Jubilee Freedom & Shalom

“Nehemiah was beating up members of his church. What do we do with that? I’ll tell you what I’d like to do with that. I’d like to follow in his example. There’s a few guys right now, that if I wasn’t gonna end up on CNN, I would go old testament on ‘em. Even men in leadership of this church” -Mark Driscoll speaking to his church family and people laughing the whole time.

After this sermon Mark called an impromptu meeting with two pastors who were also elders and fired them on the spot because they looked at the new bylaws and didn’t immediately pass them without reading them. They wanted to read them and make some potential edits, which is what they thought their lobs were as elders. The rules said Mark could fire them as employees but he couldn’t take away their elder status so he tried to intimidate them into resigning or he would open up investigations against both of them hoping they would go away quietly. They refused and welcomed the investigations. They were found innocent and still got kicked out and the church was told to shun them and treat them as an unrepentant unbeliever. Imagine what their kids felt like watching the adults at their church do these things to each other.

Accountability vs Speed when it comes to church governance and checks and balances. What’s the best Church hierarchy or structure? Moses model with one guy calling all the shots? Elder run? Complete democracy with all members voting?

So many things Mark says in this episode sound so level headed. "I’m just one vote among many. I submit to my senior pastor. This is not a dictatorship. Jesus is our senior pastor. I’m not saying I’m the spiritual leader... you do what I say. I think that’s very abusive. When one person is the spiritual leader”. But that’s exactly who he became and anyone who got in his way got railroaded. So, the question is did he ever mean what he said and he lost his way or was he lying so he could trojan horse the church and seize control when the right time came?

Back then Mark’s church was “Elder Ruled” and without denominational oversight. and Mark talked negatively about Pastor as CEO run churches and ripped on pastors who were too big to even know their members. But that’s exactly who Mark became.

Mark equated submission to Christ to submitting to the church leadership, which he aimed to take over. Dictators use the ability to declare a state of emergency to centralize power into smaller and smaller circles “until the crisis is over”. For Mark the constant emergency was people going to hell if the church didn't grow. If a church stops growing at 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000 people then people will stop being reached for Jesus. People will stop coming to Christ. As if Jesus or the Kingdom only needed you and your church to reach people. So, if you pumped the breaks on making decisions and weren't making decisions at breakneck speeds you were aiding and abetting Satan and helping him send people to hell. You were the anti-Jesus Antichrist.

“too many guys waste too much time trying to move stiff-necked stubborn and obstinate people. I am all about bless and subtraction. there is a pile of dead bodies behind the mars hill bus and by God’s grace it will be a mountain by the time we are 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. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They’re off the bus. under the bus. they were off mission so now they’re unemployed. this will be the defining issue as to whether you succeed or fail. I’ve read enough of the new testament to know that occasionally Paul put somebody in the wood chipper.“ Mark Driscoll speaking at a pastors conference the day after he fired two pastors.

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In this episode Christianity Today interviews several of the people that worked with Mark in the mid 90's that helped him find his platform online and focus his brand. The internet brought new insights through data. You could see how many people listened to his podcasts and his YouTube channel. When Mark made aggressions those numbers went up so if the ends justify the means then making more aggressions in your sermons meant more people listening and therefore more people "hearing about Jesus" and therefore more people accepting Jesus.

“Did I give Mark his first hit of heroine by platforming him because he didn’t have the maturity to handle it?”

The internet has less gatekeepers to pursue fame. There's less cost, investment, maturity or track record required to get your content published. People can get big over night before they are really ready for it.

Mark surrounded him self with people that came out of the media industry in Seattle and had an eye for branding and creating quality content. “If you are always repackaging movies like "Jesus is the real Superman" and adding some Christian flare to it you are always going to be 3-4 years behind culture at best sucking its tailpipe. You’re just mimicking a culture when you should be creating a culture and you’re doing a disservice to the original artists. It’s lazy and I hate it so much.”

Over time more and more of the church resources stopped going to ministries that supported the local church members and local community and started going to Mark’s platform and external facing media channels. If the media team asked for it, they got it. More cameras, more staff, and more production gear. Mars Hill content was consistently trending #1 in the religion category in podcasts and YouTube. They had 3 "RED Cameras". These were the same cameras The Lord of the Rings were shot on. At the same time, the whole organization of NBC only had 2 RED cameras. At this time the media team grew to 60 staff and they built a studio and original scores written for their content etc.
Mark used his platform to get into the conference speaking circuit. Older more mature pastors knew they had to recognize him because of his following online, but he made the older pastors worry because of the wild stuff he would say. They hoped by welcoming him into their circles they could have an influence on him and he would mellow out a little. But Mark didn’t want mentoring because he had outgrown them before he ever met them. His church was bigger and therefore he had nothing to learn from them. He was only interested in learning from people who had more. More absolute power within their churches, more people, and more money. And that's when he met James McDonald from Harvest Bible Chapel.

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"The Things We Do To Women"

Mark's Vision for Women: if women wanted to have a good life and raise happy and healthy children, she should not work outside the home and should raise her children personally while her husband went out and made a living for them both. Families should buy houses, grow deep roots, and have lots of kids if possible. If women were interested in working outside the home, the advice was to get married, have another kid, and for men to lead their wives better. If a man's wife worked outside of the home, it was a disqualification to be in church leadership or to be an elder. Women were told to drop out of college because their job was to stay home and sexually satisfy their husbands. If they denied their husband it was a sin. Men go to strip clubs is because their wives have not stripped enough for them and they have to get their fill somewhere. If women didn’t keep their husbands sexually satisfied, men would look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction. So, if your husband cheated on you, it was really your fault for not being sexually available.

This response was an echo of our fight against communism which was anti-family, anti-God, and anti-America and also the sexual revolution, which was also perceived as anti-family.

“There is an intense femininity that has crept into Christianity. Islam is a masculine religion. That’s why they run an airplane into the World Trade Center and we meet in Central Park in New York and we get men like Elton John to play the piano and cry. That’s our response as a nation. Gay men with wigs cry because mean men with facial hair beat them." -Mark Driscoll

Mark posed everything as a war and conflict. This was not only with the outside world but with the inside world of men and women. Someone had to dominate and men should be the ones. To be a woman meant to except that you would have to submit to a hierarchical structure. “You’d either be dominated by a good man or a bad one“.

Mark did seem to have a very genuine care for women. He would drop everything to help a woman in need or a woman who had been abused, but what he put back in its place was being dominated by a good man as opposed to being dominated by an abusive one.

Mark screams during a sermon and says, "How dare you! Who the hell do you think you are? Some of you guys are just so frustrating. Some of you guys have been coming here for years and you’re still not praying with your wife. Some of you guys have been coming here for years and you still have your hands all over your girlfriend. Some of you have already whispered in her ear and said, 'I’m sorry. I’ll do better.' Abusing a woman, neglecting a woman, being a coward, a fool, being like your father Adam. Who do you think you are! You are not God! You’re just a man! You’re not an impressive man! Some of you will hear this and your response will be, 'how dare you tell me how to live my life', but that’s the Holy Spirit telling you you need to change, little boy. You shut up, put on your pants, get a job, grow up and maybe one day you can love a woman." He did this at every service that day 5 times. It was planned and rehearsed and meant for tv in hopes to go viral.

Mark would say things like, "thank God for my smoking hot wife." Teaching from Song of Solomon, Mark exclaims, "oral sex is Biblical!"

"I am glad I was a part of a church that could speak openly about sexuality, but I am ashamed that we were a church that went beyond Scripture, with the same amount of authority, and the damage that it did to marriages and women." -Tim Smith pastor at Mars hill

"To me it was a rape culture that was promulgated using Christianity as a means to create a culture where women are subservient sexually in a way that was totally evil." -Jeff Becker

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This episode is the 4th of a series where Nate and Daniel are reflecting on the recent popular podcast called "The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" by Christianity Today. The podcast follows the story of a pastor named Mark Driscoll and it is a cautionary tale about church growth and how celebrity effects people, especially people in power. In order for this episode to be more meaningful, we recommend first listening to "The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" episode 4. Nate and Daniel reflect on questions like:

William Wallace II was Mark's pseudonym that he used to say really crude things on the church's private chat board, Midrash. He posted saying the guys in his church were acting like male lesbians and needed to be put in dresses, beaten and humiliated. Men had weekly accountability meetings called "Redemption Groups" where men would say, “it’s time for me to go to meeting and take a bat to the head or get kicked in the nuts" because it was a weekly bludgeoning about they need to grow up and be a man and get jobs and take care of their families.

What does it say if your church's favorite movie is fight club? What does that reveal about the people in your church, what they are longing for and frustrated about, and what they think are the solutions?

Mark was a mixed bag of being able to teach scripture and being very crude and vile. Example: his "Hoe Hoe Hoe" sermons about the 3 whores who are in Jesus' genealogy. Was Mark an agent of chaos just to get a rise out of people? Is that the way we should go about confronting sin in the community or making peoples' faith real to them? Saying crazy stuff and making people confront what they’re hearing even if you don’t agree with what you’re saying just to force people to go through the act of understanding what they believe and how to communicate that back to what they’re hearing. Does this bear good fruit and does your answer change in light of the prophets and how people responded to them?

In the Men’s meeting in the gym Mark gave men the "Dad talk" for 2 hours yelling at them saying things like, "You can’t charge the gates of hell with your pants around your ankles, a tissue in one hand, and a bottle of lotion in the other" and that they needed to grow up, work hard at their jobs, and if they weren’t on board with the mission of the church they needed to get out.

Where in the Bible does it say men’s jobs are to defend, protect, and kill if need be for their families? I’ve heard this said as a moral imperative and I have never heard it supported by scripture. I’d like to hear the scripture story or commandment that people use to build that view of manhood.

What does it mean to “man up”? The Mars Hill answer was to protect wives, be strong, be warriors, be fighters, be providers, be responsible, be employed, be accountable, know your family role, and that was their definition of being servants. Why are these male only roles? And how did Jesus embody these qualities or not?

Mark joined a church because the preacher used bow hunting as an story for his sermon and Mark said, “I didn’t have any theological convictions, but if I guy can kill things he can be my pastor“. Why is a violent pastor worth submitting to? Should all pastors be willing to kill to serve effectively?

What is the significance of Mark's repeated origin story? And that everyone at Mars Hill could recount it? What is your church's often repeated origin story? Does your church even have one? What do you think the downsides are of not having an origin stories that's often repeated? Is the origin story that is repeated about your pastor, the leadership at your church, or is it about Jesus?

...And much, much more.

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In this episode Daniel and Nate talk further about forming rich culture that's rooted in the story scripture and the side effects of hollow cultures and not taking the time to build sacred places in time. What are practices that draw our attention away from our busyness and the smallness our lives and lift our eyes toward God and His Son? How can we build cathedrals and temples in time that bring attention to the divine?
God's Appointed Times by Barney Kasdan
Here's a podcast the Bible Podcast did on "Sabbath Rest and Cathedrals In Time" and here is the entire series on "Sabbath and Rest". This whole series has been really impactful on Daniel and Nate and would bring a lot of context to this podcast conversation.
"Jewish Holidays"
The "Poor Tithe"
The "Sabbath Years"
The "Jubilee"

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