http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs%3Darticle
More links. Mostly just links right now.
Friday, February 10, 2012
and now Slate is in the fray
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2012/02/mars_hill_pastor_mark_driscoll_faces_backlash_over_church_discipline_case_.single.html
Between two writing projects and a composing commission I have other fish to fry but since people I know have linked to this I'm linking to it in the spirit of conformity.
Between two writing projects and a composing commission I have other fish to fry but since people I know have linked to this I'm linking to it in the spirit of conformity.
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Carl Trueman: Who Ordained You a Minister Over Me?
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/who-ordained-you-a-minister-ov.php
... The question, Who ordained you a minister over me? is an acute one, and likely to become more so in an era of information technology and hard-sell parachurch marketing.
The question may be most acute when we get an answer. Of course any old preacher can answer the question "Who ordained you a minister over me?" with the answer "God" but of course a modalist or an Arian could say that, too, right? No, the question is a bit more temporal than that, isn't it? For people who don't like "cemetaries" or denominations the question stops being what institution grants authority and the question becomes a matter of state. In other words, if we work on the assumption that EVERY preacher assumes he or she has been appointed by God to preach then who vets God's decision in this realm? The answer for a few of these preachers ultimately boils down to "me". As in we're told God has ordained pastor X as an authority over us because pastor X said so and nominated himself for the job.
Now, of course, we could suggest here that Paul faced precisely this problem of credibility in his own time and when he was faced with super-apostles who said he wasn't well trained in speaking, lacked forcefulness or charisma, or was getting things wrong Paul did make a defense but he made a defense via 2 Cor 10-13 in ways that would not be how modern-day self-described apostles and prophets so often write their own letters of recommendation.
And since I read this link by way of Phoenix Preacher here's another linky link.
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/im-a-pastor-do-i-lead-as-one-ahead-or-as-one-among/
Seeing as I'm juggling a couple of free lance writing projects and a commission I'm not feeling inspired to really write a ton at this blog or field a ton of other things. I am also still looking for something like a normal day job, after all.
... The question, Who ordained you a minister over me? is an acute one, and likely to become more so in an era of information technology and hard-sell parachurch marketing.
The question may be most acute when we get an answer. Of course any old preacher can answer the question "Who ordained you a minister over me?" with the answer "God" but of course a modalist or an Arian could say that, too, right? No, the question is a bit more temporal than that, isn't it? For people who don't like "cemetaries" or denominations the question stops being what institution grants authority and the question becomes a matter of state. In other words, if we work on the assumption that EVERY preacher assumes he or she has been appointed by God to preach then who vets God's decision in this realm? The answer for a few of these preachers ultimately boils down to "me". As in we're told God has ordained pastor X as an authority over us because pastor X said so and nominated himself for the job.
Now, of course, we could suggest here that Paul faced precisely this problem of credibility in his own time and when he was faced with super-apostles who said he wasn't well trained in speaking, lacked forcefulness or charisma, or was getting things wrong Paul did make a defense but he made a defense via 2 Cor 10-13 in ways that would not be how modern-day self-described apostles and prophets so often write their own letters of recommendation.
And since I read this link by way of Phoenix Preacher here's another linky link.
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/im-a-pastor-do-i-lead-as-one-ahead-or-as-one-among/
Seeing as I'm juggling a couple of free lance writing projects and a commission I'm not feeling inspired to really write a ton at this blog or field a ton of other things. I am also still looking for something like a normal day job, after all.
a nerdy rumination on masters and apprentices
I'm not exactly a Star Wars fan now but I was a fan once. Darth Vader arrives and tells Ben Kenobi that before he was the learner but now he was the master. A master is known by the nature of his or her apprentice. If we want some sense of who, say, Jakes is like as a master, let's consider the activities of an apprentice of his like Paula White. If we want to consider the nature of a master like, I dunno, C. J. Mahaney, we might have to turn to a Joshua Harris. If we wanted to look to the real legacy of a guy like Driscoll we'd have to look to an apprentice like Munson.
Legacy is not just some list of things you accomplish. The poem Ozymandias was written for guys who think their monuments to themselves and their unbreakable legacies can't be forgotten. Jesus did not invest in monuments or legacies, did He? He invested in people. He invested in people who betrayed Him and denied Him. Yet days after His death He restored Peter saying, "feed my sheep." What we know about Jesus we know from His disciples. As Jesus Himself put it, a student is not greater than his teacher. We do not need more mini-Jakes or mini-Mahaneys or mini-Driscolls. Christians are to be mini-Christs.
Some of the things that have been bustling in the internet are events where in the last three to four years we have been given the opportunity (dubious as it may be in some cases) to learn about a self-described master from the behavior of an apprentice. We're also learning things about which masters other self-described masters are vetting as an insight into what kinds of apprentices they want. I'm not going to say these occasions are not sobering.
Legacy is not just some list of things you accomplish. The poem Ozymandias was written for guys who think their monuments to themselves and their unbreakable legacies can't be forgotten. Jesus did not invest in monuments or legacies, did He? He invested in people. He invested in people who betrayed Him and denied Him. Yet days after His death He restored Peter saying, "feed my sheep." What we know about Jesus we know from His disciples. As Jesus Himself put it, a student is not greater than his teacher. We do not need more mini-Jakes or mini-Mahaneys or mini-Driscolls. Christians are to be mini-Christs.
Some of the things that have been bustling in the internet are events where in the last three to four years we have been given the opportunity (dubious as it may be in some cases) to learn about a self-described master from the behavior of an apprentice. We're also learning things about which masters other self-described masters are vetting as an insight into what kinds of apprentices they want. I'm not going to say these occasions are not sobering.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spiderman, The Wolverine ...
You know of those three titles two of them have the definite article in there for reasons that make sense. The first title has the definite article preceeding a subject that does something. The second has the definite article preceeding an adjective that purports to describe the subject. We're not talking simple sentence like the first title but we're talking about a definite article where I can get why it's there. In truth I get why the definite article precedes Wolverine but it comes off as dumb as it does when a similar construction is used for the Batman. Yeah, even as a Batman fan I always thought that linguistic construction was dumb.
Truth be told I've never been a Wolverine fan. Batman and Spiderman happen to be my favorite unitard wearing crime-fighters since I was a kid. I haven't changed my mind about that. I've even grown to like Superman through the herculean writing efforts of Paul Dini and the late great Dwayne McDuffie. But Wolverine? A mash-up of every macho exploitation film stereotype from the 1970s? Sorry, not my thing.
Then again, given how terrible the last Wolverine movie was I suppose the franchise has nowhere to go but up.
Truth be told I've never been a Wolverine fan. Batman and Spiderman happen to be my favorite unitard wearing crime-fighters since I was a kid. I haven't changed my mind about that. I've even grown to like Superman through the herculean writing efforts of Paul Dini and the late great Dwayne McDuffie. But Wolverine? A mash-up of every macho exploitation film stereotype from the 1970s? Sorry, not my thing.
Then again, given how terrible the last Wolverine movie was I suppose the franchise has nowhere to go but up.
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
another new little project
This is another one where I think I'd rather discuss it after it's done. You'll notice I've had a couple of those lately. It's a little musical project and one that is exciting for me. It will stretch me a little, too.
Though I'm not telling you what it is I'll mention another project I've started that it's not, there's a trio for clarinet, guitar and bassoon I've begun working on in the last month that I'm also excited about. That's new but not a little project. No, that's shaping up to be rather big. After years (think double digits rather than single digits) of not doing anything with an older idea I had for clarinet and piano I decided to rework the whole premise of the piece and make it a trio for clarinet, guitar and bassoon. Now I can't imagine going back and completing the piece in the old format.
But the higher, immediate priority is the as yet undisclosed project.
Though I'm not telling you what it is I'll mention another project I've started that it's not, there's a trio for clarinet, guitar and bassoon I've begun working on in the last month that I'm also excited about. That's new but not a little project. No, that's shaping up to be rather big. After years (think double digits rather than single digits) of not doing anything with an older idea I had for clarinet and piano I decided to rework the whole premise of the piece and make it a trio for clarinet, guitar and bassoon. Now I can't imagine going back and completing the piece in the old format.
But the higher, immediate priority is the as yet undisclosed project.
23 down, just the 24th to go
I've been working on 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar for a number of years now. The 24th and final piece in the series still needs to get finished. Even though D minor would seem like an easy key in which to compose a fugue for solo guitar I have spent a long time getting this last piece prepared. There are times when just doing the easy thing doesn't seem appropriate or satisfying. Add to this that I am anything but a virtuoso guitarist and it's not a big surprise (to me, at least) that this is a project that has taken a long time to get finished. I'm no longer surprised my creative spurts were for the works in the unusual and unfriendly keys. E flat major? Gotcha. C minor? Knocked the prelude and fugue out in two weeks. G major? That took a loong time. If anything the easier the keys the more slowly and carefully I have worked.
I have made some progress on the D minor fugue but new progress introduces new challenges. There's never just the textural or purely contrapuntal concerns in a fugue, there are also those big structural considerations. Most of the fugues I have composed are fairly short and for simple, obvious reasons. You don't want to compose something outlandishly long in the key of F sharp major any more than you would compose something in three voices in such a key. You could if you were Nikita Koshkin or Igor Rekhin writing for Vladimir Tervo but I'm not at that level of technical proficiency!
Instead what I have leaned on, as I have mentioned at this blog a few times, is making my counterpoint fully invertible as often as possible. There is more than one way to make a fugue a display of skill. I'm not apt to lightning speed but I can demonstrate three contrapuntal lines that can be presented in every possible rotation. Of course this is physically impossible in most cases but that's no reason to not create what is fully invertible counterpoint in principle. Thanks to all those years I spent singing choral works by Byrd, Tallis, Sweelinck, Messiaen, Durufle, Mendelssohn, Bach, and Stanford I've got some practice thinking in terms of what it's like to be singing middle voice parts through the entirety of a long vocal piece. As the old adage goes, you write what you know.
I'm not sure how long it will really take me to finish all 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar but my hope is to have the project finished this year. I'm also looking into filming at least some of the works from this cycle and posting them somewhere while I'm at it. Meanwhile long contrapuntal works by Beethoven and Bach are friends of mine.
I have made some progress on the D minor fugue but new progress introduces new challenges. There's never just the textural or purely contrapuntal concerns in a fugue, there are also those big structural considerations. Most of the fugues I have composed are fairly short and for simple, obvious reasons. You don't want to compose something outlandishly long in the key of F sharp major any more than you would compose something in three voices in such a key. You could if you were Nikita Koshkin or Igor Rekhin writing for Vladimir Tervo but I'm not at that level of technical proficiency!
Instead what I have leaned on, as I have mentioned at this blog a few times, is making my counterpoint fully invertible as often as possible. There is more than one way to make a fugue a display of skill. I'm not apt to lightning speed but I can demonstrate three contrapuntal lines that can be presented in every possible rotation. Of course this is physically impossible in most cases but that's no reason to not create what is fully invertible counterpoint in principle. Thanks to all those years I spent singing choral works by Byrd, Tallis, Sweelinck, Messiaen, Durufle, Mendelssohn, Bach, and Stanford I've got some practice thinking in terms of what it's like to be singing middle voice parts through the entirety of a long vocal piece. As the old adage goes, you write what you know.
I'm not sure how long it will really take me to finish all 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar but my hope is to have the project finished this year. I'm also looking into filming at least some of the works from this cycle and posting them somewhere while I'm at it. Meanwhile long contrapuntal works by Beethoven and Bach are friends of mine.
James Sturms calls for a boycott of The Avengers movie
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/02/the_avengers_why_i_m_boycotting_marvel_s_movie.single.html
It's a longer than average article for Slate and involves the subject of how Jack Kirby got a raw deal by way of "work for hire" that notorious working arrangement in which you sign away the rights and money to your creations to the company you work for. Work-for-hire is legendary enough within the industry as the basis from which a corporate shark screws over a hard-working artist or writer that it was incorporated into the origin story of a certain villain in Batman: the animated series. If you're a serious nerd about the show you probably figured out which villain I'm talking about just from that. And if you didn't, well, you'll get a chance to figure out which villain I'm talking about when the next installment of "The Wounds of Discovery" gets published on Mockingbird.
It's a longer than average article for Slate and involves the subject of how Jack Kirby got a raw deal by way of "work for hire" that notorious working arrangement in which you sign away the rights and money to your creations to the company you work for. Work-for-hire is legendary enough within the industry as the basis from which a corporate shark screws over a hard-working artist or writer that it was incorporated into the origin story of a certain villain in Batman: the animated series. If you're a serious nerd about the show you probably figured out which villain I'm talking about just from that. And if you didn't, well, you'll get a chance to figure out which villain I'm talking about when the next installment of "The Wounds of Discovery" gets published on Mockingbird.
William Feasley site updated
http://williamfeasley.com/
Bill's site has gotten updated. I've been going over not only the CDs of the d'Amore Duo (more on this later, I hope) but also the works of Ferdinand Rebay. Rebay is a composer I first learned about through the d'Amore Duo's recordings and seeing as Rebay's work has been plucked from virtual oblivion into the incomparably better status of obscurity I still plan to write about his work. But for now, Bill's site is updated and ready for your perusal. As a classical guitarist with my own obsession with chamber music I can't commend Bill's website enough.
Bill's site has gotten updated. I've been going over not only the CDs of the d'Amore Duo (more on this later, I hope) but also the works of Ferdinand Rebay. Rebay is a composer I first learned about through the d'Amore Duo's recordings and seeing as Rebay's work has been plucked from virtual oblivion into the incomparably better status of obscurity I still plan to write about his work. But for now, Bill's site is updated and ready for your perusal. As a classical guitarist with my own obsession with chamber music I can't commend Bill's website enough.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Technology and the Illusion of Control
Let me warn you in advance this is going to be ridiculously long.
http://www.newreformationpress.com/blog/2012/02/04/mars-hill-and-proverbs-1817-in-action/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewReformationPress+%28New+Reformation+Press+Blog%29
I recently put up a post contrasting the supposed mishandling of church discipline at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, and my own experience in a Lutheran congregation in Southern California. You can read that post here.
http://www.newreformationpress.com/blog/2012/02/04/mars-hill-and-proverbs-1817-in-action/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewReformationPress+%28New+Reformation+Press+Blog%29
I recently put up a post contrasting the supposed mishandling of church discipline at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, and my own experience in a Lutheran congregation in Southern California. You can read that post here.
A friend on staff at Mars Hill read that post and reached out to me earlier this week. After a fairly lengthy discussion, I have decided to post this retraction and clarification. There is much more to the story than initial reports, including the ones I linked to, than it first appears. It is a classic case of
The first to plead his case seems right,
Until another comes and examines him. Prov.18:17
While being discreet to protect the identities of those involved, and avoiding many of the gory details, my friend laid out enough evidence to satisfy me that the initial accounts given by Andrew and those promoting his story are at best incomplete, and most likely deliberately misleading. Large parts are left out, including the the majority of action taken by the church to reconcile him. Also, Andrew’s case involves a confluence of several situations that it appears Mars Hill has properly and thoroughly dealt with. Because the details involve the sin of others that are not publicly known, the church has decided the best course of action is to remain silent to protect those people’s reputation and privacy. They did not divulge the identities of the people involved, or the specific details of each situation to me, but they gave me a rough overview of the pieces missing in various accounts of the incident now in circulation. In light of these facts it is only right that I publicly retract my former comments directed at Mars Hill. In the future I will keep Prov.18:17 clearly in mind, and heed the admonition of our catechism to put the best construction on everything.
I have elected to keep an edited version of my original post up on the blog. My point remains valid, and I personally know of a number of instances of abuse of church discipline. However, I no longer feel it applies to Mars Hill or their handling of this case.
***
When the situation with Andrew first made news I considered that we couldn't be entirely sure he was telling the truth or the whole story. I also expressed uncertainty that the person leaking his story to Matthew Paul Turner even necessarily had good motives. I tried to stick to observations that could be made merely in light of claims. There were certain things that could be ascertained and asked if certain statements were true. But if it turned out these statements weren't true then a whole new line of thought would naturally emerge. I have suggested that if Andrew's statements were true there would be legitimate grounds to ask whether or not the disciplinary protocols and precedents at Mars Hill could be tainted by nepotism, conflict of interest, double standards, and retaliation. Yeah, I did write that here.
Well, if Andrew's account was incomplete or deliberately misleading then none of those points apply. If it be granted that Mars Hill is trying to cover its tail Andrew could certainly be trying to cover his even more. This must at least be considered as a possibility since he hasn't gone public with his full real name, after all. Since my real name is easy enough to figure out what one hand types the other can retract. It may be Andrew may have more to hide than just his last name. I take rather seriously the idea that there are not necessarily any "good guys" in situations like this. Or, to put it the way Mark Driscoll used to put it, there are no good guys, just bad guys in humanity. The one good guy is Christ. Well, so it seems, now more than ever. I've seen just enough remarks from members of Mars Hill via Facebook to establish that their understanding is that Andrew is a man-slut liar. Given that Mars Hill leadership has chosen to be silent about the situation in public it's disastrous that Mars Hill members are willing to try to set the record straight on Andrew when leaders have decided to not clarify things on record. Facebook comments from Mars Hillians attempting to clarify that Andrew's a man-whore do NOT, let me repeat, do NOT reflect the kind of public non-discussion the leadership has been trying to take in this situation.
What I say here does not depend on any assumption that Mars Hill leaders are covering something up or are being all above board--Mars Hill members, please feel free to shut up about Andrew on social media. You're not helping at best and are doing nothing more than confirming people's worst suspicions about your church at worst. If Andrew is a man who can't keep his pants on or maintain any physical boundaries that avoid fornication (or tell the unvarnished truth) this would not be hard to learn from even the things he DID go public with.
But regardless of that proposal, there is something else that warrants discussion. Let me offer this as an unsolicited constructive criticism. issuing a public statement to the local church on The City is a stupid way to notify the local church about a disciplinary procedure. Maybe it's because I've been writing for Mockingbird for more than a year but nothing shouts "the illusion of control" in a real and painful way quite like posting something to The City to keep it private and then finding out it's been leaked to the public via blogger. Encryption isn't that awesome and it's a federal crime to tamper with someone's snail mail. If you wanted to keep this "private" posting it on the internet is the absolute worst way to make a private notification. At least if you snail mailed everyone a notice about a disciplinary situation then it would stay private for as long as it took to get through the postal system and would require several extra steps besides hitting the "forward" button on an email!
If something needs to be told to the whole local church in a region (more about this later) an e-blast may be cheaper but a snail mail is slightly less likely to get hacked or easily leaked to unwanted parties, at least while it's in transit. How Mars Hill broke news about Andrew within the Ballard campus may not seem like a problem within the church but surely in light of leaks and counterleaks by a former member and members this should give the church leadership some pause about whether it's a good idea to use The City as a bulletin board for disciplinary processes and public shunning. That the campus has grown so massive public discussion in person is no longer possible should be a huge consideration in itself.
That Andrew leaked his case to a blogger may be miserable proof that Mars Hill didn't really learn anything from the story that was sent to the press about fired pastors in 2007. It's easy to pin blame on one errant member or non-member but maybe a larger issue needs to be confronted, that mastery of technology and a home-grown social network provide an illusion of control, an illusion of control about information that Andrew's case disproves whether or not he's given us the whole or true story. This is the SECOND STORY about a disciplinary procedure that leaked to the press because the gist of the disciplinary decision was posted for reading in an on-line social medium created by Mars Hill church. Does there have to be a THIRD case before you reconsider the wisdom of the methodology or the weakness of the technology? I mean, don't take this the wrong way but this seems not only unfortunate but really, really dumb. If Driscoll can poke fun at old guys in dresses preaching to grandmas we have permission to make fun of Mars Hill as a bunch of people who seriously believe, somehow, that posting something for thousands of people to read on a broadcast medium is "private".
Let's face it, the leak from 2007 did not have to be from an ex-member, just someone who still had access to the on-line community and was smart enough to cover his or her tracks. If the case of Andrew breaking into the public proves anything it's that The City is no better at precluding an insider leaking information to an outsider than the old system was. What do you know? There's nothing new under the sun. Isn't there a verse for that?
Given the few things Andrew said about his sexual behavior I wondered if he might have been keeping things too short. Let me consider his incomplete anecdotal testimony with my own experience of months of meetings back when I was still part of Mars Hill. Months of meetings worked out very well for me when I met with a pastor over the course of months to work out a difficult situation with people who had become former members of Mars Hill. In fact after I met with a pastor over the course of months about a difficult my situation ended in resolution, reconciliation, and a lot of mutual good will. True story.
Does this mean I agree with how Mars Hill handles a lot of disciplinary settings? Obviously not, but I'm not interested in a broad brush defense or attack of a church I called home for about nine years. I still consider it deeply problematic that the pastor who helped bring reconciliation wasn't a counseling pastor. It's really too bad that none of the counseling pastors were the ones who did anything but make a bad situation worse but, hey, I don't care if the pastor was an official counseling pastor now! I care that the relationships were reconciled. Now for people who are dead set on viewing Mars Hill in the worst possible light none of that matters. But it should matter. It should matter whether Andrew has told the whole truth. It should matter whether someone who is an ex-Mars Hill member is necessarily a proof of a problem in the church culture or a problem in the person. Even people regularly reading and contributing to The Stranger think that Nicholas Francisco (then and now) was a deceptive jerk who did wrong by his wife and children. Not everyone who left Mars Hill is necessarily an admirable or honest person. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. There may be people who choose to go public now who are honest, sincere people who have been hurt by a problematic disciplinary process.
But not everyone will necessarily fit into this profile. I've blogged months ago and further back that the woman who left Mars Hill and divorced her husband was someone we Mars Hill members were admonished to not shun, even though her conduct was not exactly above board. We were told that she wasn't a Christian even though she'd been at the church for more than six or seven years. As in signed the doctrinal statement and membership agreement a few times. As in members heard that after she left the church they'd heard where she was attending church afterward. If she was claiming to have never been a Christian, some shared with me, she sure liked getting churched up. Some members believed then that she pulled a fast one on the pastors. In any case, the gap between how Mars Hill members were urged to not shun this woman after divorcing her husband and how we were told to shun Paul Petry in 2007 was one of the big red flags some of us had about the issue of disciplinary precedent within Mars Hill. These were two people who had signed membership contracts year after year. What good is a contract if the people who are supposed to enforce it can't even clearly figure out who is or isn't even really on the same team?
Now should that woman seek a public audience in some form to say how she was mistreated by Mars Hill she's going to have some challenges. Divorce proceedings are not exactly off the public record, and neither are associated custody battles. are they? If she won't even say whether she has custody of her own children consider that a red flag, folks. There are men, obviously, who have been willing to speak on record, in public, and in their real names about what has happened to them.
If someone comes to you personally in some way using his/her real name, a real email, and their real name but wants to post anonymously feel free, I guess. It's on you to prove they're not lying if public enquiry happens, though. Remember that at that point the anonymous source has nothing to lose but you are risking your credibility if you take them at their word without further fact-checking. As I was blogging earlier on this subject, my journalism instructor said a person who wants to be an anonymous source may have his/her own tainted agenda and it's wise to not use them if you can build your story from on the record materials. As the blogosphere has been demonstrating in the last month or so, there's plenty of material within the public sphere that is on record that anonymous stories are not really necessary, especially not now. Now that at least two former Mars Hill people have gone on record using their real names the bar has been raised. If some guy wants to talk about how bad Mars Hill was and how bad the women were he might not tell you that he had a couple of restraining orders issued against him. If a woman talks about how she left her husband from her Mars Hill days because of his problems with alcohol she might neglect to mention how she cheated on him. A person who talks about how terrible MH landlords were might neglect to mention a history of not paying rent on time. A MH landlord defending his handling of tenants might not mention a lack of engagement with tenant concerns. As Proverbs warns us, the first side sounds true until the cross examination. A man may consider his ex-wife a terrible harpy and not mention the parts about his alcoholism, history of violence, or other things about himself.
Of course people could point out that I use a pen name. Yes, yes I do, but notice that just this last week I linked to two of my published works that list my real name. A pen name chosen because it sounds cool doesn't mean I'm hiding my real identity. I've hid neither my disagreements with Mars Hill on culture or disciplinary precedent any more than I have hidden the fact that I'm a fairly conservative evangelical Christian who agrees with Mars Hill pastors on core doctrines like the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection, and other core teachings of the Christian faith.
As I've been saying for a few years, my desire is to offer constructive criticism from shared beliefs as a Christian. Just because "Wenatchee The Hatchet" sounds cool doesn't mean my goal is hatchet work. It just means I've read a lot of Marvel comics and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. If I'm going to eat crow (and at some point I'm sure I will) I figure I might as well be ready to eat crow on record. If Andrew turns out to be a lying man-whore then I'm glad I spent so much time saying we can't be sure his testimony is complete or necessarily trustworthy.
There is nothing as yet I've stumbled across that establishes that what Andrew has said is contradicted by any statements made by Mars Hill so if the church wants to establish Andrew's lack of crediblity they need to do more than just say they won't discuss things publicly. At some point claims have to be disputed. If not, then, well, all confirmation biases will persist and it is those confirmation biases pro and con I have found so frustrating over the years. Oh well, some things really don't change, do they?
When people go on record in public settings about what happened to them at Mars Hill that led them to where they are, and led them to believe there are problematic disciplinary and cultural dynamics in the church this is to be preferred over anonymous accounts for all the most obvious reasons. At the risk of speaking for myself, Bent Meyer, or Kevin Potts--we have made public statements about things that happened to us. If my experience ended up good overall that's still a sobering story, isn't it? It took one pastor undoing the damage done by three or four pastors over the course of about two years and I've got the story that has the happy ending! Not everyone else has a story that ended as happily as mine. As I've been saying for a few years, my desire is to offer constructive criticism from shared beliefs as a Christian. Just because "Wenatchee The Hatchet" sounds cool doesn't mean my goal is hatchet work. It just means I've read a lot of Marvel comics and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. If I'm going to eat crow (and at some point I'm sure I will) I figure I might as well be ready to eat crow on record. If Andrew turns out to be a lying man-whore then I'm glad I spent so much time saying we can't be sure his testimony is complete or necessarily trustworthy.
There is nothing as yet I've stumbled across that establishes that what Andrew has said is contradicted by any statements made by Mars Hill so if the church wants to establish Andrew's lack of crediblity they need to do more than just say they won't discuss things publicly. At some point claims have to be disputed. If not, then, well, all confirmation biases will persist and it is those confirmation biases pro and con I have found so frustrating over the years. Oh well, some things really don't change, do they?
But I still realized at the end of that process that I needed to call a new church my home for theological and personal reasons. The strike-out rate was too hurtful despite the one glorious God-guided home-run of one of those pastors in helping bring reconciliation and understanding into my situation. I also realized that how I handled myself that got me into that mess to begin with revealed that though I saw things that were unhealthy I had to come to the even more sobering realization that if there was a disease then surely I was one of many symptoms.
I'll be the first to say that when I spent months with a Mars Hill pastor meeting and discussing the relational difficulty I had he told me I needed to be open to the realization that I'd have things I'd need to apologize for and repent of. I knew that going in and was open to it. It was very hard and it was no fun but I really wanted relational reconciliation over looking like the good guy. I'm grateful to report that thanks to the love and diligence of a Mars Hill pastor several relationships I have that are dear to me were restored. It was also imperative I apologize for the things I said and did wrong. I did that and things worked out. Yes, a few Mars Hill pastors deeply screwed up some already damaged relationships in my life but it was a Mars Hill pastor that trusted that beneath the hurt and anger these people and I ultimately wanted reconciliation. When I consider all the pastors I ended up talking with before things finally got worked out it actually took probably two years to get things worked out. It was often miserable but I kept at it anyway even when some pastors said there was no chance at reconciliation.
Why? Because Paul wrote that love forgives all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and believes all things, that's why. You know, that passage somewhere in 1 Corinthians. Love means working toward reconciliation and restitution when necessary because even though it hurts love spurs you on in a way that considers those costs to ultimately be less important than the person you love. I'm not just willing to write on this blog about things I have considered troubling at Mars Hill I'm more than willing to share how I now consider myself to have been part of that trouble. So public statements on record are of more value in contributing to a serious discussion of what is good and bad at Mars Hill as a church culture than anonymous tales. We need to have people whose stories can be in the public and, frankly, subjected to at least the possibility of scrutiny. As we're going to continue to discover not everyone who anonymously goes public with a story about time at Mars Hill may be on the level. We need to seek the wisdom to assess things on a case by case basis.
There aren't any good guys in a situation like this. To the extent that a person can speak up about a situation at Mars and have trouble saying, "I, too, have been part of that problem" have some caution. I was most assuredly part of the problems I have now come to realize existed at Mars Hill. If we don't find a way to seek repentance together this type of thing will continue. If we don't seek a humility that not only grants wrongs were done but that we have been part of those wrongs things can't improve. It's true that the first person to speak seems true until another comes and examines him. But in light of that proverb this proverb may rebuke us both ways regardless of which side we're on. It can seem right to notify thousands of people through the internet by way of an internal social media site until things leak out into the public and other people point out there's a problem. Six or seven years ago when Mars Hill members suggested using the Midrash to call out others' sin I said that was a stupid idea, an immensely stupid idea. There is a time for the internet and there is a time for snail mail. It won't have to be "the whole church" it could be to community group leaders. Driscoll said that if Jesus died for us the least we can do is get on a plane because Jesus was willing to die for what he believed in. Heh, okay, if you want to keep a church disciplinary action quiet the least you can do is not put it on the internet where there's no chance of keeping it private and instead spend the pennies it takes to print up a letter to snail mail to community group leaders who can then exercise their own judgment.
Even when we consider Proverbs 18:17 in this situation it doesn't merely warn us that Andrew may not be sharing the whole real story, it warns us that just because Mars Hill thinks they handled this in a smart judicious way doesn't mean they really did. Perhaps we need to take more seriously the warning that there is no one who is righteous, not even one. It's easy to say that in the abstract, eh? It's easy to imagine that it will not be true of us. But it is and very often when we have an opportunity to admit it it's no surprise that we don't and won't. That hardly means we can't or shouldn't. Regardless of who is saying the whole truth about what has happened it sticks with me that on either side there may be a belief that blogging and media promise an illusion of control that is just an illusion. Anonymously leaking a story to the public by itself can't improve things any more than publicly stonewalling about what you know means you've exonerated yourself or that members of your church aren't breaching the non-disclosure policy leaders are trying to stick with.
But if there's anything that seems clear to me it's this--social media and on-line information systems will not keep things "private" when church disciplinary situations arise. They didn't in 2007 with the Midrash at Mars Hill and clearly they haven't in the last three months with The City in the case of Andrew. The City has turned out to not be the means by which to keep church discipline private but paradoxically the very means by which it was leaked to the public. "Tell it to the church" on the internet has turned into "The whole English-speaking world can look up something about it now." Technology merely provided an illusion of control.
If you wanted to go for old fashioned church discipline Mars Hill couldn't you have tried something old fashioned like snail mail? Then it might have stayed private ... at least a little longer than if you'd posted something on The City. Just the people who needed to know could have been mailed a letter, maybe just community group leaders or community group leader coaches. If Mark Driscoll can jump on a plane to Elephant Room 2 to meet with T. D. Jakes can't Mars Hill church muster up enough money and time to send a notification of a disciplinary action to people through snail mail? Can they consider using snail mail as a more truly private alternative to an on-line social networking tool that has failed in exactly the same way its predecessor did?
As I asked way above in this post, does Mars Hill have to encounter a third case like this one before it reconsiders its policies, if not for disciplinary procedures as a whole then at least its methodology for "tell it to the church"? This is, after all, the second time "tell it to the church" turned into "told to the English-reading internet world." The technology provided an illusion of control, an illusion that has now, clearly, been blown away.
Internet Monk overview of 2 Cor 10-13
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/we-use-different-tools
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/2cor-10-13-3
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/2cor-10-13-4
A few more links for your perusal.
It is in 2 Corinthians 10-13 that Paul defends his ministry against super-apostles. These super-apostles had a way of commending themselves and their credentials. Being a great and engaging speaker was important, as was testifying to one's academic cred. Seems to curiously resemble the remarks made by some guys about being apostles and prophets over the last five years and having insights and visions others don't have. Well, Paul had to deal with those sorts of super-apostles who said he was timid and unimposing in person. Paul found a way to boast that countered the boasts of the super-apostles Corinth was being bewitched by and it was boasting in his weakness and suffering. I could write more but as you'll see I've had other things on my mind I've been mulling over and will post about soon.
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/2cor-10-13-3
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/2cor-10-13-4
A few more links for your perusal.
It is in 2 Corinthians 10-13 that Paul defends his ministry against super-apostles. These super-apostles had a way of commending themselves and their credentials. Being a great and engaging speaker was important, as was testifying to one's academic cred. Seems to curiously resemble the remarks made by some guys about being apostles and prophets over the last five years and having insights and visions others don't have. Well, Paul had to deal with those sorts of super-apostles who said he was timid and unimposing in person. Paul found a way to boast that countered the boasts of the super-apostles Corinth was being bewitched by and it was boasting in his weakness and suffering. I could write more but as you'll see I've had other things on my mind I've been mulling over and will post about soon.
Ken Stewart says influence of John Calvin on Reformed tradition over-rated
http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-church/dispelling-myths-about-the-reformed-faith-our-conversation-with-ken-stewart
Ken Stewart makes a case that Calvin's influence has been overblown and oversold in proportion to his actual historic influence in the Reformed movement. To put it in terms some of my blogging friends may appreciate, there's a difference between churches that are historically Reformed and Calvinstas who act as though Calvin accounted for everything. Ironically some guys who pay fealty to Calvin will say he was wrong about infant baptism and regard for Mary but I don't feel like delving into all that in what's supposed to just be a link. If I had money to pick up such a book as Stewart's I'd consider it. I certainly have time to read it, but the truth is I've been reading a few other things lately.
Ken Stewart makes a case that Calvin's influence has been overblown and oversold in proportion to his actual historic influence in the Reformed movement. To put it in terms some of my blogging friends may appreciate, there's a difference between churches that are historically Reformed and Calvinstas who act as though Calvin accounted for everything. Ironically some guys who pay fealty to Calvin will say he was wrong about infant baptism and regard for Mary but I don't feel like delving into all that in what's supposed to just be a link. If I had money to pick up such a book as Stewart's I'd consider it. I certainly have time to read it, but the truth is I've been reading a few other things lately.
HT Mockingbird: What's Wrong with the Teenage Mind?
Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship.
... In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood, where the impact of your inevitable failures would be blunted. When the motivational juice of puberty arrived, you'd be ready to go after the real rewards, in the world outside, with new intensity and exuberance, but you'd also have the skill and control to do it effectively and reasonably safely.
... At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have increasingly little chance to practice even basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents and pre-adolescents often don't do much of anything except go to school. Even the paper route and the baby-sitting job have largely disappeared.
The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences. The pediatrician and developmental psychologist Ronald Dahl at the University of California, Berkeley, has a good metaphor for the result: Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
... For most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27.
Lots of fascinating comments and observations in the above article. As I have blogged at a number of points here about men and disposability in society there are people who assume the crisis of young men is they won't grow up. What if we flip it around and look at it the other way? What if decades of fiscal policy and industry change and educational shifts have created an environment in which these young men (and not so young men) are lacking a role to play? It's not so much that these guys are doing nothing because that's what they all want to do, it's because not everyone is an alpha male, not everyone is cut out to be some entrepreneur, and not everyone is cut out to go fill the jobs that are available. The "mancession" was called what it's been for reasons.
Even an American Christian's attempts to speak about this in terms of "legacy" merely reflects a portion of the overall problem. "Legacy" is something you're supposed to accomplish as an individual for yourself. Legacy is not presented as something someone else gives you that you can continue, not in the circles in which I've heard presentations and conversations about legacy. The internship that startes at 7 instead of 27 was a social and family setting in which you figured out what you were going to do because there was something immediately pressing to which you could be useful, if I hazard a guess. The reality is that most of us have no legacy that will last or be known. Ecclesiastes does not urge us to build a legacy, far from it. We are urged to find joy in the work we have to do because that's our lot. It's not in a legacy that will be forgotten as soon as before our deaths, if indeed we have legacies anyone remembers.
That the teenage mind over-estimates reward sure could make sense of a few things, couldn't it?
I never had a teenage first love or a high school achievement I felt incomparably proud of. There's nothing I wrote among poems or music from my teen years I make a habit of looking back on with pride. I look back on things with amusement that is now a dual mixture of the amusement I felt at the time and the amusement I have now about how bad the stuff was. We're never as awesome as we think we are, particularly as teenagers.
Even an American Christian's attempts to speak about this in terms of "legacy" merely reflects a portion of the overall problem. "Legacy" is something you're supposed to accomplish as an individual for yourself. Legacy is not presented as something someone else gives you that you can continue, not in the circles in which I've heard presentations and conversations about legacy. The internship that startes at 7 instead of 27 was a social and family setting in which you figured out what you were going to do because there was something immediately pressing to which you could be useful, if I hazard a guess. The reality is that most of us have no legacy that will last or be known. Ecclesiastes does not urge us to build a legacy, far from it. We are urged to find joy in the work we have to do because that's our lot. It's not in a legacy that will be forgotten as soon as before our deaths, if indeed we have legacies anyone remembers.
That the teenage mind over-estimates reward sure could make sense of a few things, couldn't it?
I never had a teenage first love or a high school achievement I felt incomparably proud of. There's nothing I wrote among poems or music from my teen years I make a habit of looking back on with pride. I look back on things with amusement that is now a dual mixture of the amusement I felt at the time and the amusement I have now about how bad the stuff was. We're never as awesome as we think we are, particularly as teenagers.
Don Carson, a little too polite to call Driscoll a troll
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/01/29/reflections-on-the-church-in-great-britain/
http://mattbredmond.blogspot.com/2012/01/da-carson-responds-to-driscolls.html
Considering how often Driscoll trolls for controversy and attention while pre-emptively (now) claiming to be taken out of context, Don Carson has been a little too nice in his response. Then again, I'm not hugely surprised Carson would decide to take the high road on this particular point, or perhaps I would say the polite road.
Then again there's a dynamic of popularity at work between Driscoll and the old men who back him. What he has to gain from being seen with old men with academic credentials he'll probably never have is saintliness and scholarliness by association. If he's seen talking with R. C. Sproul or J. I. Packer or Don Carson Driscoll looks like he's even more important in the global church than he's likely to be. What old guys get in exchange is to look hipper and more relevant even if they already really have nothing to gain in substance by hanging out with a guy who posted as William Wallace II and publicly wrote stuff like "This is all just gay". And to be fair I'm sure more than a few of them may sincerely hope that if they hang out with the guy often enough he may behave more maturely in public. Well, he might ... if he were actually like them.
http://mattbredmond.blogspot.com/2012/01/da-carson-responds-to-driscolls.html
Considering how often Driscoll trolls for controversy and attention while pre-emptively (now) claiming to be taken out of context, Don Carson has been a little too nice in his response. Then again, I'm not hugely surprised Carson would decide to take the high road on this particular point, or perhaps I would say the polite road.
Then again there's a dynamic of popularity at work between Driscoll and the old men who back him. What he has to gain from being seen with old men with academic credentials he'll probably never have is saintliness and scholarliness by association. If he's seen talking with R. C. Sproul or J. I. Packer or Don Carson Driscoll looks like he's even more important in the global church than he's likely to be. What old guys get in exchange is to look hipper and more relevant even if they already really have nothing to gain in substance by hanging out with a guy who posted as William Wallace II and publicly wrote stuff like "This is all just gay". And to be fair I'm sure more than a few of them may sincerely hope that if they hang out with the guy often enough he may behave more maturely in public. Well, he might ... if he were actually like them.
James Harleman reflects on Haywire at Cinemagogue
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/01/27/a-few-reasons-why-life-goes-haywire/
Our resonance with movies like Haywire might have less to do with the enigmatic protagonist and more to do with whether or not we’re transparent enough to recognize we relate with the compromised people upon whom the wrath is poured out.
James and I share some things in common, we're Christians, and we both affirm that as criticism and analysis go there is no need to stick to the high or the low in artistic boundaries. We could talk about a Dostoevsky novel or a Shakespearian sonnet. Then we might turn around and talk about something like zombie movies. We could talk about a passage in Ezekiel and then talk about Transformers.
Living with the arts is not merely about the stories the arts bring to you but the story you bring to the arts. If you only consider one of these two poles it can blind you utterly from being able to reflect on the other. James and I may not agree that Superman represents a Christ type but we probably agree on what I just said.
I can just reiterate James' observation from one movie and agree that this is frequently what drives genre films, not the soul of the unstoppable force of nature but the frailties and foibles of those so often crushed in the hands of fate. Nobody relates to Jason Voorhees, do they? Nobody expects the xenomorph to do anything other than kill. Nobody expects to sit down and talk with Godzilla about whether or not he appreciates the architectural philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright vs Frank Gehry. When Godzilla comes to town we know what's on his mind and we know exactly what he's come to do.
Our resonance with movies like Haywire might have less to do with the enigmatic protagonist and more to do with whether or not we’re transparent enough to recognize we relate with the compromised people upon whom the wrath is poured out.
James and I share some things in common, we're Christians, and we both affirm that as criticism and analysis go there is no need to stick to the high or the low in artistic boundaries. We could talk about a Dostoevsky novel or a Shakespearian sonnet. Then we might turn around and talk about something like zombie movies. We could talk about a passage in Ezekiel and then talk about Transformers.
Living with the arts is not merely about the stories the arts bring to you but the story you bring to the arts. If you only consider one of these two poles it can blind you utterly from being able to reflect on the other. James and I may not agree that Superman represents a Christ type but we probably agree on what I just said.
I can just reiterate James' observation from one movie and agree that this is frequently what drives genre films, not the soul of the unstoppable force of nature but the frailties and foibles of those so often crushed in the hands of fate. Nobody relates to Jason Voorhees, do they? Nobody expects the xenomorph to do anything other than kill. Nobody expects to sit down and talk with Godzilla about whether or not he appreciates the architectural philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright vs Frank Gehry. When Godzilla comes to town we know what's on his mind and we know exactly what he's come to do.
PsyBlog: the duck/rabbit illusion provides a simple test of creativity
http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/01/duckrabbit-illusion-provides-a-simple-test-of-creativity.php
An interesting little link from PsyBlog about research on creativity. Some people see only the duck, others see the duck and the rabbit, while others can rapidly switch between seeing the duck and the rabbit. Whether a person can make this shift and how quickly they can make it has turned out to be indicative of their creativity. It's just one test, of course, but it's interesting to read about.
Being able to interpret the same thing in more than one way "is" a pretty straightforward assessment of creativity. It may suggest that if a person were to come to, say, a poem, and see only one possible meaning for a poetic phrase or image that that person is not very creative.
Ah, but paradoxically that narrowness of mind can inspire nearly unlimited springs of creativity depending on what the narrowness of one's mind may hold. Imposing one's hopes and dreams on a text to the point where it's made to say something it doesn't say can yield a single, overriding interpretation that, though it have nothing directly to do with what is interpreted, nevertheless displays a great deal of creativity and ingenuity to avoid a more simple interpretation that leaves ambiguity. But the apricots from the apricot tree are not the immediate concern of this blog post.
An interesting little link from PsyBlog about research on creativity. Some people see only the duck, others see the duck and the rabbit, while others can rapidly switch between seeing the duck and the rabbit. Whether a person can make this shift and how quickly they can make it has turned out to be indicative of their creativity. It's just one test, of course, but it's interesting to read about.
Being able to interpret the same thing in more than one way "is" a pretty straightforward assessment of creativity. It may suggest that if a person were to come to, say, a poem, and see only one possible meaning for a poetic phrase or image that that person is not very creative.
Ah, but paradoxically that narrowness of mind can inspire nearly unlimited springs of creativity depending on what the narrowness of one's mind may hold. Imposing one's hopes and dreams on a text to the point where it's made to say something it doesn't say can yield a single, overriding interpretation that, though it have nothing directly to do with what is interpreted, nevertheless displays a great deal of creativity and ingenuity to avoid a more simple interpretation that leaves ambiguity. But the apricots from the apricot tree are not the immediate concern of this blog post.
Carl Trueman: Gnosticism, Nicea and Celebrity
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/02/gnosticism-nicea-and-celebrity.php
I thought of the title "Carl Trueman does the Elliot Reid `I Told You So' Dance" but that seemed to lack the gravitas with which Trueman actually broached this subject. So out of consideration for Trueman's tone I decided to just go with his original title in the link. But in my mind the pot Trueman wrote sorta resembles the Elliot Reid "I Told You So" dance from a Scrubs episode.
The differences between the actually Reformed and the people who simply say they are Reformed but are anabaptist TULIPS, sometimes former nominal Catholics who have adopted charismatic theology, aren't exactly growing so much as becoming more apparent.
I thought of the title "Carl Trueman does the Elliot Reid `I Told You So' Dance" but that seemed to lack the gravitas with which Trueman actually broached this subject. So out of consideration for Trueman's tone I decided to just go with his original title in the link. But in my mind the pot Trueman wrote sorta resembles the Elliot Reid "I Told You So" dance from a Scrubs episode.
The differences between the actually Reformed and the people who simply say they are Reformed but are anabaptist TULIPS, sometimes former nominal Catholics who have adopted charismatic theology, aren't exactly growing so much as becoming more apparent.
HT Mockingbird: Freud: the last great enlightenment thinker
http://www.mbird.com/2012/02/the-unpopularity-of-sigmund-freud-and-the-refusal-to-flatter-mankind/
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker/
If Freud has been misunderstood, neglected or repudiated, he would have expected nothing else. He is rejected now for the same reason that he was rejected in fin-de-siècle Vienna: his heroic refusal to flatter humankind.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker/
If Freud has been misunderstood, neglected or repudiated, he would have expected nothing else. He is rejected now for the same reason that he was rejected in fin-de-siècle Vienna: his heroic refusal to flatter humankind.
an amusing request, a story about the daughter of some friends of mine
http://kabynandalyssa.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/herbivores/
Just go follow the link. This is short and cute, I promise.
I was laying low for a week to celebrate the publication of my Guitar Sonata in F minor and of the latest installment in my essays on Batman: the animated series. Well now I'm back to blogging again. You'll see I've picked up a few knick-knacks along the way very soon.
Just go follow the link. This is short and cute, I promise.
I was laying low for a week to celebrate the publication of my Guitar Sonata in F minor and of the latest installment in my essays on Batman: the animated series. Well now I'm back to blogging again. You'll see I've picked up a few knick-knacks along the way very soon.
Friday, February 03, 2012
Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire Part 4b just went up
http://www.mbird.com/2012/02/batman-the-agony-of-loss-and-the-madess-of-desire-pt-4b/
Part 4b of "The Wounds of Discovery" just went up over at Mockingbird. This week's feature is the villain Jervis Tetch, aka the Mad Hatter. This is the segment where I'm able to demonstrate most clearly why I've titled the entire project of writing about Batman: the animated series as I have. I've left you, to wit, some clues as to which villains I'll be discussing in future installments.
As you can see I've been a restrained blogger this week. I've limited myself to breaking the news that I have had my first composition published and the publication of my latest essay on Batman: the animated series this week. This just seemed like a good week to post few posts and have them be about some happy events in my life as a composer and author. I hope you enjoy the latest essay and there are four more pieces to come in this series within a series about the DCAU.
Part 4b of "The Wounds of Discovery" just went up over at Mockingbird. This week's feature is the villain Jervis Tetch, aka the Mad Hatter. This is the segment where I'm able to demonstrate most clearly why I've titled the entire project of writing about Batman: the animated series as I have. I've left you, to wit, some clues as to which villains I'll be discussing in future installments.
As you can see I've been a restrained blogger this week. I've limited myself to breaking the news that I have had my first composition published and the publication of my latest essay on Batman: the animated series this week. This just seemed like a good week to post few posts and have them be about some happy events in my life as a composer and author. I hope you enjoy the latest essay and there are four more pieces to come in this series within a series about the DCAU.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Guitar Sonata in F minor published
http://www.periferiamusic.com/en/shop/detail/product/742-guitar-sonata-in-f-minor
My Guitar Sonata in F minor is now published. This is my first published composition. Don't let the tempo scare you. Think of it as a guideline. If you get in the zone of 152 beats per minute that's fine by me. If you can actually go faster than the ideal of 160 bpm don't go faster than 168 bpm. I wrote this piece 12 years ago and back then 160 beats per minute was easier for me than it is now.
My Guitar Sonata in F minor is now published. This is my first published composition. Don't let the tempo scare you. Think of it as a guideline. If you get in the zone of 152 beats per minute that's fine by me. If you can actually go faster than the ideal of 160 bpm don't go faster than 168 bpm. I wrote this piece 12 years ago and back then 160 beats per minute was easier for me than it is now.
"The Wounds of Discovery" is wrapped up
I just wrapped up the sixth and final part of "Wounds" today. I would suggest that if you haven't read "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath" at Mockingbird to look that up first. There is a complex double structure I've been using for "Wounds of Discovery" that depends at a small level on a reader remembering what I wrote about Mr. Freeze. The two levels of structure work as follows: I examine Batman villains on the spectrum of loss and desire and thread that through a particular aspect of brokenness that defines the motivation and/or gimmick of particular Batman villains. I'm not going to give away the villains but I WILL share with you this, that I run with a tryptich of the heart, mind, and body.
Unsettled Christianity by way Scotteriology: Gay angels are a sign of the Apocalypse
http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/gay-angels-are-a-sign-of-the-apocalypse/
http://unsettledchristianity.com/2012/01/gay-angels-are-a-sign-of-the-apocalypse/
Don't watch the video clip from the Fantastic Four cartoon clip. Just don't. Do, however, read both blog posts.
http://unsettledchristianity.com/2012/01/gay-angels-are-a-sign-of-the-apocalypse/
Don't watch the video clip from the Fantastic Four cartoon clip. Just don't. Do, however, read both blog posts.
I dreamt of a X-Files/A-Team crossover show ...
I had a dream that I was watching part of a movie my brother rented because everyone was snowed in during the holidays and no one could go anywhere and I was at my brother's place. And for some reason the movie was this thing were Mulder and Scully from The X-Files were about to get killed by some black ops assasin , who had boasted he was so good a shot he could kill both of them with a single bullet, who was stopped by members of The A-Team. Not Liam Neeson, no, Peppard and the old school crew.
I mean, yeah, I was a kid during the Reagan years and I saw footage of the Berlin Wall coming down on TV but this dream personally has to go on my list as a weird mash-up dream. It's as weird as the mash-up dream I had where Mike Nelson and the bots did a treatment of what was going to be Star Trek movie using Next Generation characters. I still remember Tom Servo's line in my dream about Jonathan Frakes' character, "Watch me hold my shirt down so my chest looks big."
Sometimes a person just has weird dreams that reflect the pop culture they grew up with.
I mean, yeah, I was a kid during the Reagan years and I saw footage of the Berlin Wall coming down on TV but this dream personally has to go on my list as a weird mash-up dream. It's as weird as the mash-up dream I had where Mike Nelson and the bots did a treatment of what was going to be Star Trek movie using Next Generation characters. I still remember Tom Servo's line in my dream about Jonathan Frakes' character, "Watch me hold my shirt down so my chest looks big."
Sometimes a person just has weird dreams that reflect the pop culture they grew up with.
"The Wounds of Discovery" is coming along nicely
What I originally planned to be a mere three parts has grown into six parts, the sixth part to be done shortly. I feel pretty good about how it has been turning out. I think I may have outdone myself with this new segment. You really can't go wrong writing about the classic Batman villains and it's equally hard to go wrong writing about classic villains depicted by Batman: the animated series. Well, Hugo Strange could have been better and, let's face it, Bane was not really a classic Batman villain twenty years ago. But, with those vital historical caveats aside, BTAS gave us some of the most compelling versions of the Dark Knight's foes of the last two decades.
And, as Bat-fans know, when you have a hero defined by his villains as strongly as Batman is it's important how you develop them and what they are about. When you've done that there is then the challenge of making sure that after getting to the heart of the villains you don't forget the important stuff about the hero who stops them. It is this, more than any other set of considerations, that has made BTAS the classic television show it has become.
So now that "The Wounds of Discovery" has grown into six parts it feels more natural and effective. My hope is you'll enjoy it. If I've done my work well you can appreciate the ideas I'm working through even if you've never watched an episode of Batman: the animated series in your life. My hope, of course, is that if somehow this is the case you'll go and watch at least one or two episodes. If you come to these essays appreciating BTAS and the rest of the DCAU I hope you'll find it enjoyable and thought-provoking. This week Part 4b of "Wounds" should probably be going up and I begin to get into the heart of why I've called this series Batman: the Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire. I can't think of a better title for a series of essays about this wonderful show.
I do have other bits of news to share here this blog a bit later. I'll have links for new Mockingbird essays as they pop up and this year I'll have some news about musical stuff.
And, as Bat-fans know, when you have a hero defined by his villains as strongly as Batman is it's important how you develop them and what they are about. When you've done that there is then the challenge of making sure that after getting to the heart of the villains you don't forget the important stuff about the hero who stops them. It is this, more than any other set of considerations, that has made BTAS the classic television show it has become.
So now that "The Wounds of Discovery" has grown into six parts it feels more natural and effective. My hope is you'll enjoy it. If I've done my work well you can appreciate the ideas I'm working through even if you've never watched an episode of Batman: the animated series in your life. My hope, of course, is that if somehow this is the case you'll go and watch at least one or two episodes. If you come to these essays appreciating BTAS and the rest of the DCAU I hope you'll find it enjoyable and thought-provoking. This week Part 4b of "Wounds" should probably be going up and I begin to get into the heart of why I've called this series Batman: the Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire. I can't think of a better title for a series of essays about this wonderful show.
I do have other bits of news to share here this blog a bit later. I'll have links for new Mockingbird essays as they pop up and this year I'll have some news about musical stuff.
HT Kinnon: comment from Scot McKnight on NeoCalvinism and NeoPuritanism and ...
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/the-mark-driscoll-fiasco-what-the-latest-flap-teaches-us-about-the-neo-reformed-movement/comment-page-1/#comment-373700
2. On Driscoll representing the NeoPuritan group. We probably need to distinguish the movement/group from its leaders, and see the ordinary participants — say, in TGC or T4G — as diverse and more pastorally and local church in orientation. Driscoll represents the theology of its leaders but his brash and crude edges clash dramatically with the sanity, care, caution and focus of the Puritans. So, to me, he is an outlier who, because of his charisma and strength of influence, can’t be ignored by the NeoPuritan leaders but who surely vexes them with his over-the-top sexual angst and desire to talk in crude and strong ways about it.
Yeah, Mark Driscoll is not the kind of guy who would have ever come up with a book like Puritan Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed. In fact if anything Driscoll's anti-typological anti-allegorical take on Song of Songs just suggests that he's only Reformed or an admirer of Puritans to the extent that if he name-drops them often enough (and shares that old saw about Puritans setting up church discipline on a guy who didn't want to have sex with his wife as much she wanted sex (and by now we know why he'd find that story compelling thanks to confessions in Real Marriage)) people will think he's in the same team. After about ten years of this it's going to be tougher to insist against all evidence that he's a Puritan or Reformed so much as a Baptist TULIP. But if this is seen for what it is then suddenly Mars Hill will come off not like an up and coming church that isn't an institution, it will come off more like Calvinist Baptists 52.5
Maybe someday there will be an article about the guy that resembles the article I read in Slate years ago about Howard Stern, "The Shock Jock in Winter". For now it's becoming more evident that Mark Driscoll is no longer young, will probably always be restless, and is not even especially Reformed.
2. On Driscoll representing the NeoPuritan group. We probably need to distinguish the movement/group from its leaders, and see the ordinary participants — say, in TGC or T4G — as diverse and more pastorally and local church in orientation. Driscoll represents the theology of its leaders but his brash and crude edges clash dramatically with the sanity, care, caution and focus of the Puritans. So, to me, he is an outlier who, because of his charisma and strength of influence, can’t be ignored by the NeoPuritan leaders but who surely vexes them with his over-the-top sexual angst and desire to talk in crude and strong ways about it.
Yeah, Mark Driscoll is not the kind of guy who would have ever come up with a book like Puritan Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed. In fact if anything Driscoll's anti-typological anti-allegorical take on Song of Songs just suggests that he's only Reformed or an admirer of Puritans to the extent that if he name-drops them often enough (and shares that old saw about Puritans setting up church discipline on a guy who didn't want to have sex with his wife as much she wanted sex (and by now we know why he'd find that story compelling thanks to confessions in Real Marriage)) people will think he's in the same team. After about ten years of this it's going to be tougher to insist against all evidence that he's a Puritan or Reformed so much as a Baptist TULIP. But if this is seen for what it is then suddenly Mars Hill will come off not like an up and coming church that isn't an institution, it will come off more like Calvinist Baptists 52.5
Maybe someday there will be an article about the guy that resembles the article I read in Slate years ago about Howard Stern, "The Shock Jock in Winter". For now it's becoming more evident that Mark Driscoll is no longer young, will probably always be restless, and is not even especially Reformed.
reblog: "I see things", cessationists, prophets, and recovered memories
I spent months researching different ways of understanding Deuteronomy as a foundational text for guiding a discussion of cessationism/continuationism on the subject of Driscoll's 2008 claim to "I see things". The more I began to study the matter the more I began to realize the charismatic/cessationist debates ultimately has nothing to do with gifts the apostle Paul did not bother to define. Paul cared more to have love be the guide through which gifts not only operated but emerged. Notice that Paul spent a a good bit of space talking about spiritual fruit and bracketed spiritual gifts as a manifestation of spiritual activity.
More to the point, the cessationist/charismatic debates in the last century are not really about what Paul seemed to be talking about but about the foundation for institutional authority in contemporary ecclesiology. Do we build a church as an institution upon a confessional tradition or out of the power of a charismatic personality? It is entirely possible for even a person who is formally a cessationist to essentially be a charismatic personality whose sayings and writings and activity completely shape the church.
Thus, paradoxically, a pastor who is formally a cessationist in doctrine can still lead and organize his church around the force of his personality and his partisans in a way that demonstrates that the foundation of his church is, in a beautifully ironic way, charismatic. In case Christians forgot this obvious point, "charismatic" does not always default to a theological position regarding pneumatology!
But that's enough for now. I'm still just re-linking to some writing and thinking I did last year, after all. And here you go:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=21320258&postID=6333630757729422683
More to the point, the cessationist/charismatic debates in the last century are not really about what Paul seemed to be talking about but about the foundation for institutional authority in contemporary ecclesiology. Do we build a church as an institution upon a confessional tradition or out of the power of a charismatic personality? It is entirely possible for even a person who is formally a cessationist to essentially be a charismatic personality whose sayings and writings and activity completely shape the church.
Thus, paradoxically, a pastor who is formally a cessationist in doctrine can still lead and organize his church around the force of his personality and his partisans in a way that demonstrates that the foundation of his church is, in a beautifully ironic way, charismatic. In case Christians forgot this obvious point, "charismatic" does not always default to a theological position regarding pneumatology!
But that's enough for now. I'm still just re-linking to some writing and thinking I did last year, after all. And here you go:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=21320258&postID=6333630757729422683
Monday, January 30, 2012
Because it's worth posting again, from The Book of Common Prayer
Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices; Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read; that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous; to the honor of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
SotteVoce at a comment on Internet Monk discusses MH community groups.
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/thoughts-on-church-discipline-and-relational-wisdom#comments
Check out comment from SotteVoce January 27, 2012 at 3:36pm
Here is the excerpt that has stuck with me:
I think the problem that we see here is that the church, in taking over the formation of small groups, is trying to force community and intimacy among its people, which is impossible. Intimacy and trust simply cannot be coerced. I would not say that deep “confessions” were actively sought out by the groups that I have attended, but there is a kind of unspoken pressure in that environment to unburden yourself of anything and everything, because sharing secrets can foster intimacy in the right environment (not to mention it gets you attention). Unfortunately, in the wrong environment, it can lead to power trips, emotional blackmailing, and escalated incidents ... .
... it’s pretty easy to convince young people looking for something “authentic” and “real” that they need to be honest to the point of oversharing in order to have real spiritual fellowship. (I believe it is a natural outgrowth of the blatant emotional manipulation that is frequently employed in youth groups to get young people to open up and act spiritual.) “We’re your friends and your mentors, you should let us help you.” Except that in these situations, your “friendship” was systematically manufactured for you by a bureaucracy and all but forced upon you instead of developing through shared experience and fellowship.
There have been some awkward confessions I have heard in Mars Hill community groups, which I will not repeat. Sad and troubling confessions, confessions where people went out on a huge limb and shared things that were very real, very full of hurt, and very risky to share. Unfortunately these were done in settings where absolutely no one had the competence to speak into those situations.
One of the things a friend and I discussed about Mars Hill community group--no, various friends and i have discussed this--is that you can't manufacture intimacy and affection. In my time at Mars Hill there was basically only one community group where I simultaneously felt welcome and liked. I was in some groups where I didn't feel welcome and was not liked. I have been in some groups where I was liked be a few folks but didn't quite feel welcome.
I was in some settings where I felt welcome and liked and yet there was this weird, inexplicably awkward pall over everything. It was as though just when people were becoming truly at ease and getting to know each other the group leader would steer everything toward yakking about the Driscoll sermon. Or a group leader might share this and that about community and friendship and the air in a room would just die when someone admitted they not only voted for Obama but liked his policies. Then someone would mutter something about socialism. I didn't vote for Obama, mind you, but I don't have to spell this out, do I?
I've been in settings where someone shared a testimony that touched me a great deal. I realize, looking back, that the person shared a testimony a few weeks after in a group discussion a few folks at the group talked about how family can help you get through rough times and be there for you. I said something that nearly killed the mood of the room and said, "That's true, but family can do more to destroy and discourage you than anyone else, too." Everyone except one person looked awkward. That other person looked me in the eye as if to say, "You and I are the only two people in this room who know what that means." Later that person shared a testimony.
If my saying that thing that made the room feel awkward made that ONE person feel safe sharing a hard testimony then I believe that was the right and honorable thing to do. Fortunately in the setting this did not fall into dead air because there was real friendship and community. But it was part of another group in which we had all grown to love each other. I can't really describe that kind of connection except to say that though most of us see each other at most one or two times a year there is a strong affection and bond as though the months or even years had not really changed anything.
Now obviously that is the kind of friendship and mutual affection a church WANTS a community gruop to develop but in many cases a community group falls short of successfully manufacturing the semblance of that. In a setting like Mars Hill I think the most common cause for the failure to attain this affection is simple--too many people want the group to be where things get heavy, deep and real. There's no eagerness to kill an entire evening on things that are light, shallow and fun. I felt connected to people talking about the Bible or about sermon talking points, yes. But I also felt stronger connections watching Scrubs episodes or discussing Gene Kelly movies with the women in a CG while some of the guys either pretended they didn't know what was going on or really didn't know what was going on. I liked these people enough that I put up with Family Guy. Now if you know me and know how much I hate Family Guy that can tell you how much I like these people!
You can't manufacture that no matter how many coaches you set up or groups you put together. It happens or it doesn't. Part of how it happens is that people who work together have often learned how to play together. Think of it this way, in our society people date, do tons of fun things together and as that moves along they begin to work together, build lives together, get married. Think about how children play and learn to exercise their minds and relational tools to grow into becoming functioning, working adults. There is a life cycle to a friendship and to a fellowship. In many cases it has seemed that a community group has been erected so as to jump straight into adulthood when there has been no childhood period of play. The child, if you will, can be put into a cotton mill to work the machines for production.
I look back with some sadness realizing that some of the most heartbreaking stories shared in community groups were ones where people badly needed to be able to share what had been done to them and I and the rest of the group were completely inadequate to say anything. I didn't feel I could speak up because if I shared something it would be the wrong thing or the wrong kind of encouragement. I also felt that if I shared something about why my heart went out to someone it would compromise the trust of someone else whose trust I did not want to compromise. In other cases I just realized I could not understand where that person was coming from so I said nothing and just prayed.
There's a difference between sharing something very hard to share because you've had enough fun with friends you can share the serious stuff and sharing something very hard because you've heard the talk about how "things are real here" or "things won't leave this group" and feeling a need to share because you've been primed to believe that confessing the heavy, deep and real stuff is okay because everyone says they want to do that. They don't usually do it, though, at least in my experience. When they do the blank expressions and awkward looks leave a person feeling as though it was better to have not said anything.
The sad thing is that should you happen upon a small group where real affection and trust has developed and you end up in other groups you begin to realize how far short other groups fall. They're not falling short because other people aren't obtaining friendship and intimacy necessarily it could be because you are like a child who has to learn how to play before you can go to work. Of course, sometimes it's that the group trying so hard to be heavy, deep and real doesn't realize that because they aren't taking time to be light, shallow and fun they end up just being awkward, perfunctory and fake. Awkward and heavy are not the same and fake isn't just about not being honest it's about the moment where honesty is met with an emotional vacuum that reveals that these people weren't really ready to grasp what you shared from your heart.
Not that I'm necessarily against community groups. I could try to say something pious and trite about being the change you want to be or being that kind of person but the race is not always to the swift, nor victory to the strong, nor wealth to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. To the extent that Christians try to manufacture intimacy and fellowship in a way where it won't matter who is in the group it will be the degree to which it shows.
Check out comment from SotteVoce January 27, 2012 at 3:36pm
Here is the excerpt that has stuck with me:
I think the problem that we see here is that the church, in taking over the formation of small groups, is trying to force community and intimacy among its people, which is impossible. Intimacy and trust simply cannot be coerced. I would not say that deep “confessions” were actively sought out by the groups that I have attended, but there is a kind of unspoken pressure in that environment to unburden yourself of anything and everything, because sharing secrets can foster intimacy in the right environment (not to mention it gets you attention). Unfortunately, in the wrong environment, it can lead to power trips, emotional blackmailing, and escalated incidents ... .
... it’s pretty easy to convince young people looking for something “authentic” and “real” that they need to be honest to the point of oversharing in order to have real spiritual fellowship. (I believe it is a natural outgrowth of the blatant emotional manipulation that is frequently employed in youth groups to get young people to open up and act spiritual.) “We’re your friends and your mentors, you should let us help you.” Except that in these situations, your “friendship” was systematically manufactured for you by a bureaucracy and all but forced upon you instead of developing through shared experience and fellowship.
There have been some awkward confessions I have heard in Mars Hill community groups, which I will not repeat. Sad and troubling confessions, confessions where people went out on a huge limb and shared things that were very real, very full of hurt, and very risky to share. Unfortunately these were done in settings where absolutely no one had the competence to speak into those situations.
One of the things a friend and I discussed about Mars Hill community group--no, various friends and i have discussed this--is that you can't manufacture intimacy and affection. In my time at Mars Hill there was basically only one community group where I simultaneously felt welcome and liked. I was in some groups where I didn't feel welcome and was not liked. I have been in some groups where I was liked be a few folks but didn't quite feel welcome.
I was in some settings where I felt welcome and liked and yet there was this weird, inexplicably awkward pall over everything. It was as though just when people were becoming truly at ease and getting to know each other the group leader would steer everything toward yakking about the Driscoll sermon. Or a group leader might share this and that about community and friendship and the air in a room would just die when someone admitted they not only voted for Obama but liked his policies. Then someone would mutter something about socialism. I didn't vote for Obama, mind you, but I don't have to spell this out, do I?
I've been in settings where someone shared a testimony that touched me a great deal. I realize, looking back, that the person shared a testimony a few weeks after in a group discussion a few folks at the group talked about how family can help you get through rough times and be there for you. I said something that nearly killed the mood of the room and said, "That's true, but family can do more to destroy and discourage you than anyone else, too." Everyone except one person looked awkward. That other person looked me in the eye as if to say, "You and I are the only two people in this room who know what that means." Later that person shared a testimony.
If my saying that thing that made the room feel awkward made that ONE person feel safe sharing a hard testimony then I believe that was the right and honorable thing to do. Fortunately in the setting this did not fall into dead air because there was real friendship and community. But it was part of another group in which we had all grown to love each other. I can't really describe that kind of connection except to say that though most of us see each other at most one or two times a year there is a strong affection and bond as though the months or even years had not really changed anything.
Now obviously that is the kind of friendship and mutual affection a church WANTS a community gruop to develop but in many cases a community group falls short of successfully manufacturing the semblance of that. In a setting like Mars Hill I think the most common cause for the failure to attain this affection is simple--too many people want the group to be where things get heavy, deep and real. There's no eagerness to kill an entire evening on things that are light, shallow and fun. I felt connected to people talking about the Bible or about sermon talking points, yes. But I also felt stronger connections watching Scrubs episodes or discussing Gene Kelly movies with the women in a CG while some of the guys either pretended they didn't know what was going on or really didn't know what was going on. I liked these people enough that I put up with Family Guy. Now if you know me and know how much I hate Family Guy that can tell you how much I like these people!
You can't manufacture that no matter how many coaches you set up or groups you put together. It happens or it doesn't. Part of how it happens is that people who work together have often learned how to play together. Think of it this way, in our society people date, do tons of fun things together and as that moves along they begin to work together, build lives together, get married. Think about how children play and learn to exercise their minds and relational tools to grow into becoming functioning, working adults. There is a life cycle to a friendship and to a fellowship. In many cases it has seemed that a community group has been erected so as to jump straight into adulthood when there has been no childhood period of play. The child, if you will, can be put into a cotton mill to work the machines for production.
I look back with some sadness realizing that some of the most heartbreaking stories shared in community groups were ones where people badly needed to be able to share what had been done to them and I and the rest of the group were completely inadequate to say anything. I didn't feel I could speak up because if I shared something it would be the wrong thing or the wrong kind of encouragement. I also felt that if I shared something about why my heart went out to someone it would compromise the trust of someone else whose trust I did not want to compromise. In other cases I just realized I could not understand where that person was coming from so I said nothing and just prayed.
There's a difference between sharing something very hard to share because you've had enough fun with friends you can share the serious stuff and sharing something very hard because you've heard the talk about how "things are real here" or "things won't leave this group" and feeling a need to share because you've been primed to believe that confessing the heavy, deep and real stuff is okay because everyone says they want to do that. They don't usually do it, though, at least in my experience. When they do the blank expressions and awkward looks leave a person feeling as though it was better to have not said anything.
The sad thing is that should you happen upon a small group where real affection and trust has developed and you end up in other groups you begin to realize how far short other groups fall. They're not falling short because other people aren't obtaining friendship and intimacy necessarily it could be because you are like a child who has to learn how to play before you can go to work. Of course, sometimes it's that the group trying so hard to be heavy, deep and real doesn't realize that because they aren't taking time to be light, shallow and fun they end up just being awkward, perfunctory and fake. Awkward and heavy are not the same and fake isn't just about not being honest it's about the moment where honesty is met with an emotional vacuum that reveals that these people weren't really ready to grasp what you shared from your heart.
Not that I'm necessarily against community groups. I could try to say something pious and trite about being the change you want to be or being that kind of person but the race is not always to the swift, nor victory to the strong, nor wealth to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. To the extent that Christians try to manufacture intimacy and fellowship in a way where it won't matter who is in the group it will be the degree to which it shows.
HT Phoenix Preacher: Mark Driscoll & Church Discipline
http://phillyflash.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/mark-driscoll-and-church-discipline-is-it-biblical-or-abusive/
Normally I have no keen interest in podcasts and don't listen to podcasts. I make exceptions however, such as for this podcast. I hadn't planned on blogging about this (as I blogged earlier) but I have been following enough other blogging on the subject and reading enough comments that I do feel somebody should say the stuff I'm about to say. I'm going to discuss what concerns about Mars Hill discipline "should" be getting discussed in light of Andrew's story. I am also going to discuss why I have not blogged about some of this stuff and why I have not made comments of the sort other people have. There are folks who have commented here in the past whose comments display an approach I avoid for reasons I'm going to explain at some length.
As I blogged at some length at various points here, Mark Driscoll's Christian porn take on Song of Songs will be the sort of thing to help unmarried Christians become aware of techniques, positions, and ideas they will have not have heard of before. Driscoll's defense of "If I don't talk about it all your kids are gonna learn about it from porno anyway" is not a particularly viable defense. It certainly didn't make sense ten years ago when he said it in a sermon you probably won't even be able to find; it makes less sense now if Mars Hill is as gung-ho on home-schooling and web-filtering as I imagine they might be. It will mean that a generation of Martian kids are more likely to find out about anal sex being possible from a Driscoll book or a sermon than from official porn. Note I used the word "official" there.
I agree with the sentiment that if a guy like Mark Driscoll spent months extolling the wonders of wifely stripteases and holy blowjobs as the literal and only viable reading of Song of Songs; and then is incensed that impressionable and horny 20 somethings end up trying these things out because they lack self control; that a man like that is either a complete idiot or is not being honest about inevitable implications his teaching will have in a church that has reached into ten thousands.
When marriage is touted as the proof of true adulthood by a man who is capable of putting singles in a double bind by saying they're idolizing marriage if they feel lonely without someone and yet that they're idolizing independence if they don't to marry because they have other things to do this is the kind of blatant double bind that, should people end up having sex, is not a huge shocker. As I've blogged various times here, in Martian martial theology the only person who isn't in this double bind forever is whomever happens to already BE married. The rest can often end up being what my blogging friend Mara Reid has called the "sucks to be you" gender gospel.
I'm following the stuff related to Andrew and have not done much to blog about that. I have, however, made some comments here and there. The controversy surrounding Andrew's discipline contract is an occasion for people outside Mars Hill to ask whether or not, if the things Andrew shared are true, that discipline at the Ballard campus has not at some point been tainted by any one or all four of the following miscarriages of discipline in Andrew's case:
1) nepotism
Andrew was engaged to a pastor's daughter. When he admitted to cheating on her I don't see how nepotism wouldn't kick in. In fact if Andrew had not been engaged to a pastor's daughter it's hard to know that any of this would have gone down the way it did.
2) conflict of interest
Andrew was disciplined by campus pastors who would be in a conflict of interest if the pastor whose daughter Andrew was engaged to and had cheated on had any say in the disciplinary proceedings
3) double standard
Any word in the shunning document about the pastor's daughter? The public notice about Andrew scrupulously avoided mention that "a member" with whom Andrew was involved in "unrepentent sexual sin" was a pastor's daughter
4) simple retaliation
I don't think I have to explain this one.
These are all risks that anyone who read what Andrew shared with Matthew Paul Turner would legitimately be concerned about given what Andrew related about the disciplinary proceedings he was told he had to be part of.
Seeing as spouse and offspring information about campus pastors has been pretty well scrubbed off of Mars Hill websites when folks used to trumpet that information in prominent campus pastor profiles it does at least suggest the possibility that Mars Hill leaders somewhere have put together that members of the press or bloggers could put these things together and wonder if Andrew ended up being railroaded despite having done everything right by confessing his sins.
Newsflash to some folks, not saying you did something is not the same as deliberately lying about it. A dad angry about his daughter being betrayed by a fiance with whom his daughter was sexually involved is going to make that dad apt to assume the worst if he wasn't aware of what was going on--this could be the case if the fiance admitted to sexual activity the pastor's daughter never mentioned. IF that's what happened (and I'm not saying this is what actually went down) it wouldn't even be the first time a dad at Mars Hill retroactively made every effort to slam an emergency brake on a relationship his daughter was in with a man where he hadn't pieced everything together yet. This is my way of saying that the odds of a pastor avoiding a conflict of interest, the temptation to retaliate, or to exercise a nepotistic double standard in church discipline in the kind of case Andrew describes is not possible unless the dad in question defers to others. Andrew not saying earlier he was sexually active with a pastor's daughter during his engagement to her is not necessarily active deceit and even if it was that would only be possible to sustain if the daughter went along.
I've already written at some length about what I observed at Mars Hill that led me to believe disciplinary procedures were, let me put this discreetly, ad hoc and frequently done without any regard to the significance of procedural precedent. Don't shun the unrepentant adulteress who pulls the "I've never been a Christian card" do shun the fired pastor who objected to the by-laws.
Now I know people in the past have come here and shared (almost always anonymously) conspiracy theories and the "true" explanations about what happened to this or that person. Well, I have not been a fan of those. Anyone can post an anonymous comment. My educational background is in journalism. You'll notice that even though I have a pen name (because it sounds cool to me) I have made no secret of who I actually am here. Back in the unmoderated Midrash I was the only person who used my actual name. Full actual name, not a shorthand like PastorMark. I may say stupid stuff but I am willing to admit I said stupid stuff on record.
Something that happened in 2007 after the firing controversy was that somebody leaked stuff to the press. That somebody created a press release. A whole bunch of Martians assumed that somebody ELSE had to be responsible. That somebody was (and is) a friend of mine. The reason I take the tone and approach I do to blogging about Mars Hill is I was trained to approach things as a journalist. I was taught that there are times when the real story is not what everybody is writing about but what nobody is writing about. I was also told that you should not assume that anonymous sources or people who only want to speak off the record can be trusted.
If the story is real, if the story is legit, and if the story needs to be told do not take shortcuts by way of anonymous tippers who in all likelihood have their own agendas. Be willing to slog through obscenely large amounts of publicly accessible information to put the story together. Use an anonymous source as an absolute last resort and only if you are sure that the story of the anonymous source fits information you are able to obtain through other means.
A little backtrack into the history of the press and the Nixon administration. For decades the press had a self-congratulatory love affair with itself for having taken down the Nixon administration. That's not exactly what happened. Disgruntled people within the Nixon administration took down the Nixon administration and made use of the press to do so. There was a synergy at work. The Nixon administration fell apart through the momentum of its own graft. In fact people who suggest that there are Watergate like elements to this situation are right. Someone inside Mars Hill cared enough about Andrew to keep him in the loop. Andrew THEN went to Matthew Paul Turner. All the same, that things have been off can be observed through just about any rant Driscoll makes.
If Mars Hill is on a course for disaster we don't have to keep looking for the secret or "real" story built off of people who won't speak on record. The story of the things going wrong in Mars Hill theology or procedure is, in its way, staring us all in the face and within publicly accessible documents and statements. "I break their nose" for instance. "If I weren't going to end up on CNN" for instance. We can see it even in the curious case of shredding William Young while urging us to wait and see with Jakes.
That the case of Andrew was leaked does not surprise me any more than that the firings of Paul and Bent were leaked. However, as a blogger I am not the kind of person who will just blog out everything I have learned. I've seen first hand how a friend's life became more unhappy than it already was because Mars Hill members assumed the worst about him and would not listen to me when I pleaded with them (and non-members) to NOT view my friend this way.
In other words I've seen people act like complete assholes in anger and outrage about Mars Hill and not realize that how they reacted was perpetuating wrong-doing against people already harmed by disciplinary processes at Mars Hill. This is not abstract for me, one of my friends got screwed over not just by a disciplinary procedure at Mars Hill but even by the blowback that came from people assuming he had to have leaked things to the press when he didn't. Your words, both their content and their tone, will have consequences in the lives of people you probably aren't thinking about.
If some people think I have been overly cautious it may be because I really am overly cautious, but I take my approach because I have seen just a few too many people hurt by amateurs who don't understand the significance of what it means to violate the privacy of already hurt people by going to the press. Let me put it as scandalously as possible so that this can be more clearly articulated--if a person has been raped how much good do you think it may do the victim to go out and announce the person has been raped to the press if we're in a cultural context in which victims get blamed?
There's a lot I haven't blogged and probably never will blog because I know what "on the record" means. Now if you're someone who wants to blog or comment about something to do with Mars Hill and disciplinary abuse and you use a pseudonym, okay. I honestly do get that. But if you want to claim to have inside knowledge while simultaneously refusing to go on record or say anything concrete you're a coward. Period. There's no qualifying that. I'm not saying there's no legitimate reason to be afraid for your reputation, mind you.
If you're only willing to take the posture of someone who knows the real deal but won't use your real name or go on record as you insist people believe your anonymous comments on blogs, well, I've already seen my friends' privacy violated by assholes like you. You'll have to do better than that. Bent Meyer has just shown you what "better than that" looks like over at The Wartburg Watch if you need an example.
You don't know, watchblogger or anonymous commenter, whether or not your desire to vent your anger won't inadvertantly hurt the cause and life of someone who has already been hurt by this institution. Using already hurt people as props to win your crusade can still be secondary abuse. Don't be so quick to vent your spleen that you inadvertantly sacrifice those people on the altar of your crusade. I've already seen this done to one of my friends and I don't want to see it happen again.
And this is why, crazy as this may sound, Andrew's case is encouraging to me. Someone who is a MH member cared enough to share with Andrew that he was being declared an unrepentent sinner by a campus machine. Andrew then had the freedom to break his story to Matthew Paul Turner. Someone cared enough about Andrew to have more real regard for his privacy than an entire campus system. Now people can understandably believe that a church willing to treat Andrew that way may "deserve" to have something leaked (amen) but it should be (and was) Andrew's decision to share the story. Compared to what went down in 2007 this is still terrible but in one crucial respect it's a step up and a step in a better direction.
Normally I have no keen interest in podcasts and don't listen to podcasts. I make exceptions however, such as for this podcast. I hadn't planned on blogging about this (as I blogged earlier) but I have been following enough other blogging on the subject and reading enough comments that I do feel somebody should say the stuff I'm about to say. I'm going to discuss what concerns about Mars Hill discipline "should" be getting discussed in light of Andrew's story. I am also going to discuss why I have not blogged about some of this stuff and why I have not made comments of the sort other people have. There are folks who have commented here in the past whose comments display an approach I avoid for reasons I'm going to explain at some length.
As I blogged at some length at various points here, Mark Driscoll's Christian porn take on Song of Songs will be the sort of thing to help unmarried Christians become aware of techniques, positions, and ideas they will have not have heard of before. Driscoll's defense of "If I don't talk about it all your kids are gonna learn about it from porno anyway" is not a particularly viable defense. It certainly didn't make sense ten years ago when he said it in a sermon you probably won't even be able to find; it makes less sense now if Mars Hill is as gung-ho on home-schooling and web-filtering as I imagine they might be. It will mean that a generation of Martian kids are more likely to find out about anal sex being possible from a Driscoll book or a sermon than from official porn. Note I used the word "official" there.
I agree with the sentiment that if a guy like Mark Driscoll spent months extolling the wonders of wifely stripteases and holy blowjobs as the literal and only viable reading of Song of Songs; and then is incensed that impressionable and horny 20 somethings end up trying these things out because they lack self control; that a man like that is either a complete idiot or is not being honest about inevitable implications his teaching will have in a church that has reached into ten thousands.
When marriage is touted as the proof of true adulthood by a man who is capable of putting singles in a double bind by saying they're idolizing marriage if they feel lonely without someone and yet that they're idolizing independence if they don't to marry because they have other things to do this is the kind of blatant double bind that, should people end up having sex, is not a huge shocker. As I've blogged various times here, in Martian martial theology the only person who isn't in this double bind forever is whomever happens to already BE married. The rest can often end up being what my blogging friend Mara Reid has called the "sucks to be you" gender gospel.
I'm following the stuff related to Andrew and have not done much to blog about that. I have, however, made some comments here and there. The controversy surrounding Andrew's discipline contract is an occasion for people outside Mars Hill to ask whether or not, if the things Andrew shared are true, that discipline at the Ballard campus has not at some point been tainted by any one or all four of the following miscarriages of discipline in Andrew's case:
1) nepotism
Andrew was engaged to a pastor's daughter. When he admitted to cheating on her I don't see how nepotism wouldn't kick in. In fact if Andrew had not been engaged to a pastor's daughter it's hard to know that any of this would have gone down the way it did.
2) conflict of interest
Andrew was disciplined by campus pastors who would be in a conflict of interest if the pastor whose daughter Andrew was engaged to and had cheated on had any say in the disciplinary proceedings
3) double standard
Any word in the shunning document about the pastor's daughter? The public notice about Andrew scrupulously avoided mention that "a member" with whom Andrew was involved in "unrepentent sexual sin" was a pastor's daughter
4) simple retaliation
I don't think I have to explain this one.
These are all risks that anyone who read what Andrew shared with Matthew Paul Turner would legitimately be concerned about given what Andrew related about the disciplinary proceedings he was told he had to be part of.
Seeing as spouse and offspring information about campus pastors has been pretty well scrubbed off of Mars Hill websites when folks used to trumpet that information in prominent campus pastor profiles it does at least suggest the possibility that Mars Hill leaders somewhere have put together that members of the press or bloggers could put these things together and wonder if Andrew ended up being railroaded despite having done everything right by confessing his sins.
Newsflash to some folks, not saying you did something is not the same as deliberately lying about it. A dad angry about his daughter being betrayed by a fiance with whom his daughter was sexually involved is going to make that dad apt to assume the worst if he wasn't aware of what was going on--this could be the case if the fiance admitted to sexual activity the pastor's daughter never mentioned. IF that's what happened (and I'm not saying this is what actually went down) it wouldn't even be the first time a dad at Mars Hill retroactively made every effort to slam an emergency brake on a relationship his daughter was in with a man where he hadn't pieced everything together yet. This is my way of saying that the odds of a pastor avoiding a conflict of interest, the temptation to retaliate, or to exercise a nepotistic double standard in church discipline in the kind of case Andrew describes is not possible unless the dad in question defers to others. Andrew not saying earlier he was sexually active with a pastor's daughter during his engagement to her is not necessarily active deceit and even if it was that would only be possible to sustain if the daughter went along.
I've already written at some length about what I observed at Mars Hill that led me to believe disciplinary procedures were, let me put this discreetly, ad hoc and frequently done without any regard to the significance of procedural precedent. Don't shun the unrepentant adulteress who pulls the "I've never been a Christian card" do shun the fired pastor who objected to the by-laws.
Now I know people in the past have come here and shared (almost always anonymously) conspiracy theories and the "true" explanations about what happened to this or that person. Well, I have not been a fan of those. Anyone can post an anonymous comment. My educational background is in journalism. You'll notice that even though I have a pen name (because it sounds cool to me) I have made no secret of who I actually am here. Back in the unmoderated Midrash I was the only person who used my actual name. Full actual name, not a shorthand like PastorMark. I may say stupid stuff but I am willing to admit I said stupid stuff on record.
Something that happened in 2007 after the firing controversy was that somebody leaked stuff to the press. That somebody created a press release. A whole bunch of Martians assumed that somebody ELSE had to be responsible. That somebody was (and is) a friend of mine. The reason I take the tone and approach I do to blogging about Mars Hill is I was trained to approach things as a journalist. I was taught that there are times when the real story is not what everybody is writing about but what nobody is writing about. I was also told that you should not assume that anonymous sources or people who only want to speak off the record can be trusted.
If the story is real, if the story is legit, and if the story needs to be told do not take shortcuts by way of anonymous tippers who in all likelihood have their own agendas. Be willing to slog through obscenely large amounts of publicly accessible information to put the story together. Use an anonymous source as an absolute last resort and only if you are sure that the story of the anonymous source fits information you are able to obtain through other means.
A little backtrack into the history of the press and the Nixon administration. For decades the press had a self-congratulatory love affair with itself for having taken down the Nixon administration. That's not exactly what happened. Disgruntled people within the Nixon administration took down the Nixon administration and made use of the press to do so. There was a synergy at work. The Nixon administration fell apart through the momentum of its own graft. In fact people who suggest that there are Watergate like elements to this situation are right. Someone inside Mars Hill cared enough about Andrew to keep him in the loop. Andrew THEN went to Matthew Paul Turner. All the same, that things have been off can be observed through just about any rant Driscoll makes.
If Mars Hill is on a course for disaster we don't have to keep looking for the secret or "real" story built off of people who won't speak on record. The story of the things going wrong in Mars Hill theology or procedure is, in its way, staring us all in the face and within publicly accessible documents and statements. "I break their nose" for instance. "If I weren't going to end up on CNN" for instance. We can see it even in the curious case of shredding William Young while urging us to wait and see with Jakes.
That the case of Andrew was leaked does not surprise me any more than that the firings of Paul and Bent were leaked. However, as a blogger I am not the kind of person who will just blog out everything I have learned. I've seen first hand how a friend's life became more unhappy than it already was because Mars Hill members assumed the worst about him and would not listen to me when I pleaded with them (and non-members) to NOT view my friend this way.
In other words I've seen people act like complete assholes in anger and outrage about Mars Hill and not realize that how they reacted was perpetuating wrong-doing against people already harmed by disciplinary processes at Mars Hill. This is not abstract for me, one of my friends got screwed over not just by a disciplinary procedure at Mars Hill but even by the blowback that came from people assuming he had to have leaked things to the press when he didn't. Your words, both their content and their tone, will have consequences in the lives of people you probably aren't thinking about.
If some people think I have been overly cautious it may be because I really am overly cautious, but I take my approach because I have seen just a few too many people hurt by amateurs who don't understand the significance of what it means to violate the privacy of already hurt people by going to the press. Let me put it as scandalously as possible so that this can be more clearly articulated--if a person has been raped how much good do you think it may do the victim to go out and announce the person has been raped to the press if we're in a cultural context in which victims get blamed?
There's a lot I haven't blogged and probably never will blog because I know what "on the record" means. Now if you're someone who wants to blog or comment about something to do with Mars Hill and disciplinary abuse and you use a pseudonym, okay. I honestly do get that. But if you want to claim to have inside knowledge while simultaneously refusing to go on record or say anything concrete you're a coward. Period. There's no qualifying that. I'm not saying there's no legitimate reason to be afraid for your reputation, mind you.
If you're only willing to take the posture of someone who knows the real deal but won't use your real name or go on record as you insist people believe your anonymous comments on blogs, well, I've already seen my friends' privacy violated by assholes like you. You'll have to do better than that. Bent Meyer has just shown you what "better than that" looks like over at The Wartburg Watch if you need an example.
You don't know, watchblogger or anonymous commenter, whether or not your desire to vent your anger won't inadvertantly hurt the cause and life of someone who has already been hurt by this institution. Using already hurt people as props to win your crusade can still be secondary abuse. Don't be so quick to vent your spleen that you inadvertantly sacrifice those people on the altar of your crusade. I've already seen this done to one of my friends and I don't want to see it happen again.
And this is why, crazy as this may sound, Andrew's case is encouraging to me. Someone who is a MH member cared enough to share with Andrew that he was being declared an unrepentent sinner by a campus machine. Andrew then had the freedom to break his story to Matthew Paul Turner. Someone cared enough about Andrew to have more real regard for his privacy than an entire campus system. Now people can understandably believe that a church willing to treat Andrew that way may "deserve" to have something leaked (amen) but it should be (and was) Andrew's decision to share the story. Compared to what went down in 2007 this is still terrible but in one crucial respect it's a step up and a step in a better direction.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Bent Meyer posts on The Wartburg Watch about being fired from MH in 2007
Before you read the news peg link read this first:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=445277
THEN read this, not before:
http://thewartburgwatch.com/2012/01/27/mars-hill-and-mark-driscoll-under-scrutiny-while-another-painful-story-emerges/#comment-35184
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=445277
THEN read this, not before:
http://thewartburgwatch.com/2012/01/27/mars-hill-and-mark-driscoll-under-scrutiny-while-another-painful-story-emerges/#comment-35184
Bent Meyer 
on Sun, Jan 29 2012 at 06:06 pm
on Sun, Jan 29 2012 at 06:06 pm I am one of the men fired the day of Mark’s rant about two elders he felt needed to broken noses. Someone asked what has happened since that day.
I am happy to say, the next Sunday my wife and I attended another Church with far better expository teaching and a community that authentically and generously helps the marginalized.
I also finished my master program and have a private mental health practice serving the Seattle and Eastside area. This was a very good and satisfying result.
Regarding, whether I spoke up or not. I have not been silenced by any direct or implied threats of retaliation. It is clear that the one who possess the air waves controls the content and spin of a story, so there was not much to be done.
I thought a lot about how I would response and just what my motives would be. I chose not to be lured into a public argument through the Seattle Times asking me for a blow by blow description of the events I have documented. I have a tendency to keep material for years and years.
I did prepare my narrative, including supporting documents for members only to read who came to me for explanation. They had to agree, never to disclose any of it to the media. These people have been honorable. As best I know, none have. By doing this I opened up myself to their scrutiny and possible rebuke. I have received nothing but kindness and support.
As to my motives, I want Mark’s best. In my opinion he is a very troubled man. He is caught in his own hell. The consequence, of course, is the influence he has on others, which is mixed.
He, Lief Moi, and Mike Gunn, together the founders of Mars Hill Church, sent out to focus on those that were young, upwardly mobile and future leaders. They wanted to position themselves to influence their faith decisions and their life choices. This is a lessen for many church leaders to learn from and choose for themselves.
The downside is Mark’s pathology shows up in ways that are impulsive, aggressive, irascible, shut off from effective relational influence, and most apparent not respectful and submissive to no one, though he claims otherwise.
I have hoped and still hope for something short of him destroying himself would bring about substantial change for this every increasing population of worshiper. Some have fretted there will be a great loss of Christian’s with the demise of Mark and/or the Church. I don’t think so. The church the comprises all of us will survive. The chaff will be blown away, but the church will remain.
I would speak a caution to all of us. There is much to be learn for the Mars Hill phenomena. Don’t dismiss the hunger and openness to be influenced represented in those ages 18 through 30. Invent content that is useful and distribute it freely on the web. Always incorporate creatively some explanation of the gospel at the end of every teaching session with an invitation to do business with Jesus.
Even though Mark’s portrayal of masculinity is more like a comic book superhero and women as needing to be protected and rescued his focus on young men coming into manhood richly is important. Absent fathers is epidemic. Think about what it is that has caused them not to attach to their families. Mark comes at it from the standpoint of duty and responsibility, which is mechanical, missing other primary questions, Why do some many men not attach to their families? Why do they abandon family so easily? Mark uses shame and intimidation as the means of gaining compliance, which has the appearance of working, but is not transformative in the long run, or creates other issues of abusive relationships related to power and control. In many men, the tendency is understood in the short saying, “Monkey see monkey do.” Don’t over react, young men need to mature.
I feel like I need to give attention the needs of women with equal if not more space, since women are marginalized and silenced in so many ways. But, I will leave that for another time.
I hope this will satisfy the primary curiosity of those who wonder what has happened to me. I will say, the other elder fired at the same times is a good friend and doing well.
***
This is the very real Bent Meyer. Beyond that words are pretty much failing me so I'll post and link. I'm going to need a few hours or maybe even a few days on this one.
But for now I can manage to write out this much: to the best of my knowledge this is the first time any man who was fired from being a pastor at Mars Hill has made a public statement on the record about having been fired from Mars Hill.
I am happy to say, the next Sunday my wife and I attended another Church with far better expository teaching and a community that authentically and generously helps the marginalized.
I also finished my master program and have a private mental health practice serving the Seattle and Eastside area. This was a very good and satisfying result.
Regarding, whether I spoke up or not. I have not been silenced by any direct or implied threats of retaliation. It is clear that the one who possess the air waves controls the content and spin of a story, so there was not much to be done.
I thought a lot about how I would response and just what my motives would be. I chose not to be lured into a public argument through the Seattle Times asking me for a blow by blow description of the events I have documented. I have a tendency to keep material for years and years.
I did prepare my narrative, including supporting documents for members only to read who came to me for explanation. They had to agree, never to disclose any of it to the media. These people have been honorable. As best I know, none have. By doing this I opened up myself to their scrutiny and possible rebuke. I have received nothing but kindness and support.
As to my motives, I want Mark’s best. In my opinion he is a very troubled man. He is caught in his own hell. The consequence, of course, is the influence he has on others, which is mixed.
He, Lief Moi, and Mike Gunn, together the founders of Mars Hill Church, sent out to focus on those that were young, upwardly mobile and future leaders. They wanted to position themselves to influence their faith decisions and their life choices. This is a lessen for many church leaders to learn from and choose for themselves.
The downside is Mark’s pathology shows up in ways that are impulsive, aggressive, irascible, shut off from effective relational influence, and most apparent not respectful and submissive to no one, though he claims otherwise.
I have hoped and still hope for something short of him destroying himself would bring about substantial change for this every increasing population of worshiper. Some have fretted there will be a great loss of Christian’s with the demise of Mark and/or the Church. I don’t think so. The church the comprises all of us will survive. The chaff will be blown away, but the church will remain.
I would speak a caution to all of us. There is much to be learn for the Mars Hill phenomena. Don’t dismiss the hunger and openness to be influenced represented in those ages 18 through 30. Invent content that is useful and distribute it freely on the web. Always incorporate creatively some explanation of the gospel at the end of every teaching session with an invitation to do business with Jesus.
Even though Mark’s portrayal of masculinity is more like a comic book superhero and women as needing to be protected and rescued his focus on young men coming into manhood richly is important. Absent fathers is epidemic. Think about what it is that has caused them not to attach to their families. Mark comes at it from the standpoint of duty and responsibility, which is mechanical, missing other primary questions, Why do some many men not attach to their families? Why do they abandon family so easily? Mark uses shame and intimidation as the means of gaining compliance, which has the appearance of working, but is not transformative in the long run, or creates other issues of abusive relationships related to power and control. In many men, the tendency is understood in the short saying, “Monkey see monkey do.” Don’t over react, young men need to mature.
I feel like I need to give attention the needs of women with equal if not more space, since women are marginalized and silenced in so many ways. But, I will leave that for another time.
I hope this will satisfy the primary curiosity of those who wonder what has happened to me. I will say, the other elder fired at the same times is a good friend and doing well.
***
This is the very real Bent Meyer. Beyond that words are pretty much failing me so I'll post and link. I'm going to need a few hours or maybe even a few days on this one.
But for now I can manage to write out this much: to the best of my knowledge this is the first time any man who was fired from being a pastor at Mars Hill has made a public statement on the record about having been fired from Mars Hill.
iMonk: Hard Talk II--Defending Dissent
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/imonk-classic-talk-hard-ii#more-28114
After all, since this is something Michael Spenser wrote at Internet Monk and I've been reading Internet Monk since, I dunno, ten years ago, I'm linking to it. I have a feeling we may be sharing similar thoughts about the necessity within evangelicalism to give room for dissent. It'd be an irony that evangelicals whose roots emerge from what was considered historic and necesary dissent of the abuse of church power would now themselves represent the same kind of self-preserving and self-justifying misuse of power in the very churches where leaders would decry Papists as holding wrong doctrines. Well, when Israel became the divided kingdom which of the two groups faithfully and always served the Lord? Yeah, that's right, neither of them.
Now my own assessment of the prophetic role is going to come off as substantially less exalted than what others may have suggested. This is not because I consider prophets unimportant but because I have begun to appreciate the significance of Deuteronomy 16-18 that many people using "prophets" as a basis for defending their own authority tend to skip over; the prophet was a role provided within the Torah as an ad hoc committee role to adjudicate issues that the Torah did not cover in case law. In other words the understanding much of the time was that the majority of life within Israel did not require a prophet to be consulted all the time.
It is true that prophets often played a critical role but that is because we have written documents from prophets whose work got canonized. This is not the same as looking to Deuteronomy 16-18 to get some idea of what was considered a normative role for a prophet. Some of the most important prophets (Elijah, Nathan and Huldah) in the history of Israel and Judea did not write anything down. They were also not necessarily critics. They could, however, be construed as policy advisors.
The prophetic job was to advise a king whether to go to war because a military situation came up that the Torah didn't address. The prophetic role as to assist in adjudication of an unusual case that was not adequately adressed by case law in the Torah. The prophetic role was also to challenge Israel to be obedient to what was revealed and to not digress into the worship of other gods on the one hand nor to the neglect of obedience and faithfulness while professing a nominal faith on the other. The role of the prophet prescribed in Deuteronomy 18 was not to "write books of the Bible". Eschatological prophecy is not even on the table there, despite the fact that many, many Christians assume it must be.
There's a difference between a later Christian gloss on a passage in the Torah and what the passage was originally actually talking about. We can get to the Christian appreciation of Jesus as the ultimate prophet when we read Deuteronomy 18 but before we skip straight to the big old meaning with the indefinite article we need to properly come to terms with the definite article that doesn't have a capital letter in it, and with indefinite articles. Any old preacher can claim to be a prophet because he preaches but that does not make him a prophet, it makes him more like a priest. If the preacher fields theological and ethical issues that are not directly dealt with by the Bible then, sure, he's started to play a prophetic role.
When Paul urges people to seek the higher gifts he doesn't write this as though there was some one and done litany of Spirit-given super-powers you get for life. His corretion to the Corinthians assumes that they knew who had the gift of tongues and who had the gift of interpreting tongues. He also assumed that there was an ability to acquire the better gifts. When we consider that the fruit of the spirit is pretty prosaic it might also suggest that the gifts of the spirit may be roles we grow into and take for occasions rather than lifetimes; roles that can be informed by those things that out of love we do for the church/Church.
Paul's instruction about the spiritual gifts has often been misused by cessationists and charismatics who are bickering about whether these gifts are really available now and what that is supposed to say about which of the two teams can make the greatest claim to legitimate institutional power. Paul skips past that and doesn't bother to define the spiritual gifts contemporary Christians debate about. He provides a few general guidelines and, famously, says "And now I will show you a still better way."
When Paul says to earnestly seek the better gifts he does not describe the gift very clearly, what he does describe clearly is the role the gift of service plays in a community. In other words, cultivate the fruit of the Spirit and love your fellow believers and this will in itself constitute seeking to embody such gifts as Paul enumerates. Pursue love of Christ and of neighbor and the spiritual gifts you actually need will take care of themselves for two reasons: 1) the fruit of the Spirit that grows in your life will prepare you for service and 2) the role you are able to play by the cultivation of that fruit in seeking to love the Lord and your neighbor will be something the Spirit takes care of without you having to constantly fret about it.
You don't need to really ask yourself "Is what I am doing prophetic?" or "Is what I'm doing the gift of healing?" or "Is what I'm saying a sign of the gift of exhortation?" The gift of healing may not be something as flashy as laying hands on someone and healing their illness. A gift of healing may be something such as a providential giving that allows someone who is going blind to see. A person who plays a prophetic role does not have to always be speaking in oracles with King James English like, "Thus sayeth the Lord", a person who plays a prophetic role does not need to know he or she is doing so. But a person who considers, as the prophet Jeremiah did, that the lying pen of scribes has transformed the Scriptures themselves into a lie can perform a prophetic role without having to display some kind of superpower. Yes, we're told about floating ax handles and parting seas and all that but we all know that the real Christian life is far more prosaic and we can forget that there was a more mundane concern in ensuring a floating ax handle was rescued.
At the end of days I would rather be in a position to wonder when I did anything like speaking in a prophetic way or bringing the gift of healing to someone when the Lord speaks than to boast in the things I was sure I did in Jesus' name only to discover He says "I never knew you." The world has been full of self-appointed prophets but what the Church may need are more accidental prophets, prophets who speak not because they want to or can't think of better things to do with their time, but who through providence and eagerness to love and serve the body of Christ bear the fruit of the Spirit and live the role when needed rather than thinking of it as some permanent vocation.
Do you think Amos was a full-time prophet? No, he tended sheep and dressed trees, right? Prophets did do ordinary things, too. There were some people who played the role of prophets as formal cabinet advisors to a king or priest in Israel but there were, we know this from Amos alone, some prophets had day jobs and only spoke when it was necesarry, when seeing the corruption of leaders and self-appointed spiritual authorities grew too be too much and they spoke against corruption and wickedness.
How could there be corruption and wickedness in the Christian community, you ask? We all know the answer of course, but the need for a prophetic activity is that all too often we assume we're the ones who get to play that prophetic role for that other sinner rather than consider that God may have appointed that other sinner (of all people!) to speak in a prophetic way to us. Schlatter was right to observe we do not lessen our share in evil by condemning evil in others yet the history of prophets has often been that though they, like Isaiah, recognize they are sinful folks with unclean lips, God sends them to speak up anyway. Tricky thing is that we may not recognize them when they speak to us because we're so sure they can't be legit. Unsurprisingly, there were religious leaders and advocates who said the same thing about the greatest prophet, weren't there?
After all, since this is something Michael Spenser wrote at Internet Monk and I've been reading Internet Monk since, I dunno, ten years ago, I'm linking to it. I have a feeling we may be sharing similar thoughts about the necessity within evangelicalism to give room for dissent. It'd be an irony that evangelicals whose roots emerge from what was considered historic and necesary dissent of the abuse of church power would now themselves represent the same kind of self-preserving and self-justifying misuse of power in the very churches where leaders would decry Papists as holding wrong doctrines. Well, when Israel became the divided kingdom which of the two groups faithfully and always served the Lord? Yeah, that's right, neither of them.
Now my own assessment of the prophetic role is going to come off as substantially less exalted than what others may have suggested. This is not because I consider prophets unimportant but because I have begun to appreciate the significance of Deuteronomy 16-18 that many people using "prophets" as a basis for defending their own authority tend to skip over; the prophet was a role provided within the Torah as an ad hoc committee role to adjudicate issues that the Torah did not cover in case law. In other words the understanding much of the time was that the majority of life within Israel did not require a prophet to be consulted all the time.
It is true that prophets often played a critical role but that is because we have written documents from prophets whose work got canonized. This is not the same as looking to Deuteronomy 16-18 to get some idea of what was considered a normative role for a prophet. Some of the most important prophets (Elijah, Nathan and Huldah) in the history of Israel and Judea did not write anything down. They were also not necessarily critics. They could, however, be construed as policy advisors.
The prophetic job was to advise a king whether to go to war because a military situation came up that the Torah didn't address. The prophetic role as to assist in adjudication of an unusual case that was not adequately adressed by case law in the Torah. The prophetic role was also to challenge Israel to be obedient to what was revealed and to not digress into the worship of other gods on the one hand nor to the neglect of obedience and faithfulness while professing a nominal faith on the other. The role of the prophet prescribed in Deuteronomy 18 was not to "write books of the Bible". Eschatological prophecy is not even on the table there, despite the fact that many, many Christians assume it must be.
There's a difference between a later Christian gloss on a passage in the Torah and what the passage was originally actually talking about. We can get to the Christian appreciation of Jesus as the ultimate prophet when we read Deuteronomy 18 but before we skip straight to the big old meaning with the indefinite article we need to properly come to terms with the definite article that doesn't have a capital letter in it, and with indefinite articles. Any old preacher can claim to be a prophet because he preaches but that does not make him a prophet, it makes him more like a priest. If the preacher fields theological and ethical issues that are not directly dealt with by the Bible then, sure, he's started to play a prophetic role.
When Paul urges people to seek the higher gifts he doesn't write this as though there was some one and done litany of Spirit-given super-powers you get for life. His corretion to the Corinthians assumes that they knew who had the gift of tongues and who had the gift of interpreting tongues. He also assumed that there was an ability to acquire the better gifts. When we consider that the fruit of the spirit is pretty prosaic it might also suggest that the gifts of the spirit may be roles we grow into and take for occasions rather than lifetimes; roles that can be informed by those things that out of love we do for the church/Church.
Paul's instruction about the spiritual gifts has often been misused by cessationists and charismatics who are bickering about whether these gifts are really available now and what that is supposed to say about which of the two teams can make the greatest claim to legitimate institutional power. Paul skips past that and doesn't bother to define the spiritual gifts contemporary Christians debate about. He provides a few general guidelines and, famously, says "And now I will show you a still better way."
When Paul says to earnestly seek the better gifts he does not describe the gift very clearly, what he does describe clearly is the role the gift of service plays in a community. In other words, cultivate the fruit of the Spirit and love your fellow believers and this will in itself constitute seeking to embody such gifts as Paul enumerates. Pursue love of Christ and of neighbor and the spiritual gifts you actually need will take care of themselves for two reasons: 1) the fruit of the Spirit that grows in your life will prepare you for service and 2) the role you are able to play by the cultivation of that fruit in seeking to love the Lord and your neighbor will be something the Spirit takes care of without you having to constantly fret about it.
You don't need to really ask yourself "Is what I am doing prophetic?" or "Is what I'm doing the gift of healing?" or "Is what I'm saying a sign of the gift of exhortation?" The gift of healing may not be something as flashy as laying hands on someone and healing their illness. A gift of healing may be something such as a providential giving that allows someone who is going blind to see. A person who plays a prophetic role does not have to always be speaking in oracles with King James English like, "Thus sayeth the Lord", a person who plays a prophetic role does not need to know he or she is doing so. But a person who considers, as the prophet Jeremiah did, that the lying pen of scribes has transformed the Scriptures themselves into a lie can perform a prophetic role without having to display some kind of superpower. Yes, we're told about floating ax handles and parting seas and all that but we all know that the real Christian life is far more prosaic and we can forget that there was a more mundane concern in ensuring a floating ax handle was rescued.
At the end of days I would rather be in a position to wonder when I did anything like speaking in a prophetic way or bringing the gift of healing to someone when the Lord speaks than to boast in the things I was sure I did in Jesus' name only to discover He says "I never knew you." The world has been full of self-appointed prophets but what the Church may need are more accidental prophets, prophets who speak not because they want to or can't think of better things to do with their time, but who through providence and eagerness to love and serve the body of Christ bear the fruit of the Spirit and live the role when needed rather than thinking of it as some permanent vocation.
Do you think Amos was a full-time prophet? No, he tended sheep and dressed trees, right? Prophets did do ordinary things, too. There were some people who played the role of prophets as formal cabinet advisors to a king or priest in Israel but there were, we know this from Amos alone, some prophets had day jobs and only spoke when it was necesarry, when seeing the corruption of leaders and self-appointed spiritual authorities grew too be too much and they spoke against corruption and wickedness.
How could there be corruption and wickedness in the Christian community, you ask? We all know the answer of course, but the need for a prophetic activity is that all too often we assume we're the ones who get to play that prophetic role for that other sinner rather than consider that God may have appointed that other sinner (of all people!) to speak in a prophetic way to us. Schlatter was right to observe we do not lessen our share in evil by condemning evil in others yet the history of prophets has often been that though they, like Isaiah, recognize they are sinful folks with unclean lips, God sends them to speak up anyway. Tricky thing is that we may not recognize them when they speak to us because we're so sure they can't be legit. Unsurprisingly, there were religious leaders and advocates who said the same thing about the greatest prophet, weren't there?
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