The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill: Public Knowledge to Common Knowledge

Earlier this summer, a friend of mine sent me a link to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill (RFMH) podcast produced by Christianity Today. After I listened to the trailer and the first 30 mins of episode 1, my basic response was, “Eh- not really a new story”. Rearrange the names and the geography, and this could easily have been a podcast about a well known megachurch in Chicagoland that faced its reckoning in April of 2018. Or replace “church” with “itinerant minister” and this could be a story about a once renowned Christian apologist whose reputation was recently sullied posthumously. Or change the pastor from a GenX guy to a Hipster Millenial and it could be the story of a church here in our backyard who’s senior pastors’ marital infidelity was strategically revealed the week of the 2020 Presidential Election.

Like most things, I assumed this podcast would be quickly forgotten. But in the ensuing month since its release, the question “What did you think of the RFMH?” came up almost daily. It dawned on me that what I perceived to be a relatively familiar and uninteresting story seemed to be getting lots of people’s attention. It made me wonder: Why is a story that is 7 years old hitting such a chord right now? From what I can tell, the basic facts and testimony have been out in the public sphere there for a really long time. What is it about our current moment that makes the story being told feel so timely?

No one knows for sure, but this sure feels like an interesting moment in the American Church. In some sense, it reminds me a lot of the #MeToo reckoning that started in Hollywood back in 2017 and is at least partially responsible for the recent resignation of the governor of our fair state. When Harvey Weinstein was fired in October of 2017 from the company bearing his name, the strange thing to me was that he was being taken down for things that a whole lot of folks seemed to know was going on for decades. TV shows like “30 Rock” made multiple references to Weinstein’s behavior years prior to his fall and interviews with Hollywood actresses on late night TV alluded to his coercive predilections. When the bombshell report from the NY Times came out, we now know that scores of Hollywood insiders were fully aware that Weinstein’s predatory actions had been going on for decades. So what was it about October of 2017 that made the consequences so different than in October of 2007?

Consider the following frame: there’s a difference between public knowledge and common knowledge. Public knowledge is information that is in the public domain. It’s out there. It’s not a secret. Common takes it one step further- when something is common knowledge, not only do I know, but you know that I know, and vice versa and so on. It’s a subtle but important distinction when considering the basic context for the dialogue and discussions that I’ve been having, and are also probably going on all over this country.

Applying this frame to this situation, the systemic issues that led to the RFMH have been public knowledge for as long as I’ve been a part of the church. Consider the following common issues that are familiar to anyone who’s spent significant time embedded in American Protestant Evangelical Christendom.

1. Weak to non-existent accountability for senior pastors. The vast majority of churches I am familiar with are effectively planted non-denominationally. By design, there’s no higher structure capable of providing a check on senior leadership.
2. Celebrity syndrome. When a church is largely built on a particular gift of a senior pastor, there’s no real possibility of a check on their behavior (outside of their conscience) because to provide a check with actual teeth would mean that a church board has to be willing to dissolve the church as they know it. This just reinforces point 1.
3. Obsession with the stats. When we obsess over Sunday attendance, it forces an obsession with branding, which leads to carefully constructed narratives on social media accounts. It begs the question, “what is real”?. As Lieutenant Daniels of The Wire famously states, “Juking the stats is what ruined the police department…”

This is just the tip of the spear for reasons why the Mars Hill story keeps playing out over and over again with the only substantive difference is the scale at which it occurs.

Nothing stated here is “new”, but over the past 20 years these discussions were exclusively held when I was around other pastors and seasoned lay leaders of churches. As someone who has occupied both seats, I often knew when I was in the presence of someone with whom such things can be discussed. It was an inside baseball kind of thing. The fact that this podcast is hitting such a chord with ordinary congregants and not just elders and board members suggests that these issues are transitioning from public to common knowledge. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the timing of the release by the folks at CT is a response to these issues hitting the mainstream. In the same way that widespread sexual misconduct in Hollywood became something we “know” to something we “really know and know that others know”, deep-seeded issues in how we do church in America are making a similar transition. We can debate why or how we got here, but there’s no denying that this is the current state.

We could write a tome on any particular issue raised in RFMH, but one thing this podcast gets right is that it doesn’t just focus on the actions of one man- in this instance, Marc Driscoll. Power goes to someone’s head and all manner of bad behavior ensues… this is not an interesting story. The more interesting question is who are the ones that enable all of this? The RFMH implicitly points the finger at the cadre of leadership around Driscoll that went along with this for years. I’ve had countless conversations with elders and board members of NYC churches over the past 20 years, and they all know something is amiss with the way things are run. Yet they either feel powerless to do anything about it, or many just willfully look the other way as former staff and congregants are left in the wake of a pastor getting high on his own supply. To confront a senior pastor when they have the masses behind them means risking being put on the outside and no longer invited into the “room where it happens”.

It goes without saying that all this is far more nuanced and complicated than what I just articulated above. Most of my friends who are pastors are not power hungry jerks (as Driscoll is often portrayed)- they want the real thing. Most of the elders and board members I know are not spineless pushovers, they actually exhibit courage and fortitude in other spheres of life. So while our individual choices and agency certainly matter- I think this is less about people behaving poorly and more about a system whose fissures are being exposed. A complete thought of mine would not be truly complete without a reference to The Wire, and this is the right time for that. David Simon’s masterpiece highlighted a simple truth for many of us: flawed but well-intentioned individuals can be overwhelmed by institutionalized dysfunction.

A pastor with a preaching gift is on its own an unambiguously good thing and a gift from the Lord. But building a church around this gift… making said pastor’s livelihood dependent on the tithes and offerings of the people who come on Sunday… and creating ad-hoc organizational structures where elders and board members are essentially appointed by the pastor… this is a setup where extraordinary virtue is required for things not to go awry. By definition, this is rare.

Flawed people in a dysfunctional system- this appears to be the ultimate point this podcast is making. It’s why even though most of us don’t attend churches with 13,000 people run by overtly bombastic screamers, we all seem to “get” the story that is being told. Substantial pieces of the Mars Hill story are present in nearly every church that I’ve been proximate to over the last 20 years. And the “pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus” that Driscoll refers to… yeah, there’s a lot of that lying around everywhere.

I am an optimist. Always, and in every realm of life. I often say that I am born again, and always being reborn. The same goes for the American church. The cracks in our systems are now on display for all of us to see and the sooner we recognize that what we’re witnessing is a feature (not a bug) of the program, the sooner we can rewrite the code. And this is precisely what we’ll do. I’m already seeing signs of it. But most importantly, I believe in Jesus’ desire to constantly redeem what is broken, particularly in His Church. And that will be my posture of hope no matter what the facts on the ground might be. As John Wimber (an inordinately gifted man with his own body count) famously stated, “I’m a fool for Jesus.” who’s fool are you?