“(I learned) ‘to love Jesus without feeling like we had a thinly veiled homosexual relationship.’" Mark Driscoll

 

 

So, there I was, valiantly trying to write a post about history, when some guy wants to discuss oral sex on my blog in response to my thinly veiled disdain for Driscoll's exegesis. And then he called me, Dee, of the public health circuit, prudish!!! This means war!!

So, I put on my most adorable clothes (as Driscoll commands) and sat down to document a little recent history. You see, Dris”cool” regularly makes comments that get him in hot water. Then, he makes like he apologizes and most Christians, especially Calvinistas, give him a pass.

Here is the problem. Each time he says something, folks seem to treat it like it is an isolated incident. We are just supposed to forgive and forget that one incident. After all, people who like tattoos go to his church. But, eventually people have to accept the fact that a lot of ones can add up to a problem.(1+1+1+1+…= Uh Oh)! Need I say Jimmy Swaggert or Ted Haggard?

Now, to make this all the more interesting, Cathy Mickels, a Seattle author, wrote an open memo on 1/12/09 to church leaders documenting, in detail, her concerns about Mark Driscoll’s statements. I first read it yesterday but that site, in the last 24 hours, removed the entire memo. I spent the last hour tracking the full memo down and found it at the site Driscoll Controversy under the well penned title,  The Death of Discernment.  LINK. I have downloaded it onto my computer in case it disappears again. Please go to this site for some in-depth documentation.

So, here is a list of some things Driscoll has proclaimed. Many are direct quotes, some are paraphrased, and a couple have brief commentary to go with them. I have tried to give the sources of each statement to help the readers research this on their own. I want to especially recognize Cathy Mickels for bringing together many of his quotes within one memo. Unless noted, the quotes are documented in her memo. Also, I may have repeated one or two comments. My eyes are starting to cross!

“It was a stand-up comedian, foul-mouthed Chris Rock, whom Mark Driscoll credits with teaching him how to preach. Mark claims this comedian was ‘a better study in homiletics than most classes on the subject’. (Confessions, p70)”.

“God creates a perfect woman who is beautiful, sinless, and naked – the same kind of woman every guy ever since has been looking for.”’ (Radical Reformission, p28).

He describes the Old Testament as ‘a redneck hillbilly comedy. LINK

“He turns the issue of circumcision found in Galatians 5 into a crude ‘cut off your pickle joke'.”

“In his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev, he thanks ‘God the Ghost’ for helping him write his book (p26).”

“He calls Jesus ‘a dude’ and uses word pictures depicting Him as ‘a prize-fighter with a tattoo down his leg’. (I think he is erroneously paraphrasing from Revelation) (Radical Reformission, p30).”

“Mark answers a question as to whether or not Jesus went ‘potty’. In response, according to Driscoll, ‘yes, Jesus went number one and number two’, but he did it ‘perfectly, apparently… never got the lid all wet. But I won’t go there, but I could and it would be funny’. What was the congregation’s response? They laughed. (Sermon: How human was Jesus, Part 2, October 15, 2006)”

In Radical Reformission, he says the following:

“(I learned) ‘to love Jesus without feeling like we had a thinly veiled homosexual relationship’ (p14).”

“One of his former pastors taught him ‘to have a relationship with Jesus that did not feel like he was my lifelong prom date’ (p15).”

Then, On Song of Solomon, he says: “ ‘Now what happens is some say “Well, we do believe in the book, and we will teach it, but we’re gonna teach it allegorically.” And there’s a literal and an allegorical interpretation. They’ll say, “Well the allegorical interpretation, it’s not between a husband and a wife, Song of Solomon, love and romance and intimacy; what it is, it’s about us and Jesus.” Really? …I hope not… If I get to heaven and this goes down, I don’t know what I’m gonna do… I mean it’s gonna be a bad day. Right? I mean seriously… You dudes know what I’m talking about… You’re like, no, I’m not doing that… You know I’m not doing that… I love Him [Jesus] but not like that.’ What was the response of the congregants? They laughed. (Excerpts from Driscoll’s first sermon on the Song of Solomon series called, ‘The Peasant Princess’ – start at 27:15)”

“‘God came to earth and he kicks things off as a bartender.”

“In a Christianity Today article titled, ‘A Jesus for Real Men’, Driscoll is quoted as saying that ‘real men’ avoid the church because it projects a ‘Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ’. However, according to Driscoll, ‘real men’ – like Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptists – are ‘dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes’. The article states this is the sort of Christ men are drawn to – what Driscoll calls ‘Ultimate Fighting Jesus’. 

“‘I assumed the students and singles were all pretty horny, so I went out on a limb and preached through the Song of Songs… Each week I extolled the virtues of marriage, foreplay, oral sex, sacred stripping, and sex outdoors, just as the book teaches… This helped us a lot because apparently a pastor using words like “penis” and “oral sex” is unusual, and before you could say “aluminum pole in the bedroom”, attendance began to climb steadily to more than two hundred people a week.’ “

“Mark describes his barbershop as ‘providing the finest selection of waiting area pornography in our city’. But isn’t the word finest a rather odd way of describing perverted material? Driscoll’s own young son goes with him to his barber, a flamboyant transsexual.”

“Driscoll writes that the phone rang at ‘some godforsaken hour… when I’m not even a Christian’. He said, ‘some college guy was crying’. Driscoll said that he tried to ‘muster up my inner pastor… and tried to pretend I [he] was concerned’. Since the caller was beating around the bush, Mark blurted out, ‘What have you done?’ When the caller confessed he had watched porno and masturbated, Driscoll actually asked the upset caller, ‘Was it good porno?’ As expected, the caller was left speechless by his question. Then, Mark told him, ‘Well, you’ve already watched the whole porno and tugged your tool, so what am I suppose to do?’ The caller answered him, ‘You are my pastor, so I thought that maybe you could pray with me.’ But, to the contrary, Mark wrote, ‘I did not want to pray so I just said the first thing that came to mind… Jesus thank you for not killing him for being a pervert. Amen.’ According to Driscoll, the caller was still left unclear about what he was suppose to do, so in Driscoll style, he told the caller, ‘A naked lady is good to look at, so get a job, get a wife, ask her to get naked, and look at her instead.’ (Confessions pp59-60).”

“He tells about a time of exhaustion when he snapped at the young men at his church. Describing them as a chronic masturbator, a porn addict, banging weak-willed girls like a screen door in a stiff breeze, Mark says he cussed out a poor guy, losing his mind to the point that he thinks he actually cuffed him upside the head. In a follow-up meeting, he preached to the young men about manhood, but then, in my opinion, he snapped again. (Confessions p128).”

“According to Mark, his explanation for getting their act together was ‘because you can’t charge hell with your pants around your ankles, a bottle of lotion in one hand, and a kleenex in the other’. He concluded the meeting by handing ‘each man two stones and told them that on this day God was giving them their balls back to get the courage to do kingdom work’. (Confessions p129). “

"Mars Hill began having ‘boot camps’ for men, teaching them how to get a wife, have sex with that wife… buy a house… study the Bible… and brew decent beer’. (Confessions p130)."

"Driscoll said, ‘I emailed Rick Warren, assuming that he is now so big that he must wear a cup all the time just to get through an average day.’"

“He says he was impressed with his worship leader because ‘most of the worship dudes I have heard are not very dudely… they seem to be… exceedingly chickified from… singing prom songs to Jesus’.”

“The detail the story about the attractive woman at the airport who offered him what Driscoll describes as her ‘impressive sexual favors’? It is also curious why Mark would use the language he does to describe this woman, whom Mark says was ‘Hot—like hell’. (Confessions, p128)”

He was “bragging about how ‘tough’ it was for him to preach on Lake Washington with frat guys ‘mooning my [his] church’ with ‘a backdrop of their hairy heinies’, or describing the ‘well-endowed young women passing by on a boat, lifting up their shirts’, or detailing his gross account of ‘messing my[his] pants while preaching with the stomach flu’.”

“He describe his flu ordeal saying ‘getting sent to hell would be an upgrade’. He proudly declares, ‘I crapped myself about fifteen minutes into the sermon and was left with a terrible dilemma. Do I finish the sermon and just not move much on the stage? Do I… sneak off and clean up the oil slick?’ Instead of excusing himself like a mature adult, he preached for another 45 minutes and then adds more crudity to his story and writing, ‘I tried to breath out of my mouth to lessen the stench.’ (Confessions, p88 and 176-177)

 

Southern View Chapel does a review of his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev LINK

They note:

• He admits to stealing a sound system (p. 62)
• He has a mission to ultimately grow a church of 10,000 attendees – p. 164)
• Anyone who does not fit into that mission is dispensable (pp. 45, 63, 112, 131, 135, 148-150) or fired (pp. 146-147, 196).
• He admits his fits of anger when not pleased (pp 99, 128, 130).

 

Missouri Baptist Laymen’s Association also quotes from his books LINK 

 "In its first few years, the Paradox [a secular music ministry of Driscoll’s church] hosted about 650 concerts for about 65,000 kids. We have had only a few minor problems, like the Japanese punk band that got naked during their set for no apparent reason and another band that set off fireworks during their show.” (Confessions, p.127)"

“I had grown facial hair, started cussing again (I had stopped for about fifteen minutes after I got saved), and briefly considered taking up smoking but had asthma, which kept me from achieving my full cool potential.” (Confessions p.50)

“I occasionally bought lottery tickets and promised God I would tithe if he’d let me win, but to no avail.” (Confessions, p.58)

“The Bible could end right there [in Genesis], after only two chapters, with the man and woman naked, eating fruit, and trying to fill the earth all by their happy, horny, holy selves.” (Radical Reformission, p.28)

 

From Sermon Index we learn: LINK

“Our church services started to stink a whole lot less. We scraped together enough money to buy some big honking speakers, and I stole an unused sound console from my old church along with a projection screen, which were sins that Jesus thankfully died to forgive.” (Confessions, p.62)

“We never paid for electricity in our office apartment because the building was illegally hooked up to the power grid and all our power was stolen.” (Confessions, p.125)

“And to top it all off, God comes to earth. He has a mom whom everyone thinks is a slut, a dad whom they think has the brilliance of a five-watt bulb for believing the ‘virgin birth’ line, and brothers who likely pummel him frequently, because even God would have to get at least one wedgie from his brothers if he were to be fully human.” (Radical Reformission, p.29)

 

Another section of Driscoll Controversy blog. LINK

“Here is an extract from Mark Driscoll’s sermon on humor Part 2; preached on January 13, 2008. Abstracted from the Mars Hill website. LINK

‘We’ll start at the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, where all things begin including good comedy. The book starts with a guy marrying his sister, which is really funny unless you’re from Kentucky and then it’s too close to home. And then it moves along and God floods the earth and kills everyone except for a family headed by a man name Noah. They climb into an ark and upon exiting the ark in Genesis 9, there’s this really funny little story. Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent. I mean the whole book is a redneck hillbilly saga par excellence. It’s like all of Genesis takes place in a trailer park… the whole book is filled with redneck comedy. And Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent like a hillbilly redneck on vacation and when I see it, I see a guy with blue tarbs, a guy in a swim trunks and cowboys boots, drunk on moon shine with a John Deer cap, sitting around playing Texas-Hold ‘em with his uncle daddy, eating hot pockets. That’s how I see it. It’s kind of funny that after God kills everyone the one “righteous” guy passes out naked in his tent.’”
“I was recently given a recording of one of these messages, where the speaker said, “Ladies, let me assure you of this: if you think you’re being dirty, he’s pretty happy.” Such pronouncements are usually made amid raucous laughter, but evidently we are expected to take them seriously. When the laughter died away, that speaker added, “Jesus Christ commands you to do this.” That approach is not exegesis; it is exploitation.”

Continuing on in this site we read this short commentary from John MacArthur

“Song of Solomon is used by Driscoll to say God commands a wife to have oral sex with her husband. It doesn’t say any such thing. He is perverting Scripture..”

(Editorial Comment: Didn't Solomon have hundreds of wives and concubines? So, if we do what Song of Solomon says, we are supposed to have perfect marriages. End editorial)

 

"Let me just say our position is this—tattoos are not a sin, right. Jesus Christ is going to have a tattoo—Revelation says on his second coming. It says that down his right leg will be written King of Kings and Lord of Lords, which will be really freakish for all for the fundamentalists to see Jesus all tattooed up. I can’t wait for that day…" 

Make sure you go to a good tattoo parlour, two of the best in Seattle are actually members of Mars Hill… go in there for a biblical new covenant tattoo, is what we would recommend.” LINK 
 

Again from  Driscoll Controversy LINK

 Ever wonder about the type of punk rock group that plays at Mars Hill?

“So I grabbed one of our punk-rock worship teams that had recently come together, with Matt drumming, Jeff [Suffering], who had been the front man for a punk band called 90 Pound Wuss, and a college student named Luke singing and playing guitar. They have remained with our church ever since as the worship team humorously called Team Strikeforce. I also grabbed a few young college students who wanted to go into ministry, expecting I could use the experience to train them.” (Confessions, p100)"

Here are some words from this group’s Apathetic Selfish Destruction’:

“Revolt towards corruption, towards pain.

Flee existance, flee sanity.

Yeah towards denial, towards self mutilation.

Self mutilation.
 Apathetic selfish destruction, ah woe (4x)”

“The term ‘chamber-pop’ is used to describe the sound of Suffering and the Hideous Thieves. There is a large classical component to the music. I can honestly say that this is the first time I have heard a hymn sound like a drunken waltz in ‘There is a Fountain’, which is the introduction to the record, where a choir of voices slur, ‘There is a fountain filled with blood.’”

“The content of the album leaves you feeling like you are reading the journal of a man on the brink of insanity. It pulls you in and forces you to face the atrocities of the world. Suffering and the Hideous Thieves have gone beyond musical boundaries to create an album that stays with you emotionally and mentally. After listening to this album you almost feel defiled or like you are witnessing something that is just wrong. Its mix of beauty and repulsion, glory and damnation, and comfort and hopelessness, leaves the listener at a loss.”

 

From TWW’s post called Mark Driscoll- Two Hour Theologian and Repristinizer of Patriarchy LINK

“It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness," Driscoll wrote. "A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either.’” ( This is the unofficial verse of TWW and is the reason why we call ourselves the glamorous bloggers. We promise never, ever, to be dressed in anything less than Talbot's level of clothing when we blog. You can count on us to hold up the standards for blogging.)

“He claims to have prepared his sermon in 2 hours! Not only that, he noted that he did so while watching a Mariners Game on television!”

“Women will be saved by going back to that role that God has chosen for them. Ladies, if the hair on the back of your neck stands up it is because you are fighting your role in the scripture.”

 

 

From TWWs Mark Driscoll-Narcissistic Cowboy or Knight Errant LINK

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”(the entrie quote
 

• “He, who was not a student at the college, threatened guys in a dorm setting who lived on the same floor as his then girlfriend, now wife.
• He drove 600 miles round trip to make sure his girlfriend had arrived at her college because she “forgot” to call him as she had promised.
• He faces the front door in restaurants and puts her against the wall to protect her in case something “bad goes down”
• He censors her email so she doesn’t get bad emails.
• He seems to convey that physically assaulting members of his staff and leadership is normal.
• He needs to worship a Jesus that he cannot beat up.
• Jesus has tattoos, a sword and is committed to making someone bleed.
• Questioning a pastor is a sin and he will suspend your membership privileges if you question him.”

And, of course, from our recent post,

“So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you’ve ever personally witnessed?”

“Without blushing, Paul is simply stating that when it comes to leading in the church, women are unfit because they are more gullible and easier to deceive than men. Before you get all emotional like a woman in hearing this, please consider the content of the women’s magazines at your local grocery store that encourages liberated women in our day to watch porno with their boyfriends, master oral sex for men who have no intention of marrying them, pay for their own dates in the name of equality, spend an average of three-fourths of their childbearing years having sex but trying not to get pregnant, and abort 1/3 of all babies – and ask yourself if it doesn’t look like the Serpent is still trolling the garden and that the daughters of Eve aren’t gullible in pronouncing progress, liberation, and equality.” (Editor's Comment-So, are the guys who encourage this stuff not easily deceived?)

From ExMinistries LINK

“It’s a Jay-Z soundtrack kind of day. Watched his NY show this weekend – I know he says bowling words but man the guy is a genius”

.

From the New York Times, LINK  Iin an article titled “Who Would Jesus Smack Down” we read:

“An “Under 17 Requires Adult Permission” warning flashes before the video cuts to evening services at Mars Hill, where an anonymous audience member has just text-messaged a question to the screen onstage: “Pastor Mark, is masturbation a valid form of birth control?” Driscoll doesn’t miss a beat: “I had one guy quote Ecclesiastes 9:10, which says, ‘Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.’ ”

“Driscoll is adamantly not the “weepy worship dude” he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, “singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.”

“The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

“Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a “mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy” who attends Mars Hill. “His answer was brilliant,” Driscoll reported. “He said, ‘I break their nose.’ ” When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. “They are sinning through questioning,” Driscoll preached.”
 

A reader, Jean Seldon, has told me that I am not following the Bible because I said I liked Dwight from The Office. Another favorite character, earning me, I am sure, eternal condemnation from Ms Seldon, is Stanley. Here is a montage, including the never to be forgotten statement, "Did I stutter?" And that is how I end this post. Driscoll is not stuttering. He is speaking loud and clear. My question is this. Are his admirers deaf?

 

 

Lydia's Corner: 1 Kings 3:3-4:3 Acts 6:1-15 Psalm 126:1-6 Proverbs 16:26-27