What You’ve Been Searching For

The Rise And Fall Of Mark Driscoll

They’re still talking about Mark Driscoll and the fall of Mars Hill Church. This is what you’ve been searching for. It’s being talked about and searched for on the internet. I guess we’re talking about Mark Driscoll again. I’m Joel Fieri. Stay tuned.

Previously, I did a podcast commenting on the first couple of episodes of the Christianity Today podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church, talking about Mark Driscoll and his church in Seattle. Again, how it rose and how it fell rather drastically and disastrously, in their view.

I wanted to pick up because I’ve taken in a few more of the podcasts. I haven’t gotten through all of them yet, but I’m a busy guy trying, but through the internet you can do it on demand whenever you want, which is a great thing. It’s what we do here at Christian Podcast Central.

I’m going to give you my thoughts on it, as I’ve listened to it so far. In listening to some of the episodes that have gone on, early on they mentioned boomers. How a lot of what happened at Mars Hill and was happening at church at that time is in reaction to how boomers did church.

Now I’m a boomer myself. I’m a late boomer. If you don’t know what boomers are, it’s baby boomers. Those of us born from, right after the World War II, from 1946 through about mid-’60s. I was born in 1960s. I say I’m a late boomer. I’m right on the cusp between boomer and Gen X, I think.

If you’re into those kind of labels, I would call myself a boomer. I do know what they’re talking about when they talk about how boomers did church, and how we changed the way America did church. I can see where they’re going with it, because what we did as boomers.

We were born, like I said, to World War II parents at a time when, after World War II, our parents had just saved the world. There was this really, a sense that God had used the Western democracies for sure, and America in particular, to save the world from a couple of monstrous evils called Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Fascism.

Some really horrible things happened in that war. We stopped some horrible things from happening, and really saved the world and entered an era of prosperity that, frankly, those people deserve because they did a really incredible thing.

Churches, especially the mainline denomination churches, traditional churches were very popular and had a lot of World War II people going to them and raising their families in them. A lot of us were raised in traditional churches.

It’s funny, the thing about boomers is, we came along at a time when that victory kicked off a huge wave of prosperity. The world really changed for us, for a lot of different reasons because of that prosperity, because of the technology that was emerging. Cars, television, modern appliances in the home. Something else that emerged was pop culture. Those things, television especially, and radio brought pop culture into our lives. Young people had never had that before.

We as boomers, we had a lot of entertainment at our disposal. Because of all these modern conveniences that they talked about then, that was such a miracle to my parents and their generation, to us they were just something that was always around. We never had to worry about a lot of the things that our parents had to worry about just to survive.

Survival was pretty much guaranteed to us. We weren’t Depression people. We weren’t living in an era when things were rough. We had a lot of security that previous generations didn’t have. We were young, which meant we were immature, but we were able to continue with our immaturity without any consequences because we had all of these basics of life covered and taken care of.

We were the first generation that could be immature and not die, if that makes sense, and not really have trouble in life. Okay? When we were sitting in church and it was boring, which church is to someone who’s immature, we whined about it and we were distracted.

We were distracted by all these other things, all this other music, all these other stories that were being told through TV or movies or whatever it was. We had records and the radio to listen to. We didn’t need to listen to these stuffy old hymns, right?

Our parents realized, “Hey, we need to give them something that’ll keep them in church.” So they gave us a little bit more entertaining church. Back then it was just guys standing up, young guys standing up with the guitars, singing songs that were a little more folksy and a little more rock-ish, maybe. We’re the ones that started the wave of a more contemporary church, more entertaining church.

The difference is, we had … The key thing was, we were still under the leadership of those World War II veterans, that World War II generation that was more mature, more responsible. That knew how the world worked and knew what we had been saved from.

Fast forward a while, and all of a sudden our children, the millennials and the Gen Zs or whatever you want to call them now, they, about 20 years ago, started thinking, the way we did church with just our guitars and our folksy kind of stuff was boring. We thought, “Well, what can we give them, to make sure they’re entertained?”

Well, they even took a lot of the stuff, because they had the internet generation, they had social media, they took it to even further depths of entertainment church. The difference with them is, they’re now being led by the immature baby boomers who never grew up.

About 20 years ago, this started manifesting itself in something called the Emergent Church. The Emerging Church and the Emergent Church. I remember, there were two strands of that. Mark Driscoll was on the cutting-edge of that.

He was really, the first super famous internet star in that phenomenon of the Emerging Church and Emergent Church. In a lot of ways, the growing pains and all the things that were wrong, and started off wrongly with the Emergent Church, he became the poster boy.

Now looking back and examining that, because the Emergent Church has basically, in my view, failed, and in most people’s views, has not lived up to its promise, and what it aspired to at the beginning. There’s been a lot of heresies. A lot of the pastors that were leaders of that movement have fallen every bit as hard as Mark Driscoll, but because Mark Driscoll was the big star, well, he’s the one that we’re talking about, continually now.

It’s a little unfair to him, but at the same time, he very much aspired to be this big celebrity. A lot of the things that are coming out in this documentary series, this podcast are fair, in my view.

It also goes to what we as boomers, and millennials, and Gen Xers, Gen Zers whatever, we like young leaders. We as baby boomers like young people. We like singing with them. We like them teaching us. The problem is, we tend to like them a little bit too much.

When we were leading in this Emergent, Emerging movement, not only did we want our young people to have young leaders teaching them, we abandoned our overseer role, our elder role. We, more or less conformed ourselves as old people, and you see it all over church.

You see baby boomers, people older than me in flip-flops and with their hair gelled or whatever. We are trying to lower ourselves, in a sense, to the level of the young people that we are putting in leadership of the church. We’re abandoning that responsibility, to be the elders.

I see it all over the place. We have left the younger generation rudderless because we’ve given them these young pastors who didn’t have a lot of experience. Mark Driscoll was a rough guy before he became a Christian, by his own admission. He’s from the streets of Philadelphia. He did some damage, by his own admission, and he became a Christian and started this church without a whole lot of grounding, it doesn’t sound like.

When he did have elders, older pastors mentoring him, they were a little bit too caught up in the celebrity that he had. I have no doubt that, in their hearts they really did want to disciple him, really did want to mentor him, but they were caught up in the youth movement that he was creating, in the celebrity that he had. They saw, and it brings out in this podcast that, they saw that they could get a little bit out of him. They could ride his celebrity a little bit.

They abandoned the role of elder leader with him. I know, not all have. I shouldn’t [inaudible 00:10:31]. Not all did that, of the leaders that he looked at, did that, but I think that’s where the elder generation has failed the Emerging Church, the millennials, whatever you want to call it, just as, it seems, a lot of the elder leadership that Mark Driscoll should have been under, kind of failed him, and he rebelled against it.

He sought to use them and they sought to use him. It just didn’t seem like everybody had their rules squared away. I think a lot of that is from that boomer sensibility that we have from the old days when we thought we wanted to be cool when we were under leadership, to now that we are leadership, we still want to be cool.

We didn’t really take our elder leadership seriously, and we haven’t been the stable force that our children and grandchildren need. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s the sense I got when I was listening to some of the early podcasts in this series that, here’s a guy who was obviously very gifted, who obviously, really wanted to have an impact, but he was a little bit too young, a little bit too immature, and he got way too famous and way too big, way too fast. There was nobody to pull him in.

By the time someone did try and pull him in, he wasn’t really hearing it. He had to have a hard fall, and he did.

I think, again, it’s a worthwhile podcast. It’s a little bit piling on with Mark Driscoll, but at the same time, he’s probably the best cautionary tale we have right now, as for what is the right way and the wrong way. I hope people are listening. I hope a lot of young Christian leaders are listening to it. I hope a lot of older Christian leaders are listening to it because I think there’s a lot to learn.

I think CT is doing a pretty decent job of staying on that, with that spirit of, “Hey, this is something we can learn from.” It’s a little clickbaity. They throw in a few things. They’re a little controversial, but that’s the world we live in too. It’s one of the reason I’m talking about it.

Face it, folks. I’m the President of a Christian podcast network. I need you guys clicking, so I’m going to talk about Mark Driscoll. It’s just the way it is. Hopefully, I have that spirit too, of learning from it. If I don’t, if you sense that I don’t, please tell me in the comments and tell me what your take is.

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Please do that. Please comment. Please go to Christian Podcast Central for more content like this. I’m Joel Fieri. Thanks for listening.