issue 66

I rarely, if ever, find myself writing in disapproval of another ministry. I believe that one of God’s great ideas is diversity; ‘horses for courses’, in that we are all called to different things and we are made differently to accommodate that. The Lord has uniquely designed His church to dazzle the world with the myriad facets of what Church is to look like and be. Ephesians 3:10 sums it up beautifully:

So that, through the Church, the multi faceted wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

However, I’m about to break that habit, having been stirred to action by the highly destructive scattergun tirades emanating from the mouth of Mark Driscoll from Mars Hill Church, USA. Mark has been in the Christian news a lot lately for a variety of reasons, none of which have cast him in a favourable light.

Senior leader, his choice of name for his church is interesting in that Mars was the Roman god of war. Mark seems bent on vying with Mars for the lead position in terms of pugnacious behaviour. Regardless of the subject matter, his demeanour is combative, seeming to be bent on picking a fight with any viewpoint and expression of Church that differs with his own.

His church website earnestly states: ‘…we believe Jesus is God so everything we do is all about Him’. I suppose that most churches would like to consider themselves to be operating under the same philosophy. However, in the process of being ‘all about Jesus’, he appears to have forgotten that God so loved the world. Paul, himself a contrary and combative person by nature, had learned by the time he came to write 1 Corinthians 13, that no matter how right you may be, if you are not operating in love, rightness does not have the power to validate unloving and graceless behaviour.

Mark’s recent remarks about the dearth of ‘young’, ‘male’ leaders in the UK, and the cowardice and ineffectiveness of UK church leaders has not earned him a great deal of good publicity. Quoting from the interview, (http://www.christiantoday.com/article/ mark.driscoll.takes.aim.at.the.cowards.in.the.british.church/29159.htm) Mark says -

“Let’s just say this: right now, name for me the one young, good Bible teacher that is known across Great Britain. You don’t have one – that’s the problem. There are a bunch of cowards who aren’t telling the truth.”

With this sweeping generalisation, Mark not only dismisses the effectiveness of all but the youngest and male-est of leaders, (that excludes me on both counts) he also sets himself up as judge and jury of what could be called courageous, honest leadership. Being ‘known’, as in having achieved a celebrity status that reaches across the pond to his bastion of power in Mars Hill, USA seems to be his criterion for evaluating that.

Apart from being shocked at the temerity of this young guy’s overt and narrow-minded statements, I’m also alarmed for his future. As a veteran of over 30 years of ministry, I’ve seen many great leaders and church celebrities come and go… and for the most part, the reason they tend to go is just this – their total lack of humility and the blatant arrogance with which they purport their own opinions as being the (only) Word of the Lord.

One of the greatest marks of genuine theological study, and one that I have come to value deeply and which tends to be diligently practiced in the UK where I live and minister, is the willingness to engage in conversation with those of a differing theological standpoint.

Rich Erickson, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, wrote a paper entitled ‘Critical Openness’ which is ‘the willingness to listen, to think and to respond with intelligence and grace’. In this paper he advocates the necessity for all serious scholars of the Word to God to be willing to embark on the Grand Theological Conversation that began when God first began to speak to humanity in the Garden of Eden. That conversation has continued down through the millennia, and despite its flaws, the Church has grown and developed because of it.

All Christians, whether church leaders or scholars or members trying to live in the way God wants, are flawed and broken by their own histories. We tend to see everything through the lens from which we have been taught, either by our own teachers, or by life. When a person gets serious with God, one of the things they can learn, if they are willing, is that they don’t know everything, and that what God speaks to them is only the tiniest fragment of what He knows. He tells some of what He knows to one person and other aspects of what He knows to others… together we can form a great understanding of who God is, complete with all of the seemingly contradictory aspects of theology that we find hard to reconcile with the bit that we heard from Him.

My concern for Driscoll is this. More times than I want to remember, I have watched great leaders fall badly from their pedestals when they have begun to believe their own publicity. The tenet from Proverbs 16:18 ‘pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction’ is unfortunately as much a fact now as it has ever been.

The Church has lost too many great leaders because of their inability to listen to and respect others, and for this we grieve deeply. David had no joy in the death of Saul, but wept copiously because the mighty had fallen. None of us want to see Driscoll and others who skate so near the abyss of their own prideful deception, fall into it. They need prayer to help them grow past the adolescent thrill of their own successes and into a rich and adult faith in which they value and respect others of different understanding, without having to embrace the same opinions. Maturity is expressed most clearly when people learn to disagree agreeably.

However, I also suggest that, just as when anyone acts in an attention seeking way, the best option would be to ignore Driscoll’s rants. The quickest way to help people become aware of their lack of wisdom is to go on with what you know to be right and let them conclude from the resulting lack of attention, that it may be time for them to change. That’s how anyone who has successfully made the journey from adolescence to adulthood has accomplished it. I hope Mark can find a way to make this vital transition. He has so many giftings and his loss would be a loss for the Body of Christ, but we all know that gifting isn’t character and it’s for lack of mature character that great leaders fall.

In the meantime, there’s a world to be reached by people who carry the Kingdom of God selflessly and diligently, despite their gender, their manner, their lack of street-cred as understood by others whose call is different. Let’s move past our irritation and offence at the childish and irrelevant rantings of one young guy who hasn’t learned any better yet. And let’s pray for him, that when the opportunities come for him to learn, as we know they will, that God will enable him to grasp what is being shown to him and that we will see the evidence of that in the changes that take place in his life and ministry.

Love,

BEV

Bev Murrill, 31/01/2012