On being God's bruiser

Mark Driscoll started a Bible study in his lounge in Seattle just 15 years ago.

His church — Mars Hill — now numbers some 19,000, and his fiery straight-talking sermons are watched by thousands more online. EN’s Tim Thornborough caught up with him at the London Men’s Convention.

EN: Mark, as they say to James Bond, your reputation precedes you. You’ve come in for a lot of criticism over the years for your style, and the way you talk. How do you respond to that criticism?

MD: I think I’m learning, by the grace of God to turn critics into coaches and ask, ‘Is there anything truthful in their criticism, is there anything I can learn from that, is there any way I can do better?’ So, you know. I’m not saying I’m humble, but I’m working on it.

Handling criticism

EN: Does it sadden you, that people from even quite Reformed churches might say that you’re very crude and that you’re not a godly character.

MD: I’m a human being, so it does grieve me, but at the end of the day as well, I think we need to repent of both sin and religion. Religious people are very quick to call others to repent of sin, but they’re very slow to repent of their own religion which can be moralism, traditionalism and self-righteousness.

EN: You are just 40 years old, which is quite young in ministry. Have you found people to step up and mentor you in a way that was constructive and helpful?

MD: Absolutely. It’s why I’m part of things like the Gospel Coalition. I am a young pastor; I started the church in Seattle when I was just 25. We’re not part of any denomination and so we’re pretty independent. I’ve intentionally joined things like the Gospel Coalition to be part of a bigger team and tribe and community and to be in relationship with older men who are godly.

They love me enough that when they have a problem or a concern they will pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey Mark, what about this or that?’ and sometimes I explain myself and then they say, ‘OK, well, that’s reasonable’. Other times they say, ‘We think you should apologise publicly’, and I will and I have.

EN: Why do you think you’ve come in for such hostility?

MD: The hard part for me is how do I speak to my audience in Seattle when the world is listening? My audience is Seattle, the least-churched city in America, at least it was, it no longer is. The congregation of Mars Hill is primarily young, college-educated single men who are usually addicted to pornography and are sexually active.

And so, when a 60-year-old grandmother in another country hears the sermon, it’s shocking to her. You’ve always got multiple audiences and so usually what you’ll find is that it’s not the people in the room that have the problem, it’s the people that are far, far, far away from the room.

Satellite congregations

EN: Interestingly, you’ve just articulated a strong argument against something else you do: satellite congregations with preaching by live feed, or pre-recorded, rather than by a local pastor. The criticism would be that it is not an expression of local church.

MD: We do use video, but those congregations are all in major urban centres where the culture is very similar: secular, liberal, single, sexually-active, non-Christian and so we are intentionally going after, as a church, primarily young men who are non-Christians, single, college-educated in urban areas and those men tend to be quite similar. If we were aiming, for example, for a very rural part of England, then things would be different. But London’s much more like Seattle than London is like a very rural part of England. They’re not the same, but the kind of people here are similar.

We currently have ten campuses across two states, 30 services a Sunday.

EN: But isn’t it always better to have a permanent pastor?

MD: At the end of the day the Scripture doesn’t forbid it and so it’s not a sin. It’s not something that a church has to do, but it’s something that a church can do.

Men like Tim Keller are doing multi-site with a live preaching team. John Piper’s using video also, but, at the end of the day, you know, some who are criticising don’t understand some of the grace of God we’re trying to steward. I mean we’ve grown by as many as 800 people in a single day. You know, just on Easter alone, we baptised 724 new converts. And so, if the average pastor who had 100 people all of a sudden had 1,000 show up he’d have to figure out what to do with that.

And we didn’t set out to become a multi-campus church. It just got to the point where I was preaching six times on Sundays, an hour plus each, and we were turning upwards of 100-200 people away per service because they couldn’t fit in the building.

Some would say, well you should plant churches. This year we gave away $1.7 million to church planting and I oversee a network that has planted 400 churches in the US, so we do a huge amount of church planting as well. But our basic problem is what do you do with all these people who show up on Sunday. Some people say, ‘We don’t like your answer’, but the question is, do you have a better one? Do you want fewer people to go to church, do you want me to just turn them away?

Emergent church

EN: There’s some confusion in the UK over this whole term emerging/emergent church. Could you just articulate what that actually means in the US? Would you describe what you are doing as emerging/emergent church?

MD: I wouldn’t use that term for what we are doing now, no. I think the term has morphed and, basically, come to be liberalism, modern-day liberalism. It’s young and cool, but it’s still liberalism, where the inerrancy of Scripture is not held, the belief in human sinfulness is not held, the necessity of Jesus alone for salvation is not held, a real hell is not held, penal substitutionary atonement where Jesus died in our place for our sins is not held. It perhaps started as younger leaders in evangelicalism trying to figure out how to reach post-modern, urban people but it’s morphed into just cool liberalism and so I would not identify with that at all. I’m theologically very conservative.

EN: Rob Bell and Brian McClaren are both in that emergent category. What are your thoughts on Bell’s latest book Love Wins. Do you know him? Do you meet with him?

MD: Rob Bell’s probably the only one in that camp that I have never personally met. Don Carson, who I really respect, and is a brilliant New Testament scholar, I think said the book is blasphemous. That’s a big statement from a man of Carson’s stature. Franklin Graham recently said he thinks Rob is, quote ‘a heretic and a false teacher’.

So, when men of that stature are saying things that plainly, I think you must have crossed a very serious line.

Celebrity?

EN: Whether you like it or not, you are a bit of a celebrity preacher in the worldwide church. How do you deal with that, how do you keep yourself grounded?

MD: Well, you have fans and you have foes and you can’t listen too much to either. If you listen only to your foes you’d be depressed. If you only listen to your fans you’d be proud. So I try to hang out with my wife and kids a lot, read my Bible, repent of my sin and hang out with my elders.

But, at the end of the day, I am the pastor of a local church, dealing with people whose lives are in crisis — and I don’t want to leave local ministry. I like being a pastor, it’s what I intend to do for the rest of my life.

An interview with Mark Driscoll

Handling criticism

Satellite congregations

Emergent church

Celebrity?

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