July 27, 2014

A group of former members, elders, deacons, staff, and other affiliates of the conservative evangelical Mars Hill Church headed by bombastic, controversial pastor Mark Driscoll have taken to Facebook to insist that they will not be “anonymous” in their anger, frustration, and pain over experiences that they say drove them from the church.

The “Dear Pastor Mark & Mars Hill: We Are Not Anonymous” group began after Driscoll posted a 30-minute video on the megachurch’s website apologizing for mishandling the terminations of staff members and the defection of church members. (The video is available here, and a transcript is available here.) In the video, Driscoll said that he had found the situation “just a little overwhelming and a bit confusing,” with desired reconciliation difficult to pursue because “we, and I, were not exactly sure what was happening.”

Driscoll’s apology then struck the nerve that set off the nearly 300 members (growing by the hour) of the Facebook group:

As well, one of the things that has been complex is the fact that a lot of the people that we are dealing with in this season remain anonymous. And so we don’t know how to reconcile, or how to work things out with, with people because we’re not entirely sure who they are, and so that has, that has made things a little more complex and difficult as well.

The new video missive broke a period of social media silence that began last spring, when controversy erupted over the use of church funds to market Driscoll’s book Real Marriage. Driscoll himself called the marketing strategy “manipulating a book sales reporting system,” the aim of which was to land the book on the New York Times best-sellers list.

A member of the “We Are Not Anonymous” group claims Driscoll spent more than $200,000 on the marketing campaign and, likewise, has misused other church funds. While these financial accusations are central in the narrative developing through the Facebook group, stories of spiritual hurt and abuse are also prominent.

Not surprisingly, women are particular sufferers in the masculinist ethos of Driscoll’s neo-muscular Christianity, which amplifies biblical claims of men’s “headship” over women in the family—including especially, if one follows Driscoll’s advice in Real Marriage, the bedroom—and the wider world.

Margaret Bullitt, a 10-year Mars Hill member from Seattle, reported that she joined the church after a divorce precisely because of its masculinist orientation. She hoped “that Pastor Mark would ‘make men’” of her two sons, then age 9 and 12. Vulnerable and “susceptible to strong leaders,” Bullitt says she “eagerly submitted to the authority of the pastors and elders,” following their advice to reconcile with her former husband and settling in for a long season of self doubt, unhappiness, and what she terms “spiritual abuse” that remains “too raw for me to write about.”

Over time, Bullitt came to understand her experience with Mars Hill, as have others, as akin to being in a cult. Eventually, she found her way to “the open and affirming Seattle First Baptist Church,” which she had earlier rejected as “apostate.” “I feel a great sense of relief to be in a congregation that loves and does not judge or condemn,” Bullitt wrote.

Controversy and Driscoll are certainly not strange bedfellows. Driscoll’s radical Calvinist theology, his misogynistic and anti-homosexual ideologies, both frothed by dramatic and charismatic preaching style, and his deployment of slick media strategies, made Driscoll, by his own admission, a “celebrity preacher” rather than a pastor to his multi-state, 14,000 member flock. These practices also apparently lined his own pockets and have provoked regular charges of financial malfeasance.

Patheos “Evangelical Channel” blogger Warren Throckmorton has shown public acknowledgement by Mars Hill that it misappropriated monies from its Global Fund for restoration of new church properties. Throckmorton has also reported on plagiarism charges against Driscoll.

Earlier this week, Stacey Solie wrote a detailed exposé of the financial, spiritual, and psychological abuses that have prompted a “mass exodus” from the church at all levels. Solie reports that nearly 500 irate former members have signed a Change.org petition calling for financial transparency at Mars Hill. And, disgruntled member blogs, websites, and other social media groups fan out across the digital media landscape.

It is that space—the digital media landscape—that seems to me to be the thorn in the side of Driscoll and Mars Hill. There is a certain irony in that, of course, because much of the growth of the Mars Hill brand and the elevation of Driscoll to cult leader status has been fueled by the particularly canny deployment of media at which conservative Evangelicals have excelled from Aimee Semple McPherson to Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggert, Jim and Tammy Faye (Messner) Bakker, and onward. As a broadcast phenomenon, even in new media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on, Mars Hill has a massive presence that would be the envy of many churches.

But that mass audience has rapidly moved out of the passive, obedient consumer mode of the broadcast media era that allowed those gifted at shaping apparently authoritative messages to “capture” listeners and viewers. The prioritization of social over media in the new communication landscape has had implications that extend far beyond the technical and artistic fluency evangelical churches have demonstrated in their media ministries.

Social media is profoundly relational in nature. The focus of engagements between parties to a mediated exchange—subject to subject, rather than subject to object. A compelling message only has meaning in the context of relationships characterized by trust and mutuality rather than authority and obedience.

Driscoll craves a control that a world shaped by social media practice does not allow.

It is the nature this new media reality that has landed Driscoll and his ilk in the hot seat repeatedly in recent years, culminating in his decision last year to withdraw from participations in social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. In March, on the heels of the book promotion scandal, Driscoll told church members, “To reset my life, I will not be on social media for at least the remainder of the year.”

What Driscoll clearly did not understand then, and seems not to now, is that any individual—even one with the power he claims—has fairly limited control of his or her social media participation. Especially for a high profile, public personality of the sort actively cultivated by Driscoll and Mars Hill leadership, the social part of social media—that is, individual participants acting on their own or in intentional or spontaneous collaborations (as with the “We Are Not Anonymous” Facebook group), can and do draw others into social media platforms, like it or not.

Sometimes, the degree of power individual actors have to pull those who may not wish to be present in social networking sites is deeply problematic, as when cyberbullies post photos and other content without the knowledge of the subjects for the express purpose of embarrassing or humiliating them. But the very real risks associated with the dark side of the redistribution to power and authority in producing and disseminating content are more than outweighed by bottom-up social media actions that shine light into the darkness. We have seen this again and again in politics, religion, education, and other institutions of public trust that are easily corrupted by silence and misinformation.

What the Mark Driscolls of the world still don’t seem to get is that someone can lock himself in a saferoom for a year to try to avoid social media engagement, and that will have little effect on the ability of someone else (the pizza delivery guy?) to pin a photo of the saferoom door on Pinterest, blog about the absent personage, and otherwise continue to bring his presence into the light of social conversation.

Old media practices were built on old world modes of communication and authority: top-down, message-focused, missives to anonymous masses.

New media practices are built on bottom-up, relational engagements among people who want to connect with, know and be known by, progressively wider networks of others. The pain of the “We Are Not Anonymous” group participants focuses exactly on a refusal of anonymity of the masses upon which Driscoll’s ministry (and clearly his narcissistic psychology) depends.

Thus, when Randall Chrisman reminded Driscoll of how they met, he was not acting as a “passionate defender” of the pastor (as one reporter interpreted it):

Before coming to Mars Hill, Mark, you and I met at a coffee shop near the Wallingford church. I told you about myself, where I was, where I wanted to go, and asked you if people like myself had a table at the church. You assured me that they did, and that I was more than welcome.

When I became disabled, you came out and visited me at both the awful first nursing home and the better second one. Your counsel got me through some of the worst times of my life and I suspect it was what helped save my life during that time. You gave me a book of autobiographies of theologians who had suffered greatly. Your son Zack prayed for me and I actually regained feeling in my ankles that afternoon.

When you were looking for the Ballard Building, you informed me that the building had no obstacles to the disabled, something you specifically wanted.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, anonymous to Mars Hill. Or to you.

Rather, Chrisman was making a claim of a relational humanity that Driscoll’s pastoral, leadership, and psychological make-up seems not able to accommodate.

Indeed, Driscoll’s pained attempt toward the end of his recent video message to cast himself as a “spiritual father” reveals his inability to see himself in relationships of mutuality with others. “A spiritual father,” Driscoll explains in the patronizing tone that seems the only way he is able to moderate the bombast of his homiletical voice, “is somebody who teaches and instructs and encourages and corrects but does so with a tremendous amount of patience, affection, and hope…”

Driscoll sees as his primary opportunity for spiritual growth, it seems, being less of an asshole in lording his authority over others. He wants to be more humble. He wants to be less prideful. But he still wants to be in charge. He has a lesson to teach, lives to instruct, supplicants to encourage.

Driscoll’s selection of Ecclesiastes 7:8 as a source of biblical reflection on the swirling controversy is yet another window on the state of his soul: “The end of the matter is better than the beginning, and patience is better than pride.” What he seems to be telling himself is that he can just wait it out. This, too, shall pass…

But it won’t, neither terms both of social media practice nor of theologically and biblically informed Christian practice.

In the digitally-integrated world, social practice elevates relationships, honors them, and awards authority and power to those who best nurture, sustain, and extend relationships. Here, power and authority are never permanent attributes of a person but effects of her actions. To paraphrase Heidi Klum, one day you’re in, and the next day you can be out if you can’t continue to creatively share in social spaces in ways that enhance relationship.

Relational rather than paternalistic sharing involves listening to diverse voices, thoughtful attentiveness to the interests and concerns of others, wide connection within and across networks, and a desire for real engagement that moves from digital to local spaces and back again. It’s not about messaging, teaching, and instructing as though you had some privileged access to all the answers. You don’t know me. I’m anonymous to you. And as long as that’s the case, we cannot be in right relationship.

A critical lesson of leadership of Christian practice, likewise, is not about waiting out insurrection so you can get your authoritative message out. It’s about giving up power and authority.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus scolds his disciples as they bicker over which of them is the greatest, “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Real power for Christians is exactly the opposite of the kind of 1950s paternalism that might represent growth from Driscoll’s stone age, chest thumping, masculinist Christianism, but which does not begin to come close to the teachings of Christ.

The promise in the ugly, painful socially mediated spin-out of both Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church is that it brings to light the ecclesiological problem of multimedia, megachurch, celebrity preacher modes of Christian practice that burst forth like so many comets in the broadcast media age. As we watch these bright lights burn out across our digital screens, there would seem to be a profound opportunity to re-mediate notions of church as entertainment and church as luxury product that arose with the whole megachurch and associated coin of emergent church and prosperity gospel movements in the second half of the twentieth century.

From the grass roots of everyday Christian practice, in local and digital spaces, more diverse, more complex, certainly more challenging, and perhaps more hopeful stories of Christian life are being shared.

Let’s put down our megaphones and start listening more closely.