Lay in bed thinking about Nathan’s church this morning. What would I say to him and the people he seems to be leading, at this point? (After all, they come to his house, indicating to me that he and his wife have a vision for hospitality and fellowship, at least.)
I went back and forth in my mind, all centered around whether the problem is really sinful relations or sinful doctrine which gave birth to sinful structures? Was it really, as guys like Enroth, Mauw, and McKnight tell us, unaccountable, male egotists using church office to service their sins, and the destruction they caused their flock—with a likely undercurrent of misogyny which they only bring up obliquely in their books, most likely, because that is a divisive doctrinal issue which might cause them to have a smaller audience. And also, because the point of the intrinsically evil nature of father-rule and the abuses of authority it always causes is made much more effectively among Evangelicals by subtext, today; sotto voce.
In leaders, sin you will always have with you. This is Calvin’s point saying God could have sent angels to preach and shepherd us. But He didn’t, and this to humble us by being fed and led by our inferior.
I have no question Nathan’s pastor was a sinner, just as he described above. But in the end, what best explains the explosion of their church—the sinful character or the errant doctrine and structure of their authority?
Now, I don’t want to force a choice between the two. I’m guessing there’s a good bit of both, but which needed to be addressed for such a long time that in the end the only way to put it all to rest was for the church to explode?
My thinking is errant doctrine and therefore errant structure of leadership, and what I fear is the hundreds who left will carry away with them precisely what Jason wrote above which all the rebels shout about, which is abusive personalities. So as Nathan and the sheep of his former church begin to look for a new church, they will be wary of the wrong things, and therefore continue with their wives and children to be sheep without shepherds, which they’ve already been for a long time, sadly.
A story: Bobby Knight was a basketball coach, once. Do I hear any “amens!” And by all accounts, he was both loved by his players and hated by the academics. Didn’t matter the money be brought to them and the library he built them and the fact that his players actually graduated.
In time, Bobby got a president named Miles Brand who was a philosophy prof from Oregon and typical of that brood in being weak and sneaky in his leadership while presenting himself as strong and principled. I once had a go-round with him over sodomy in front of about 25 campus ministers and his conduct and words were pathetically passive-aggressive, but that’s for another time.
Eventually, he got Knight under a “zero-tolerance” threat. Knight agreed to it, but shortly after was dissed by a punk on campus, lost his temper, and was fired. Brand then went on to his reward which was to head the NCAA.
An older elder of mine had, for decades, held very expensive and very good season tickets. He was a successful businessman who had taught me much about leadership, and more about hidden generosity. We had lunch weekly and one day he said to me: “Bobby Knight has always been a bully. If they had disciplined or rebuked him twenty years ago, he’d never have been fired today and he’d have been an even greater coach.”
Wise, I thought; very wise. Good men need to be disciplined, and then they do even better.
Jump forward a decade or so to Mark Driscoll. One of our elders moved to Seattle and became an elder at Mars Hill near the beginning. He and Mark shared the hobby of homebrews and exchanged their products.
It some point, we thought about joining Acts 29. We took a carload of pastors and elders out to a church leaders meeting of about 100 out in St. Louis and the vibe of “we’re IT and IT is us” was heavy in their everything. But the content wasn’t actually bad, and we went home. A year or so later, we were on their radar because of several things about our church and leadership, so they invited us to come out to their lead pastors national conference being held in Boulder.
Stephen Baker and I went, accompanied by Stephen’s wife Sebra and my junior high school son, Taylor. There were maybe forty or fifty lead pastors there, most with their wives accompanying them. Only Mark and I had any children, he an infant and toddler cared for by his wife.
The couple of days were endarkening on a variety of levels, and when we left, we never had anything to do with Acts 29 again. They had been kind hosts and we appreciated them, including Mark and his sweet wife with whom (along with our children) we spent some time one evening.
What was sickeningly clear, though, was that Mark was a (small) bully. In fact, he bragged about it. One thing he said was that, since junior high school, no one had ever landed a punch on him. He told all the young lead pastors how much more money he hauled in at this church than they did at theirs. He told them how many people he “ran” each Sunday. He was, as I said, a (small) alpha male bully.
But what was it that left us opposed to Acts 29? Publicly, Mark was a turnoff, but the real issue for us was the obvious lack of any structure of accountability in the denomination, combined with the knowledge that Mark would never lower himself to do the work to establish one. Nor would any of his sidekicks. Acts 29 was incompatible with any Biblical doctrine of authority or structure of ecclesiastical discipline.
So as we left to drive back to the Midwest, we agreed that it was only a matter of time until Mark and Acts 29 exploded. Yes, due to Mark’s bullying and pride. But more because the denomination was unwilling to do any of the hard work of setting up accountability in its leadership. So indeed, years later they exploded. And even here in Sanityville, the narrative everyone has is how nasty a personality Mark was, and is, and how people should have seen his sin and not supported him in it.
True and true, but the real issue is structural. It is a failure to do the difficult work of shepherding and accountability within both the flock and leaders that allowed the personal sins of this or that leader to bear their fruit. Eventually. Long after they should have been disciplined.
My four cents, with love,