The Driscolls, Tchividjians, and Webbs are responsible for their sinful choices. But I can take responsibility for my part in clamoring for their platform—for the longevity of their brands. And perhaps if I recognize my own culpability, I can begin to consider what it may look like to turn from living as one unfilled and longing for filling, and live as who I actually am—one filled by the Spirit whose heart still wanders as she walks a broken earth.
I was sixteen years old when a new album came on the scene, quickly labeled “edgy,” if not offensive, in the world of 2003 Contemporary Christian Music. The lyrics were provocative, at least for the time, and my teenage heart was enthralled by them.
I am a whore
I do confess
I put you on just like a wedding dress
And I run down the aisle
—Derek Webb
I listened to the album over and over again, enticed by the call to what felt like a deeper faith, a rawness and authenticity that seemed to be missing in so much of the evangelical culture around me. The music was artistically good, but not overly polished. The lyrics were reverent (enough), but not stripped of human honesty.
I knew my salvation was secure, but I wondered if perhaps the hollowness I’d sometimes felt in the conservative evangelicalism of my childhood could be filled by the fresh air this singing provocateur was breathing. Maybe this was the missing piece.
Seven years later, my husband and I sat in a small group Bible study on a Sunday afternoon. We were working our way through a video series on Song of Solomon taught by Mark Driscoll. He, too, was “edgy” and seemed to be offering something new. His hardcore-neo-Calvinist-swirled-with-Seattle vibe was fascinating to me as a lifelong Bible church–attending Texan. As a twenty-something whose husband was training to become a pastor, his zeal for ministry and family caught my attention.
Driscoll’s eyes brimmed with tears on the video once, his voice quivering as he described his inability to imagine sending their children to daycare. The woman sitting in front of me, a friend, slumped a bit in her seat, inched toward her husband. Their daughter attended day care, and everyone in the room knew it as clearly as we knew that Driscoll was condemning their choice.
I was confused about how to feel in that moment. Was that judgment my friend was feeling? Or maybe it was conviction? Driscoll seemed so certain that what he was saying was godly. Maybe this was the missing piece.
Just four years after those Sunday afternoons in Bible study, an article by a man named Tullian Tchividjian came across my computer screen. He spoke of abundant grace and I immediately felt a connection to him for a specific reason—he was articulating free grace theology in a reformed space. My husband had recently accepted a pastoral position at a free grace church, and, as a mid-twenty-something, I often felt keenly aware of the bits of difference between us and the TULIP crowd.
But Tchividjian, for that brief moment, seemed to be straddling both worlds. Maybe he had it figured out. Maybe I wasn’t going to be left out after all. Maybe this was the missing piece.
The Pieces That Weren’t
Over the past few years, Driscoll publicly departed his church and the Acts 29 Network amidst allegations of harshness, verbal abuse, and plagiarism. Tchividjian and Webb both engaged in extramarital affairs that led to the ends of their marriages, as well as Tchividjian being deposed from his pastorate.
Their stories are not the only ones, either. Darrin Patrick, Perry Noble, and others have also been removed from pastoral and Christian leadership positions in the past few years. There were thousands of people harmed by their sin, and the internet predictably cried out with pain, frustration, anger, defenses, and eye rolls.
But the outrage doesn’t seem to have affected them.
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