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"I knew I wanted to share Amy’s story, but I didn’t feel like the timing was right until now."

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Originally posted by Enoch:
I don't know who Mark Driscoll is, but:-

1. He's entitled to be heard on his version of the story, and

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Originally posted by Komensky:
Of course these blogging stories are prone to exaggeration, but the sheer number of 'Mars-Hill Recovery' sites, groups and blogs that are appearing suggests that, even accepting some exaggeration, there is some consistency in the stories. Moreover, a number of them have produced printed evidence in form of letters and emails about the cultish behaviour at Mars Hill..

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Originally posted by Johnny S:

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Originally posted by Komensky:
Of course these blogging stories are prone to exaggeration, but the sheer number of 'Mars-Hill Recovery' sites, groups and blogs that are appearing suggests that, even accepting some exaggeration, there is some consistency in the stories. Moreover, a number of them have produced printed evidence in form of letters and emails about the cultish behaviour at Mars Hill..

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I don't think you get it.

All churches have stories from disaffected ex-members. Really big churches have a lot of them. That is all.

There may be something in this but all you are engaging in here is tabloid journalism.

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Originally posted by Enoch:
There may be a nugget of truth somewhere in this, but it does sound a bit like 'I chose the wrong husband and it's everyone else's fault but mine'.

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Originally posted by Komensky:
Of course there are bound to be more complaints from a church with large numbers, but there are many larger churches around the world where there are fewer complaints and certainly fewer that focus on this sort of abuse combined with theological and pastoral incompetence.

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Originally posted by churchgeek:
but reading the Bible like a normal person,

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Originally posted by Johnny S:
I don't think you get it.

All churches have stories from disaffected ex-members. Really big churches have a lot of them. That is all.

There may be something in this but all you are engaging in here is tabloid journalism.

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Originally posted by Eliab:

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Originally posted by Enoch:
There may be a nugget of truth somewhere in this, but it does sound a bit like 'I chose the wrong husband and it's everyone else's fault but mine'.

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I thought that, too. I felt rather sorry for 'Amy's' husband. All the article really tells us is that he was a bit arrogant and inconsiderate (as people are), once looked at porn, and that his wife doesn't much care for him. This does not seem to me to be the sort of scandalous behaviour that deserves having his private life made public. If anything, Amy's conduct in saying 'I want a divorce' over a period of years, while not doing anything to get one and continue to sleep with and get pregnant by her husband is the most emotionally abusive behaviour in the article. There may be an excuse for it, of course, but the article doesn't help me to find it.

Driscoll probably did give crap relationship advice to Amy. His sermons/soundbites get linked to from here once in a while, and always in the context of his odd ideas about women. That does not make him responsible for the crap relationship.

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Originally posted by Mark Betts:
…

I have heard someone say that Mark Driscoll is the only preacher they have ever heard who has used the word "vulva" from the pulpit, so I don't think I could subscribe to his take on "manliness".

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Originally posted by Eliab:

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Originally posted by Enoch:
There may be a nugget of truth somewhere in this, but it does sound a bit like 'I chose the wrong husband and it's everyone else's fault but mine'.

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I thought that, too. I felt rather sorry for 'Amy's' husband. All the article really tells us is that he was a bit arrogant and inconsiderate (as people are), once looked at porn, and that his wife doesn't much care for him. This does not seem to me to be the sort of scandalous behaviour that deserves having his private life made public. If anything, Amy's conduct in saying 'I want a divorce' over a period of years, while not doing anything to get one and continue to sleep with and get pregnant by her husband is the most emotionally abusive behaviour in the article. There may be an excuse for it, of course, but the article doesn't help me to find it.

Driscoll probably did give crap relationship advice to Amy. His sermons/soundbites get linked to from here once in a while, and always in the context of his odd ideas about women. That does not make him responsible for the crap relationship.

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Originally posted by Mark Betts:
Isn't Mark Driscoll linked with NewFrontiers these days?

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Johnny S, it is ludicrous to suggest that when it comes to spiritual abuse, churches are all much of a muchness. No church is immune, but forms of government and particular teaching, especially about submission and authority, have a lot to do with it.

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Where did I say that?

I'm not a particular fan of Driscoll or Mars Hill.

What I said is that all churches of this size (there are very few in the UK that are comparable) have a large coterie of disaffected ex-members. It wouldn't be hard, for example, to come up with an 'anti-KT' brigade.

All big churches are not the same. These claims may well prove to be true.

If you want a hypothesis to test then I suppose it would be this - no church grows to a really big size (3000+) without hacking off a large group of people on the way. That is all. If the conclusion you draw from that is that some kind of the abuse of authority becomes almost inevitable with a really large organisation then I tend to agree with you. Big is not necessarily better.

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Originally posted by Johnny S:
If you want a hypothesis to test then I suppose it would be this - no church grows to a really big size (3000+) without hacking off a large group of people on the way. That is all. If the conclusion you draw from that is that some kind of the abuse of authority becomes almost inevitable with a really large organisation then I tend to agree with you. Big is not necessarily better.

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The word you're looking for is churn, the rate at which individuals in an organisation leave. In very large churches, the amount of churn is often hidden: if newcomers join at a greater rate than leavers leave, the church even grows, despite losing a great number of long-time member.

Churches ought not have a high churn. Yes, people move away, people die, but the if people leave because of a build-up of worry or resentment, then the churn rates become unhealthy, and the church essentially loses its memory.


<snip>

There is something fundamentally wrong with a church with a high churn. Mars Hill, it seems to me, churns, and churns hard. That's where the stories of bad behaviour and disaffection are coming from.

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originally posted by JohnnyS:
it may simply reflect the kind of dissonance inevitable when someone who has completely divergent theology tries out a church mainly because 'it seems cool'.

I would expect the same kind of reaction if a cessationist tried out Mars Hill too.

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:

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Originally posted by Johnny S:
If you want a hypothesis to test then I suppose it would be this - no church grows to a really big size (3000+) without hacking off a large group of people on the way. That is all. If the conclusion you draw from that is that some kind of the abuse of authority becomes almost inevitable with a really large organisation then I tend to agree with you. Big is not necessarily better.

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Yes and no.

The word you're looking for is churn, the rate at which individuals in an organisation leave. In very large churches, the amount of churn is often hidden: if newcomers join at a greater rate than leavers leave, the church even grows, despite losing a great number of long-time members.

Churches ought not have a high churn. Yes, people move away, people die, but the if people leave because of a build-up of worry or resentment, then the churn rates become unhealthy, and the church essentially loses its memory.

In a previous incarnation, I worked at a very large CofE church as admin staff. One of my yearly jobs was to purge the address list of members we no longer had contact with, or no longer wanted contact with us.

I discovered our churn was in the region of 25-30%. Per year.

Some of this could be put down to students - we'd lose at least one-third of them a year as they graduated - and highly mobile young professionals finding jobs elsewhere. But this meant that there were less than a hundred or so people who'd been there for 10 years, and most people of the (at the time) 800 strong congregation had been coming for less than 3 years, and in 3 years would be simply gone again, replaced by another tranche.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a church with a high churn. Mars Hill, it seems to me, churns, and churns hard. That's where the stories of bad behaviour and disaffection are coming from.

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I wonder, for instance, if some clergyperson who was not a male-supremacist neo-Calvinist Evangelical would get the same velvet-glove treatment Driscoll has gotten here...Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church in the USA, for instance

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Oh come on . The Ship is a) absolutely crawling with US Episcopalians b) hardly over-flowing with Mark Driscoll love. The fact that Driscoll is indeed an arsehole of epic proportions does not mean that every accusation aired against him on the internet happens to be true, simple as.

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Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
I am no fan of Mark Driscoll's. I can quite believe that a lot of stuff goes on in his church that shouldn't.

HOWEVER, I am also aware that a lot of the Driscoll-bashing that I see around the internets looks rather too gleeful for my liking. If my brother in Christ is making a colossal screw-up of things, I ought to be sad about it, not smugly pleased about how right I am.

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Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
I am no fan of Mark Driscoll's. I can quite believe that a lot of stuff goes on in his church that shouldn't.

HOWEVER, I am also aware that a lot of the Driscoll-bashing that I see around the internets looks rather too gleeful for my liking. If my brother in Christ is making a colossal screw-up of things, I ought to be sad about it, not smugly pleased about how right I am.

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Agreed - don't we all love to gloat?

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"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."

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Originally posted by Mark Betts:

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Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
I am no fan of Mark Driscoll's. I can quite believe that a lot of stuff goes on in his church that shouldn't.

HOWEVER, I am also aware that a lot of the Driscoll-bashing that I see around the internets looks rather too gleeful for my liking. If my brother in Christ is making a colossal screw-up of things, I ought to be sad about it, not smugly pleased about how right I am.

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Agreed - don't we all love to gloat?

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I must say, I have never seen Mr Driscoll as 'cool', although I have only seen him on video.

He strikes me as incredibly old-fashioned actually, a kind of chest-beating neanderthal misogynist.

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Posted                      

quote:

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Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
I am no fan of Mark Driscoll's. I can quite believe that a lot of stuff goes on in his church that shouldn't.

HOWEVER, I am also aware that a lot of the Driscoll-bashing that I see around the internets looks rather too gleeful for my liking. If my brother in Christ is making a colossal screw-up of things, I ought to be sad about it, not smugly pleased about how right I am.

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