Born Again Part 17 Pastor Mark Driscoll
Who Would Jesus Smack Down?
Marking Driscoll'due south sermons are more often than not too racy to post on GodTube, the evangelical Christian "family friendly" video-posting Web site. With titles like "Biblical Oral Sex" and "Pleasuring Your Spouse," his clips do not stand a hazard confronting the site's content filters. No matter: YouTube is where Driscoll, the pastor of Mars Hill Church building in Seattle, would rather exist. Unsuspecting sinners who type in pop keywords may of a sudden discover themselves face to face up with a husky-voiced preacher in a black skateboarder'due south jacket and skull T-shirt. An "Under 17 Requires Adult Permission" warning flashes before the video cuts to evening services at Mars Loma, where an bearding audience member has just text-messaged a question to the screen onstage: "Pastor Marking, is masturbation a valid form of birth control?"
Driscoll doesn't miss a vanquish: "I had ane guy quote Ecclesiastes 9:10, which says, 'Any your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.' " The audience bursts out laughing. Next Pastor Mark is warning them about animalism and exalting the confines of marriage, one hand jammed in his jeans pocket while the other waves his Bible. Even the skeptical viewer must admit that any Driscoll's opinion of certain recreational activities, he has the coolest style and foulest oral cavity of whatsoever preacher you've ever seen.
Marking Driscoll is American evangelicalism's bête noire. In little more than a decade, his ministry building has grown from a living-room Bible study to a megachurch that draws nigh 7,600 visitors to seven campuses around Seattle each Sunday, and his books, blogs and podcasts have made him one of the near admired — and reviled — figures among evangelicals nationwide. Conservatives call Driscoll "the cussing pastor" and wish that he'd trade in his fashionably distressed jeans and taste for indie rock for a suit and tie and placid choral arrangements. Liberals wince at his hellfire theology and insistence that women submit to their husbands. Just what is new about Driscoll is that he has resurrected a particular strain of fire and brimstone, one that well-nigh Americans presume died out with the Puritans: Calvinism, a theology that makes Pat Robertson seem warm and fuzzy.
At a fourth dimension when the once-vaunted unity of the religious right has eroded and the mainstream media is proclaiming an "evangelical crackup," Driscoll represents a movement to revamp the style and substance of evangelicalism. With his taste for vintage baseball caps and omnipresence on Facebook and iTunes, Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Notwithstanding his message seems radically unfashionable, even united nations-American: y'all are not captain of your soul or master of your fate merely a depraved worm whose hard piece of work and good deeds will go you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time. Yet a pregnant number of immature people in Seattle — and nationwide — say this is exactly what they want to hear. Calvinism has somehow become cool, and simply as startling, this generally bookish creed has fused with a macho ethos. At Mars Hill, members say their favorite motion-picture show isn't "Amazing Grace" or "The Chronicles of Narnia" — it's "Fight Club."
Mars Hill Church is the furthest thing from a Puritan meetinghouse. This is Seattle, and Mars Loma epitomizes the city that spawned information technology. Headquartered in a converted marine supply store, the church is a boxy grayness building near the diesel-infused din of the Ballard Span. In the lobby i Sunday non long ago, college kids in jeans — some sporting olfactory organ rings or kitchen-sink dye jobs — lounged on ottomans and thumbed text messages to their friends. The front desk, black and slick, looked as if it ought to offering lattes rather than Bibles and membership pamphlets. Buzz-cut and tattooed security guards mumbled into their headpieces and directed the crowd toward the auditorium, where the worship band was warming upwardly for an hour of hymns with Bruce Springsteen'southward "Built-in to Run."
On that Sun, Driscoll preached for an hour and 10 minutes — nigh three times longer than virtually pastors. As hip every bit he looks, his message brooks no compromise with Seattle'south permissive civilization. New members can continue their gustation in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had improve abandon their feminism, premarital sexual practice and any "modern" interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly non the "weepy worship dude" he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, "singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of fourth dimension putting product in his long hair."
The oldest of five, son of a union drywaller, Driscoll was raised Roman Catholic in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Seattle. In loftier school, he met a pretty blond pastor'due south daughter named — providentially — Grace. She gave him his beginning Bible. He read voraciously and was born again at nineteen. "God talked to me," Driscoll says. "He told me to marry Grace, preach the Bible, to plant churches and train men." He married Grace (with whom he now has 5 children) and, at 25, founded Mars Colina.
God called Driscoll to preach to men — peculiarly young men — to save them from an American Protestantism that has emasculated Christ and driven men from church pews with praise music that sounds more like male child-ring ballads crooned to Jesus than "Onward Christian Soldiers." What bothers Driscoll — and the growing number of evangelical pastors who hold with him — is not the trope of Jesus-as-lover. Afterward all, St. Paul tells us that the Church is the helpmate of Christ. What actually grates is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church building, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into "a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ," a "neutered and limp-wristed pop Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk nigh sin or send anyone to hell."
This reaction to the "feminization" of the church building is non new. "The Lord save us," declared the evangelist Billy Sunday in 1916, "from off-handed, flabby-cheeked . . . effeminate, ossified, three-carat Christianity." In 1990 a group of pastors founded the Hope Keepers ministry building defended to "igniting and uniting men" who were failing their families and abandoning the church. In recent years, mainstream megachurches — the mammoth pacesetters of American evangelicalism that package Christianity for mass consumption — have been criticized for replacing hard-edged Gospel with feminized pablum. According to Ed Stetzer, the director of LifeWay Inquiry, a Southern Baptist religious polling organization, Mars Hill is "a reaction to the atheological, consumer-driven nature of the modern evangelical machine."
The "modern evangelical machine" is a production of the 1970s and '80s, when a new generation of business-savvy pastors developed strategies to reach unbelievers turned off by traditional worship and evangelization. Their approach was "seeker sensitive": upon learning that many people didn't go in for stained drinking glass and steeples, these pastors made their churches wait similar shopping malls. Complex theology intimidated the curious, and talk of damnation alienated potential converts — and then they played downward doctrine in favor of upbeat, applied teachings on the Christian life.
These megachurches, like Joel Osteen'southward Lakewood Church in Houston and Bill Hybels's Willow Creek Customs Church in Illinois, have come up to symbolize American evangelicalism. By any quantitative measure they are wildly successful, and their values and methods have diffused into the evangelical bloodstream. However some megachurches have begun to admit what critics maintained all forth: numbers are not everything. In the fall of 2007, leaders of Willow Creek sent shockwaves through the evangelical world when they announced the results of a report in which churchgoers reported feeling brackish in their faith and frustrated with slick, program-driven pastors. "As an evangelical, I would say this tells u.s. something," Stetzer says. "The centre is not holding."
Mars Hill has not entirely dispensed with megachurch marketing tactics. Its success in one of the most liberal and least-churched cities in America depends on being sensitive to the body-pierced and latte-drinking seekers of Seattle. Ultimately, nonetheless, Driscoll'southward theology ways that his congregants' salvation is not in his hands. It's not in their own hands, either — this is the heart of Calvinism.
Man beings are totally corrupted by original sin and predestined for sky or hell, no matter their earthly conduct. We all deserve eternal damnation, simply God, in his inscrutable mercy, has granted the grace of salvation to an elect few. While John Calvin'southward 16th-century doctrines have deep roots in Christian tradition, they strike many modernistic evangelicals as nonsensical and even un-Christian. If predestination is true, they contend, then there is no point in missions to the unsaved or in leading a godly life. And some babies who die in infancy — if God placed them among the reprobate — go straight to hell with the residuum of the damned, to "glorify his name by their own destruction," as Calvin wrote. Since the early 19th century, most evangelicals take preferred a theology that stresses the believer's complimentary decision to take God's grace. To be born again is a choice God wants you to brand; if y'all then choose, Jesus will exist your personal friend.
Yet Driscoll is non an isolated eccentric. Over the past two decades, preachers in places as far-flung as Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., in denominations ranging from Baptist to Pentecostal, are pushing "this new, aggressive, mission-minded Calvinism that really believes Calvinism is a transcript of the Gospel," co-ordinate to Roger Olson, a professor of theology at Baylor University. They have harnessed the Internet to recruit new believers, specially young people. Any curious seeker can observe his way into a world of sermon podcasts and treatises by the Protestant Reformers and English language Puritans, whose abstruse writings, though far from acknowledged, are enjoying something of a renaissance. New converts stay in touch via blogs and Facebook groups with names like "John Calvin Is My Homeboy" and "Calvinism: The Group That Chooses You."
New Calvinists are still relatively few in number, simply that doesn't bother them: being a persecuted minority proves y'all are amidst the elect. They are not "the next big affair" only a protestation movement, defying an evangelical mainstream that, they believe, has gone soft on sin and has watered down the Gospel into a glorified self-assistance program. In part, Calvinism appeals considering — like Mars Hill's music and Driscoll's frank sermons — the message is raw and disconcerting: seeker insensitive.
Most people who attend Mars Hill exercise non encounter themselves as theological radicals. Mark Driscoll is just "Pastor Mark," not the New Calvinist warrior demonized on evangelical and liberal blogs. Yet while some initially come for mundane reasons — their friends nourish; they similar the music — the Calvinist theology is often the gum that keeps them in their seats. They phone call the preaching "accurate" and "true to life." Traditional evangelical theology falls autonomously in the confront of real tragedy, says the 20-year-quondam Brett Harris, who runs an evangelical teen blog with his twin brother, Alex. Reducing God to a projection of our ain wishes trivializes divine sovereignty and fails to explain how both good and evil have a identify in the divine plan. "At that place are plenty of comfortable people who can say, 'God'due south on my side,' " Harris says. "But they couldn't turn effectually and say, 'God gave me cancer.' "
Though they believe that God has already mapped out their lives, Calvinists have always been activists. Ye shall know the elect by their fruits, not by their passive acceptance of fate. When it comes to wrestling with life's challenges, however, they reject the "positive thinking" ethos that Norman Vincent Peale made famous in the 1950s. That philosophy still dominates the Christian self-help market in books like "Your All-time Life Now" by Joel Osteen, which promises readers that everything from a Hawaiian vacation business firm to a beauty-pageant crown is within their grasp if only they "develop a can-practise mental attitude." Marianne Esterly, a women'due south counselor at Mars Hill, says she tries to help women resist the desperation that can come up with forgetting that man's main terminate is to glorify God, not to obsess over earthly problems. "They worship the trauma, or the anorexia, and that'south not what they're designed to worship," she says. "Christian cocky-help doesn't piece of work. We can't do anything. It's all the work of Christ."
Calvinism is a theology predicated on paradox: God has predestined every homo's actions, yet we are nevertheless to blame for our sins; we are totally depraved, yet held to the impossible standard of divine law. These teachings exercise not jibe with Enlightenment ideas well-nigh homo capacity, yet they have appealed to a wide range of modern intellectuals, especially those who stressed the dangers of human hubris in the wake of Earth State of war I.
Driscoll found his mode into this tradition largely on his own. He recently earned a master'southward degree through an independent-study program he arranged at a seminary in Portland, Ore. Years ago, paperback reprints of old Puritan treatises in the corner of a local bookstore piqued his involvement in Reformation theology. He came to admire Martin Luther, the vulgar, beer-swilling theological rebel who sparked the Reformation. "I constitute him to be something of a mentor," Driscoll says. "I didn't have all the luggage he did. Merely you lot can run into him with a quill in 1 hand and a drink in the other. He married a brewer and renegade nun. His story is kind of indie stone."
Driscoll disdains the prohibitions of traditional evangelical Christianity. Taboos on alcohol, smoking, swearing and tearing movies accept done much to shape American Protestant civilisation — a culture that he has called the domain of "chicks and some chickified dudes with limp wrists." Moreover, the Bible tells him that to seek conservancy by self-righteous make clean living is to behave like a Pharisee. Dissimilar fundamentalists who isolate themselves, creating "a separate culture where you live in a Christian cul-de-sac," as one spiky-haired member named Andrew Pack puts it, Mars Hillians pride themselves on friendships with not-Christians. They tend to be cultural activists who play in rock bands and care about the arts, living out a long Reformed tradition that asserts Christ's mandate over every corner of creation.
Like many New Calvinists, Driscoll advocates traditional gender roles, called "complementarianism" in theological parlance. Men and women are "equal spiritually, and it's a difference of functionality, not intrinsic worth," says Danielle Blazer, a 34-year-former Mars Hill member. Women may work outside the abode, merely they must submit to their husbands, and they are forbidden from taking on preaching roles in the church.
"Information technology'southward merely since women have been in church leadership that this backlash has come," says the Seattle pastor Katie Ladd, a liberal Methodist who holds that declaring Jesus a "masculine dude" subverts the transformative message of the Gospel. Just New Calvinists fence that traditional gender roles are true to the Bible, especially the letters of Paul. Moreover, embedded in the notion of Adam equally the "federal head" of the man race is the idea of man as caput of the habitation.
Nowhere is the connection betwixt Driscoll'due south hypermasculinity and his Calvinist theology clearer than in his refusal to tolerate opposition at Mars Loma. The Reformed tradition's resistance to compromise and emphasis on the purity of the worshipping community has always contained the seeds of authoritarianism: John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a human being who casually criticized him at a dinner political party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked communication on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a "mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, skillful guy" who attends Mars Loma. "His answer was bright," Driscoll reported. "He said, 'I suspension their nose.' " When i of the renegade elders refused to apologize, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online bulletin board and instantly establish his membership privileges suspended. "They are sinning through questioning," Driscoll preached. John Calvin couldn't have said information technology better himself.
Nearly members, however, didn't join Mars Loma in order to ask questions. Damon Conklin, who is 41 and runs a tattoo parlor, says he joined Mars Hill because Driscoll made his life make sense — and didn't ask him to pretend to be someone he wasn't. "I decided to finish smoking fissure and drinking every day," Conklin says. "I had to find some kind of God in order to practise that." He hated the churches he visited: "I would bear witness up looking as mean every bit possible, with my Afro blown out, wearing a wife-beater, and then I'd say, 'Why don't they like me?' Then I went to Mars Loma, and I believed Mark."
Driscoll's theology "inverse how I view women," Conklin says. He quit going to strip clubs and now refuses to tattoo others with his former specialty, pinup girls (though he notwithstanding wears two on one arm, souvenirs from earlier, godless days). Mars Hill counts 4 of the city's top tattoo artists amidst its members (and many of their clientele — that afternoon, Conklin was expecting a fellow church building member who wanted a portrait of Christ enthroned across his dorsum). While other churches left people like Conklin feeling alienated, Mars Hill has made them its missionaries. "Some people say, 'Y'all're pretty cool and you're a Christian, so I judge I tin can't hate all of them anymore,' " he says. "I understand where they're coming from."
Mars Colina — with its bourgeois social teachings embedded in guitar solos and drum riffs, its megachurch presence in the middle of bohemian skepticism — thrives on paradox. Critics on the left and right akin predict that this delicate balance of opposites cannot last. Some are skeptical of a church building and so bent on staying perpetually "hip": members have only recently begun to ally and take children, only surely those children will grow upward, grow too cool for their absurd church and insubordinate. Others say that Driscoll'due south ego and taste for controversy will be Mars Hill'south Achilles' heel. Lately he has fabricated a concerted effort to tone downwardly his language, and he insists that he has delegated much authority, but the heart of his message has not inverse. Driscoll is still the one who gazes downward upon Mars Hill's seven congregations virtually Sundays, his sermons broadcast from the primary campus to jumbo-size projection screens around the city. At one suburban campus that I visited, a huge yellow cross dominated center stage — until the projection screen unfurled and Driscoll's face blocked the cross from view. Driscoll's New Calvinism underscores a curious fact: the doctrine of total human depravity has always had a funny way of emboldening, rather than humbling, its adherents.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html
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