"Oh, Behave!"

Many of you by now have probably read Andrew's account of his firsthand experience of church discipline at the hands of Seattle's Mars Hill and its pastor, Mark Driscoll (if you've not read the account, I would strongly urge you to do so. It is very enlightening, as well as consistent with the accounts I have heard about Mars Hill in general).

Now, I must admit I am a bit torn about this....

The reactions to this story that I have come across have been been overwhelmingly negative. The leadership of Mars Hill has been described as legalistic and heavy-handed, and Andrew's decision to leave Mars Hill has been met with general approbation.

But from what I can gather, the majority of the objections to Mars Hill's discipline has been coming from evangelicals, many of whom consider ecclesiastical authority of any kind to be bordering on abusive and illegitimate. To the evangelical mind, the Christian life is almost solely an individual affair, the only really corporate dimension being when a collection of those individuals gathers together in the same room to have their one-on-one experiences with God simultaneously.

As if this were not enough, evangelical churches like Calvary Chapel do not even have church membership, which makes the kind of discipline practiced by Mars Hill make about as much sense as a citizen's arrest in a town with no government.

All that being said, I can still understand why Andrew would balk at being told by his church's leadership that unless he signs their discipline contract and jumps through their hoops, that they will be unable to properly judge the sincerity of his repentance, and further, that his refusal to submit will result in his being treated as a publican and a sinner. While such thoroughness in shepherding its flock is admirable in principle, I can't help but wonder if there are some delusions of grandeur on Mars Hill's part (although I can't exactly put my finger on why I feel this way).

So anyway, I would be curious to hear the thoughts of those of you who have read Andrew's account. Is Mars Hill simply being scupulous and deliberate, or have they overstepped their bounds?

"Looking for Jesus and His Mother"

I recently came across (what I eventually realized was) a satirical piece about Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle's Mars Hill Church. According to the article, Driscoll was speaking at a recent men's conference when he launched into one of his tirades about how effeminate everyone except him and the apostles is. The satirized Driscoll explained:

"The problem with our churches today is that the lead pastor is some sissy boy who wears cardigan sweaters, has The Carpenters dialed in on his iPod, gets his hair cut at a salon instead of a barber shop, hasn't been to an Ultimate Fighting match, works out on an elliptical machine instead of going to isolated regions of Russia like in Rocky IV in order to harvest lumber with his teeth, and generally swishes around like Jack on Three's Company whenever Mr. Roper was around."

The men of the Bible were real men, Driscoll insisted: "King David might have played the lyre, but he also slaughtered thousands of guys."

Driscoll's obsession with masculinity is well-documented. As I highlighted in my last post, he recently suggested that Great Britain's complete lack of good Bible teachers is due to its churches being filled with effeminate, limp-wristed girly men.

I have been doing a bit of thinking about this issue, and I've concluded that maybe Mark has a point. Many in the American church have feminized God even to the point of insisting that his nurturing, maternal qualities eclipse his power and omniscience (what comes immediately to mind is Open Theism, which teaches that when your loved one dies in a car accident, God is a true shoulder to cry on since he is as genuinely surprised and saddened by the tragedy as you are). Clearly against the backdrop of such a housebroken and castrated God who spends all his time wringing his hands and weeping powerlessly, one cannot really blame a pastor for trying to reassert God's strength and masculinity.

But then again, those who have grown up around men only with no feminine influences can surely testify that there is a big difference between a house and a home, and that a family without a mother can be rather cold, clinical, and repressed. So when people perceive the Christian church to be lacking in warmth and compassion, they understandably seek to project these more feminine attributes upon God. This, in turn, tends to drive men away and make them dismiss church as being a place for women, causing Mark Driscoll to huff, puff, and expose his chest hair.

G.K. Chesterton highlighted the paradox of how that the church in his own day was both dismissed as a place that oppresses all women while simultaneously being criticized for unduly exalting one of them in particular. In other words, Christianity has historically thought too little of every female except Mary, of whom it thinks too much.

Of course, we Protestants understandably cringe at the Mariolatry perceived in certain older, pre-Reformation traditions, but if our choice is between God-as-coldhearted-Father and God-as-compassionate-Mother, one can hardly blame those who wish they were part of a two-parent family.

No, I'm not suggesting that anyone start kissing statues or venerating the Virgin's image in a tortilla. But I do think it would be worthwhile to ponder the source of the error to which Driscoll is erroneously reacting, and to whatever degree one can, to seek to rectify it.

On Being Impressed by All the Wrong Things

I am sure many of you have heard about the recent interview of Mars Hill's Mark Driscoll by Justin Brierley on the British radio program Unbelievable. During the interview the following exchange took place:

Driscoll: I go too far sometimes. Almost every other pastor I know doesn’t go far enough and that’s okay ’cause the church tends to be led by people who are timid and fearful of going too far. I mean, let’s just say this: Right now, name for me the one young good Bible teacher that’s known across Great Britain.

Brierley: Hmm....

Driscoll: You don’t have one. That is a problem. There’s a bunch of cowards who aren’t telling the truth.

Brierley: So you think that the Bible teaches...

Driscoll: You don’t have one. You don’t have one young guy who can preach the Bible that anybody’s listening to on the whole earth.

(Driscoll then tells Brierley that he is annoying, and characterizes his church's ministry as weak and effeminate due to their pastor being a woman.)

As many who have attended Driscoll's Seattle church have attested, his views on things like patriarchy and sexuality are bordering on bizarre, and now he appears to be dismissing any minister who doesn't fit his own criteria for masculinity, and who cannot boast of the numbers that Mars Hill can, with a contemptuous wave of the hand.

Make no mistake, Mars Hill is not the antidote to the baby-boomer megachurch evangelicalism that its devotees claim it is, but is instead its mirror image, only with a younger target demographic with more piercings and ink. When such a high level of success is coupled with near-total unaccountability and then placed into the hands of a young man with no formal theological training (whether it's Mark Driscoll or Chuck Smith), the results -- although seemingly impressive in the short term -- will only be disastrous and harmful toward God's people. I have seen the abuse firsthand countless times, and it never gets any easier to stomach.

But there is good news for all you Seattle-ites who may be tired of watching your Sunday morning sermon on a large-screen TV: just across the lake there's a place you can go that really is different from what you're used to. Sure, Exile Presbyterian Church may not have rock star pastors who preach NC-17 sermons about anal sex or millions of dollars to spend on multimedia technology and state-of-the-art sound systems (read: we're not all that edgy or impressive).

But what we do offer makes up for all that: worship characterized by joy, reverence, and awe, liturgy that situates its participants in the drama of God's redemptive work, no-frills expositional and Christ-centered preaching of the Bible, and at the climax of the event, the feasting by God's people upon the body and blood of Christ.

Unimpressive? Maybe, but such is God's kingdom in this passing age, shrouded as it is in the mystery of the cross and the lamentation that the "not yet" occasions.

No News on the Complaint Against the PNWP

This past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was in Eugene, OR, for the Pacific Northwest Presbytery's winter meeting. As many of you know, a complaint was filed by one of our presbyters against the acquittal of Rev. Peter Leithart, who was tried for allegedly holding to views inconsistent with the Westminster Confession and Catechisms.

Well, the judicial commission whose task it is to rule on and respond to the complaint has yet to finalize its judgment, meaning that it will not be until our April meeting that we will know its decision.

If the complaint is denied, it will be appealed to the denomination's highest court, and where it will go from there is anyone's guess.

Mary or Moroni?

I read an article recently that suggested that our country's evangelical leaders may ask Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry to bow out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination in order for their preferred candidate, Rick Santorum, to be able to go head-to-head against frontrunner Mitt Romney. The purpose for this tactic is to avoid a situation in which evangelicals against Romney split their votes between a handful of men, thus securing a Romney victory.

The reason for this opposition to Romney? Well, he's a Mormon, and we all know we can't have one of those for a president. But the problem with this stance is that Santorum is a Catholic, and evangelicals were calling the pope the antichrist a good 200 years before Mormonism even existed. So American evangelicals appear to be caught on the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand we have a guy whose church believes he will become a god over his own planet one day with a host of spirit-wives at his beck and call, and on the other we have a guy whose religion believes that they are the one true church whose leader, the pope, is the pontifex maximus and supreme head of all Christians everywhere.

Hmm....

As long as faith and politics are intertwined, American evangelicals will have to implicitly choose between Mary and Moroni (an act that cannot but be accompanied by gagging and holding one's nose). But if we were able to distinguish between the earthly and spiritual kingdoms, we would be freed to vote for the person with whose policies we most closely align without feeling like we're endorsing his religion, too.

Heck, we may even find ourselves capable of voting for a black Muslim from Kenya.

Ascension-Driven Advocacy

I preached last Sunday morning on John's account of Mary's encounter with the risen Christ in which her attempts to demonstrate genuine affection and surprise upon seeing Jesus alive were seemingly rebuffed with a curt rebuke: "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father" (Jesus' seeming annoyance notwithstanding, I resisted the temptation to title the sermon "Mary, Mary! Why Ya Buggin'?").

What strikes me about this exchange is that the obvious difference between the pre- and post-ascension relationship of Jesus with his followers seems to be one that suggests less intimacy, when in fact the opposite is the case. We know this by what Jesus said next: "Go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father." If anything, the physical absence of Christ creates a relationship that is more intimate, not less.

If you had asked me a few years ago whether a study of the gospels would really yield any new insights for me, I would have dutifully answered "yes," but the things I would have had in mind would have been mostly factual (such as becoming familiar with this or that Jewish custom, or learning how many days' journey it was from Jerusalem to Galilee). But I must say, the things I have been learning and passing along have been every bit as mind-blowing for me as they have been for many members of my congregation. So despite how basic and fundamental it sounds, it really is incredible that Jesus ascended to the Father with our human nature, that humanity is now part of the Godhead, and that when the Trinity gathers, our flesh is present there as the glorified firstfruits of things to come.

Considering Christ's heavenly advocacy through the lens of the historia salutis takes things to a whole new level, and it makes me wonder why the ascension doesn't get more press in Reformed circles (although Horton's People and Place, building upon Douglas Farrow's work, is a welcome addition). I'll leave you with a quotation I cited in my sermon:

"[The ascension of Christ] is an act that, having overcome sin and death, results in a time and place and mode of life defined by full participation in the trinitarian economy. For in and through the ascension of Jesus the earthly things of human existence (whether physical or mental) are so united with the heavenly things of the Spirit that the former are made fully subject to the goal of communion with the Father." Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology, p. 48