Reconstructing My Faith: Postmodernity, Bullies, and Uncle Carl

Well, you knew we'd eventually get to Mark Driscoll if we started talking about deconstructing and reconstructing my faith, right?

[insert heavy sigh here]

Postmodernity

In the spring of 1997, I attended the GenX church planting conference at Mount Hermon (a Christian retreat center in California). One of the speakers there was Mark Driscoll, who spoke passionately about the collapse of modernity, the rise of post-modernity, and how both of those would likely affect the way leaders taught & led their church communities. At the time, I reacted pretty positively to Mark's "in your face" style of speaking.  (For more personal context on my experience at the conference, you can see my post from 2006 entitled 9 Years Ago.)

What I didn't internalize back in 1997 was that Mark Driscoll had only been leading a church for a year or so. Mars Hill Church (Seattle) was growing rapidly, but he was relatively new to church leadership. His forcefulness, his charisma, his passion, and his humor masked his inexperience... and his tendency towards autocratic leadership.

Gosh, guys, I love what I’m doing. I got charged by a demon-possessed guy in my pulpit, the night we launched I had to exit counsel one of my key leaders, 10 minutes before the sermon, I kicked him out of the church. My worship team left three months ago. We moved six miles in the first three months, and it is… I love it. (quote from that message) 

In fairness, lots of the folks involved in the GenX church movement were pretty young... including me. (I was 33 years old in 1997 - man, that seems like a long time ago.) But you can still hear the echoes in that quote of the "pile of dead bodies" attitude that would overtake Mark D. and Mars Hill in the years ahead. 

There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus, and by God’s grace it’ll be a mountain by the time we’re done. You either get on the bus or you get run over by the bus. Those are the options. But the bus ain’t gonna stop. This is what we’re doing. (quote from Church Planters Boot Camp, Oct. 2007)

With 29 years of life since that gathering at Mount Hermon, I find myself questioning how completely modernity has collapsed while facing pretty clear evidence that post-modernity has become a bigger & bigger part of our cultural conversations. Mostly I see a mish-mash - a sometimes toxic stew - of beliefs and theories about how the world works (or should work) that borrow from both strains of philosophical thought.

And I struggle with the support I gave Mark Driscoll's teaching & writing. What was it about Mark, about myself (also Mark - heh), that drew me in and convinced me to ignore red flags?

I have some thoughts - but, per the usual here on the akapastorguy blog, that's going to require me to tell you some stories.

Story #1: Bullies

I'd experienced bullying off and on in elementary school and junior high... but it kicked into high gear as a high school freshman. I was a small and not very strong guy with glasses - and an invisible target painted on my back. I particularly hated P.E. class and the whole "locker room antics" where weaker folks (like me) became targets for bigger guys trying to prove just how macho they were. (Looking back at this, I realize that those behaviors were more than "I'm big & dumb & mean" - that those guys had their own aches, pains, fears, and wounds that they were struggling with - but at the time they were simply dangerous people I tried to avoid.)

I had basically two strategies to dissuade bullies:

1. invisibility - try to do as little as possible to attract their attention
2. stiff upper lip - no matter what they did, maintain a stoic face (no crying, no complaining, no taunting, no reaction)

But my salvation from being bullied came not from my strategies - instead, it was a friendship with a much larger acquaintance who firmly noted that I was his friend and he didn't want anyone to mess with me. (God bless you, Tony V.)

Story #2: Uncle Carl

My Uncle Carl was actually my great-uncle Carl... he and my Aunt Beulah married late in life and I only met him once (I think) at about age 5.

I don't remember much about him - if it wasn't for family pictures of him with Aunt Beulah, I probably wouldn't even recognize him. But what I do remember was that he was a tremendously skilled amateur magician who specialized in close-up magic. (Close-up magic is sleight of hand tricks - cards, coins, silks, etc. - performed in tight proximity to your audience.) The wonder of seeing those tricks happen, of things appearing and disappearing, of his tremendous command of fan decks to make beautiful patterns... that's never left me.

When he passed away, my Aunt Beulah made sure that my dad & I got his magic books and paraphernalia. (Dad quickly confiscated his marked card decks - but I was left with the fan decks, the rope tricks, and a library of books on magic.) What I discovered is that performing magic isn't, well, magic - it takes confidence, a great deal of dexterity, and a lot of practice to make it seem easy and magical.

Point of Information: My Peculiar Media Intake Habits

I'm a news addict who doesn't like news shows - particularly those in the "let's get a bunch of supposedly smart people together to yell at each other" mode. 

I watch a limited amount of YouTube - mostly things like Rodney on Watch It Played (game explanations), WDW tips videos (hats off to DSNY Newscast, Touring Plans, Ear Scouts, and Disney Food Blog), and smatterings of the Holderness Family and Legal Eagle.

I seldom if ever watch sermons (including my own) - as much as I love truth and hearing God's word preached, I'd rather be forced to watch unboxing videos shot without a tripod than suffer through most church services (my current church is an exception, of course).

I read - a lot. A good bit of stuff on the Internet but also actual physical books - either from the local library or my own bookcase. Weirdly enough, most of my online reading is not about spiritual matters - even as I'm currently reading physical copies of two different devotionals, a couple of books (Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around & God, the Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution), and have a stack of commentaries sitting at my feet.

Back to the Question At Hand: How Did I Get Drawn In?

This post has been "under construction" for almost two years because answering that question is... complicated. The disconnected stories you just read are my best attempt to give you some context and metaphors for the musings that follow.

• As I already told you, I don't listen to recorded sermons. So my interaction with Mark Driscoll's teaching was filtered simply through what he was writing. That means I got less of the "Chris Rock goes to church" vibe he liked to lay down in preaching & speaking but still all of the Teflon-coated certainty that was part and parcel of his writing about church leadership.
• I've been a summer missionary, a church staff member, a church planter, and a lead pastor of various churches over nearly thirty years. I cannot emphasize enough how much appeal there is to someone telling you "this is the way to do this" and "it's OK to be taking flak - that means you're over the target". Because the two things that are common to all of those ministry positions are (1) not feeling confident about what you're doing and (2) taking flak (criticism, hostility, attempts to fire you from your ministry position, etc.).
• For a kid who was bullied, congregational church ministry can feel an awfully lot like you were just magically transported back to junior high. I never experienced the physical intimidation I had as a teenager when I was serving a church, but emotional and spiritual bullying were par for the course. 
• For a minister who was bullied, Dricoll's "damn the torpedoes" attitude toward opposition was incredibly attractive. It wasn't that I wanted to be Mark Driscoll - I could sense the potential problems in leaning into that persona - it was that I liked hearing about someone standing up to the bullies.
• Here's the problem inherent in that: Mark Driscoll is, at best, an unreliable narrator of his own story. 
• For a very deep dive into the Mars Hill story (and, by extension, the ministry journey of Mark Driscoll), the podcast series The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill from Christianity Today is excellent.
• I wanted certainty - the bedrock assurance that I was doing the right thing and that my position as a pastor/church leader put me on the side of rightness and goodness. In exchange, I was willing to gloss over elements of Mark's message that were disturbing or problematic.
• I also wanted desperately to be able to do magic (grow a church, see people cross the line of faith, etc.)... ignoring that no single pastor has ever grown a healthy congregation. It takes not just personal confidence but the confidence of a group of believers in the presence and power of Christ. It requires flexibility to react to the moment rather than simply putting a plan in motion and running the bus over anyone who won't get onboard. And it's a marathon, not a sprint - a "long obedience in the same direction".
• Interesting aside: I first came upon long obedience in the same direction as a title of a Eugene Peterson book on the Psalms... but Peterson borrowed the quote from Friedrich Nietzsche.

And Then I Woke Up

I don't specifically remember what caused me to push Mark's books aside - it was probably the plagiarism scandal. Any residual goodwill was crushed by the choices that followed the death of Mars Hill Church. 

I'm not really sure how to end this wandering post. I've tried three or four different ways to approach it and all of them end with too much finger-pointing at broken people and too little self-examination on my own part. In the case of Mark Driscoll, that seems really easy for me to do. 

For me, the important thing wasn't to stop listening to Mark Driscoll - though that certainly wasn't a bad idea. The key was to start listening to what was bubbling out of my heart & mind that would cause me to ignore and/or excuse unhealthy and unChristlike teaching because it "felt good". 

And that's bigger than getting rid of books by "the cussing pastor".

This is the ninth post in a series... if you'd like to read the first eight, here they are:

#1: Reconstructing My Faith: Rocks, Dross, and Almonds

#2: Reconstructing My Faith: Syndrome, Mars, and the "F" Word

#3: Reconstructing My Faith: Cheaters, Ice, and Déjà vu

#4: Reconstructing My Faith: Flywheels, Smokescreens, and The Medicine

#5: Reconstructing My Faith: John Wayne, Straight Lines, and the Benefits of Being a Nerd

#6: Reconstructing My Faith: Pedigrees, Car Crashes, and Saying Goodbye

#7: Reconstructing My Faith: Worst. Church. Service. Ever.
#8: Reconstructing My Faith: A Question, The Rapture, And Dreaming of Escape