The Potential Dark Side of Movements: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

For me, listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast has been cathartic.

I was a seminary student in the early 2000s during Mark Driscoll’s meteoric rise. Like most seminarians, it was a time of implicitly searching for my own theological identity (for better or worse) in the vast sea of Evangelicalism.

I was drawn to Mars Hill and Driscoll for their focus on contextualization, perceived commitment to “the gospel,” slick internet media, and the hilarious hyperbole in Driscoll’s preaching. I eagerly consumed several of his writings and sermons (I somehow missed his most controversial comments).

At the end of the day though, Mars Hill wasn’t international enough for me and so I never fully opted-in. One of my church partners was affiliated with Acts 29 but cut ties with Driscoll early on, circa 2009, because of his authoritarian leadership style. I was never given details, but it was not an amicable parting.

After a comment I made in 2008 to a Christian leader about my admiration of Mars Hill in the post-everything American scene, I was gently warned by this leader that Driscoll had a history of spiritual abuse. So when word came out in 2014 about the demise of Mars Hill, I wasn’t surprised, and I eagerly wanted for years to hear the whole juicy yet tragic story. This podcast has not disappointed.

However, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is not so much about Driscoll as it is about the evangelical subculture that created the environment for his flourishing. Despite the obvious entertainment value of the podcast, I have lamented my own part in contributing to Driscoll’s noxious celebrity.

Writer and producer Mike Cosper has done an admirable job of highlighting the consumeristic nature of popular Evangelicalism and pointing the listener to repentance and Jesus. At the conclusion of more than one episode, I had some soul-searching prayer times with God. My personal leadership take-a-ways revolve around the concepts of accountability, character, gentleness, and integrity.

But that is not my focus here. I believe the wider lesson pertains to the potential dark side of movements.

Beware the Celebrity Patronage and Sociocultural Ideology

Just because there is a “church planting movement” (as Mars Hill was called) or a Christian movement of some kind, in any context, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Kingdom is spreading. You can multiply healthy disciples, but you can also multiply a harmful ideology covered in a “Christian” veneer. And sometimes it is nearly impossible for insiders to tell the difference between the two.

As the podcast has made clear, both the fall and rise of Mars Hill was closely tied to an ideology created in the image of Driscoll and reflected in certain aspects of American culture. Yes, God still works in broken places where the Bible is preached and the gospel proclaimed. But Driscoll’s framework of chauvinism, combativeness, and autocratic hierarchy bears all the marks of a cult-like leader. As the series finale made clear, Driscoll’s overall message was not the gospel but instead a triumphalistic brand wedded to disproportionate media influence: “Be a winner, like me.”

Why does this also implicate us? The point of the podcast is that this ties in closely with American Evangelicalism. The past several years, and 2020 in particular, has been a time that exposed many of the ideologies inherent in our movement. A number of hard-hitting books and videos have nailed this point home.

To name only a couple, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation exposed the toxic masculinity and Christian Nationalism in the movement. Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump traced the religious right’s co-option of Evangelicalism into conservative politics. Phil Vischer explained how fundamentalists snuck into the big tent of Evangelicalism. And The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism uncovered the deep rootedness of white supremacy in American Christianity. We could also mention an anti-science ideological bias among white evangelicals. And the tendency to embrace baseless conspiracy theories. The list goes on and on.

To simply dismiss these as hit-pieces intended to persecute “true believers” would only reinforce the charge of ideologies in American Evangelicalism. You don’t need to agree with everything to recognize that something has to change.

Some have chosen to abandon Evangelicalism altogether. I think that might be too easy, and also a bit presumptuous. Evangelicalism is a global movement which American Evangelicals do well to realize that they are no longer the leading partner.

The proper response to recognizing ideology in our midst is to repent, lament, and recalibrate Church around the person of Jesus. In the final episode, Paul Tripp shared some sobering and helpful words related to the constant necessity for recalibration/deconstruction (37:15):

We should all be deconstructing our faith. We better do it, because our faith becomes a culture, a culture so webbed into the purity of truth, it’s hard to separate the two. And we better do some deconstructing, or we’re going to find ourselves again and again in these sad places… You know I celebrate the church of Jesus Christ…. I love the gospel, I have no other wisdom than that, but I’m sad for the Church… There is a devastating humility that comes when you are willing to deconstruct something you have given your life to.

Also in the final episode, former pastor and worship leader at Mars Hill, Joe Day, explains how he has disentangled ideology from his faith (35:42):

I was coming to see that I was involved in a very toxic culture for a very long period of time… the theology, the methods, and even the whole outlook on mission and church was all tangled up within that, and it was really hard to know what was what… I think there is so much bullsh*t in Evangelicalism. I think that we’re getting so many things backwards… But for me, I bring it back to Christ… Everything else might be rot, but the person of Christ is still extremely compelling to me.

As the Motus Dei Network studies movements, particularly in the Global South, our contextual analysis of these movements needs to take these lessons to heart. There are sophisticated reporting and verification procedures of these movements already in place to the extent that we know these are healthy movements centered on Christ.

But as the rise of the Mars Hill movement displayed so clearly, we do well to constantly exegete the context and continue to pay attention to potential issues of celebrity patronage and sociocultural ideology. Movements should be christological in nature. The pile of bodies behind the Mars Hill bus paints a vivid picture: any foundation and focus other than Jesus inevitably leads to pain and trauma.

Beware the Anti-Movement Bias

However, in the reaction to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, we may be tempted to an anti-movement bias. Like a pendulum that swings too far in the other direction, it would seem that smaller is better or that the ministry of presence is the only safe way to grow.

To be sure, Christian growth centered around a celebrity, coupled with an ideology, and flavored through the vapor of social media is an immediate red flag. As we discussed, the Mars Hill church planting movement certainly supports the suspicion that quick growth is inherently unhealthy, like cancer. But this would be a fallacy of a selective use of the evidence.

The story of the world is the story of movements, both for ill and shalom, with a lot of variation in between. Biblical faith, by its nature, is a movement of God (in Latin, motus Dei). Every people significantly impacted by Christ had a discipling movement at one point occur in its midst. A theology of multiplication ties movements to the grand narrative of Scripture. Jesus started a Kingdom movement that continues to this day. We are invited to be participants in his movement to redeem all nations back to himself. If anything, we should be biased towards those traditions and theologies that support a stagnant view of the Church and consumeristic Christianity that impede healthy Kingdom movements.

Movements as Biblical Yeast

To summarize, we need to discern the idolatry of charismatic celebrity and fanatical ideology that creates a lot of energy but ultimately burns people out. Jesus and the early disciples displayed what we might call a paradoxical “apostolic calmness” or a “patient urgency” in ministry. There was definitely a passion and realization that God uses people to accomplish his purposes, but also at the same time a trust that ultimately the movement is God’s, not ours. We can rest as grateful participants in movements of his Kingdom instead of building our own.

This focus recognizes the strategic nature of movements as zúme (yeast) in relation to the Kingdom. In the biblical narrative, zúme is used both positively (the parable of the yeast in the flour – Mt. 13:33) and negatively (the leaven of the Pharisees – Mt. 16:6). In the same way, movements start out small and insignificant but eventually have a huge impact, be that good or bad.

Mars Hill was a warning about the potential dark side of movements. Following Jesus, let us aim for Christ-centered Kingdom movements, especially considering the movemental nature of our faith. One third of the world still has yet to hear.