{"id":3458,"date":"2012-04-12T05:00:30","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=3458"},"modified":"2012-04-12T08:16:36","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T14:16:36","slug":"mark-driscolls-mesmerizing-hold-on-lu-evangelicalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=3458","title":{"rendered":"Mark Driscoll’s Mesmerizing Hold on LU & Evangelicalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t get it. More to the point, I don’t get him. Mark Driscoll, that is. I simply do not understand the Seattle pastor’s mesmerizing hold over large swaths of conservative Evangelicals, including many Southern Baptists, both young and old. In the last few years, Driscoll’s influence has continued to expand, both through the church he pastors, Mars Hill, and through the Reformed church planting network he founded,\u00a0Acts 29. Driscoll also served as President of Acts 29 until he unexpectedly\u00a0announced his resignation\u00a0<\/a>just\u00a0nine days\u00a0after\u00a0a former Mars Hill elder, Paul Petry, and his wife, Jonna, went public with explosive and credible\u00a0allegations of spiritual abuse at Mars Hill<\/a>. Some might chalk that up to one big coincidence, but as one who believes in the sovereignty of God over all things, I don’t really believe in coincidences, luck, or happenstance.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to believe that people can be so overpowered by a leader’s charisma that they would\u00a0be unable to clearly see\u00a0the manipulation and spiritual abuse taking place all around them. Of course, by their own admission, that is exactly what happened to the Petrys and their relationship with Mark Driscoll:<\/p>\n

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Not as an excuse, but the fact is, while we were at Mars Hill Church there was a lot we did not see. Many things were kept secret. And we did not have clear vision then. We were in the ether<\/span><\/em>, <\/span>under a kind of \u201cdelusion.\u201d I have come to believe that when idolatry is at play, it often creates and allows for an unreality to take hold of those who participate, as if under a spell, unable to see or hear the truth because it is all filtered through a projected \u201creality.\u201d But it is a false reality – a delusion. I believe this dynamic is often true in cults where there is one dominant, charismatic, controlling leader. As I look back, this \u201cdelusion\u201d aspect makes sense to me and helps to explain why the abuse is allowed and continues, while so many people are unaware and\/or unwilling to confront. At some point though, a circumstance with leadership arises that invariably places you in the fray. You either bow and submit, or resist and face searing retribution. (“My Story,” by Jonna\u00a0Petry<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It would be easy to\u00a0dismiss or downplay\u00a0the mesmerizing influence that charismatic leaders like Driscoll and other celebrity pastors have on their legion of followers. But, the Petrys\u00a0offer a cautionary tale about what can happen in churches and religious organizations — including Christian\u00a0institutions like Liberty University — when Biblical servant leadership is\u00a0diminished or rejected\u00a0(by words and actions)\u00a0in favor of an unBiblical, charismatic leadership model\u00a0which trades on celebrity, power, and a misuse (and oftentimes, abuse) of Scripture to retain control of the church or religious institution.<\/p>\n

What has been lost in the recent kerfuffle regarding Peter Lumpkins’ reporting on the\u00a0LU Trustees’ apparent vote to express their displeasure at the invitation extended to Mark Driscoll to speak on the Lynchburg, VA campus and to hold his “Real Marriage”<\/em>\u00a0Conference there (here<\/a>, here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>), is the question, “Why would Liberty University invite Mark Driscoll to speak to impressionable young students on their campus?” <\/em>Of course, that’s the same question that could be asked of Southern Baptist institutions which have invited Driscoll to speak to their students<\/a>. One might also question why some SBC leaders have\u00a0held Acts 29 <\/a>—\u00a0founded by Driscoll and at the time the statements were made, led by him\u00a0—\u00a0 up as a model for church planting? If the answer to that last question is because of the outward success that Acts 29 seems to have had, then we could also hold up\u00a0Joel Osteen and Lakewood Church as a model for\u00a0how\u00a0to have a\u00a0“profitable”<\/em> Christian ministry.<\/p>\n

Liberty has a history of inviting controversial speakers — Ted Kennedy and Glenn Beck among them — to address their students. While I would personally not have invited a Mormon-convert like Beck to speak at a Christian school, no one could reasonably conclude that Beck — and certainly not Kennedy — would have any lasting influence on the spiritual faith and practice of Liberty’s students. That’s simply not the case with Driscoll. He has tremendous influence in conservative Evangelical life, particularly among those who could be described as “Young, Restless, and Reformed.”<\/em>\u00a0His growing influence among Southern Baptists — including at the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia-affiliated Liberty University — should be cause for concern for those who view Driscoll’s brand of Christianity as a perversion (in more than one way) of the Biblical model of servant leadership within the church and home.<\/p>\n

But, why does Mark Driscoll seem to get a pass, particularly on issues which non-conservative pastors would most certainly not be allowed to skate by? One answer might be because of his Reformed\/Calvinistic theology. I don’t know how many times\u00a0I have read\u00a0something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t agree with everything that Pastor Mark preaches, but he preaches the Gospel.”<\/em> \u00a0That in itself gives me pause to question what they mean by “Gospel.”<\/em> I didn’t realize that preaching the “Gospel”<\/em> automatically exempted leaders from the Biblical standard of “being above reproach,”<\/em> including with those outside the church. As one who is an inconsistent Calvinist in my theology, surely we can find better Reformed\u00a0role models for students in our colleges, universities, and seminaries to emulate than Mark Driscoll.<\/p>\n

What of Liberty University, that bastion of Reformed thought and theology? Of course, anyone who knows anything about LU knows that it is about as far from Reformed as one could get in Baptist life (unless you believe that Southern Baptists are automatically “Reformed”<\/em> in their theology). How to explain not only LU’s invitation to Driscoll to speak at Convocation and hold his “Real Marriage”<\/em>\u00a0Conference, but LU’s heavy-handed, clumsy, and poorly written\u00a0response to Lumpkins’ initial reporting of the Trustees’ vote? (here<\/a> and here<\/a>)\u00a0Are the leaders at Liberty so mesmerized with Driscoll that they are willing to place themselves at odds with their own Board of Trustees? Do Liberty’s leaders — who\u00a0attempted to\u00a0leave the impression that not only was the Trustees’ vote “against”<\/em> Driscoll not unanimous, but that there was no vote at all —\u00a0really want to be seen\u00a0trying to\u00a0obfuscate and pull a “Clinton”<\/em> in an effort to redefine “unanimous”,<\/em> “not welcome,”<\/em> and “vote?”<\/em><\/p>\n

I have to hand it to Mark Driscoll. He\u00a0is at the center of a storm, the culmination of\u00a0a series of events,\u00a0which\u00a0has placed one of our nation’s premier conservative Christian universities in a pickle. If the reporting is accurate (and I believe it is), then\u00a0Liberty University’s Trustees have voted (unanimously or at least what could be categorized as such) that Mark Driscoll should not have been invited to speak on campus. Liberty’s leaders, including their legal counsel,\u00a0have\u00a0left the impression that there was no\u00a0Trustee vote on Mark Driscoll’s upcoming appearance.\u00a0What is true? What is false? If it turns out that Mr. Lumpkins’ original story was\u00a0truthful, then not only will Liberty University have some\u00a0“splainin to do,”<\/em> but their reputation and\u00a0credibility\u00a0will be tarnished.<\/p>\n

“At some point though, a circumstance with leadership arises that invariably places you in the fray. You either bow and submit, or resist and face searing retribution.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>The Trustees have apparently entered the fray. Some may even face retribution.\u00a0How will LU’s leaders respond? If, by their response (or lack thereof) it’s proven that\u00a0Mark Driscoll has a mesmerizing hold on the leaders at Liberty University, then the\u00a0Southern Baptist Convention\u00a0and Evangelicalism is on a greater downgrade than anyone\u00a0could have imagined!<\/p>\n

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I don’t get it. More to the point, I don’t get him. Mark Driscoll, that is. I simply do not understand the Seattle pastor’s mesmerizing hold over large swaths of conservative Evangelicals, including many Southern Baptists, both young and old. In the last few years, Driscoll’s influence has continued to expand, both through the church…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,8,1681,35,37,39],"tags":[60,1841,1589,1910,1912,1860,356,443,558,1851,594,606,1903,1911,3404,1855,1840,1850,775,1683,825,868,3393,1842,1270],"class_list":["post-3458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-calvinism","category-christianity","category-mark-driscoll","category-religion","category-southern-baptist-convention","category-theology","tag-acts-29","tag-acts-29-network","tag-calvinists","tag-charismatic-leaders","tag-clinton","tag-evangelicalism","tag-evangelicals","tag-glenn-beck","tag-joel-osteen","tag-jonna-petry","tag-lakewood-church","tag-liberty-university","tag-lu","tag-lynchburg","tag-mark-driscoll","tag-mars-hill","tag-mars-hill-seattle","tag-paul-petry","tag-peter-lumpkins","tag-real-marriage","tag-reformed-theology","tag-sbc","tag-southern-baptist-convention","tag-spiritual-abuse","tag-ted-kennedy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-TM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3458"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3471,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458\/revisions\/3471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}