generational curses
i started a generation x church once. we used gen x music, gen x media, put gen x in leadership, even talked about gen x values. problem was, it didn't really appeal to generation x. my dad loved it, my son didn't. some of the 20 somethings we targeted raved about it. others asked when we were going to sing 'shine jesus shine' or whatever. we were mystified by how conservative some of the teens were. we were surprised by how progressive a few 50 year olds were.

i remember pitching the idea of a gen x church to the volunteers. one of them, who would eventually come on staff as a pastor, was somewhat mortified by the allusion that she was too old for what we were after. she liked the music, understood the philosophy, but didn't fulfill the age requirements. it wasn't for her. she was too old. but she got it. got it, in fact, far better than about 50% of those we were trying to touch. she understood implicitly what i would only figure out much later - it's not about age. it never was.

it was about philosophy, and culture and anthropology, but rarely, if ever about genealogy.

it's the same today with the postmodern world. we continue to start churches almost every week targeted to the young urban cool; only to find out later that we have, in fact, sought after a generation replete with paradox. some get it, others never will. some of their parents or children understand right away the emerging reality, but not them. and church kids are the weirdest of all. it's as if the postmodern world has largely passed them by. they are often more conservative than their parents, less open to change. less in touch with the world outside the holy huddle. and yet we somehow think that they will be the chief consumers of our gen x church, or gen y, or milleniums or whatever the flavor of the week happens to be.

i have stopped designing services for a specific age dynamic. it is a massive generalization. today we talk in terms of a way of life, an understanding of god and community. our services, if you can call what we do any kind of service at all, touches the secular experience. we do not design our gigs for youth, or for twenties or for any age dynamic actually. my younger son and i work on music together, we have the same tastes. the group that thinks about what happens at the club is made up of 3 who are 40 plus, one who is in his mid-twenties, one who is 20, and two or three teens. we seem to genuinely like each other, get each other. there is no division of authority based along age lines.

different ages. different generations. same heartbeat.

just heard a representative from the big valley creation science museum explain that there were dinosaurs on noah's ark. does this represent anyone in the christian world anymore?

Homer Simpson: I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?

there have been several excellent blogs out there about why you should consider starting a church. for what it's worth, here's my reasons you should reconsider...
1. it's almost certain that we don't need another church like the one you have been d.n.a.'d to start. it's nothing personal, it's just a fact. regardless of what it's dressed up to be, how many candles you use, the fact that you are casual and relevant, statistically it's sure to fall within the scope of the thousand other church plants that are being started this year in north america. and the bad news is that almost every church plant started will not turn the town over and convert the masses. it's simply not even an issue. most church plants are planted by guys in their twenties who grew up in the evangelical church, with great vision and very little life experience. most went to evangelical bible colleges, most will try to be edgy but will not know how. most will have fabulous desktop publishing skills but few life skills. which brings me to the second point...
2. most church plants will look almost the exact same. single word names or initials, good lighting, jeans and now tattoos, u2 and crowder, jack johnson wannabe music, and still the 30+ minute talk. almost all will still use the attractional model. most will be led by guys. most will advertise in the paper and see growth the first two years. almost universally that growth will be transfer growth.
3. inertia is a powerful thing. it's virtually impossible to remain true to a radical vision once a church experiences transfer growth. consumers want sunday schools and worship services and the full service menu. the pull to the middle is incredible. most, if not all, churches change their emphasis drastically in the first ten years. maybe starting a sunday morning service driven church is not the answer to your desire to touch the world. it may be the default response with the greatest likelihood of funding, but it is probably not the most effective. one of the reasons is...
4. sunday morning is not a good fit for most people. it is not a natural time for non-churched people with no religious history to get up, look their best, clean up their family, and go to a major event. north american culture is more suited to evening activities than morning. mornings are for family, for waking up, for coffee, for yard work.

i believe it is time that young leaders considering starting yet another church take a long hard look at the "why" questions, not just the "how" questions. from time to time when i run across people wanting to start a church i ask them the "why" question, and it is usually not something their team has stopped to consider. starting a church is often a default response for young, aggressive, visionary leaders. let's face it, at least in my part of the globe, there are plenty of church options in every local town. the need is not for newer, trendier, acoustic guitar driven, generational churches; the need is for new and unique expressions of faith and service in a world that has long forgotten that sunday morning is church day.

don't do it unless you have to.

lee iaccoca is not a happy guy. my buddy steve sent me this link to an excerpt from his book on leadership. here's an excerpt from the excerpt:
Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.

once upon a time i was a member of a denomination. in that denomination, a very good one, they asked churches to report on a monthly basis how things were going. they provided a template, they were fairly tolerant (truly because i rarely, if ever, did it), and tried to stay open to new and innovative alternatives.

i struggled to answer those questionairres because they asked, in my humble opinion, the wrong questions. it must be said that the questions were fairly standard and reflected the prevalent reporting of most major denominations. it asked for conversion statistics, fans in the stands, programs etc. it wanted numbers - numbers of people that went through the discipleship mill, finances, budgets and that ilk. it was all fairly generic and intended to provide a picture of how a church was managing.

i had occasion to speak to the denominational leader, who was a close friend of mine, about the surveys. the denom was frustrated that i was tardy in reporting, i was frustrated by the questions. we had a frank and open discussion. we talked about scorecards.

churches fill in scorecards. denominations gauge their success by these same scorecards. but the scorecards don't reflect anything close to reality.

healthy churches cannot be reduced to a scorecard. the real numbers that count have little to do with the bloated attendence on easter sunday. giving to a local church can provide a feel for health, but it cannot measure the impact a church makes on a community. in fact, the churches with the best bottom lines financially are probably not using their resources in a radical way. in every church plant i have been a part of - the bigger the nest egg, the more milk-toast the church. gauging financial stability is fine if you are interested in creating a corporation or a dynasty; it matters very little to a church dedicated to feeding the poor, giving away resourcing, strategically investing in people etc. the same can be said for churches with real estate. the very thing that may impress the middle class may sicken the god they serve.

look at attendence. in the program-driven church the number of people who show up for the gig indicates the health and growth of a church. in the attractional model, attendence is everything. it is an internal focus. in a missional church it is all about an external focus. the number of people who gather on a sunday morning may in fact be inversely proportional to the health of a body that encourages it's people to strategically invest themselves in a community. to push it one step further, a church that is serious about reaching it's community may opt to not meet in a traditional setting at all, sending the bean counters over the edge. churches that take seriously the call to feed the poor will probably never have money in the bank. it may be easy to calculate the number of people who run through the discipleship bases, it may be something else to figure out the number of transformed relationships or families that have found healing.

the scorecard celebrates the mega-church, the programmed show, the consumer-driven gathering. it would be easy to suggest that churches should just massage the scorecard but in reality the problem is systemic and virtually impossible to fix. contrary to what the doomists and idealists would like to believe, the modern church is not in danger of dying out anytime soon. and there is little chance that those churches will suddenly wake up to the post-christian culture and hand their buildings over to the secular poor. it is simply nieve to assume that the scorecard will ever change, given the financial and ego ramifications of the current system. until whole denominations stop celebrating numbers and no longer give in to the temptation to fall in love with our own superstars, little will change. the emerging church is little better, replete with it's own superstars and branding, infatuated with criticism and "cool".

one of campolo's famous stories is about when he and a friend broke into a store and didn't steal anything, they simply switched the price tags. i believe it is up to us to switch the price tags back, one store at a time.

i spent a day listening to reggie mcneal this week. he's a chaotic, disorganized, brilliant speaker who is trying to explain a reality that some of us have sensed, to a group that isn't sure it wants to know. reggie is an apologist, a futurist, a proponent of the postmodern reality.

i watched people squirm as reggie spoke of the complete and utter problem he has with church buildings, worship services, evangelism, discipleship. he believes we have designed a post-constantinian spectator sport that is bloated and self-propagating. he talked to pastors who ran churches worth millions of dollars of his wish that churches would sell their building or at least give it back to the community during the week. he was a frustrated prophet advocating a life coaching model in a program driven world.

i struggle with programs and programming. i have, admittedly, been a proponent of the glossy show. i was a student of the willow creek model. at the time it seemed like a breath of fresh air in a world gone stale. it gave freedom and newness. back in 1988 it seemed like a good idea at the time.

i visited willow creek in 2000. the exact same leaders were leading the exact same band. the exact same soloist was singing in the exact same venue. the music was the same, the drama was one that i had seen in the early 90's. i was dumbfounded. you know how it is when you don't see a kid for a couple of years and then, when you do see them they seem so grown up? didn't happen here. it was like stepping into a time-warp.

i no longer believe in the programmatic church. i still, from time to time, see its value, but cannot dedicate my life to bloating the saints or babysitting their children any longer. i'm not even sure anymore what a platter of discipleship choices even does for the average church attender. are they becoming any more holy? more knowledgeable? more committed? i would contend that the answer to this question is a resounding no. people attend church for years and don't seem to grow. churches compete with each other to shuffle the entertainment driven. just across the river from me a church started, hired a big name singer, and emptied out the already committed from most of the churches in town. it won't be long before the pastor is doing a conference on church planting.

reggie said it yesterday and i'm reiterating it here. if you want a fully devoted, discipled saint put them in a soup kitchen. get them to volunteer at a rehab. jesus didn't hold classes, he modeled compassion. there were no curriculum driven membership classes. people who are broken by the things that break god's heart want to learn. they need the tools. they ask for the weapons. i'm tired of trying to convince myself that the four bases of discipleship or getting someone's 'shape' is really of much value. it looks good on the scorecard but then again, we keep score completely wrong. we measure the number of fans in the stands but completely ignore the number of saved marriages. we count the members and have absolutely no idea how many of our church people are making a difference in their community. we are internally focused. we teach people that the ultimate service to god is servicing the church...that full time ministry is better than real life ministry.

i think the best thing we have done at the club this year has nothing to do with how many seats are filled or nifty projects we have done. i'm fairly certain no one is going to remember the movies or the speaking, or even the squealing raunchy guitar solos. for me the best day is the day my son spoke, or his 17 year old friend sam. the times people walked in off the street. the poem the child read. the hundreds of plates of fries. the hours spent just talking. the chaotic, seemingly completely unorganized times we have spent journeying together, not having a clue what the night will bring. the morning the teens showed up to move someone who had no one. the kids on the runway at the sweatshow. the times spent laughing and drinking and heckling and crying and dancing.

you know... church.

Tuesday May 15, 2007
He was the voice of the right wing, a man who represented the moral judgments of many in the Republican Party and became a celebrity who wielded political influence with his own weekly TV show. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, has died in Lynchburg, Virginia. The reverend was discovered unconscious in his office Tuesday morning after missing a scheduled appointment. He was rushed to hospital, but doctors were unable to revive him. The cause of his death hasn't been confirmed, but Falwell has had a history of heart problems.

the problem is a crisis of ego, of creativity, of conformity, of leadership. we have no idea what community looks like. we do not know how to feel. we struggle to pray. we long for transparency. we settle for imitations. we make unrealistic expectations. we are consumers. we are driven by guilt. we have horrible self image problems. we feel unworthy. we are afraid. we are complacent. we are safe. we run from desperate solution to desperate solution. we have adopted the wrong definition of success. we are human.

we had been joyriding in our 35 dollar car and happened to be walking down the street in moose jaw. it was sunday and the stores were closed. as we passed the Met store i happened to pull on the door, more by chance than on purpose. to this day i don't know why the door was open, why the alarm wasn't on. maybe somewhere on another floor someone was cleaning. i'll never know.

we were alone, we were in a department store, two kids in a candy shop. we were free to roam, moral-less and thieves by nature. but it was too much for us. sensory overload. i stole a watch. just a watch. and we were afraid, too afraid to think. so we ran.

i sometimes think about that day, wonder why we had so much to gain and settled for so little. it was not any quirk of conscience that stopped us. we just couldn't handle the freedom. somewhere, somehow, beneath layers of personal license maybe our consciences won out. maybe we were just afraid.

fear drives us religious folk. fear of the future, fear of excess. fear of getting caught. we live with a western protestant ethos that drives our meetings and our lives. i believe, on many levels, this is why the north american church is so conformity driven, so middle of the road. we wouldn't know innovation if it kicked us between the legs. we still think that naming our new church plants with one word, "embrace" or something from hebrew or latin, will define our niche market and render us fashionable. our pastors spend their high school years wishing they could hang out with the cool kids, only to define "trendy" for hundreds of people later when they get their first tattoo and learn how to grow a goatee. we still believe that radio stations actually play music made with acoustic guitars. for some reason, god only knows why, we are still arguing on denominational levels about whether or not it's ok to drink light beer. we are in the world but not of it. not even close.

i remember when i once had the audacity to question, as a youth pastor, whether or not suicide really was the unforgivable sin. i made the mistake of talking about it with my teens. i was later to find out that i was almost fired from that position. the parents believed that if i slaughtered their sacred cow that the teens would all run out and hang themselves. the suicide clause was a safety net. i tried to explain that if the kids were contemplating suicide that there may be other issues than theological ones. no one wanted to hear it.

try this if you are a minister or speak to large religious groups. try talking to an evangelical audience about christian liberty. quote augustine or whoever it was who said, "love god and do whatever you want". explain the concept of changing our desires, not our outward actions. tell the yaconelli story about how he looked up to a lady who smoked as the holiest person he knew. then don't explain it any further. quote the bible passages that talk about liberty and let it hang. just leave it out there. and pack your bags.

to their credit i do know several mature religious people who can take it; but most will barrage you with "yes, but..." statements. they will remind you that there are other aspects to this belief. they will wonder aloud whether or not you are leading people to wanton sin and naked orgies or jazz music. liberty scares them. it almost always leads to excess.

i remember an annual meeting at a church i was attending where they actually voted against clapping, under any circumstance, in the church service. they were afraid it would lead to excess. they worried that people would start going crazy and speaking in tongues. the next thing you know people would be rolling in the aisles. let's be candid, people in that church wouldn't have rolled in the aisles if you ran 30,000 volts through them. there was as much chance that they would dive into charismania as there was that they would invite boy george to sing the doxology. but the fear of excess... the chance of abuse... was sufficient to quash the exercise of liberty.

i have been reminded, time and time again, that those who stray too close to the edge are in danger of falling off. this may be true. it may also be true that most christian leaders wouldn't know the edge if they fell over it. in their fixation with compromise they keep far from the real battle and believe that by dressing up a U2 song every once in a while that they are speaking to a culture that deems them a fringe cultic movement with little credibility and less relevance.

i do it too. we all do. we know little of the real world, in spite of our nifty piercing and celtic tattoo of the cross (personal bumper sticker). we have long since taken the plunge.

so week after week, at the club, we wrestle with what it means to speak to a generation, a culture, that talks a foreign language. my friend, dan sheffield, reminds me from time to time on his blog that foreign mission fields have indigenous motifs and mores. perhaps it is time that we begin to recognize that we are strangers in a strange land, no more wise than those who sought to dress up natives and teach them the king's english. i wonder if i were to get my head around that concept if it would help me to appreciate more the inherent dignity of those i seek to reach. maybe it would teach me humility instead of challenging my own fixation with being cool.

marilyn manson was heavily criticized in the movie "bowling for columbine" but i appreciated the interview that moore showed where manson was asked what he would say to the children who survived columbine. he said, "i wouldn't say anything at all. i would just listen..."

I love what Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually try to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt

i went to bible college. at the time the sole reason was because my wife got a job there and i was able to go virtually for free. i had no intention of becoming a religious anything, i just saw it as free education. and i enjoyed it a great deal; partly because i found the material interested me. i enjoyed philosophy, and would eventually follow that love into a master's degree. it was a great time.

i was the only graduate not offered a church. by that time i had expressed an interest in the whole deal but the dean of students informed me that "my name never came up" when they discussed assignments. it was an obvious slight - my g.p.a. was among the highest in the school. but i was deemed to be inappropriate for full time ministry, i was too rough around the edges. within a few short years i would be the only graduate from that class still in religious service. i'm still not sure why.

many years have passed and i have had occasion to work with quite a few young and up and coming pastors. i think it's pretty safe to say that i have yet to meet a new minister who had a clue what the score was. but why is that?

take a look at the professional track for ministers. most go from high school to bible college to seminary (i have no idea why you would want to repeat the same stuff you studied in bible college) then into a ministerial position. the other trajectory is little better - high school, tree planting, university (or "college"), seminary, service. the resulting training leaves a young man or woman with virtually no life experience, a cloistered mentality, regional thinking, no business sense, no real experience, no pragmatic training. few colleges and even fewer seminaries teach the true necessities for ministry - starting a small business, leadership, leading meetings, working with budgets, psychology, clinical counseling, dealing with depression, working through your own inadequacy, how to move people ( i mean literally, i've helped to move dozens and dozens of people... flexible schedule), bereavement counseling, sociology, cultural anthropology, music theory, advertising, personal scheduling, etc. etc. etc. sure the average pastor can spend 2o+ hours studying for a sermon that people won't listen to but really, who has 20 hours to prepare a sermon?

let's admit it right off the start, the average clergy is completely under-trained and over enthusiastic. how are we ever going to build effective biblical communities when our educational institutions train our leaders so poorly? some of my friends went this route and turned out great, but paid the price for years. experience was a hard teacher.

my friend susan got it right. she spent 20 years or so working in the real world before entering into the fray. she learned how to budget, where to expend resources, how to lead and facilitate people, the whole deal. let's face it, second career ministers have a world of advantages over first career children.

if we are ever to reconstruct the church we need to re-imagine our leadership training. let's face it, leading in the 21st century is complicated and tough. the price is exacting and the burnout is monumental. real life is not theoretical, it's a day to day relentless grind with a sunday that comes around with exhausting regularity.

and don't even get me started on one-shot wonderboys teaching the rest of us...

it's an easy task to be a critic. nothing is easier than picking something apart. anyone can see, with relatively little effort, the problems with a school, a church, a person.
it's easy to deconstruct religion. there is just so much wrong. everyone is aware that something is inherently problematic with organized church, organized religion, organized anything for that matter. put a human in charge and sure enough you will find flaws.
i belong to a club sort of church sort of rock thing. walk in the door and you will be bombarded by flaws. it's not loud enough, it's too loud. it's predictable, it's like somewhere else you've been. the people swear too much, they don't swear enough. they only serve light alcohol. the pastor isn't a pastor. the fries were cold. the music wasn't worshippy enough (worshippy?). the lead singer sounded nothing like the everclear song we were covering. it's pathetically small and disorganized.
go to your local church. watch the thing and come away with an opinion. i guarantee it will be easy to pick apart. it's fallable. it's predictable. the people are.... whatever. being a critic is the easiest thing in the world. it's far to easy to throw rocks at a glass building.
and yet, in spite of more failures than i can imagine, i am still in love with the church. someone asked me recently why i even bother. why not just walk away and join the long ranks of the disgruntled. it is fair to say that i long for church by my own definition, not by contemporary standards. I desire something that by many definitions does not even resemble what you would see on a sunday morning. but still there is something there. something beneath. something i need or want.
for this reason over the next while i will force myself, from time to time, to identify some of the aspects of church that i yearn for after 7 church plants and 20 years of trying to be something beyond my capacity. i'm going to post about music, speaking, community, leadership, humanity. it is not going to sound like much you will read in the emergent conversation because i'm tired of reading books by people trying really hard to sound like they have a doctorate. this is not a defense of the post-modern experience, in no way an apologetic for academics who wrestle to define and discuss and dissect and eventually nauseate. i also don't really care about the theology of church, others care more than enough for all of us. i do not believe, as so many others do, that our theology is the most important defining aspect of church planting or church in general and that the problem with the contemporary church is a crisis of theology. we have thousands upon thousands of dead churches and hurting people with good theology. i'm convinced the problem is a crisis of ego, of creativity, of conformity, of leadership. we have no idea what community looks like. we do not know how to feel. we struggle to pray. we long for transparency. we settle for imitations. we make unrealistic expectations. we are consumers. we are driven by guilt. we have horrible self image problems. we feel unworthy. we are afraid. we are complacent. we are safe. we run from desperate solution to desperate solution. we have adopted the wrong definition of success. we are human.
so what is important? what do we need? maybe you can tell me what you have learned, i'll post any response not made in crayon.

he truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. ( Scott M Peck )

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. ( Charles Darwin )

Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. ( Unknown )

via

i haven't slept much...

years ago much was made of the trend towards downward mobility. people were ditching their jobs, moving to the country, homeschooling. it was trendy to advocate a return to a simpler lifestyle. didn’t seem to work for most of us, however. we are busier than ever. we have more commitments, less time, fewer options. we are in love with speed. moments spent in leisure are often filled with guilt. there is always laundry, renos, visits to make, chores to be done, children screaming for attention.

my own life has seemed like a series of meetings, interspersed with a multitude of speaking engagements. i have a manuscript that keeps begging for attention. more than one job. life is busy. life is guilt.

a few years ago, when i was paid to be religious, we had a meeting of clergy and spent a great deal of the time bemoaning our poor lives. we took turns bragging about how busy we were. it seems, in retrospect, that so much of our egos were caught up in appearing overworked. pastors love to complain about their schedule.

we also complained about the people in our churches. they were incessantly lazy and under committed. their priorities were wrong. they weren’t serious about the kingdom of god. they were basically lousy Christians. i’ve come to realize that i need to ask forgiveness for those comments and thoughts. i realize now that those of us in that room were not as in touch with the real world as we truly believed we were. we were paid to study, to coffee, to talk. we were paid to go to the board meetings, no one else was. people were not under-committed, they were over committed. they were not lazy, they were harried. it wasn’t that their priorities were necessarily wrong; it might have been that we had completely unrealistic expectations. life is nuts.

now that i am nothing more than a volunteer at club i realize, maybe for the first time, that life is far too busy to define myself by my religious committee meetings. there is something inherently problematic with a church that badgers it’s people to experience the freedom of god.

churches need to be run. budgets need to be met. i am beginning to re-evaluate my commitment to lay leadership. it may be inappropriate to ask someone to give up 20+ hours of their week to help administrate a larger church. it seems almost immoral in a world where we already struggle to make enough to feed our families, and cannot find enough time to hang with them. if we are going to continue to build fancy expensive buildings and demand counseling, personal attention, deep talks and committee driven churches than i am finding it harder and harder to imagine asking someone who is already over committed to dive further in unless i can pay them to cut back somewhere else.

something is broken. that which was once the center of civilization is now considered a pariah by a growing segment of society. but still we pump out traditional church plants with cooler names and better media that continue to drain resources and demand outlandish budgets in order to further bloat the nearly religious and already saved.

but then again, it is monday…

annette and i spent some time with amanda this afternoon and she is going great. they will be putting the rest of her skull back in on monday and will have to learn to walk again. she hopes to be home in 2-3 weeks.

not a minor miracle...

via POC...
Mark Driscoll is back on a lot of blogs after making a mountain out of a molehill with Bill Hybels. Driscoll is pastor of the 5000! 5000! 5000! - member Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Hybels the pastor of Willow Creek in Chicago. Here's the short version: at a church-planting conference, Driscoll and his crew contributed a video talking about what church-planters need to do and who they need to be. One of his main points is essentially "no chicks allowed." Right after this video was shown, Hybels got up to speak and began by saying, "After that video i would like to acknowledge that there are women in this room and they have spiritual gifts." Source from a guy who was there is here.

And if you can stand it, you can watch the video yourself here. Lowlights include men being able to have sex with their wives at least once a day, Jesus is not a gay hippy in a dress (seriously...who believes that?), and guys "we" have to reach are less concerned with church and more concerned with putting subwoofers in their "retarded" cars. I've been reading reactions around the blogosphere to this video and have seen no one pick up on the use of that word. I just found that point interesting.

Anyway, Mark's version is that Hybels had attacked him and his ministry and had banned the video from being distributed afterward, none of which is true. What Hybels said is above. Elsewhere, people testify to seeing people distributing the video at the door. Does Driscoll believe his hype that much nowadays?

Why'd I even mention this? I like writing responses to Driscoll's rants on occasion just to sharpen my own sword, so to speak. And here, I was amazed that such a view on marital sex is being propped up by such an influential pastor (who IS, I acknowledge, reaching a lot of young guys...if not with a limited view of gender roles and "acceptable manly behavior"). If there are married couples with such a sexual relationship out there, I applaud them. But statements like this have the potential to first set up false hopes and in extreme cases lead to abuse if a woman isn't "fulfilling her role." It's a terrible view of sex besides...in iMonk's critique, he calls it "sex as servicing the man." That ain't right, man.