EMPOWERED BY THE SPIRIT FOR MINISTRY
Pastor Mark Driscoll
ACTS (5:12-42)
May 04, 2014
http://marshill.com/media/acts-chapters-6-11-empowered-for-jesus-mission/acts-12-6-1-7
http://download.marshill.com/files/2014/05/04/20140504_acts-12-6-1-7_sd_audio.mp3
http://download.marshill.com/files/2014/05/04/20140504_acts-12-6-1-7_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2014/05/04/20140504_acts-12-6-1-7_tv_sd_progressive.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2014/05/04/20140504_acts-12-6-1-7_tv_hd_progressive.m4v
http://marshill.com/en/transcript/acts-chapters-6-11-empowered-for-jesus-mission/acts-12-6-1-7
41:26ish
...
So I want to be careful with this because this can be an opportunity for spiritual abuse. Because sometimes people say, “God told me.” Well, we’ll see, OK? You can’t just pull out the “God told me” card. [emphasis added] Ladies, let’s say you meet a guy and the guy says, “God told me to marry you.” “Interesting, he didn’t tell me or my dad, you know, so I don’t have to just assume that because you say the Lord says that the Lord in fact has spoken.”
You need to be very careful. Somebody comes along, “God told me to plant a church.” Let’s check that. All right, you can’t—I mean, 1 Corinthians 14 is clear. If you think you got a word from the Lord, you’ve got to check it by the leaders. So what we’re looking for, if you believe God has told you something, especially to do something that is difficult like this, we’re looking for a godly person—Peter’s a godly person. In godly community—it says he’s with the apostles, they’re all agreed. Under godly authority—they all agree on this. With a godly motive—to talk about Jesus. Doing a godly thing—wanting to minister to people. In a godly way—by being open in public and not hiding anything. So if you believe the Lord has told you something, he may have, but I would ask, “Are you a godly person in godly community under godly authority with a godly motive doing a godly thing in a godly way?” ... [emphasis added]
With all that in mind, let's revisit how Mars Hill Church broached the matter of their interest in getting the International Paper Building in later 2013.
http://web.archive.org/web/20131026120216/http://goodforbellevue.marshill.com/about/
About
Letter from Pastor Thomas Hurst
At the heart of every church plant is a “core group” of committed individuals who are always driving toward the mission of Jesus – making disciples and planting churches. This committed core sacrifice with great passion so that the church might grow and that more people would have their lives changed by Jesus. Much like the church elders, the members of a core group are able to see the vision of how the Gospel can change people, neighborhoods, even cities.
Through much prayer and consideration, the Executive Elders and I believe strongly that Jesus wants us to set down deep roots here on the Eastside by owning our next location [emphasis added] and planting a large healthy church that would include a training center. This location would serve as Mars Hill’s central operations center and regional hub for making disciples and planting churches.
Why Now?
God’s plans have far exceeded our own and, for his glory, He has given us fruit that has outgrown our current facility.
Our current location at the Danz building is a leased space and has been sold to the Rockefeller Group. They have announced plans to demolish the building and develop the entire block. Over the next few years our church would be situated in the middle of a major construction project, and ultimately we would be forced to move at the end of our lease in 2017.
The bottom line is this: God has had bigger plans for Mars Hill Bellevue all along, bigger than we could have ever imagined. When we moved into the Danz building we prayed for growth, and by God’s grace, the growth we’ve seen in Bellevue makes us one of the single fastest growing churches in America today. We need a larger location to accommodate what God is doing in our church.
We believe the right location is in Bellevue and that this church and training center will be the epicenter from which the Gospel will ring out around the world.
We’re Still in Core Group Phase
As we walk down the path God has laid out for us, we want to share with you a bit of a paradigm shift: Bellevue is now in “core group” phase. [emphasis added]
While many churches plant with a core group of 25 people, or 250 people, Mars Hill Bellevue is currently a core group of 2,500 people. As we look ahead, the Bellevue elders and the Executive Elders are not just praying for 1,000 people, or 5,000 people on a Sunday, we’re praying for 10,000 people to worship on a Sunday at Mars Hill Bellevue…10,000 individuals whose lives are forever changed by the Gospel. To this end, we need to think, act and pray differently, starting today. If we wait until tomorrow, a year from now or three years from now when our lease is up, it will be too late.
With this in mind, we have found a site in Bellevue that meets these needs. I’m asking you to pray with us as we explore what it will take to move Mars Hill Bellevue to this new location, and how you can be a part of the mission.
The International Paper Property on 120th St.
After many months of searching and narrowing down our choices, only one building in Bellevue is available that meets the needs of the church that God is building on the Eastside. A few weeks ago we made an offer on a property in the Bel-Red corridor on 120th St. which is currently owned by the International Paper Company.[all emphasis added]
The space is about 180,000 sq. feet on 10.5 acres of property, located directly on the new light rail line being developed in 2017. The City of Bellevue has plans to develop the area immediately surrounding this site with retail, restaurants, and urban housing.
After renovations the property could feature:
Seating for 3,000+ per service
Local Bellevue Church office space
Central Operations office space
Media & Communications space
Much larger Kids Ministry area
Space for Mars Hill Students
Training classrooms for a future Bible college
Ample parking space on-site
Large common areas
Mars Hill Bible College
Part of this vision includes opening a Bible college. Recently we sent out proposal requests to the best Bible colleges in the U.S. with the intention of partnering with one of them to establish an accredited Bible school at Mars Hill Bellevue. We want to provide sound theological training for your children as we raise up the next generation of leaders and church planters.
We’re Not Done Yet
Upon submitting our offer for this property, we’ve hit a snag.
Sound Transit, the government agency responsible for building and operating the light rail transit system, has purchased this property to protect their interests, even though we offered to outbid any other offers.
Sound Transit intends to use this property to build an Operations & Maintenance Satellite Facility (OMSF), basically a large barn they will use to maintain the light rail trains, much like the one located in Georgetown just south of downtown Seattle. They have five locations in mind for this facility, and this property on 120th St. is currently their top choice.
“Good for Bellevue”
We believe, though, that this property is the location that God wants us to use to further the mission of the Gospel through Mars Hill Church [emphasis added], so we are continuing to pursue this property and work with Sound Transit to come to an agreement that works well for everyone involved.
We believe a Mars Hill church at this key location is far better for the church, better for the City of Bellevue, and better for the community and local economy than a transit maintenance barn. We will provide:
Immediate benefit to local commerce (restaurants, hotels, transit and more).
More jobs to Bellevue (150+ employees).
Much needed conference/multi-use space to Bellevue.
Ridership for Sound Transit will increase due to our large events and regular attendees because we will be located directly on the transit line.
We plan to use the existing structure, which supports local green initiatives and the development plan for the Bel-Red corridor.
The City of Bellevue can benefit greatly by having both Mars Hill Church’s largest facility and the Sound Transit OMSF located in the city. While Sound Transit has several options for their maintenance barn, we only have one option for our church. Our intention is to work with Sound Transit as they decide by the end of the year whether to use this location or choose one of the other locations that they have available to them.
Unfortunately we find ourselves in a position where we are going up against the government. Given the perspective, we are a small church with little chance of being able to make the government change their decision. However, we will continue to move forward with faith in a God who is bigger than any government. [emphasis added]
Notice that the added emphases aren't even to all the spots where Hurst implies that God's will for Mars Hill Church is a given with respect to a very specific piece of real estate.
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2022117927_marshillbellevuexml.html
For those who have followed this story it's worth noting that early on MHC was proposing that Sound Transit seized the real estate under eminent domain.
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Church-Boasts-God-on-Their-Side-in-Property-Dispute-229184911.html
What MHC had claimed via Justin Dean to have offered above and beyond Sound Transit ended up being moot given that the Sound Transit purchase of the International Paper Building seems to have been finalized before Mars Hill even expressed interest in the real estate.
Well, despite the repeated statements to the effect that God wanted Mars Hill Church to have the International Paper Building is it possible God has changed His mind? More recently Warren Throckmorton has mentioned newer discussions emerging from within Mars Hill leadership bout another piece of real estate that may or may not be God's will for Mars Hill Church to own now.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/05/09/mars-hill-church-wants-40-million-to-buy-bellevue-college-building-and-build-new-church/
So as useful as the observation from Mark Driscoll from the pulpit happens to be about not taking as given that God really wants something just because a person tells you "God told me ... " it's begun to seem in just the last year that this warning can apply, paradoxically, to the announcements and statements made by Mars Hill Church's executive and campus leaders.
Are there are contexts in which an executive leader at Mars Hill has directly invoked God? Well ...
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/MHCletterMD.png
...
In the last year or two, I have been deeply convicted by God that my angry-young-prophet days are over, to be replaced by a helpful, Bible-teaching spiritual father. Those closest to me have said they recognize a deep change, which has been encouraging because I hope to continually be sanctified by God's grace. I understand that people who saw or experienced my sin during this season are hurt and in some cases have not yet come to a place of peace or resolution. I have been burdened by this for the past year and have had private meetings one at a time to learn from, apologize to, and reconcile with people. Many of those meetings were among the most encouraging moments in my time at our church. Sadly, not all of those relationships are yet mended, but I am praying that God is gracious to get us to that place of grace. Now that others have come forward, my desire is to have similar meetings with those who are willing.
The thing that is worth noting about the use of the term "spiritual father" is that for those who were at Mars Hill Church in 2007 the most commonly reported response to enquiry into why Bent Meyer and Paul Petry were fired was summed up as "When dad and mom are having an argument the kids don't need to know all the details." The invocation of a superior, fatherly role relative to rank-and-file members was explicit, the dad didn't have any obligation to explain to the kids what was happening between him and their mother. I.e. direct questions about why Meyer and Petry had been fired were not going to get answered and the dad role was invoked. So Driscoll's proposal that he's been convicted by God that the angry-young-prophet days are to be replaced by a helpful Bible-teaching spiritual father could be a potentially very poor choice of words since in the wake of the 2007 firings the "dad" role was invoked as the basis from which to stonewall members asking about why two pastors were fired. If the "dad" role was invoked to not have to explain why two men were fired back in a period that could ostensibly be the "angry young" phase it's hard to see the use of the phrase "spiritual father" as in itself establishing anything about anything.
The second thing to be observed about the paragraph quoted above from Driscoll's reported letter to members that was published on The City is that he leans heavily on a lot of private reconciliation. The trouble with that is that in a variety of cases the things Driscoll and Mars Hill said and did with respect to former leaders or members ended up becoming a matter of public discussion. Andrew Lamb went on record a while back, for instance, and it was his disciplinary case that ended up making headlines. Paul Petry published the website Joyful Exiles a bit more than two years ago. Let's bear in mind that it's been SINCE the publication of the Driscoll apology internally to Mars Hill that the website repentantpastor went up. If repentance is so important to Mars Hill in general or to Mark Driscoll in particular and if there's more than a decade of teaching from the pulpit to the effect that repentance involves confession that is specific rather than generic and involves restitution then why has Driscoll and the rest of Mars Hill taken the approach of pushing for all "reconciliation" to be as private and secretive as possible? It is impossible to even establish that ANY private meetings or conversations have ever even happened unless someone that isn't Mark Driscoll can confirm having actually met with Mark Driscoll in the last year or so to have patched things up.
And most striking is this quote, " I understand that people who saw or experienced my sin during this season are hurt and in some cases have not yet come to a place of peace or resolution." The passive voice so permeates this sentence it's a bit of a wonder to behold. Well, what "sin" was Driscoll referring to? Hasn't he said confession of sin should be specific? What sins did he commit against whom? There are people in "this season" (when?) who are (currently) hurt and in some cases have not yet come to a place of peace or resolution? Well, put that way it makes everything seem as though coming to a place of peace or resolution depends entirely on people who saw or experienced Mark Driscoll's sin, whatever that may have been. But what sins were being referred to? And hasn't Mark Driscoll begun to speak, since the on-air accusations made by Janet Mefferd that Mark Driscoll plagiarized, in terms of there being a distinction between a "mistake" and a sin? The wording in Driscoll's apparently March 2014 letter (which is hard to construe as an apology so much as an announcement of policy for Wenatchee The Hatchet) suggests that the burden of finding a place of peace or resolution depends on someone else other than him. Other readers may have a different impression of course.
So ... then, we get to this articulation of the basis for policies outlined in the earlier body of the letter:
...
To be clear, these are decisions I have come to with our Senior Pastor Jesus Christ. I believe this is what He is asking of me, and so I want to obey Him. [emphasis added] The first person I discussed this with was our first, and still best, church member, Grace.
...
I have also submitted these decisions to the Board of Advisors and Accountability. They have approved of this direction and are 100 percent supportive of these changes. It's a wonderful thing to have true accountability and not be an independent decision maker regarding my ministry and, most importantly, our church.
So if you say "I believe God told me" that means everything must be taken at face value in a way that doesn't apply to "God told me"? Let's bear in mind the letter Throckmorton published was an internal communication posted to The City, it seems, that was not formally intended (so far as can be known) to be a public apology about anything. And in this missive Driscoll states he came to a series of decisions WITH JESUS CHRIST. A more direct invocation of divine approval would be more difficult to come by apart from claiming to actually be divine one's self.
And yet from the pulpit Driscoll has said to not assume that just because anyone says "God told me" that it is so. Test things out. See if what a person wants to do is being done by a godly person under godly authority in a godly way (i.e. honest and not hiding anything). It's particularly difficult these days for Wenatchee The Hatchet to get the sense that Mars Hill has been completely open and not hiding things these days when about a decade of sermons have been purged from the media library; when Mars Hill PR in the last two years has made statements that have been directly and actively disputed as not an honest account of events; and when it has come to light that half a dozen of Mark Driscoll's books featured content that was not adequately acknowledged or credited.
It's also worth noting, awkward though it may be, that Grace Driscoll was a co-author of Real Marriage. It was her chapter 7 that made use of Dan Allender's work without any attribution in spite of the fact that it was easy to document Grace Driscoll's public advocacy for the work of Dan Allender over the years. If Grace Driscoll herself has been part of the plagiarism controversy that has more commonly named Mark Driscoll alone in the coverage of the controversy Grace Driscoll's name is not out of this set of questions about what's been going on just because everyone else has ignored the elephant in the room. When Mark Driscoll did his A Blog Post for the Brits in early 2012 he leaned on the fact that both he and Grace Driscoll got communications degrees from a top program in the US. Remember that on January 12, 2012 Mark Driscoll published a post that featured a few statements:
There is reportedly an article coming out in a British Christian publication that features an interview with me. As is often the case, to stoke the fires of controversy, thereby increasing readership, which generates advertising revenue, a few quotes of mine have been taken completely out of context and sent into the Twittersphere. So, I thought I would put a bit of water on the fire by providing context.
...
I have a degree in communications from one of the top programs in the United States. So does my wife, Grace. We are used to reporters with agendas and selective editing of long interviews. Running into reporters with agendas and being selectively edited so that you are presented as someone that is perhaps not entirely accurate is the risk one takes when trying to get their message out through the media. [emphasis added]
With the release of our book, Real Marriage, we have now done literally dozens of interviews with Christians and non-Christians. But the one that culminated in the forthcoming article was, in my opinion, the most disrespectful, adversarial, and subjective. As a result, we’ve since changed how we receive, process, and moderate media interviews.
The interview in question had nearly nothing to do with the book or its subject matter, which in my understanding was supposed to be the point of the interview. My wife, Grace, was almost entirely ignored in the interview, and I felt she was overall treated disrespectfully. The only questions asked were about any controversial thing I’ve ever said in the past 15 years with a host of questions that were adversarial and antagonistic. It felt like a personally offended critic had finally gotten his chance to exercise some authority over me. [emphasis added]
Things got particularly strange near the end of the interview. I was asked a question about, if a woman was the pastor of a church which that pastor’s husband attended, would that be emasculating to him. The question was asked in such a pointed way that it was odd.
At the end of the interview, I started asking questions of the interviewer. He admitted that his last questions were really about himself and his wife. Apparently his wife is the pastor of their church, he’s strongly committed to women as pastors, disagrees strongly with our complementarian position, and takes it to some degree personally.
He then admitted that he very much struggles to believe in penal substitutionary atonement—that Jesus Christ died in our place a substitute for our sins—and that he does not believe in a literal hell. In short, the reporter is a very liberal Christian, and on these issues I am not.
Subsequently, I am not surprised that after a very long interview, which took the better part of an hour, that I may be selectively edited and presented in a way that is not entirely accurate. In particular, the quote about cowardice may not fit all British men, but for men who misuse their authority to advance their agenda, it seems applicable.
For those so inclined, you can go listen to the entire interview. What's striking about this blog post for the Brits was that it was a pre-emptive strike on a specific journalist. What's worth noting is that Driscoll leaned on the credentials of both himself and his wife Grace as having communications degrees and being shrewd about reporters.
One of the things that someone like Mark Driscoll is going to have to get used to is the reality that sometimes when people have critical things to say about a person or that person's sought-after public role this will involve 1) quoting people accurately 2) quoting them in context 3) showing that they have flip-flopped on a variety of things and 4) may have reached a point where what they have said and done that can be publicly documented seems to fly in the face of the things they publicly said they didn't and wouldn't do. Some bloggers may believe that the sign of a successful blog is that hundreds of comments erupt in the wake of some posting. Other bloggers may wonder if the sign of a blog having a significant impact on at least some readership can be measured in terms of sweeping retroactive media purges of material that has been quoted accurately and in context.
But if Mark Driscoll says from the pulpit that a person who seeks to do something that's really of God will do so in a way that is open, honest, and not hiding anything then it can sure look as though there's room for improvement in light of all the controversies and questions that have come to light about Mars Hill Church in general and its leadership culture in particular.
If people are to follow what Mark Driscoll counsels from the pulpit about not taking as given that someone who says "God wants this", then the first place to start for a Mars Hill member might, unfortunately, have to be just about anything Mars Hill leadership says about what Jesus supposedly wants for Mars Hill Church.