Rise and Fall of Mars Hill | Theocast

hi this is john and today on theocast we are going to be reviewing the rise and fall of mars hill and this is not necessarily a podcast about criticizing mark or his ministry but it's more about looking at history and theology and examining the motives of the church and the mission of the church we try to give you some helpful ways to understand how it is we get here not only with this particular church but with a lot of churches that seem to be fallen and ministers who have been falling recently in history we hope you enjoy the conversation if you'd like to help support theocast you can do that by leaving us a review on itunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app you can also follow us on instagram twitter and facebook plus we have a facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there thanks for listening [Music] welcome to theocast encouraging worry pilgrims to rest in christ conversations about the christian life from a reformed and pastoral perspective your hosts today are three pastors we have justin perdue pastor of covenant baptist church in asheville north carolina i'm john moffett pastor of grace reform church in spring hill tennessee and just below me so below nashville is where i'm at and below me in spring hill is our guest today first time on the podcast not new to theocast but new on this podcast is patrick crandall he is the pastor of covenant grace church in or covenant grace colombia as it's correctly known in columbia tennessee patrick we were able to send him down there with about 60 people back in the first week of june and you are three months officially in to church planting and so patrick it's good to have you here brother tell us a little bit about you the church and well but let me continue actually there's a little bit more about patrick and then we'll ask him some questions but first of all just so you guys know patrick uh he is a graduate from westminster you graduated 2014 2014 and uh was already working in a church the fields church down in um what's technically what city was that in carlsbad carlsbad in carlsbad california they're eight years on staff oh ten ten ten years as an associate there's when the church was well below 100 and uh part of the acts 29 network and has moved out here last september joined working with me and we started men's women's bible studies and in june we we didn't think it was going to happen in june with the pandemic but in june the lord blessed us and uh you are now meeting in colombia in a christian school and up over 100 people now so anyways that's uh patrick and well patrick um tell us brother one of the things we're doing now is talking about what we're preaching so what are you feeding your sheep right now yeah thanks guys thanks for letting me join the conversation john and i get to have conversations every week that's right he has to deal with me but uh it's great to be able to do this i've been blessed by theocast over the years and glad to be part of the it's good to have you conversations here thanks bro yeah so we've just hit our three month mark since we started services out from from grace and we've been working our way through ephesians i couldn't really think of a much better book to start a church plant with with that rich theology of the gospel for the first half and then the practical realities of how it plays out starting in chapter four which is what we just got to so last week we did the first part of chapter four talking about the priority of the unity of the body which is really good and kind of pushing back against the idea that christian maturity is about strength and independence it's actually about humility and love and gentleness and pursuing that unity which is really good and this week we move into the diversity of the church right the gifts that god gives for the building up of the body yeah ephesians 4 makes yet another appearance yes it does i think we're i think we might be at 100 episodes yeah last week we realized that after we recorded we're like well i mean there that went and it came and went we didn't really say anything about it here we go yeah the um uh the other thing is i forgot to mention that that patrick is actually in studio with me so this is my first ever in studio in person recording john do you wanna say anything about just patrick and his role and like the fact that people may see him on the show from time to time yeah so two things while we have them on here today uh patrick um is obviously um i've been a pastor for over 10 years now church planting which is always fun to have church planters on the theocast podcast uh but also he is going to uh be a regular contributor here going forward means we'll get to see him um every so often covering certain topics we're going to have him back on we're going to talk about evangelism every church planner's favorite thing to do and uh maybe how we have misinterpreted what that means in the new testament and how maybe sometimes the fear that we have is not uh scripture based so we'll that'll be in a few weeks specifically why we're about patrick on as this episode and the first one we'll let uh justin you can introduce the subject but yeah uh patrick actually was a part of the acts 29 network that mark driscoll started back when it was in just the early stages i think you were in the first 20 churches that's correct yeah really first 20 30. so patrick's kind of been up close and personal kind of watching the growth of the ministry and uh the fields church that he is at it's an excellent church pat justin and i both have been there we had our first theocast live event there about two years ago which is where we met uh patrick and started our conversation and not long after that i got a phone call from him saying hey so what do you think about doing a church plant to which i said sure figure out how to get the money and we'll do it and somehow he figured out how to get the money so yeah apparently he had he's a gangster in la or something like that so that's kidding yes something like that hey let's uh let's jump into this this is an important topic so justin please explain why we would want to do something it's pretty different for us this is not an unusual podcast so talk talk to us we occasionally do things like this but it's quite rare to your point so the title of the episode i'm sure has been a dead giveaway for people we are not trying to just do something that's uh in the realm of click bait by talking about the rise and fall of mars hill today the podcast put out by christianity today has been listened to by a lot of people that's probably an understatement and i know even in my own local church there are a number of individuals who were very impacted by mark driscoll by mars hill church even by acts 29 in in that whole movement in its early years and people have been affected by the fall of mark driscoll over the last half dozen seven years or so and so we thought it could be good for us given that everybody is currently listening to this content people who are very familiar with mars hill are listening to it people like myself who were not familiar with mars hill and really had never listened to driscoll preach um i'm probably one of the the anomalies who encountered calvinism in the 2000s and wasn't infected by driscoll very much but it doesn't matter like everybody's listening to this podcast and it's it's a good listen it's well done the content is it's engaging it's troubling it's heartbreaking it's all of those things and people are having strong reactions to it and the three of us are not an exception to that like we're listening to it and we're thinking we have a lot of thoughts about it as pastors as church planters and what we thought we would do today we don't want to oversell what we're doing so you guys this is not a planned episode we haven't mapped this thing out at all we've talked about a few of our main thoughts with each other before we hit record this morning but you're being invited in on a conversation amongst the three of us as we are reacting to and interacting with the content that we've listened to that is the rise and fall of mars hill the podcast and so i'm going to kick us off just very quickly with an observation about history and circumstance that's not all that important i mean in terms of some of the things that we want to get to so just going to kind of acknowledge this and then move forward from here and get into more theological kind of takeaways so i i think one thing that did strike me guys as i listened to the podcast particularly episode two i think outlines this really well the pump had been primed for a movement like mars hill church and for a man like mark driscoll to become what he and it became you had the rise of the mega church movement in the latter part of the 20th century that i think the podcast does a good job of outlining and you had a lot of people in the 90s who you know that's that's our generation guys i mean we came of age in the 90s disenchanted with cultural christianity disenchanted with kind of moralism and all this kind of stuff that we had grown up with in the church and we were all looking for something more substantial and then comes along mark driscoll who is he's bright he's smart he's insightful he's a big personality he's an engaging speaker he says the quiet part out loud he's antagonistic against the things that many of us had wrestled with and kind of hated ourselves and then man like he really taps into something and it's not a mystery historically circumstantially as to why mars hill exploded like it did and why he became such a larger than life persona and personality in the evangelical church and so that that definitely happened and there's a lot of fallout from that and there's a lot of other stuff that that flows out of that that we're going to get to now but i started kick us off with that observation it's not surprising it makes a ton of sense when you think about it historically and logically um but now let's talk maybe more about some other significant thoughts that we have and ways that we want to interact with the content mm-hmm yeah it's um i had someone describe it as kind of like a car crash it's hard to kind of knock away man it's hard to look away yeah and uh i i remember i've heard i had several people tell me about it and i really wasn't interested in listening to it at the moment insane and then i was driving one day and i was like well i don't have anything to listen to i guess i'll see what this is about and i couldn't stop listening well it's well produced it is well done mm-hmm and then it it kind of um it got to that moment where i i i was taken back there was so much i didn't know uh i was obviously aware of mark driscoll obviously aware of his ministry early on in my you know when i was in seminary there was this big um debate between him and macarthur and and i was there for all of that and the uh i appreciated a lot of the emphasis that you could see more kind of regaining some traction as it related to godliness being standing up for women um standing up for the truth of the gospel and so some of the material that i engaged in i it's like not it's not how i would probably say it it's not how i would necessarily communicate it but i appreciated that there was somebody who was you know had a platform and was communicating things that needed to be communicated and i kind of just left it at that and then as the years went on i you know i remember reading his marriage book and that's when i went oh wow this this is not good this is and um you know i at that point i had been really engaging covenantal theology and and reformed theology and so mark really didn't fit that that that brand he was definitely a part of kind of the you know the young russell's the neo-calvinist the new calvinism or the young restless reform movement which i wasn't really intrigued by that movement i i was that seemed like they're they their history of how how far back they read was was not far back enough and uh so when i when i first engaged the marriage book that's when i became pretty concerned and not really a big fan of his anymore and anybody who would ask me about his ministry i would say yeah i'm not not i'm a little concerned about how he decides to communicate things that seem to be very very unbiblical but that's the initial reaction whenever when i started listening to the podcast i had no idea you know how bad it really was and i know there's a lot of people that have been hurt and and yeah this is pretty shocking for a lot of people you know that's my first initial thoughts uh patrick love to hear from you as well yeah so my journey with things i grew up fairly calvinistic and i had this long process of kind of figuring out how exactly to put those pieces together they didn't really come all the way together until i went to westminster and got some of the categories that they gave me like confessionalism and ordinary means of grace and things started to cover things together and things like that yeah but until then it was kind of jumping from guy to guy within the calvinistic camp trying to make sense of these different things and finding different things that resonated and kind of glomming onto that for a while until something didn't work and then finding the next guy uh and so driscoll was a big part of that for me um in my college years and right after that um loved all the stuff that everybody else loved right i loved that he was willing to say things that other people wouldn't say it pushed back against kind of traditional legalism yeah right and that that called you know you can't drink you can't dance those kinds of things it had an edge to it it was a piece right yeah and it also wasn't the soft and fluffy right eva's stuff too it was like it seemed like a third way in a different way for somebody who didn't have all those reformed confessional categories it looked like hey this might be this might be the thing i've been looking for and trying to put my finger on it really was until i got to westminster and started to get some of those categories where it all started to click and some of the stuff i saw coming out of marcel and driscoll it started to rub the wrong way like oh this seems a couple degrees off yeah yeah so i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna give just a couple of my you guys have sort of done this i haven't yet i want to talk just viscerally for a second and then i want to maybe move into my first big like theological like pastoral concern in listening to this so i found that in listening to this content i often was listening to it when i was like riding my bike or working out or something and i had so many like audible out loud moments listening to this where something would be said i mean a clip of driscoll speaking or something and i had an audible reaction with my earbuds in my ears like if somebody had walked by me or something they'd be like what is that guy listening to um so it hit hard right and i i'll just go ahead and say this i think some of my most visceral responses were uh in the episode two two things the episode about women uh john you mentioned this i think there's a great irony in this this driscoll thing where he early on was saying things that i think at least on the surface appear to be um an attempt to protect women from weak men and from men that would harm them but then the the heartbreaking sort of ironic turn in this is that it seems to me that so much of what was created by mark and what he was advocating and what ended up happening at mars hill ended up being a culture that was very abusive toward women and actually ended up demeaning them unintentionally in very significant ways and i was just greatly perplexed by so many things that i heard in particular in that episode uh and we're going to get to this maybe later the binding of the conscience in the bedroom like what you need to be doing there was just oh it was like hard to listen to uh so that was one just visceral reaction for me um the other was just shocking to me with how he spoke so aggressively antagonistically like machismo style about how look you either you either get on the bus you sit down shut up and play nice or we'll throw you off and run you over um it was just like like look i rewind it did he really say that like oh my gosh bro so those are just some visceral reactions i had and i mean may god be gracious to us and and protect us and keep us from from error right so i the the first big theological reaction though guys if i can kick us off with this because i assume we may talk about this for a minute is we all the time are advocating uh confessional theology and by that we mean a whole host of things but one of the things that means is that we are in a self-conscious way trying to be unoriginal and are aiming to simply tap into the faith once we're all delivered to the saints as outlined by saints through history in historic confessions of faith and there's a lot more to being confessional than that but it is never less than that and so i think as i'm listening to this i am struck by the what i would call the the contrast between a confessional kind of stream of thought and then what i would call the big evangelicalism the big eva kind of ethos and philosophy where we tend even if we don't mean to do this on purpose we tend to in the evangelical church build a theology in a movement you know in a church on the personality and the convictions of one man and it's like it doesn't right now we're talking about mark driscoll but literally you could plug your guy like insert your dude whether it's driscoll or whether it's piper or whether it's you know whoever james mcdonald i mean pick the guy perry noble you know any of them it's not any particular issue or or point of doctrine per se that troubles me it's the whole ethos of the thing where it really is a cult of personality and this one leader effectively becomes our confession that's right it's like what he says goes um as though he is a prophet like literally is a conduit straight from god and it's almost like there is just unchecked unquestioned thus saith the lord authority in this leadership you know person this person of leadership and influence it's it's frightening um that's that was just an initial thought and i think confessionalism and a confessional way of thinking about theology that's inherently corporate with people who are alive and with people who are long dead is one buffer in insulator from this really dangerous place that's right so when episode two i thought probably should have been what the entire podcast should have been about uh loved episode two we'll let christianity today know that i'm just kidding i'm kidding yeah well they did they did uh reach out and asked if we wanted to advertise on their pockets maybe we should have done that i mean i don't know maybe we declined but um the the episode i thought was very helpful because it really exposed the problem i didn't know it was about mark but mark's not the issue the issue is because you know uh jd coke and their podcast um it's about stanfirm it's an anglican i call the anglican version of theocast the uh he he said a statement in there that the church has really failed to catechize its people and it's true and because we don't understand historical theology we don't understand the debates that have come before and the easiest way to say that is creeds and confessions are the clarity of heresy right this is what's heretical how do we know that because of the debates the church has been in before in almost all of the episode two you will see every single one of those men or those leaders they aren't basing their teaching off of anything historical other than what their conclusion is to be and almost all of them are dispensational and so when you have guys who are coming at it from i just believe what the bible says but really it's whatever i interpret the bible to be your confession at that moment goes as far back as the guy standing in the pulpit in other words you can't say that you can hold the preacher accountable to what he says because whatever he says goes uh and when some people say well i don't believe in confessions i just believe in the bible yet they're holding a bible with a man's name on it with his commentary in it which is a confession you're you're waving your study bible in my face it's like where did that's where those guys came from yeah that's right the the danger of when when the the the guy in the pulpit you know you call them the senior pastor the i mean they have all kinds of names now visionary pastor visionary caster whatever you want to call him he and some of these guys are they're good teachers they're faithful teachers but they they're very good leaders they're usually very engaging personalities yeah right i remember listening to james mcdonald over 20 years ago when he was teaching the radio and that was very i was benefited greatly by a lot of his teaching because it was verse by verse it was helpful uh but what when you have guys who there's no structure there's nothing there that they can be held accountable to for their own sake and their own sanity you do have the craziness that things like james mcdonald and men i even listened to a podcast that was talking about um the stuff that was happening liberty university and and all of that nonsense that goes on over there uh christianity it seems to repeat itself over and over again when it doesn't pay attention to history one of the things i do with my children is i sit down weekly and we work through the confession because i want them to hear don't believe this because dad told you to believe this you need to understand that if you believe in christ and you've been baptized into his church here's your history this is how we got here and this is these documents have been handed to us to make sure that we don't fall into the same traps mark driscoll and james mcdonald aren't the first leaders to lead people down a path that is to destruction now and they and technically they're not heretical teachers they weren't teaching another gospel but they definitely got off track on what was the priority of the local church which is majority if i want to say anything about the rise and fall of marcel the whole podcast and we'll get into this but when when you lose the focus and mission of the church which i think the confessions help you do that man that church can go it can go in that's right it can go into any any gutter that's on either side of the road and i think we saw that with both james and i mean lots of churches unfortunately if you're new to theocast we have a free ebook available for you called faith versus faithfulness a primer on rest and if you've struggled with legalism a lack of assurance or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a reformed confessional perspective you can get your free copy at theocast.org primer yeah i'd echo everything you guys said and i think what happens in most evangelical churches is you have a doctrinal statement right but it's like a one-page doc it's basically a couple of sentences tacked onto the apostles but it's something the lead pastor put together right yeah so it's it has almost no history and it's incredibly minimalistic right but the bottom line is no church is doctrinally minimalistic you have more beliefs and more things that are set than that and if they are not coming from a confession or something like that those blanks are being filled in by the guy who's teaching right and with whatever he wants because there's nothing kind of constraining him and kind of fencing him in to to a box and i mean that in the best way it's one of the things i love about being confessionals i talk to my new church is how the confession protects them right because this is what we have agreed on this robust view of doctrine and theology that they can hold me to without being theologians without having gone to seminary i can't pull that trump card and just say well you guys just don't know as much as we do they can say hey this is this is what we affirm as a church and you've gone outside those bounds so it helpfully boxes me in and constrains me to a definition of the faith that has come down through time that has answered heresies that has been tested by many people many churches versus what i got into a room with a couple guys and threw together yeah yeah a couple of thoughts on what you guys are saying like one i agree john with what you were talking about how having a confession of faith or being confessional actually protects the mission of the church and keeps it keeps it pure and i mean the mission of the church at its most basic level as we agree on all the time is the proclamation of the gospel in the administration of the sacraments for the salvation of god's people and so ultimately it is it's paul in first corinthians too like i desire to know nothing among you except christ and him crucified i mean that is the mission uh at the most basic level of the local church is this is about christ this is about him and the people who need him and then we can with the best of intentions right we can turn and to slightly redirect that trajectory the trajectory of that mission and turn it into this kind of movement where we at such and such a church or we under this guy's influential leadership we have really tapped into the secret like we've got the special sauce that nobody else has and we've got the corner on the market as far as how to do church and we're going over here and we're going to win the city you know like that's not sticking that way yeah it becomes the mission like as i was listening to the podcast over and over again it becomes this very kind of wartime and i understand that the scriptures use this imagery right but it's very much this like wartime paradigm of we are going into battle um perpetually it seems to win the city and the way that we're going to do that it's like yeah we're going to preach christ that's almost assumed like we want people to come to jesus that's that's stated sometimes assumed at others but we're going to do that by you know getting people married and by people having a bunch of babies and by people buying houses and we're going to you know we're going to get jobs in the city and we're going to take over the city for jesus becomes the the mission rather than i think something like you want to sort of back that up and always keep the heralding of christ and the loving of one another in the forefront of your mind as a leader in the church and i mean while we're talking about that mission thing another reaction i had that's very much related to this as i was listening is i think that there was a decent amount of over spiritualization going on as i listened to marx speak as i listened to him preach and teach where literally what i mean by that is we are turning everything into a spiritual matter we are taking things that are not inherently spiritual or even inherently moral and turning them into spiritual and moral issues and you could hear this a lot in the way that he would frame everything in terms of yeah it's it's war like we're in we're in the midst of war guys um everything is about your fidelity to christ including like i alluded to earlier like what you're doing in the bedroom and and whether or not women should work outside the home or fill in the blank like it's all about the mission and we've got to be on mission and i mean he even uses this language about firing pastors and whatever it's like they got off missions so we threw him off the bus you know and so like everything becomes about the mission like literally everything and and i'm like man there's no room whatsoever for just ordinary faithfulness it doesn't seem like this is just another way to repackage that kind of radical stuff uh that apparently we're all called to in christ and simply to trust jesus love the brethren love my family be an honorable employee where i work apparently i'm still not i might do all that and not be on mission right yeah yeah and i think those things are really tied together in this sense i was in the military before i went into ministry and if there was one thing i took away from my military training it was pure training in pragmatism because when you're in the military your job is to win yeah and there is no box you do whatever it takes to win like and that is the goal it is the goal there is nothing else you sacrifice everything to that goal right and that's where some of that over spiritualization that happened with mark happened everything now has to serve the mission so you will make things imperatives you'll bind people's consciences to things that the lord doesn't in because it serves that mission because it serves right and so when everything is about the mission it really opens the door to a pragmatism where we end up with a the ends justify the means church and if you read the new testament and we have the exact opposite the ends are what god does through the holy spirit and he decides what he wants to do what we're told about over and over again is what we are to be doing and how we are to be doing it he produces the increase whatever he wants to right but there's a whole lot more about the manner in which we do things and and the stuff we're supposed to be doing along the way versus what we are supposed to produce and show at the end you hear multiple times in the podcast about the results right and the results really justified the means no matter what was going on and no matter how out of control mark may have been it's like look at look at what we're doing and you could hear look at the improvement that's right you could hear the staff and the other pastors when they're being interviewed saying it was really hard for us i mean it brought tears these days where we saw all these baptisms and see all these people coming to christ and you even hear these stories about people who wanted nothing to do with church and left the church and now back in the church and love the church and those those stories are hard because i think that those people are genuine believers yeah and what what can be so complicated about christianity is that people say well you you're just being critical because you know your church is small and their church is big and you know what threw me for a loop and and i remember calling justin and we talked about this i said man when when someone asked mark who who like who's who's mentoring you who's kind of like watching you they mention piper and his response was well and i'm i'm assuming this is a legit conversation and his response was well you know piper's church is smaller than me how can he mentor me and it became not about the nature and the character of a man and as a shepherd and as a guy who needs to be watched over unless he too stumble it became about the game of a size and how big it became and that is it's so dangerous we all want to see multiple people rest in christ but ultimately that is god's responsibility we all want to see fruit we all we want to see fruit sure that's right and it's you know we can be we can become discouraged about oh well you know i only had 30 people in my church or 300 or whatever the number of it can be but this is this is the i think the result of the moderate evangelical church that a successful pastor i think there's you know patrick you can speak into this but in acts 29 they kind of talk about like if you're not this size by this year your church is a failure and i'm like i'm sorry but there's nothing in the new testament that tells me where a successful church needs to be at at a successful time frame in a successful moment and when i see when i see the command of a pastor he is to feed a sheep he has to tend his sheep and he is to love and care for them and god gives the increase i mean paul literally says some plant and some water and god brings the increase so if a pastor is faithfully shepherding his flock by feeding them and tending them then that he is a successful man it's not his responsibility to determine what the size of a church is going to be he cares for people he evangelizes and he lets god bring the increase but the problem is in a results-driven world that just doesn't work you know i i hate when i'm around other pastors when you get that question of like well how big is your church or how you it's like why does that matter to you you know what's the significance of that who cares you know who cares how many churches you've planted that's gotta be the glory it's an angel dilemma though john i mean because there's a quote from a from john brown i mean he's a like and this is back several hundred years ago puritan era where he writes to a younger minister and says i know that you will be tempted to be ashamed at the size of your congregation because you know it's so small yeah but plea but please know that when you stand before it on the last day you will know that you've had enough in terms of enough people to care for like so don't be wigging out you know about the size of your church and the size of your assembly and we all are prone to do that my goodness i mean we're three pastors three church planters here and it is so easy for your identity to be wrapped up in how many people show up on sunday i mean that that just speaks to the frailty that's in all of us right that's not to our credit that's to our shame you know that we think in those ways um i thought one one thing too guys is i'm listening to you talking as i reflect back on my experience listening to podcast i was struck over and over again by like you were talking about john the baptism and all the people coming to faith and people who hated the church are now in the church and love the church it's like look it's clear that the lord did some really great stuff through this like i don't think that can be debated because the tendency amongst evangelicals too is like when there's a failure and when this kind of expose piece comes out it's like well we need to literally burn the whole thing down and act like it never happened like we need to so distance ourselves from driscoll and mars hill that anything that ever took place there couldn't have been from god and it's like you can't do that in a fallen world because if anything the scriptures bear witness to the fact that he's always used broken vessels to advance his purposes and that's that's true it's been true for millennia and so i think it's better for us to say you know what the lord obviously was a part of this he in spite of the sin and failure here did some phenomenal things brought people to christ i mean stoked a fire in people's hearts in terms of love for the church and love for their brothers and sisters and that's the lord's doing uh it ought to humble us all i mean that he accomplishes this stuff in like through our sin and failure not in spite of it apart from it no no it's just right part of the reformed tradition which all three of us here espouse and hold to and believe that it is biblical is a plurality of leaders or as we say a plurality of elders see i grew up in the baptist world fundamentalist baptist world where ceo the ceo pastor is basically you never you don't question him and his word amen and his uh and i i saw the the impact i had on my own dad he was a pastor the pressure that put under him i see how it can affect other churches and even though mark had elders it was unfortunately you can see the structure where those guys weren't keeping him accountable and it's in many ways they couldn't because of the way in which the structure that was set up there and it is scary when one man has that much influence and not much power and we're even changing the bylaws to give him more exactly exactly and i don't want to make this just a you know a bash of mark driscoll i think it's a broader problem where we become more concerned about running the church like a business where you have a business model and you have both you have ceo like it's awards yeah and and it's more about the decision-making process where pastors become businessmen instead of shepherds and they're more about movement that's right they're about leading this movement which you can hear going back to your point justin that everything is about the mission everything is about what are we trying to accomplish which i agree the church should be on mission but the mission that god was handed to them by god and it's not this transformation of city and it's not this i mean you get lost it's the preacher christ that's right when you look at i mean ephesians 4 i know we mentioned it but when paul seems to give us the clearest mission of what the church is it's like when we all function as we should we are building each other up into the maturity of the person of christ and somehow we have lost it um two weeks ago i preached a sermon on the shattered church or shattered by the church and because the church has lost one its history into its mission it it runs people over i mean mark is just an example of hundreds of churches that just run people over because if you show up and you have problems and you and you are you are weak and feeble and this church isn't is it's like moving somewhere and you're going to drag them down they just don't have time for that they don't have time for counseling they don't have time to carry your burden they don't have time to sit and weep with you i mean the thing that paul says is weep with those who weep the church should literally if if someone is hurting then we hurt with them but in today's movement you can't do that because it's more about growth and movement and power and more campuses and more and more and more and more and more and i'm looking at going look at how many people you have left in the wake of your mission how can that be the mission of the church yeah really quick before toss it to patrick i think it's clear that in the early years a lot of that was happening like based on my listening of to the podcast but then as it evolved and the thing got bigger it became all about the growth of the platform and that's i think one of the more humbling sobering things that we all need to be mindful of uh for sure like as we're thinking about about leading leading churches and uh and loving people um yeah that just struck me john as you were talking about it i agree with you and it seems like that was happening but that was lost somewhat over the course of years yeah yeah just a couple of thoughts to piggyback on what you guys have been saying one of the things i've heard over the years is healthy things grow right and but that is true in part but it depends on how you define growth first of all right are we defining that growth by the way that scripture does right versus our our self-defined mission right and the way that we've kind of changed the mission and purpose of the church the other thing is unhealthy things grow too right the wheat and the tares grow up together so to just start using great concentration the appearance of fruit as justification for doing anything essentially it really is a manifestation of a theology of glory right that that the advance of the church looks like this it's this magisterial glorious thing where we're kind of taking things over instead of right a theology of the cross where we are simply proclaiming christ caring for each other in a broken world where we're going to have trouble where the things of the world will flourish at times and our glory is to come not here and so i think that is how we define some of those things we talk about is so important and making sure we're constrained by scripture yeah i think a couple final observations from me and then you guys maybe make yours too one i was astonished to listen to uh almost like to hear driscoll speak with pride about the number of bodies that laid behind the mars hill bus like and he said by god's grace it'll be a mountain when we're done and i'm like i mean just to interject on that there's another podcast that interviews about his new church and they literally have a bus parked in the parking lot for that visual purpose yeah so i'm i'm like man um i understand in some to some extent that at times there will be people that are in the church that are actually not of us and that's why church discipline exists and those kinds of things i i we all agree with that uh but the fact that you are wearing this like a badge of honor that you're not excommunicating people for unrepentant hard-hearted obstinate sin that's not what this is that's not what he means he's like if you're not on the mission if you're not buying into this particular vision and what we're doing and you're not abiding by all of these various things that we do here then we're going to throw you off and run you over and it's going to be because we're doing god's work that we're doing that you know in the name of god we're going to throw you off and run you over and this is obviously a good thing let me look at paul he had to get rid of people at points it's like homie yeah i don't i don't think that's faithful exegesis you know i don't think that's what the lord is telling us to do um if anything if we're going to strive to do anything as pastors ought to we not strive to keep people in the fold for goodness sakes you know and and preach christ to them and love them in such a way that we would see them restored rather than taking pride in the fact that we threw them off uh so that was what last thing it's very much related to some of the stuff we're talking about john you were mentioning counseling and weeping with people and all this other stuff i i was shocked at how much and it all serves the mission so it makes entire sense because we're all about this particular mission this particular brand here's how mars hill does church there was so much like gross binding of the conscience that goes so far beyond scripture it was wild and i think example after example of what i would call very significant pastoral overreach where it's a really an abuse of the pastoral office and an abuse of the pastoral authority that the lord has given us it's like look we deal as pastors in the areas of the preaching of christ in the administration of the sacraments and then we deal in the areas of sin and repentance period yeah like for us to then go and tell people uh like oh well you know you're gonna you're gonna do this you know intense pre-marital thing like you wanna get married okay well you're gonna meet with a mentor couple and this and this and this may happen and you're gonna have to tell them everything about all of your failures sexually and the whole you know your whole life and then they're going to assess it and they may very well tell you you can't get married you know and it's like i mean that's one example or here's how you need to conduct yourself as husband and wife or you know here's what it is like women you know there are certain roles that they need to occupy and if they're working outside the home clearly you're in sin the male's failed because he's not leading the right way i mean it's just over and over and over and over again like all these things that the bible doesn't speak to definitively at all yet we're telling people that they must do it this way that is a man that's a way to abuse people and really throw a bunch of clutter on on top of the gospel and i think that occurred sadly from what i listened to anyway yeah that was a huge thing the reformers pushed back on because that was what was because rome was doing that right the view of the church's authority was that's right it was magisterial authority like a king it was authoritative because they said it yeah in ecclesiastical courts were a thing right to your point inquisition that whole deal right yeah and then on the other side you had the anabaptists right who are essentially spiritual anarchists nobody has any authority right it's just me in my world the libertarian whatever i feel like it says yeah the reformers push back on both right there is authority within the church but it is ministerial authority the church has authority as it faithfully ministers the word of god and that authority stops where the word stops we can't bind anybody's conscience beyond where the word of god does and so i'll even do this when i'm counseling people i make a very clear distinction what i'm telling them hey thus saith the lord you you have to do this this isn't an optional thing versus where i'm giving them wisdom i'm so like hey this has been helpful for people i've seen this be get but i can't bind your conscience to do that because i don't have that authority we're not financial advisors we're not psychologists right people that come to me people that come to me seeking wisdom probably grow weary of they probably know that the thing i'm going to save for the first two to three minutes i'm going to be super clear about you know what this is and uh where my authority does and does not lie in this situation it's like hey if this is what you want for me to just talk to you as your brother in christ and your friend about this particular thing i'm happy to do that there may very well be other people in this church that are way more you know able to speak to this than me but i'm happy to talk to you about it happy to process it with you but i have no unique authority or wisdom to offer here you know and i mean i'm sure people are like okay he's saying that again you know but i think to your point patrick john i know you do the same thing we do need to help our people know where our authority lies and where it doesn't uh because we are not just this you know like unilaterally just kind of making decisions for everyone in our congregations about every single thing right i mean god help us good friend of mine uh mike abendroth on a podcast recently said unfortunately congregants look at their pastors if they're competent in all things yeah and we are not competent in all things we are called to be competent in few things and that's you to be able to uh you're right to properly administrate the word and shepherd the flock that's what we're supposed to be competent in if we're going to be put in that position and this is why james says not many of you should be teachers you're probably not confident to do it uh so it's hard when you know we do get advice for a lot of things and even when it comes down to certain areas of counseling i'd tell people i'm like i'm not competent to handle that that is outside the realm of a theological issue that is that is a domestic issue and you're going to have that's a civil issue or whatever it is yeah right my uh my last shot here i know we're going over time is uh for someone who's been rocked by this my encouragement to you is um i too have experienced this i have lost mentors um i unfortunately i grew up at a pastor's home and in the fundamentals baptist world there's been a lot of guys in the news over the years i've seen this i've seen this happen unfortunately more often than not and the news just loves this they love to see the fall and uh i being one that has experienced um people that i love go through this it is a good and helpful check to remind yourself of your motivation so if you're a pastor you're listening to this my encouragement to you is these are these are healthy moments from the lord for you to examine your own motivations and ask yourself you know what how am i being held accountable can someone call me on the carpet who who can confront me if i'm being arrogant and prideful and out of control and i tell my congregants in all of our new members class the reason why i have you read the confession and agree to it before you join our congregation is that you're going to hold me accountable to this confession and i'm going to hold you accountable to it and it protects the both of us and um this is a historical document that's been handed down by the churches and affirmed by thousands and hundreds of people and i think we should pay attention to those kind of things now listen not every confessional church holds the priority of plurality of elders and a confession you can walk into a confessional church and that church will absolutely fail you if they don't see the history and the importance of what is there which justin means we need to do a church podcast soon which we have scheduled on confessionalism which maybe we'll bring patrick in for that one as well yeah maybe one last shot for me too i'm sorry i'm just no more you're done you hit your quota i don't i don't want to leave this regular episode without saying this like we ought not listen to a podcast like this just assuming that we have it all together and that we have the moral high ground and that we have the answer to every problem that ails us that is not a healthy posture we ought to listen to it with humility we ought to grieve when we hear of things like this we should weep with those who have been hurt by this and yeah we should we should pray frankly for the grace of god that he would keep us from error and from wounding other people so we don't want to come in with that kind of condescending mindset of well if they would have just understood this this this and this then clearly this wouldn't have happened and yeah we've got it all figured out so this isn't going to happen here that's we need to galatians 6 1 right the second part of that verse is that we ought to keep watch on ourselves you know unless we two fall i mean to that point justin i i sent this to all of my leaders and elders in training and said you guys need to listen to this because we need to make sure that we don't fall into the same traps you know as as i'll say this before we go but as paul says uh these old testament failures were given as an example that you too may not fall in them i think it's helpful to see the failures of others and say that's right hey i think we need to pay attention to that the the frailty of the flesh is real and don't harden your heart yeah that's right and just remember just our the tendencies of our flesh of wanting to look at the other people's failures to feel validated better indicated self-justified and that is so prevalent in our culture in the church outside of the church this is this is what social media exists for it seems like at times is to look at everybody else's failures and fallings so that we can say well it's not me we're going to move over to the simpler from mono podcast we're going to be talking over there multiple other things but how does the church respond to things like this do we have responsibilities to go after something like a mark driscoll or a james mcdonald uh how do as shepherds do we uh shepherd our own congregation what if you find yourself in a church where it is more of a dictatorship uh how do you handle that as well these are what we call a little bit more intimate and what we call team conversations simple for monda are those who have partnered with us to spread the message of confessional theology reformed theology not only to strengthen our own hearts and our own communities but to really build up the local church this is really what the design of this ministry is for if you'd like to learn more about it you can go to theocast.org and that's where we uh have our app our podcast and local and online groups to meet for the sake of edification that we might build each other up and the church so if you'd like to participate in that we'd love to have you there patrick welcome it's good to have you here we look forward to having you back as well as jimmy jimmy should be back here in a few weeks um as he gets his schedule up and going these two are our new um what do we call regular contributors all right we'll see you guys [Music] you

Channel: THEOCAST

Views: 995

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: jon moffitt, justin perdue, rise and fall of mars hill, rise and fall of mars hill podcast, rise and fall of mars hill church, rise and fall of mars hill christianity today, mark driscoll, mark driscoll how dare you, mark driscoll interview, mark driscoll sermons, rise and fall of mars hill theme song, Rise and Fall, mars hill church scandal, mars hill church, mark driscoll mars hill scandal, mark driscoll mars hill, Mark Driscoll marriage, Acts 29, Mark Driscoll Acts 29

Id: dX1r2morO-g

Length: 52min 14sec (3134 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021