Mark Driscoll

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What in the world is happening to evangelicalism in 21st Century America?

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What in the world is happening to evangelicalism in 21st Century America?

In nine-plus years of these weekly Memos, the Religion Guy has sometimes complained that the news media pay too little attention to e.g. the “Mainline” Protestant denominations or to white Catholics as all-important swing voters who decide elections.

Nonetheless, as GetReligion.org prepares to close down February 2, it’s understandable that this next-to-last Memo would send fellow journalists a few notations about the U.S. Evangelical Protestant movement. (Full disclosure: This is The Guy’s own private, lifelong home, even though he was raised in a “Mainline” denomination, worshipped for years in another and currently belongs to a third one.)

Evangelicalism, in one form or another, was analyzed in 43 prior Memos. Why so much attention?

Evangelicalism may be confusing in terms of organizations and fiefdoms, but since World War II has developed into the largest and most dynamic force in American religion, striding into the hole in the public square created by the decline of the old Mainline. Also evangelicalism has been the most disruptive, and certainly one of the evident influences within the Republican Party.

Something odd is happening to this movement in the 21st Century. The Memo has dealt with relentless politicking, conflicts over race and women’s role, squalid scandals and has discerned signs of a “crack-up.”

Pundits regularly tell us that in the Donald Trump era we’re no longer even sure what an “evangelical” is, that it’s as much a socio-political label as a religious one and that this redefinition damages churches’ spiritual appeal to outsiders. Maybe so, but despite the media focus on outspoken agitators on the national level, local evangelicals are the least politicized faith grouping, according to noteworthy Duke University data at pages 52-58 in this (.pdf) document.

Then there’s that ongoing head-scratcher: Why have fat majorities of white evangelicals supported Trump, a morally bewildering politician and now a criminal and civil court defendant? For one thing, they automatically give lopsided support to Republican nominees, whether Romney, McCain or Bush, just like Black Protestant, Jewish, non-religious and anti-religious Americans have done for Democrats. Many truly believe that they have no choice.


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Plug-In: Pope Francis, the nones and an embattled pastor's life after Mars Hill Church

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Plug-In: Pope Francis, the nones and an embattled pastor's life after Mars Hill Church

The next generation is leaving the Christian faith faster than parents realize, Lifeway Research’s Aaron Earls writes.

Religion cases are notably absent from the U.S. Supreme Court’s fall schedule, the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas notes. The question: Is that a good thing?

Surprisingly, state-level pandemic restrictions had no measurable, lasting impact on American churches, according to data cited by Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with major news we previewed last week: the Catholic Church’s Synod of Bishops on Synodality.

What To Know: The Big Story

Blessing same-sex unions: Even before the synod opened Wednesday, a doctrinal earthquake shook the Catholic world, as our own Clemente Lisi explains:

In a move that would signal a seismic shift for the Catholic Church, Pope Francis said he’s open to blessing same-sex unions and to studying the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood.

The comments came in an eight-page letter Francis penned this past July — and released by the Vatican on Monday — in response to five cardinals who had written to the pope expressing concern about a number of issues that will be discussed at a meeting of bishops set to start Wednesday at the Vatican.

“Pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or several people, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage,” Francis wrote.

A welcome for “everyone” — Lisi, a veteran journalist who has reported on the Vatican for years — offers additional insight in his coverage of the synod’s opening day:

Pope Francis opened a meeting of bishops at the Vatican on Wednesday by warning that the Catholic church needs to put aside “political calculations or ideological battles” and welcome “everyone” to dialogue about the faith.


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Covering Mark Driscoll and life after Mars Hill: Why isn't this a mainstream news story?

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Covering Mark Driscoll and life after Mars Hill: Why isn't this a mainstream news story?

It’s been nearly seven years since Mars Hill Church, the fabulously successful multi-campus evangelical flock in Seattle, imploded when its pastor, Mark Driscoll, resigned. The church’s nearly 13,000-person Sunday attendance totals quickly dissolved, its headquarters and branch campuses were closed or sold.

I moved to the Seattle suburbs the following summer and had a long conversation with one of the church’s leaders. I’ve rarely turned down a chance to do a story, but it was clear that covering this mess would take up more time and emotional energy than I had time for.

Dodging a lawsuit that accused him of misappropriating $30 million worth of members’ tithes, Driscoll ended up moving to Scottsdale, Ariz., (whose sunny clime is like Shangri-la to many rain-drenched Seattleites) and starting a new church plant in 2016 called Trinity Church.

Recently, a number of stories have come out about Driscoll’s heavy-handed leadership and dysfunctional pastoring at Trinity that sounded all too similar to what went down in Seattle. The latest just came out Monday in Christianity Today:

Nearly 40 elders who served with Mark Driscoll during the final years of Mars Hill Church are publicly calling for him to step down from his current pastoral position and seek reconciliation with those he has hurt.

“We are troubled that he continues to be unrepentant despite the fact that these sins have been previously investigated, verified, and brought to his attention by his fellow Elders, prior to his abrupt resignation” from Mars Hill, they wrote in a statement released today to CT. “Accordingly, we believe that Mark is presently unfit for serving the church in the office of pastor.”

Christianity Today is one of two outlets that have been following the Mars Hill story a lot recently and I’ll get to CT’s podcast series in a moment.

But first I should first mention investigative journalist Julie Roys’ two podcasts. She’s been following the Mars-Hill-in-Arizona beat for some time, but her latest is an act of war. From the transcript of Inside the Driscoll Cult Part 1:

The cultic activities of Mark Driscoll and The Trinity Church have escalated to a whole new level. As Julie’s guests describe on this edition of The Roys Report, Driscoll is now sending cease and desist letters, threatening to sue whistleblowers.


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Passing of the guard at the Associated Press; the rise of Ministry Watch and the Roys Report

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Passing of the guard at the Associated Press; the rise of Ministry Watch and the Roys Report

The death of a well-known religion reporter; a new job announcement from a beat veteran and a spotlight on two feisty independent religion news organizations is what concerns me this week.

Tmatt had previously offered an update on the health of Rachel Zoll, a former Associated Press religion specialist who came down with glioblastoma, a brain cancer that has no cure, in early 2018. That was only a few months after another religion-beat pro, Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News, died of the exact same malady.

Last week, Zoll died at the age of 55 at her home in Massachusetts. She reported on religion for AP for 17 years.

There have been lots of tributes, so I’ll spotlight this Associated Press obit atop the list.

Zoll covered religion in all its aspects, from the spiritual to the political, and her stories reached a global audience. But her influence was far greater than that. Other publications often followed her lead, and AP staffers around the world depended on her generosity and guidance.

Zoll was at the forefront of coverage of two papal transitions, the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, and tensions within many denominations over race, same-sex marriage and the role of women.

She often broke news, as in 2014, when she was the first to report Pope Francis’ appointment of Blase Cupich to become the new archbishop of Chicago.

Fellow GetReligionista Dick Ostling, who was at AP from 1998-2006, wrote this:

My partner Rachel was simply a delight to work with and a personality enjoyed by everyone who knew her -- and who competed with her. But in broader and more historical terms she exemplified all that's needed in reporting and especially with a complex and emotion-laden field like religion. She was of course quick and accurate but those are the basics for any Associated Press writer. And then, remarkably intelligent. She knew her stuff and knew she needed to learn ever more stuff to handle this beat.


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Mark Driscoll redux: Believe it or not, this Daily Beast feature is best of the lot

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Stories about ousted Mars Hill Church pastor Mark Driscoll are surfacing again, now that the former Seattle mega-church leader has resurfaced in Phoenix with a new church plant and no repentance toward the carnage left behind in the Pacific Northwest. Mars Hill, his now former church, has had to sell $25 million worth of property to make ends meet. 

Of all the outlets I’ve scanned, the Daily Beast thus far has come up with the best reporting about the matter. I should mention that Joel Connelly’s blog atseattlepi.com was first out of the blocks in December with the story of Driscoll’s move to Phoenix.

Connelly has been following Driscoll for years. If you need to bone up on his clips and some of Driscoll’s history, click here. Here's a brief summation of the latest news, which appeared Feb. 1 in The Seattle Times:

Mark Driscoll finally made it official: He’s starting a new church in Phoenix. The culmination of a comeback that has been gaining steam over the past year, the former Mars Hill pastor announced the news of The Trinity Church on Monday by email, Twitter and a new website.
In a folksy video on the site, which begins with a “howdy” from Driscoll, the pastor said he and his wife, Grace, sitting by his side, were “hoping, trusting, praying, planning and also a little” -- he made a jokey grimace -- “worrying about planting a church here.”
Driscoll also noted that he was “healin’ up” in his new home. And his bio on the site refers to the Driscolls recently facing “the most challenging year of their lives,” one that prompted the pastor to take a year off.
But aside from those remarks, there’s no reference to Driscoll’s troubled and controversial history at Mars Hill. Indeed, there’s no direct mention at all of the megachurch he presided over for 18 years in Seattle, until snowballing allegations of plagiarism, emotional abusiveness and misogyny led him to resign in October 2014.

 It does seem weird that Driscoll seems to have taken up a southern accent in his new digs.


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History of religious cults in America's Northwest gets graphic-art treatment

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When you search for religion news around the Pacific Northwest, what’s out there is definitely a mixed bag. The biggest religion story in years has been the break-up of Seattle's Mars Hill Church and the continuing saga of its one-time pastor, Mark Driscoll.

This week’s big story, broken by the Sydney Morning Herald, was that Driscoll’s invite to an Australian conference sponsored by the megachurch Hillsong had been rescinded. And so one alternative Seattle publication cribbed off the Driscoll angle by offering -- in graphic novel format -- a story titled “Predators and Prophets: A Comic History of Pacific Northwest Cults.” The subtitle: “Spiritually-motivated bioterrorism at Taco Time, 35 thousand year old Lemurian warrior gods in Yelm, LSD-fueled Queen Anne hippie cults, and much more.”

Figured I had to read that one, which begins thus:

The decline and disintegration of Mars Hill Church last year may have surprised some, but to others it was predictable, and not without precedent. The Pacific Northwest has been home to numerous utopian communes and fanatical religious groups, from the radical to the deeply conservative. Since the arrival of European Christianity and its normative pall, outsider and fringe belief has been a staple of the local culture. From Eastern philosophies to the syncretic, the Pacific Northwest has been a site of religious demagoguery for ages, and the present is no exception.


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Seattle Times scores a winner in piece on Christian health-share ministries

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There aren’t many religion writers in the Pacific Northwest these days and that's a shame.

For example, The Seattle Times apparently hasn’t had one since Janet Tu left the beat several years ago. If something breaks like last year’s ouster of Mark Driscoll -- then-pastor of Mars Hill, Seattle’s largest church at the time -- the newsroom has to pull reporters from other beats to cover it.

So it was a surprise to see this story leading their web site Sunday on Medi-Share and two other Christian “health-sharing ministries” that act quasi-health insurers for lots of Washington state residents.

When Melissa Mira suffered sudden heart failure at the end of her second pregnancy last year, she worried first about her health and her baby -- then about the more than $200,000 in medical bills that began rolling in.
“Your world is just crashing down around you and you wonder: ‘How is this going to be covered?’ ” recalled Mira, 30, who spent more than a month away from her Tacoma home, hospitalized at the University of Washington Medical Center.
For Mira and her family, the answer came not through traditional health insurance, but through faith that fellow Christians would step forward to pay the bills.
The Miras -- including daughter Jael, 4, and baby Sienna Rain, now a healthy 9-month-old -- are among the growing numbers of people looking to “health care-sharing ministries” across the U.S. At last count, there were more than 10,000 members in Washington state and nearly 400,000 nationwide, individuals and families whose medical costs are taken care of entirely through the organized goodwill -- and monthly payments or “shares” -- of like-minded religious followers.

The writer is the newspaper’s health reporter and the tone is informative and respectful. It’s kind of sad when it’s unusual to find a piece in the secular media about religious practices that have no snark attached.


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Big scoop for Sarah: Former GetReligionista scores exclusive on Mark Driscoll resignation

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We're proud to say we knew you way back when, Sarah Pulliam Bailey.

The former GetReligionista scored a major scoop Wednesday with her Religion News Service report on the resignation of Mars Hills Church pastor Mark Driscoll:

(RNS) Mark Driscoll, the larger-than-life megachurch pastor who has been accused of plagiarism, bullying and an unhealthy ego that alienated his most devoted followers, resigned from his Seattle church Tuesday (Oct. 14), according to a document obtained by RNS.
The divisive Seattle pastor had announced his plan to step aside for at least six weeks in August while his church investigated the charges against him. Driscoll’s resignation came shortly after the church concluded its investigation.
“Recent months have proven unhealthy for our family — even physically unsafe at times — and we believe the time has now come for the elders to choose new pastoral leadership for Mars Hill,” Driscoll wrote in his resignation letter.

Other major news organizations quickly jumped on the story, including CNN.


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Who is in charge of judging Mark Driscoll, other than the New York Times?

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As the story of Mars Hill Church and the Rev. Mark Driscoll continues to unfold, I want to flash back to the very important New York Times story that yanked this drama onto the national front burner (other than for evangelical insiders).

This story was quite good, with few examples of usual jarring advocacy language pointing readers toward the progressive social doctrines advocated by the Times. In particular, note that this story often featured the views of conservative Christians who are now critical of Driscoll's leadership style and some of the actions that may or may not have grown out of it. Even though this story travels into moral and cultural issues, there are very few traces of "Kellerism" in it.

However, this report does have one major problem, from my point of view. It is clear that Driscoll is facing the judgment of evangelical Protestant leaders from coast to coast. However, the story never really states the degree to which Mars Hill Church is, itself, an independent body that has few ties binding it to any denomination or tradition.

In other words, if Mars Hill is a kind of mini-denomination of its own, who has the legal, as well as the doctrinal, right to investigate and then pass judgment on its founder?


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