Morning Thanks--Denominational me

I know. I've already praised the Christianity Today's podcasts that follow the demise of the Mars Hill phenomenon and its captain, the pastor Mark Driscoll, who steered the whole Mars operation into the Bermuda Triangle. It's a stunning story, thoughtfully (and bravely) done by CT. 

I liked it so much that I wish I hadn't heard it so I could listen in again. Seriously. For a while at our house those podcasts replaced the news, rang from my phone throughout the kitchen while we made supper. 

Why did I find them so outstanding? I'm somewhat ashamed to say, at least in part, I enjoyed hearing how the kingdom of Mark Driscoll and his charismatic Calvinism went off the rails. Everything about Mars Hill is miles adrift from my own experience of "church." Just now, I had to look up "Acts 29 Network," his organization, where I discovered that it was a loosely affiliated band of church plants that bend toward Calvinism in theology. Never heard of it before.

If you're wondering, as I did, about the name, there is no Acts 29, which is the point exactly. The "acts" of Acts 29 Network is the ongoing work of preaching the gospel to every tribe and nation: the book of Acts contains 28 chapters. Hence, we are Acts 29.

I didn't know that, and that I didn't is both good and bad.

"Church plants" is language I understand. Prayerfully and sometimes painfully, pastors, or their denominational superiors, determine which new suburb or old city is ripe for brand new harvest. Following steps diligently set out in some Driscoll-like playbook, they begin with a handful of people with their cuffs rolled, men and women who hit the streets to see how much attention they can arrest, how many warm bodies they can attract, and, eventually, how many souls they can win for Jesus.

I sort of know about that subject, know that Bill Hybels started small and built an empire, know that "America's Pastor," Rick Warren, who pilots Saddleback Church in Southern California and around the world, has dozens of satellite "campuses" (they're not called "churches," I guess--a kind of naughty word). "Church planting" was really hot stuff some time ago. In fact, it still may be. I don't know.

And, like I say, that I don't know is both good and bad.

I realized I had no dog in the Mark Driscoll hunt. Maybe, for me, the story was altogether too "easy listening." I'd never been particularly "seeker sensitive," although I do remember feeling an amazing kind of high when a new church we were part of opened its doors to whoever showed up. Seeing new people come in the door was a joy and a thrill, like none I'd ever experienced in a church.

I suppose I was both depressed and blessed by the Mars Hill story--depressed this whole story had gone on in evangelicaldom without my knowledge. I didn't even recognize the name of Mark Driscoll, and it was perfectly clear that he was a mover-and-a-shaker like few others in the evangelical world. How could I have not heard of the guy? I've had a subscription to CT for years.

I have to admit I was cooped up, locked up, fenced in by my own faith tradition. I've always been sort of stubbornly denominational, so narrowly focused that I missed huge stories in the Christian church--stories from Calvinists, too. It made me depressed to think that I knew so very little about that world.

But then, I told myself that if given the choice, I don't think I'd change where I stood or stand of what path I'd taken in the last quarter century. I'm happy to have missed what's hot in the evangelical world, content to live with the faith that God almighty created in me when I came from the factory. If that's then, ho-hum, then all right--"ho-hum."

CT's podcasts made me wonder where I was during the whole Act 29 Network thing. At the same time, it made me more confident that I'd been where I should have been, where I wanted to be. I'm happy to have been so depressingly out of it. In my life, there's always been enough life to live and die in a single congregation. That church we worked at starting decades ago?--we left ten years later, beaten up, black-and-blue. 

I liked the Fall of Mark Driscoll, maybe for the wrong reasons. 

But I can live with who I am.