Perhaps Christians can be most countercultural by setting aside all of our preferences and certainly our insistence upon them and taking our starting point as submission to God’s Word.

Recently, I have been reading Carl Trueman’s excellent newest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), and listening to Christianity Today’s fascinating podcast about Mark Driscoll’s ministry, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. One thing that stood out to me, which I think captures an ongoing pastoral issue throughout the church, is the predominance of preferences.

How does this theme appear in these seemingly very unrelated sources? Trueman wrote,

In the hands of Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, the world loses its innate teleology. These three effectively strip away the metaphysical foundations for both human identity and for morality, leaving the latter, as Nietzsche is happy to point out, a matter of mere taste and manipulative power games. The Romantics grounded ethics in aesthetics, in the cultivation of empathy and sympathy, confident that a universal, shared human nature provided a firm foundation for such. (pg. 27; emphasis added)

Within a lot of detail, the point lands that when we lose sight of God’s purpose for the created order, life and morality become a matter of insisting on what we like and finding leverage over others to get it. Nature, rhetoric, and appeal are all simply matters of justifying our preferences.

Before moving on to the podcast, this point itself warrants serious reflection. I considered this passage with a group of other pastors who are reading Trueman’s book together, and the insistence upon preference as characteristic of modern morality registered with us all as a massive, if latent or dormant, threat for churches across the board. Regardless of whether church members want to change worship styles or keep them exactly as they were, often the defense completely omits exegetical and theological grounds on both sides. So-called “traditionalists” and so-called “revisionists” (neither term really suits my purpose here and probably suggests more intention and intensity than I intend, but I trust the reader knows what I mean) likewise often both assume that their preferences must be God’s.

So, we come to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I have no mind here to discuss Mark Driscoll himself, his ministry, or how the podcast presents him. That is beside my present purpose. The series’ second episode, however, discusses the background to Driscoll’s approach at Mars Hill, which was largely shaped by the mega-church movement’s strategies. The recurring theme I heard was that a new generation wanted church “for them.” The older leaders of this movement validated that desire, acknowledging that they had organized church designed for a previous generation, which leaves the need to design church afresh for the next generation.

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