of 1 Timothy
Pastor Mark Driscoll
1 Timothy 4:1-8
February 22, 2004So as a young boy growing up, I aspired to be like my father. I’m thinking, “You know what? I can’t wait to get married, have kids, be a dad, coach Little League.” This is like my vision and goal. I go to church. Catholic priest is effeminate. No wife, no kids, no Little League, can’t catch, can’t throw, can’t change his own oil, nothing. And I’m looking at him and I’m looking at my dad, saying these two guys are totally different, and I wanna be like my dad. So I didn’t go to church anymore. I just checked out till I got saved at 19, just checked out. Didn’t want anything to do with it. I was thinking, “You know what? I don’t wanna be like this guy. I don’t wanna be single.” Like virginity is a season, not a goal. [emphasis added]

As if all that weren't enough, in 2008 Mark Driscoll made it very explicit what the purpose of the sex drive in males was.

to motivate them toward growing up and honorably taking a wife. Nearly every man wants to have sex. The issue is which woman he will have sex with. If he grows up, leaves home, walks with God, pursues his career, and then marries his bride to enjoy her biblically, then his love for her was part of God's motivation to turn a boy into a man by making him take manly responsibility. Since most young men want sex, that desire is to encourage them not to settle for having sex with their hand or with their girlfriend but rather grow up and lovingly enjoy their wife.

Yes, it seems to be that simple.  Driscoll declared that the reason God gave young men such strong sexual desires is so that in their desire to get laid they would grow up and get married.  Now if Driscoll were still actually Catholic and showed any evidence of taking a natural law approach then, okay, this is still pretty bad.  After all, same sex attraction introduces a substantial monkey wrench.  Then again, Driscoll emphasized that it was God who gave young men such strong sexual desires without bothering to adduce from any biblical text whether that's the case or to what degree.  In other words, in Driscoll's truncated taxonomy of sexual desire as the impetus to inspire men to grow up and therefore marry Driscoll hasn't addressed why gay marriage (in light of a recent SCOTUS ruling) couldn't theoretically be considered.  Romans 1?  Well, Driscoll didn't quote Romans 1 there, did he?

That's just the phallic half of Mark Driscoll's heteronormative biological determinism.  There's also an ovarian version. In Real Marriage, in the chapter on men, Driscoll mentioned that some men are cowardly and are afraid to indulge in the desire of their wives to have children because they're afraid they can't afford children. The wife who wants children is described as having a God-given desire that the cowardly husband sinfully won't grant.  The full nature of this double bind can have on men and women alike may need to be spelled out in the bluntest form by way of a case history.

http://welovemarshill.com/post/91453501122/sara-delansig
 ...
Over time, we were influenced by the pressure we heard from the pulpit on how we need to have children because they are a blessing (not saying they aren’t) and it is biblical to not use birth control. We were in agreement that we would wait until I finished my degree (I was a high school dropout and was almost finished with my High School Completion and AA Degree at this time). The more we went to church the more we thought about having children and so we changed our plans and got pregnant in early 2007. This was where things started to change for us. We were in a great community group that we attended for a year when suddenly the leaders disbanded due to the strain on their growing family and other church commitments. Right when I became pregnant I lost the community I thought would be there to support us through the journey. My husband is a quiet and slow-to-speak type and it took him a very long time to feel comfortable in the group we were in (which basically disqualified us from taking the group over because I am not allowed to lead and he was not the quintessential Mars Hill “man”). So we didn’t find another group until our son was almost born. During this time we moved to West Seattle and that is a whole different story in itself.

Things were weird after our son was born; it was hard, and I mean damn hard. The following may contain explicit information, just an FYI…I fell back into sin with abusing prescription medication because I had a condition after childbirth that made sex extremely painful and literally impossible (I wonder how Mark would handle no sex for 9 months due to something of this nature!) I can honestly say my husband was most gracious with the situation, he didn’t demand any other sexual activities to make up for it, he didn’t complain, he comforted me and supported me to get healthy. I also remember thinking that he would start watching porn or something because of Mark’s teaching on keeping your husband satisfied to keep him from sinning or something along those lines (I specifically remember a sermon where he blamed the wife of a pastor who committed adultery for “letting herself go”). I never saw anything of that nature from my husband, he was self-controlled and was mostly concerned with my well-being.

It wasn’t long before he was laid off from his job and our financial security was gone. Our savings were used up quick and despite my husband’s efforts to find a job, he couldn’t. It was at the beginning of the recession, I was told by church leaders that my husband wasn’t doing enough and wasn’t fit to be a father or husband since he had no job. As if all his other Godly qualities are worthless because  of the economy! Unfortunately, I agreed with the church and started to resent my husband for not having a job. I did this because I believed MH knew God’s plan for marriage even though at my core I felt differently.

In the real world, the application of the metrics of Markulinity are reported to have led to a couple being pressured to "trust God" and have children against their own reservations. The local church first applied pressure that the couple should have children and then, when financial crisis hit after their son was born, they were told the man had failed as a husband by not being able to provide.  That's a pretty damned evil double bind there, folks.  And it's a double bind that is not so latent in Mark Driscoll's conception of gender, sexuality and adulthood as espoused in Real Marriage. Unfortunately the book is in a box somewhere at the moment so Wenatchee isn't in the best spot to cite the page in which Driscoll addressed husbands not being willing to give their wives babies.  Perhaps an alert reader can help there.

A disciple is not greater than the teacher but will be, when fully trained, like the teacher.  Somebody said that ... .

Meanwhile, in light of what has been shared and how it relates to the teachings and expectations the Driscoll and other MH people have expressed, it seems impossible not to close with Matthew 23.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=ESV
1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, 3 so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear,[a] and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.

The Evolution of Markulinity: seeds of implosion, a poorly reinvented wheel and a backtrack to the chaplaincy of M. S. Evers, Driscoll wanted the man in the trench masculinity but stuck to the "air war" in the end.

Those unfamiliar with church history and the history of Christian faith and practice will always be at risk of doing a whole lot of work to poorly reinvent a wheel.

Mark Driscoll's take on masculinity was not helped by his increasingly "air war" approach to ministry.  As the brand expanded he became a disembodied video presence with a week delay to the vast majority of people he was ostensibly a pastor to.  The long-term fatal flaw in such an approach is that the sort of clean, manly evangelical Christian faith Driscoll wanted to be known for tends to work better, literally, when the man espousing it is willing to meet men in the trenches of the ground war.  Wenatchee The Hatchet discussed the life and work of Chaplain M. S. Evers at moderate length in the following post.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-problem-of-markulinity-as-air-war.html

At the risk of quoting from WtH again:

Now the ethos and metaphor of the soldier becomes even more critical when we have a figure like Driscoll espousing a particular kind of manliness.  It really matters when you say men pay their own way if you are really paying your own way or have convinced others to pay at least some of that expense for you.  Here's another example. It matters if when you tell men not to take shortcuts if it turns out you've taken shortcuts or allowed shortcuts to be made for you.  The kind of manliness Mark Driscoll seems to want is the kind of manliness that doesn't come across in the air war nearly as clearly as it would in the ground war.  For that matter, assuming all positive possible definitions for Mark Driscoll's ideals about a manly evangelical Christian life and example, we've passed the century point for a chaplain in World War I who was all for a "clean manly" Christian witness and ministry a century ago.
What's unfortunate about a "my life was changed by Jesus" narrative in Mark Driscoll's case is that over time he's become the kinds of hands-off executive elder who was able to single handedly make a decision that led to the dissolution and death of the church he spent 18 years saying God told him to plant. Not only that, the resignation he tendered was given after he'd agreed (he says) to submit to the authority of the board that was governing Mars Hill.  Turns out that wasn't quite the case.

Driscoll had spent years not only being in a kind of "God box" where executives made decisions to close campuses or lay people off without campuses being able to appeal, Driscoll's approach had become so "air war" he was no longer in the trenches. As said before, Driscoll's theoretical approach to manliness could work if he were, like Chaplain Evers, literally in the trenches with the people he was a pastor to.  But by now we've seen that he wasn't.


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The Evolution of Markulinity: seeds of implosion, the Alpha Male only weakness

It can be perilously easy to forget that, as popular as Driscoll was with evangelicals, he had plenty of criticism.  Driscoll was one to steadily present himself as always the sensible centrist.  Anyone to his theological “left” was a godless liberal and anyone who was to the “right” of him was a fundamentalist legalist type.  So long as nobody dug into the issue of whether he was competently exegeting biblical texts or coherently defending his position these rhetorical plays could work very well.

But even among conservative American Christians there were serious doubts about the validity and viability of Driscoll’s approach to manhood. Heath Lambert’s review of Real Marriage expressed direct worry that the Driscoll book would simply introduce Christians to pornography. John MacArthur made a case that Mark Driscoll’s interpretive approach to Song of Songs essentially is pornographic back in 2008.

There was yet another critique, however, and the critique held that Mark Driscoll’s Testosterone Gospel was one that elevated Mark Driscoll by way of belittling everyone else.  A blogger who goes by Dalrock published “The only real man in the room.”  Dalrock wrote “For the strongest-man-in-the-room model to work, the pastor has to always sustain this position.” While much of the rest of the post does not indicate familiarity on Dalrock’s part with the actual cultural history or dynamics of Mars Hill it’s a good observation that Driscoll’s rhetoric and image-molding presented him as “the only real man in the room”. That men would say after a Driscoll sermon “Mark really kicked my ass today” suggests as much.

The mystique of Driscoll as Alpha Male began to collapse with the publication of Real Marriage. We were given a narrative in which it turned out Driscoll wasn’t happy all the time circa 2000-2005 like he told us he was; nope, he was bitter and resentful toward Grace because she didn’t give him as much sex as he needed to fight off his mood swings and depression, it turned out. Then there was that plagiarism controversy which raised other questions about the accuracy of the public narrative.  That the first print edition of the 2012 book did not give Dan Allender so much as one mention was problem enough since Grace Driscoll’s public deacon profile had listed Allender as a favorite author twelve years prior.  The alpha male element of Mark Driscoll’s image began to crumble. Driscoll was probably not shifting to the gentler father figure image only to find that old grudges were resurfacing; it seems more likely that as Team Driscoll discovered that the old battles had not been so definitively won after all, image revision could potentially lessen the sting.  It’s hardly likely that anyone within Mars Hill in 2012 expected Paul Petry to publish Joyful Exiles, is it?

For those who heard the “how dare you!?” sermon, consider the difference between the Driscollian taxonomy of “jerks” and “cowards”.  The “jerks” needed to repent while the “cowards” were worthless.  It was in sermons like that that the strictly alpha aspect of Driscoll’s appeal to men became easiest to see but it was sitting in plain sight for anyone who could do the math on what “shoot your dogs” could potentially include. 

 By 2012, thanks largely to the narrative, and the then undisclosed behind-the-scenes promotional dealing to market, of the book Real Marriage, Driscoll had opened himself up to skepticism about the plausibility and sincerity of his decade-long prior narrative. Even before there was any controversy associated with possible copyright infringement or Result Source deals, those of us who had heard Driscoll preach from 2000 through 2008 found the story of the real Driscoll marriage problematic.  If the Driscoll marriage had always been as rocky as was claimed in the 2012 book how and why was Mark Driscoll ever considered competent for ministry?  For many of us from the early years what we were drawn to was the community overall and to the dynamic of co-founding pastors Mark, Mike and Lief--they could be likened to Kirk, Spock and McCoy and you didn't have an Enterprise without them. 

Driscoll's saturation of social and broadcast media had reached a point in 2012 through 2013 where documenting the number of times he changed his story was no longer a particularly difficult task. Owing to the catastrophic turnover in staff Mars Hill began to have circa 2011, apparently broadly coinciding with the arrival of Sutton Turner, Driscoll was reportedly aided by leaders who amplified or transmitted rather than ameliorated or offset his leadership flaws.

And by later 2013 it became awkwardly clear that when a journalist with evidence and a comparable capacity for blunt questions pinned him down on why he was so lax in giving credit where it was due in his books, the alpha male, only real man in the room façade withered.