“Driscoll, age 44, has been a successful pastor and religious celebrity for 18 years, and perhaps he rose too far too fast, without sufficient time to mature into his fame and responsibility. He is a dynamic preacher with an artful stage presence. And his creation of a robustly conservative and once thriving evangelical church network in the secular northwest, especially appealing to much vaunted hipster, often tattooed Millennials, showcased both his own skill and the Gospel’s capacity to appeal even in difficult terrain.”

Famous Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll’s recent resignation from his Mars Hill megachurch and empire of church satellites is maybe vindicating to some of his many critics, who denounced his brash, hyper-masculine Calvinism. He was accused of plagiarism and inflating his book sales, but his downfall seems more related to a brusque, often obnoxious demeanor that ultimately turned many associates against him.

Driscoll, age 44, has been a successful pastor and religious celebrity for 18 years, and perhaps he rose too far too fast, without sufficient time to mature into his fame and responsibility. He is a dynamic preacher with an artful stage presence. And his creation of a robustly conservative and once thriving evangelical church network in the secular northwest, especially appealing to much vaunted hipster, often tattooed Millennials, showcased both his own skill and the Gospel’s capacity to appeal even in difficult terrain.

It was especially memorable and satisfying when Driscoll’s Mars Hill took over a once glorious Seattle Methodist sanctuary that had served thousands but whose congregation collapsed into irrelevant liberalism. As the highly reduced United Methodist church met nearby in much smaller space, self-congratulating itself on its supposed inclusiveness, Mars Hill transformed the church-turned-theater back into a vital worship space, attracting hundreds that inert liberal Methodism never could.

Driscoll famously denounced liberal religion as effete and feminized, offering instead his own manly, sometimes vulgar but popular form of Reformed orthodoxy. Here’s a quote from a New York Times story about him five years ago:

As hip as he looks, his message brooks no compromise with Seattle’s permissive culture. New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any “modern” interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the “weepy worship dude” he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, “singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.”

… The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that… would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

Wonderfully, the same Times story cited early twentieth-century evangelist Billy Sunday, who also championed muscular Christianity, quoting him: “The Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked… effeminate, ossified, three-carat Christianity.”

Read More