Barry's Blog

Mark Driscoll shatters the stereotypical image of the American church pastor. His sermons are typically too racy to post on GodTube, the evangelical Christian "family friendly" video-posting website, but you will easily find him on YouTube, where he would rather be. Unsuspecting sinners who type in popular words may find themselves suddenly face to face with a husky-voiced preacher in a black skateboarder's jacket and a skull T-shirt. An article in the January 6th issue of The New York Times, "Who Would Jesus Smack Down?" reveals how this break-the-mold pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle has, in a little more than a decade, grown from a living-room Bible study to a megachurch today that draws over 7,000 visitors to seven campuses around Seattle each Sunday.

For all of his popularity among his flock, he is reviled by conservative Christians. As Molly Worthen writes in The New York Times article: "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 particular 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."

Driscoll has an interesting story to tell. The oldest of five, son of a union drywaller, he was raised Roman Catholic in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Seattle. In high school, he met a pretty blond pastor's daughter named, providentially so, Grace. She gave him his first Bible, and he would go on to read it voraciously until he was born again at 19. "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 five children) and, at 25, founded Mars Hill. Typical ministry plan for a pastor, right?

Despite his contrarian approach to ministry, Driscoll is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. His teaching epitomizes a deep-rooted allegiance to reformed theology that has a certain winsomeness to it, despite its seemingly radical unfashionableness. At Mars Hill, members say their favorite movie isn't "Amazing Grace" or "The Chronicles of Narnia," but rather, "Fight Club." On a recent Sunday, as The New York Times article reported, Driscoll preached for an hour and ten minutes, nearly three times longer than most pastors.

Worthen observes in the article: "As hip as he looks, his message brooks no compromise with Seattle's permissive culture. New members can keep their 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 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 time putting product in his long hair."

Like him or not philosophically or theologically, reading of Driscoll's ministry and impact reminds me of Jesus' words to the religious leaders of His own day, who tried to define the boundaries of what is "acceptable" religion, and how His message could not be contained in the traditional confines of organized religion: He told them this parable: "No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. [37] And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. [38] No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'The old is better.' " (Luke 5:36-39).

As different as he is from many of us, I find him utterly refreshing!

"There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity."
-Mark Driscoll, Relevant Magazine