Born Again Part 9 Pastor Mark Driscoll
Who Would Jesus Smack Downwardly?
Mark Driscoll'south sermons are by and large too racy to mail service on GodTube, the evangelical Christian "family friendly" video-posting Web site. With titles like "Biblical Oral Sex activity" and "Pleasuring Your Spouse," his clips practise not stand up a chance against the site's content filters. No affair: YouTube is where Driscoll, the pastor of Mars Colina Church building in Seattle, would rather exist. Unsuspecting sinners who type in popular keywords may suddenly observe themselves face to face with a husky-voiced preacher in a black skateboarder's jacket and skull T-shirt. An "Under 17 Requires Adult Permission" alert flashes before the video cuts to evening services at Mars Hill, where an bearding audience member has just text-messaged a question to the screen onstage: "Pastor Marker, is masturbation a valid form of birth control?"
Driscoll doesn't miss a crush: "I had 1 guy quote Ecclesiastes ix:10, which says, 'Whatever your paw finds to practice, exercise it with all your might.' " The audition bursts out laughing. Next Pastor Marker is warning them about lust and exalting the confines of marriage, one paw jammed in his jeans pocket while the other waves his Bible. Fifty-fifty the skeptical viewer must admit that whatever Driscoll'south stance of sure recreational activities, he has the coolest fashion and foulest mouth of any preacher you've ever seen.
Marking Driscoll is American evangelicalism's bête noire. In fiddling more than a decade, his ministry has grown from a living-room Bible study to a megachurch that draws nigh 7,600 visitors to seven campuses effectually Seattle each Dominicus, and his books, blogs and podcasts accept made him one of the most 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. But what is new about Driscoll is that he has resurrected a item strain of fire and brimstone, one that most Americans assume 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 correct has eroded and the mainstream media is proclaiming an "evangelical crackup," Driscoll represents a move to revamp the style and substance of evangelicalism. With his taste for vintage baseball game caps and attendance on Facebook and iTunes, Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American popular culture. Yet his bulletin seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: yous are non helm of your soul or master of your fate just a depraved worm whose hard work and expert deeds volition go yous nowhere, because God marked y'all for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time. Notwithstanding a significant number of young people in Seattle — and nationwide — say this is exactly what they want to hear. Calvinism has somehow become cool, and just as startling, this generally bookish creed has fused with a manlike ethos. At Mars Hill, members say their favorite movie isn't "Amazing Grace" or "The Chronicles of Narnia" — information technology's "Fight Lodge."
Mars Colina Church building is the furthest matter from a Puritan meetinghouse. This is Seattle, and Mars Hill epitomizes the metropolis that spawned it. 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 vestibule i Sunday non long ago, college kids in jeans — some sporting nose rings or kitchen-sink dye jobs — lounged on ottomans and thumbed text letters 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 oversupply toward the auditorium, where the worship band was warming up for an hour of hymns with Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."
On that Sunday, Driscoll preached for an hr and 10 minutes — about 3 times longer than most pastors. As hip as he looks, his bulletin brooks no compromise with Seattle'southward permissive culture. New members can keep their sense of taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any "modern" interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the "weepy worship dude" he assembly with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, "singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented equally a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting production in his long pilus."
The oldest of 5, 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 outset Bible. He read voraciously and was born over again at 19. "God talked to me," Driscoll says. "He told me to marry Grace, preach the Bible, to found churches and train men." He married Grace (with whom he now has five children) and, at 25, founded Mars Colina.
God chosen Driscoll to preach to men — specially young men — to salve them from an American Protestantism that has emasculated Christ and driven men from church pews with praise music that sounds more similar male child-band ballads crooned to Jesus than "Onward Christian Soldiers." What bothers Driscoll — and the growing number of evangelical pastors who agree with him — is not the trope of Jesus-equally-lover. After all, St. Paul tells us that the Church building is the bride of Christ. What actually grates is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings draw a gentle human being embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into "a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ," a "neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop civilization that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell."
This reaction to the "feminization" of the church is non new. "The Lord salvage united states," declared the evangelist Billy Sunday in 1916, "from off-handed, flabby-cheeked . . . effeminate, ossified, three-carat Christianity." In 1990 a grouping of pastors founded the Promise Keepers ministry building defended to "igniting and uniting men" who were declining their families and abandoning the church building. 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 managing director of LifeWay Research, a Southern Baptist religious polling organization, Mars Hill is "a reaction to the atheological, consumer-driven nature of the modernistic evangelical machine."
The "modernistic evangelical machine" is a product of the 1970s and '80s, when a new generation of business organization-savvy pastors developed strategies to reach unbelievers turned off past traditional worship and evangelization. Their approach was "seeker sensitive": upon learning that many people didn't go in for stained glass and steeples, these pastors made their churches look like shopping malls. Complex theology intimidated the curious, and talk of damnation alienated potential converts — and so they played down doctrine in favor of upbeat, practical teachings on the Christian life.
These megachurches, like Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church building in Houston and Bill Hybels's Willow Creek Community Church building in Illinois, take come to symbolize American evangelicalism. By any quantitative measure out they are wildly successful, and their values and methods have diffused into the evangelical bloodstream. Yet some megachurches accept begun to admit what critics maintained all along: 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 study in which churchgoers reported feeling stagnant in their faith and frustrated with slick, programme-driven pastors. "Every bit an evangelical, I would say this tells us something," Stetzer says. "The center is non property."
Mars Loma has non entirely dispensed with megachurch marketing tactics. Its success in one of the most liberal and to the lowest degree-churched cities in America depends on being sensitive to the body-pierced and latte-drinking seekers of Seattle. Ultimately, however, Driscoll'southward theology means that his congregants' salvation is non in his easily. It'due south not in their ain easily, either — this is the middle of Calvinism.
Human beings are totally corrupted by original sin and predestined for sky or hell, no matter their earthly conduct. Nosotros all deserve eternal damnation, only God, in his inscrutable mercy, has granted the grace of salvation to an elect few. While John Calvin's 16th-century doctrines have deep roots in Christian tradition, they strike many modern evangelicals every bit nonsensical and fifty-fifty united nations-Christian. If predestination is true, they fence, then there is no bespeak in missions to the unsaved or in leading a godly life. And some babies who die in infancy — if God placed them amidst the reprobate — become direct to hell with the balance of the damned, to "glorify his name by their own destruction," as Calvin wrote. Since the early 19th century, nearly evangelicals accept preferred a theology that stresses the laic's free decision to take God's grace. To be born again is a choice God wants you to brand; if you lot so cull, Jesus will be your personal friend.
Yet Driscoll is not an isolated eccentric. Over the past two decades, preachers in places as far-flung every bit Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., in denominations ranging from Baptist to Pentecostal, are pushing "this new, ambitious, mission-minded Calvinism that really believes Calvinism is a transcript of the Gospel," according to Roger Olson, a professor of theology at Baylor University. They have harnessed the Internet to recruit new believers, especially young people. Whatever curious seeker can discover his style into a world of sermon podcasts and treatises by the Protestant Reformers and English Puritans, whose abstruse writings, though far from best-selling, are enjoying something of a renaissance. New converts stay in touch via blogs and Facebook groups with names similar "John Calvin Is My Homeboy" and "Calvinism: The Group That Chooses You."
New Calvinists are still relatively few in number, but that doesn't bother them: being a persecuted minority proves you are amongst the elect. They are not "the side by side big matter" but a protestation movement, defying an evangelical mainstream that, they believe, has gone soft on sin and has watered downwardly the Gospel into a glorified self-help programme. In part, Calvinism appeals because — like Mars Colina'southward music and Driscoll'due south frank sermons — the bulletin is raw and disconcerting: seeker insensitive.
Most people who attend Mars Hill do not come across themselves equally theological radicals. Mark Driscoll is just "Pastor Mark," not the New Calvinist warrior demonized on evangelical and liberal blogs. Notwithstanding while some initially come for mundane reasons — their friends attend; they similar the music — the Calvinist theology is often the glue that keeps them in their seats. They call the preaching "authentic" and "true to life." Traditional evangelical theology falls autonomously in the face up of real tragedy, says the xx-yr-old Brett Harris, who runs an evangelical teen blog with his twin brother, Alex. Reducing God to a projection of our own wishes trivializes divine sovereignty and fails to explicate how both good and evil have a place in the divine programme. "There are plenty of comfortable people who tin say, 'God'south on my side,' " Harris says. "Simply they couldn't plow around 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 credence of fate. When information technology comes to wrestling with life's challenges, nonetheless, they reject the "positive thinking" ethos that Norman Vincent Peale made famous in the 1950s. That philosophy still dominates the Christian self-assistance marketplace in books like "Your Best Life Now" past Joel Osteen, which promises readers that everything from a Hawaiian vacation house to a beauty-pageant crown is within their grasp if only they "develop a tin can-do attitude." Marianne Esterly, a women's counselor at Mars Hill, says she tries to help women resist the desperation that tin can come up with forgetting that man's primary end is to glorify God, non 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 self-assist doesn't work. We can't practice annihilation. It's all the work of Christ."
Calvinism is a theology predicated on paradox: God has predestined every human existence'south actions, yet we are still to blame for our sins; we are totally depraved, all the same held to the incommunicable standard of divine police force. These teachings do not jibe with Enlightenment ideas near human capacity, yet they have appealed to a wide range of modernistic intellectuals, especially those who stressed the dangers of human hubris in the wake of World War I.
Driscoll found his way into this tradition largely on his ain. He recently earned a chief's 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 establish him to be something of a mentor," Driscoll says. "I didn't have all the baggage he did. Only you can see him with a quill in ane hand and a drink in the other. He married a brewer and renegade nun. His story is kind of indie rock."
Driscoll disdains the prohibitions of traditional evangelical Christianity. Taboos on alcohol, smoking, swearing and fierce movies have done much to shape American Protestant civilization — a culture that he has chosen the domain of "chicks and some chickified dudes with limp wrists." Moreover, the Bible tells him that to seek salvation by self-righteous make clean living is to behave like a Pharisee. Unlike fundamentalists who isolate themselves, creating "a dissever culture where y'all live in a Christian cul-de-sac," as one spiky-haired member named Andrew Pack puts it, Mars Hillians pride themselves on friendships with non-Christians. They tend to be cultural activists who play in rock bands and intendance about the arts, living out a long Reformed tradition that asserts Christ's mandate over every corner of creation.
Similar many New Calvinists, Driscoll advocates traditional gender roles, chosen "complementarianism" in theological parlance. Men and women are "equal spiritually, and information technology's a difference of functionality, not intrinsic worth," says Danielle Blazer, a 34-year-erstwhile Mars Colina member. Women may piece of work outside the home, only they must submit to their husbands, and they are forbidden from taking on preaching roles in the church.
"Information technology's just since women have been in church leadership that this backfire has come up," says the Seattle pastor Katie Ladd, a liberal Methodist who holds that declaring Jesus a "masculine dude" subverts the transformative bulletin of the Gospel. Merely New Calvinists argue that traditional gender roles are true to the Bible, especially the letters of Paul. Moreover, embedded in the notion of Adam as the "federal head" of the human race is the idea of human being as head of the home.
Nowhere is the connexion between 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 customs has always contained the seeds of authoritarianism: John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, only Driscoll has little patience for dissent. In 2007, 2 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 advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a "mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, skillful guy" who attends Mars Colina. "His reply was bright," Driscoll reported. "He said, 'I break their nose.' " When i of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One fellow member complained on an online message board and instantly plant his membership privileges suspended. "They are sinning through questioning," Driscoll preached. John Calvin couldn't have said it better himself.
Most members, even so, didn't join Mars Hill 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 cease smoking crack and drinking every day," Conklin says. "I had to find some kind of God in lodge to practise that." He hated the churches he visited: "I would show up looking equally hateful as possible, with my Afro diddled out, wearing a wife-beater, and and so I'd say, 'Why don't they like me?' And then I went to Mars Loma, and I believed Marking."
Driscoll's theology "changed how I view women," Conklin says. He quit going to strip clubs and now refuses to tattoo others with his one-time specialty, pinup girls (though he still wears two on one arm, souvenirs from earlier, godless days). Mars Loma counts four of the city's top tattoo artists amongst its members (and many of their clientele — that afternoon, Conklin was expecting a swain church building fellow member who wanted a portrait of Christ enthroned across his back). While other churches left people similar Conklin feeling alienated, Mars Hill has fabricated them its missionaries. "Some people say, 'You're pretty cool and you're a Christian, and then I guess I can't hate all of them anymore,' " he says. "I understand where they're coming from."
Mars Hill — with its conservative social teachings embedded in guitar solos and drum riffs, its megachurch presence in the heart of bohemian skepticism — thrives on paradox. Critics on the left and right alike predict that this delicate residuum of opposites cannot terminal. Some are skeptical of a church so bent on staying perpetually "hip": members have only recently begun to marry and have children, but surely those children will grow upwardly, abound too cool for their absurd church building and insubordinate. Others say that Driscoll'due south ego and sense of taste for controversy volition be Mars Loma's Achilles' heel. Lately he has fabricated a concerted effort to tone down his linguistic communication, and he insists that he has delegated much authority, but the center of his message has not changed. Driscoll is still the one who gazes down upon Mars Hill's vii congregations near Sundays, his sermons broadcast from the principal campus to colossal-size projection screens around the city. At ane suburban campus that I visited, a huge yellow cantankerous dominated center phase — until the projection screen unfurled and Driscoll'south face blocked the cross from view. Driscoll's New Calvinism underscores a curious fact: the doctrine of full human depravity has always had a funny style of emboldening, rather than humbling, its adherents.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html
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