#43: The Rise And Fall Of Mars Hill

#43: The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey guys, it’s Jesse. Real quick reminder that we have an application deadline coming up on July 12 for our program. Our program is for 18 to 30 year olds where they can come serve with us for an entire year and make a difference in the lives of hurting people with the gospel. So if you are somebody who’s between 18 and 30, or you know somebody that is and they’re trying to figure out what to do with the next year of life, come serve with us. We would love to journey with you and help you discover what it means to live in community with other Christians and to go out into the world where you can live the gospel. So head over to our website at lovethyneighborhood.org, where you can take a look at the hundreds of different internship opportunities that we have and find the one that’s perfect for you. So again, head over to lovethyneighborhood.org and apply by July 12. Okay, onto the episode. 

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you’re anything like me, you look at the state of evangelicalism in America and you think – what in the world happened? I mean, it seems like every month there’s another story in the news about a well-known Christian giving up their faith, another leader caught in a scandal, about one group of Christians being fed up with another. And while we don’t have the time or the staff to look at every single story individually, we can all learn something by taking a look at just one story and diving in deep. That’s what our friends at Christianity Today are doing in their new podcast series called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. If you listen, it sounds similar to our approach. They use journalism and storytelling, they have a great soundtrack, and I wanted to share that with you. So today, I’ve asked the host of this new series, Mike Cosper, to join me. Hey, Mike. 

MIKE COSPER: Hey, thanks for having me. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so Mike, you host the series, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, but you’re also Christianity Today‘s director of podcasting. So I guess the question is, like, what made you wanna dive into the Mars Hill story specifically? 

MIKE COSPER: Yeah, I, I think there’s a, a few factors for it. I mean, this is a story in many ways that you do keep hearing over and over again. You know, 25 years ago when a pastor was fired from a church, the predominant reasons were issues like money or addiction or, you know, sexual infidelity or whatever, but increasingly in the last 10 years we’ve heard these stories about abusive cultures, bullying, domineering. And um, you know, what Mars Hill sort of represents is this larger than life version of it. And because the culture of Mars Hill was so interesting and unique, it makes a really compelling deep dive, uh, into one story that can then give us a window into these broader cultural currents.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah. So we’ll be listening to segments of the very first episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill as we ask the question – how does a multi-site megachurch go from a weekly attendance of over 12,000 people with 15 locations across four states – how does it suddenly go from that to nothing? What makes a megachurch grow like wildfire only to end up as nothing but ashes? And what does this story have to do with all of us?

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Today’s episode – The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so the first episode – it focuses mainly on Mark Driscoll, who was the founder and the pastor at Mars Hill, and all the controversy surrounding him. And I think for those who may not be familiar with the Driscoll and Mars Hill controversy, here’s some basics that you should probably know. In May 2013, charges were brought forward from a fellow elder against Driscoll, including a lack of self-control, a domineering attitude, being verbally violent, disrespectful, arrogant, and quick-tempered. The charges were found to be non-disqualifying. As a result, that elder resigned. In November of 2013, Driscoll was publicly accused of plagiarism in one of his books. That plagiarism was later confirmed to be true. In August 2014, Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church were expelled from the Acts 29 Network on grounds of his, quote, “ungodly and disqualifying behavior,” end quote. After the Acts 29 expulsion, Lifeway stores announced that they would not sell Driscoll’s books until further assessment of his ministry had taken place. During that same month, two letters written by 30 current and former Mars Hill pastors were sent to the board expressing concerns for the leadership structure and state of the church, particularly around issues of Mark Driscoll’s character. And then, just two months later, Mark Driscoll officially resigned from Mars Hill. And finally, on January 1, 2015, the entire Mars Hill Network officially dissolved.

Okay, so Mike, you start off the episode talking about a letter from Mark Driscoll announcing his leave of absence. So this would’ve been in August of 2014, and I’d like to pick up where Driscoll reads that letter to his congregation. 

MARK DRISCOLL: When a small group of us started what would become Mars Hill in 1996, we could not have dreamed it would be what it is today. Uh, thousands upon thousands of people have become Christians as the gospel of Jesus Christ has proven powerful over and over. Thank you. I genuinely mean this. Um, thank you for being a wonderful church family. 

MIKE COSPER: He goes on to acknowledge that it’s a tumultuous time at Mars Hill, and he takes responsibility for some of the conflict. He’s specific about one thing in particular – a series of comments he made on a message board about 15 years earlier – but for the most part, his acknowledgement of fault is pretty broad, pretty vague. 

MARK DRISCOLL: God is not honored by conflict, strife, disunity, arguing, slander, gossip, or anything else that is inconsistent with the fruit of the spirit, and I am deeply, genuinely sorry for the times I have not done my part to live peaceably with all men. 

MIKE COSPER: He ends with this. 

MARK DRISCOLL: As I look forward to the future – and I do look forward to it – I believe the Lord has shown me I am to do two things with the rest of my life – love my family and teach the Bible. I, uh, (applause)…

MIKE COSPER: It matters. It isn’t just a polite response. These folks loved Mark, and that’s a really critical piece of the puzzle when you try to understand what happened at Mars Hill. Mark was a firebrand, and he attracted a lot of outside criticism over the years for his language, his attitude, his views on masculinity and sexuality, and his general posture towards the world. But if you were insideMars Hill – those things were features, not bugs. They were part of why you wanted to be there. 

JOEL BROWN: I think a lot of who we were good at reaching were kids like me. 

MIKE COSPER: This is Joel Brown. Joel served as a staff member and later a pastor from about 1999 all the way to the end of Mars Hill.

JOEL BROWN: People who were a little bit disenfranchised with cultural Christianity and had a little bit of that punk rock spirit, and I would say most people had some sort of heart of rebellion that we wanted to break conventions inside or outside of the church. 

MIKE COSPER: Mars Hill embodied that spirit in many ways – the music, the aesthetics, the way they issued certain norms in ministry. Everything had an air of that punk rock spirit. But most of all, it was embodied by Mark himself. Today, it’s not uncommon to find pastors with a kind of personal brand. You see them on YouTube or Instagram wearing expensive sneakers, hanging out with celebrities, taking selfies at hip bars and restaurants. There are whole social media channels like Preachers and Sneakers devoted to pointing this stuff out too. But when Mars Hill started 25 years ago, things were very, very different. The cool pastors at the time, where guys who wore pleated khakis and Hawaiian shirts – they pastored churches that looked like cruise ships and preached in friendly, inviting ways. And outta that world comes Mark Driscoll. He’s loud and angry. He talks about drinking beer and watching MMA. He preaches for an hour or more – long, fiery, shouted sermons that talk about hell and judgment and blood and redemption at a time when the church growth experts around him are holding seminars on how to make your church more seeker-sensitive. And he speaks to young men, but not first and foremost in a “You can do it. Let’s take the hill” kind of way. He attacks young men constantly for the way they’ve been lured by the surrounding culture into being passive, lazy, and weak. For example, here’s an excerpt from a sermon from November 2009. 

MARK DRISCOLL: You can, you want a guy you can marry and have babies with. You don’t wanna marry a guy who’s a baby. And it’s unbelievable. I, I swear to you, I keep waiting to go to the mall and just – I’m waiting for the day when guys are in strollers, just with meat binkies and sippy cups full of beer, and the girlfriends are like, “Oh, he’s nice. He’s got potential. I think he’s got a lot of potential.” “Oh, I messied. I messied.” I mean, it’s like, “Good Lord.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like you go on to say there that, like, he’s got this sort of, uh, cantor to him, similar to like an insult comic. And I thought that exact same thing when I was listening to him, like, man, he’s got this, like, rhythm to him that’s, like, very inviting and, like, enjoyable.

MIKE COSPER: Yeah, I mean he, over the years, he talks a lot to pastors about kind of his preaching method, and he’s pretty disdainful of most preaching and basically said, you know, “my preaching method was primarily derived from listening to Chris Rock.” Um, and you hear it, like the timing, the pacing. There were so many people I talked to who had hard feelings with Mark of one sort or another who would just as readily say, like, he was the most engaging speaker, preacher, funniest guy in the room in every encounter they ever had with him. 

JESSE EUBANKS: A couple things that, you know, stick out to me is this. Like, in the clip, there’s the person that talks about, you know, the early years of Mars Hill that there was an attraction for, like, those that were drawn towards, you know, a Christian faith, but they were really, you know, on the fringes, sort of a punk rock attitude. And like, that easily could have been somebody talking about the, the church that you and I have been a part of, you know, for 20 years. You and I, uh, both were founding members of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, and in our early years, like we were the punk rock kids. We were the, you know, the indie rock kids and the, the folks that were trying to be serious about our faith but didn’t really fit into traditional church. Like, that easily is our story.

MIKE COSPER: Yeah, I, I would say that’s definitely our experience, and I think at the time there’s a movement happening across the country. Um, we didn’t know anything about Mars Hill Church in, you know, 1998, 1999, when we started getting together for Bible studies and praying and just feeling alienated from church. We just felt alienated from church. Um, didn’t speak our language, we didn’t connect with it. There were churches being planted at that time all over the place that don’t really know about each other but are feeling the same thing. Uh, there’s a guy named Jeff Vanderstelt who was at Willow Creek in Chicago and is going like, “Hey, this ministry model just doesn’t seem to work for anybody once they get into their, you know, their early twenties. We gotta figure out something different.” You know, Jeff went on to plant Soma Community Church and has had, uh, a lot of influence in Acts 29 in other places in the 20 years since. That was happening here with us. That was happening in St. Louis. And you can go on and on. There was an ethos that was happening, and churches like Mars Hill, churches like Sojourn, were, were tapping into that because, you know, the leaders and the, the people themselves that were members of the church were just looking for a place to connect when the church didn’t seem to speak their language.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. The other thing too that Driscoll’s appealing to that I understand is, like, he’s appealing to the passivity of men and confronting them about it, like, in a very, sort of like a father figure way, like there’s a better way to live life. These all seem like really good things, like these can be really beneficial things to people’s lives. I see why so many people were attracted to it. Let’s pick things up at a quote from author-missiologist Ed Stetzer. He was actually involved with Mars Hill at the beginning. 

ED STETZER: I saw stunning life change. Um, there’s a reason that 10,000 plus people engaged there and there’s reasons why it ultimately imploded and those reasons didn’t always become simultaneously apparent. I think that’s what people kind of assume, that you’d see all the, the good and the bad simultaneously. No, I think there were some people who were seeing the bad ’cause they were living it and they were experiencing it and, and I, I know a lot of people who have left the faith – people who are pastors are now not Christians because of their experience in those contexts. And then I know countless numbers of people who, who were just in lives that were just a mess and were redeemed by the power of the gospel and changed at Mars Hill and, and, and see, you know, have moved from there. You know, now see some, but, but again, it’s, it’s, you could have lived as people did and had very different experiences and very different impact on your life depending upon what part of the orbit you were in or not in at Mars Hill. 

MIKE COSPER: That contradiction is the center of the Mars Hill story – stunning life change and stunning pain, radical transformation and wounds so deep they drove people from the church or from the faith altogether. And the connection between those two realities is critical. Those who are walking wounded after their time at Mars Hill wouldn’t have those wounds if they hadn’t first experienced something profound at the church. And in a twisted way, that pain wouldn’t have been tolerated over the years if there hadn’t been a sense of kingdom advancement. As we ask who killed Mars Hill, we have to look at the character issues that led to Mark’s leave of absence and resignation, and we’ll do that a lot as this series goes on, but you have to ask bigger questions too – questions about the culture of a church that that tolerated and even enabled that behavior for years. Here’s how Joe Day, a worship leader who was on staff for a decade there, described it. 

JOE DAY: The prevailing justification for pretty much all the carnage to happen within Mars Hill was, “Hey, look at the fruit. Look at all the people that are coming to Christ. Look at all the people that are being baptized. Uh, look at all these stories of redemption. Could, could those things be real if Mark was, you know, off the rails?” And eventually, I mean, that became Mark himself, like, you know, there’s, there was a Mars Hill training day where Mark got up and talked for about an hour about he is the brand and our role is essentially to bring people in the doors so that Mark can preach to them because he’s more effective than everybody else. I mean, he was blunt. 

MARK DRISCOLL: Too many guys waste too much time trying to move stiff-neck, stubborn, obstinate people. I am all about blessed subtraction. 

MIKE COSPER: This is from a church planter’s bootcamp in October 2007. The day before, Mark and the executive team had fired two elders who’d raised objections to changes in the church governance policy. 

MARK DRISCOLL: There, there is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus, and by God’s grace, it’ll be a mountain by the time we’re done. You either get on the bus, or you get run over by the bus. Those are the options. But the bus ain’t gonna stop. This is what we’re doing. There’s a few kind of people. There’s people who get in the way of the bus. They gotta get run over. There are people who wanna take turns driving the bus. They gotta get thrown off ’cause they wanna go somewhere else. There are people who will, uh, be on the bus leaders and helpers and servants. They’re awesome. There’s also just sometimes nice people who sit on the bus and shut up. Um, they’re not helping or hurting. Just let ’em ride along. Um, you know what I’m saying? But go look at the nice people. They’re just gonna sit on the bus and shut their mouth and think, “I need you to lead the mission.” They’re never going to. Uh, you need to gather a whole new core. I, I’ll tell you guys what too. You don’t do this just from your church planting or replanting. I’m doing it right now. I’m doing it right now. We just took certain guys and rearranged the seats on the bus. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They’re off the bus, under the bus. Um, they were off mission, so now they’re unemployed. 

MIKE COSPER: For a long time at Mars Hill, there was a tolerance for this sort of thing. Like many organizations, the relational fallout from people being run over by the bus was just part of doing business. But as the years went on, as that pile of dead bodies grew higher and higher, the tolerance lowered and a consensus grew inside the church that there had to be change. Part of the solution was simply that Mark became more and more insulated from other people – separate offices, limited access, changing phone numbers and email addresses – and part of it came with intentional efforts to recruit help for healing the wounds. One of those involved Paul David Tripp, a respected biblical counselor and author who had years of experience working with church leaders. He joined the Board of Advisors in November 2013 and worked for eight months trying to facilitate a reconciliation process between Driscoll and those who were expressing concerns and hurt, but he resigned the board eight months later in July of 2014. When he did, it was big news covered in many major news outlets because of the bad omen it seemed to be for Mars Hill. Shortly after that, at a retreat for Mars Hill’s lead pastors, a group of them gathered in a conference room and called him looking for guidance and hoping to see a way forward. Tripp was not optimistic.

PAUL DAVID TRIPP: This is without a doubt the most abusive, coercive ministry culture I’ve ever been involved with. In fact, I would say this – any local church, whether it’s 50 or 50,000, that whose leadership culture is not shaped by the same grace it, it says it believes is, is unbiblical and heading for trouble. Now I have said from the beginning, Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll, deals with its sins or it’s done. I, I absolutely believe this. It’s done. It’s over. There is – you guys may not know this – there’s a firestorm coming that’s worse than what you’ve been through.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, when we come back, we’ll try to answer the question – who really killed Mars Hill? Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey, it’s the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. I’m here with Christianity Today‘s director of podcasting, Mike Cosper, as he takes us through the first episode of their brand new series, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Okay, so before the break, we heard Paul David Tripp say some pretty blunt things about Driscoll and Mars Hill. Uh, can we play a part of that again? 

PAUL DAVID TRIPP: Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll, deals with its sins or it’s done. There is – you guys may not know this – there’s a firestorm coming that’s worse than what you’ve been through.

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean, the, the tone is a sense of urgency. What happened? What went wrong? 

MIKE COSPER: So one of the things I am really thinking about with this series is trying to, trying to continually contextualize it in ways that show how this happens in lots of different churches and lots of different contexts because a lot of people would answer your question and they would say, “Well, it’s because his theology was too conservative” or they would say, “Well, it was because he was too sort of permissive in the culture that he created about language and vulgarity and this, that, and the other.” But I think what emerges over time, really, it, it, you don’t get past character. Character is destiny. You can debate the finer points of how the polity was arranged and, you know, what they were teaching and all of that. Those are all worth talking about. But I think what emerges as you press into the story over and over again is that there was ultimately no willingness to submit to the accountability of the men around him, and that’s why the polity changed over the years. That’s why the church evolved some of the ways that it was, is people were trying to sort of solve that puzzle – “How do we create restraints and accountability?” And, um, that evolution was intended to do that, and for complicated reasons it never did. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Okay, so I think it’s clear that, like, a large part of what happened to Mars Hill had to do with the leadership, but then, like, in the episode, you take this interesting turn and you end up putting the focus on some of the outside influences to what happened, specifically some of the blogs that started circulating once people realized that posting anything about Driscoll was automatic click bait. Uh, so let’s actually listen to that. 

TONY JONES: You know, I was in the blogosphere for 10 years. 

MIKE COSPER: That’s Tony Jones. Tony was one of the founders of the emergent church movement and had been connected with Mark in the ’90s. They diverged over theology – a story we’ll get into in another episode – and in the years that followed, Tony was kind of a chronicler of what was happening in the church, both inside emergent and beyond. 

TONY JONES: I knew for a fact that my numbers shot through the roof whenever I blogged about Rob Bell or Mark Driscoll. I mean the, like, do – a lot of people forget, like, that’s, that’s how Rachel Held Evans became famous – blogging about Mark Driscoll. 

MIKE COSPER: That’s probably overstating the case a bit. Rachel’s criticism of conservative Christianity, particularly around biblical womanhood, drew attention on its own. But yes, she was also one of Mars Hill’s foremost critics. Where most of the criticism that came from inside the church was around leadership style, tactics, and personality, Rachel’s critiques focus on issues like toxic masculinity, objectification of women, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. In this, she was kind of the foremost voice in a chorus of critiques that saw the problem not just in the style of Mars Hill, but the substance too. And those critiques continue to this day. Rachel tragically passed away about two years ago from medical complications after an infection. Another source of that criticism came from us at Christianity Today. 

KATE SHELMAN: I, I will say that he is the first person that I know of that blocked me on Twitter, and I’m still blocked.

MIKE COSPER: That’s Kate Shelman, senior news editor here at CT. 

KATE SHELMAN: And I think that happened pretty early on in Her.meneutics times. So probably 2013. I, we were writing about him on Her.meneutics. It would’ve been that. So Her.meneutics was CT‘s women’s blog, and we posted every single day. Um, and so that was back when it was earlyish in the Twitter sphere, but when blogs were where all this went down. I mean, you know, from all these stories that, um, the blogs are a character themselves and the, the story of, of Mars Hill, and so we had kind of a, a side role in all of that, I think, in platforming evangelical women. And because a lot of them were either naming him explicitly or talking about the same phenomenon that he had, that he represented, about gender, uh, about sex, about marriage, about celebrity culture, about church, uh, structure, all of this, um, that I think he didn’t like being the enemy in so many of those stories that I was editing and pushing out there. Um, so it wasn’t my direct reporting, but it was the content that CTwas sharing at the time. I also ran all of our social media back then. Um, so I would’ve been tweeting and tagging at Pastor Mark in any case.

MIKE COSPER: It would be impossible to fully account for the other voices, especially the bloggers, who contributed to a mounting wave of criticism that flooded the church. Warren Throckmorton, who you’ll hear from later in this series, was probably the foremost as he became an outlet for Mars Hill insiders to leak internal documents, letters, and news. But it was a flood, and it grew steadily louder and more mainstream as the years went on. You can’t talk about who killed Mars Hill without considering the role the blogs played. Kate put it perfectly – they’re kind of a character in and of themselves.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, why did you think this section was important to include? You know, why not strictly focus on what was happening inside the church? 

MIKE COSPER: Well, I think the outside pressure, you know, adds to the inside pressure, right? Let’s say I had a teenage son – which I don’t – but let’s say I had a teenage son and he’s like being a punk. Over months and months, I’m trying to sort of deal with him, deal with our relationship, work all those kinds of things out. And, you know, it’s, it’s a rocky road. If all of a sudden I start getting unsolicited notes from neighbors or from other parents’ kids, or, you know, if I’m a pastor and I’m getting those kind of unsolicited notes from people in my congregation – which pastors of older kids will tell you happens a lot – there’s a reactivity in the other direction. There’s a reaction that happens in terms of protection, like, “Hey, that’s my problem. Like he’s a jerk, but he’s my jerk.” And so I think there’s a dynamic like that that’s taking place, uh, inside lots of churches, but inside Mars Hill in particular, in the midst of this. The blogs mattered. The blogs helped reveal a lot of stuff. The blogs also had a way of creating their own kind of pressure on the church. You know, my point in bringing it up in the story is not to say this shouldn’t have happened, but if the question is, you know, “Who killed Mars Hill?” uh, the blogs definitely played a role. They added to the pressure ,they added to the environment, and for good and for ill. The stuff that was being published needed to be said at times. Some of it didn’t. Some of it was wrong. There’s definitely points at which efforts of exposing things just got facts wrong over time and that kind of thing. But it’s an essential part of the story to know that there was pressure being applied to the church and there was a reactivity in the church to say, “We’re going to circle the wagons and, and protect even while people are leaking things and feeding that monster.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it makes me think of, like, uh, Newton’s third law – you know, that every force in nature, there’s an equal and opposite force, you know, a reaction to it. It feels like all this pressure came barreling down on Mars Hill, and Mars Hill chose to respond with an equal amount of force back. 

MIKE COSPER: I think there’s some truth to that. Well, I’ll put it this way – I think if you’re a leader with some prominence, right, like the guys on Mark’s board were towards the end in particular, it doesn’t matter who you are, doesn’t matter how much character you, you have. If you live on a big platform, you’re a target and there are people who are slinging arrows at you all the time. And so I think it’s very easy for a board who was not part of the day to day at Mars Hill to see these attacks, to hear all of this kind of stuff, and even if they saw truth in them, they were also able to look at that and go, “Well, that could be me. There are people who would write those exact same articles about me and they wouldn’t be true, so I’m gonna back my guy.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you started the episode with Driscoll announcing his temporary leave so that the investigations could take place, but then as I read earlier, he actually ended up resigning shortly after that. So I’d like to jump now toward the end of the episode where he talks about that decision. 

MIKE COSPER: The audio you’re about to hear is from an interview that Mark and Grace gave to Brian Houston, lead pastor of Hillsong in Australia. As Mark recounts it, he’d met with the board on October 10th and 11th and agreed to start a restoration process, but then on Monday, October the 12th, he had an experience hearing God’s voice that would change his mind.

MARK DRISCOLL: I was in the bedroom, Grace was in the living room, and, um, he spoke to me and he spoke to her in a supernatural way that neither of us anticipated or expected. Um, and so Grace walked in, and she said, “I feel like the Lord just spoke to me and said what we’re supposed to do.” And I was like, “I, I feel like the Lord just spoke to me and said what we’re supposed to do.’ It’s not what we wanted, it’s not what we had agreed to, and it’s not what we had planned for. And so I asked her, “Well, what did the Lord say to you?” ’cause I didn’t want to influence her. And she said, uh, “We’re – “

GRACE DRISCOLL: “We’re released.”

MARK DRISCOLL: Yeah. 

GRACE DRISCOLL: “From Mars Hill.”

MARK DRISCOLL: Yeah. She said, “Well, what did he say to you?” And I said, “Well, the Lord revealed to me that, you know, uh, a trap has been set. There’s, there’s, there’s no way to, for us to return to leadership. And I didn’t know what that meant or what was going on at the time. And, um, um, I said, “He said we’re released and we need to resign.”

MIKE COSPER: Now, if you listen closely, you heard a really key phrase, one that set the tone for the diverging stories about Mars Hill that continue to this day. Mark didn’t just say, “We’re released” – he said, “A trap has been set.” Aaron Gray was the campus pastor at Mars Hill Shoreline and part of the team investigating the charges against Mark.

AARON GRAY: To this day, I have no idea what that means. It was, it was really disappointing to, to hear the, you know, kind of pulling the “God told me” card, especially around something as, as specific about there’s some trap laid for him. 

MIKE COSPER: In the years since, that’s essentially been Mark’s story. In that interview with Brian Houston, he did emphasize his personal responsibility. But in a lot of other appearances, the question of character really doesn’t come up. Instead, there are references to a conflict around leadership issues. For example, here he is at a conference called “Men Coaching Men” in September 2015. 

MARK DRISCOLL: And we had a, we had a conflict that went public after about seven years. It really went public for the final year and just was an insane, crazy, difficult year, um, and it reached the point where, um, God released my wife and I from that ministry. And, uh, and up until that point, I mean it, it really got nuts. 

MIKE COSPER: And here’s another example from a TV show called Life Today from April 2017.

MARK DRISCOLL: We had a governance war at the church that went eight years behind the scenes over who’s in charge and how things play out. And so at the end, we had 67 elders in 15 locations in five states – a large percentage of whom I had never met – and they wanted to have independent local churches and we were one large church in many locations. So there was an eight year battle that finally went public the last year and was very painful for everyone involved, especially the wonderful, dear, generous, amazing people that served and gave and made it all happen. And so, um, the governing board in authority over me invited us to continue and we prayed about it and talked about it as a family and felt like we heard from the Lord and I resigned. 

MIKE COSPER: Mark wasn’t just telling that story to outsiders. In the summer of 2015, Tim Smith reached out to him to reconnect, and as I said earlier, Tim was a 16-year veteran at Mars Hill. You’ll hear a lot of his story in a later episode. At times, he and Mark had been very close. In fact, in the early days, Tim and his wife Beth lived in Mark and Grace’s basement for a while. So Tim felt loyalty to Mark and a desire to reconcile, so they met in June at a Panera Bread. 

TIM SMITH: And I confessed to him that I really felt like, um, I wasn’t a very good friend to him at times, that sometimes out of loyalty I, I pulled too many punches and I didn’t share with him some of the things that I thought, that I kind of chose peace over, over honesty at some points, and I, I regretted that and, and I really cared for him and, and I, I wish that I would’ve been a better friend to him. And, you know, I think he was appreciative of that. But he said there wasn’t really anything to forgive and, but that he knows what I really did and he had forgiven me for that a long time ago, and that was confusing. So I was like, “Well, well, what?” And, uh, without going into all the details, he basically just shared with me that, that he had come to believe that towards the end of the investigation process, what he had come to believe is that myself, along with, uh, a couple of the other guys in the board of elders, long-running pastors of the church, were planning to release all the details of the investigation to the media as a way to push Mark out and take over the church for ourselves and that I broke his heart but he forgave me for it. 

MIKE COSPER: Dave Bruskas was one of the executive elders at the time. He had a front row seat to the investigation and all the discussions that were going on inside the board. 

DAVE BRUSKAS: You know, I’ve heard the narrative in, in, in, in the public that those men, the board of elders, somehow some way had an underlying motive to take the church away from Mark, to arrange the evidence in such a way and then, and then respond to the overseers who ultimately made the decision regarding Mark’s future, controlled it, led it in a way that there was no other option for Mark to step away and because they wanted to take the church from him. And, and I just wanna, I just wanna be on record of saying I think that’s absolutely false. Every single one of those men wanted to see, without exception, Mark restored to ministry. 

TIM SMITH: We weren’t going to fire him. And by him resigning, further processes – they were canceled, they were circumvented, they were derailed by his resignation. And so he’s out and now we have to decide what to do next and my, my perspective, my attention, as did most of the, the lead pastors, um, shifted to, uh, what am I gonna do with this church? And it was a two or three hour meeting is all it took to come to the, the grim reality that Mars Hill was done.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so Mike, all throughout the episode, you pose this question – “Who killed Mars Hill?” How would you answer that now? 

MIKE COSPER: I’ll say this. We really are telling this in a 12-part series that covers history – not just in terms of the church going back to ’96, but really looks at, like, several decades of evangelical history to understand this story and why it happened – because the, the answer to that who killed Mars Hill question is really complicated because you have to keep in mind that this isn’t just the story of a pastor that fell. This is the story of a church of 15,000 people, many of whom experienced radical transformation. It’s the story of a church that started a movement, that has planted hundreds of churches. It’s a church that inspired even more church planters and sort of was a permission giving structure for churches to think differently about the gospel and contextualization and reaching people that didn’t fit in other churches. That church went from that kind of massive influence to disappearing in a matter of a few months. And so the fall of Mark Driscoll is obviously central to the story. You can’t tell the story and say, “Well, his character didn’t matter.” I mean, his character is central to the story, but how is he in a position with, without accountability? How is he in a position for 16 years, enabled to, to lead the way he led? Why did people stay? Like, why were pastors still there after some of the things they witnessed that they knew were problematic, after they watched their friends get fired and trampled on? It’s a multi-layered question, and, and the reason we lead off the series with that and we lead off with this end story is because I think you kind of have to see the end from the beginning and then trace back and go, “Where were the seeds of this downfall starting from the day the church was planted in 1996?” And I think the scary thing about this story is that we’ll see a lot of our own churches in it and we’ll see ourselves in the ways that we attach ourselves to celebrity pastors and in the way that we have this spectator attitude of people at a demolition derby. We love to watch a train wreck. We love a controversy.

JESSE EUBANKS: You know, as I listen to the episode, I was really struck with how much kindness and empathy is all throughout the episode. There’s so many moments that punches are not pulled, you know, the truth is laid out very clearly, but it never crosses over into a cruelty or into mocking. You know, when I think about the gospel, I think about grace and truth, and I think that, uh, what you guys are trying to do with this podcast is explore the grace and the truth of God and people interacting at Mars Hill. 

MIKE COSPER: That’s encouraging to hear. I mean, that’s definitely the goal. I had a conversation last August with somebody as we were prepping for the show and I was talking with her, kind of prepping her for the interview, and, you know, she basically said, “Hey, can I, can I appeal to you on one thing?” And I was like, “Sure,” you know. And she said, “I wanna encourage you to talk to people who loved Mark, and I don’t mean his people who are, who were his fans and supporters and don’t think he did anything wrong. But there are a lot of people who have an ax to grind over this stuff, and the people whose voices I hope you highlight,” she said to me, “are people who loved Mark and who saw, you know, so much opportunity and so much beauty in Mars Hill and who were really heartbroken by the story.” That’s where we’ve tried to focus because that’s where the story’s I think the most interesting and where as a podcast we can dive in and connect with people. It, it, it’s been hard to translate, I think, through the, the other ways the story has been told thus far. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, thanks Mike. Thanks for joining us today.

MIKE COSPER: Thanks for having me on.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Go listen to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Episodes one through three are out now. New episodes release every Tuesday. You can find The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill wherever you listen to podcasts or at christianitytoday.com/podcast. Anna Tran is our audio engineer. Rachel Szabo is our producer and media director, who, on the way to the bathroom today, told us that her stomach was upsetting her.

PAUL DAVID TRIPP: There’s a firestorm coming that’s worse than what you’ve been through. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Our theme music and commercial music is by Murphy DX. Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Again, that’s lovethyneighborhood.org. Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”