Megachurches and the Temptation of Mass Appeal

For the past week I have been making my way through The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a podcast published by Christianity Today about the Seattle megachurch. Although the story is ostensibly about Mars Hill Church, much of the focus is given to its pastor, Mark Driscoll and his personality, leadership style and impact on the church and its people. The podcast was published between mid-2021 and late-2022. To its credit, and despite being a retrospective on events that had taken place more than five years prior, it does not try to wrap up the story with a tidy moral. I imagine there are a variety of reasons people will listen to a podcast like this, ranging from processing trauma if the listener was close enough to the story all the way to schadenfreude over seeing a controversial Christian leader fall from grace.

I was not close enough to be traumatized by the events, and I question the impulse to revel in someone else’s failure, yet I have found The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill riveting. Reflecting on this, I believe there are at least two reasons for it. First, there was a short period of time where I saw Driscoll as a force for good, as someone who was able to preach the Gospel in a way that resonated with a certain kind of person the church had maybe neglected. The podcast offered an opportunity to revisit that with the benefit of hindsight and see what there might be to learn. Second is what the podcast has to say, almost by accident, about the ways megachurches like Mars Hill are often drawn to focus on the wrong things. If it is true that there are no ethical billionaires, there might similarly be no healthy megachurches.

There was a time when I admired Driscoll. Looking back, it’s hard to remember the shape of that admiration. Perhaps I just respected his ability to build what looked, from the outside, like a fruitful ministry in a city with a reputation for being unreceptive to the Gospel—Driscoll would often tout Seattle as “the most unchurched city in America.” Or, maybe I admired something about his irreverent style. Most likely, it was some combination of both.

What’s worth lingering on for a bit is his style. I first encountered him in the late aughts as he rose to prominence as “Mark the cussing pastor.” It seems fair to summarize his style in the pulpit as blunt honesty with what read at the time as a fair bit of humor. In a time when people like John Piper made a case for the seriousness of preaching, it was common to hear Driscoll make jokes from the pulpit. The red flag, in hindsight, was that these jokes were often at the expense of others. It was common for comments about feminists and effeminate men (to use Driscoll’s language) to draw laughs from his audience. Whether he meant them as jokes or not, it’s hard to listen to these comments now without hearing his contempt for the groups he was calling out. That’s sad in itself. Here is a preacher ostensibly sharing the Good News of Christ’s love for sinners while speaking with contempt towards some of those same sinners.

This is why it was so clarifying to hear recordings in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill of Driscoll saying (erroneously) the foundational feature of God’s relating to people was not love, but covenant. This is, to me, a pretty shocking error. I went to seminary, and every treatment of theology proper I can remember made love an attribute of God, which is to say, something so central to who God is that you cannot remove it and still have the God of the Bible. I do not ever remember seeing covenant elevated to the status of attribute, and I feel some confidence in saying that is because no one (until Driscoll?) has. God is Love (1 John 4:8); He is not covenant. God uses covenant to give fallen humanity the security of knowing he will not withdraw his love from us, but saying that should only highlight the centrality of his love. It seems reasonable that Driscoll’s misunderstanding here would lead to a lack of love on his part. It’s also possible to reverse the causality and see his theology as resulting from his own lack of love. The damage would, I think, be similar in either case.

I say all of this by way of apology. Looking back, I know there was a time when I would have laughed along with Mark as he made his jokes. I would have looked up to him as someone brave enough to speak the truth even if it meant offending some. I am sorry for that. Not only do I regret ever thinking his jokes were funny, as I have just explained, I am not even sure anymore they were jokes. They sound now like genuine expressions of contempt from someone who thought people not like him were less than him. We are all image bearers, even as sin makes all of us imperfectly so. That means there is no place for this sort of contempt. That it came from the pulpit only makes it all the sadder.

Another movement in all of this was the culture at Mars Hill around the uncritical use of technology. This is, to be sure, a minor theme in the overall story told in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Nonetheless, I think it is worth teasing out a bit the part technology plays here.

There is a certain kind of person who has grandiose ideas about himself. He might dress his aspirations up in the language of a calling from God, an “anointing” to do a great work, but at the end of the day he thinks he is destined for greatness and is looking for an opportunity to step onto whatever-sized stage he thinks he is entitled to. This is where the Internet in the decade from about 1995 to 2005 comes in. Remember that we were all still trying to figure out what this new technology could do for us. It makes sense that a person with delusions of grandeur would, upon coming into contact with this technological moment, see in it their opportunity, not just to step onto their stage but to build it.

That outline is of course an un-subtle attempt to paint Driscoll’s story at Mars Hill with a very broad brush. After listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, I am also convinced that it is accurate as far as it goes. And if there is a lesson to draw from this outline, I think it is that mass media technologies enabled by the Internet are a temptation. They call wolves to enter in among the sheep. Here the wolves are grandiose narcissists and the sheep are believers who need a pastor. While believers, especially ones new to the faith, need someone to come alongside and enter into life with them, they instead receive a distant figure piped in via video feed and calling 10,000 people into a cookie-cutter version of the Christian life that bears little resemblance to the actual Gospel. As a result, the sheep end up becoming little versions of the wolves, and they eat each other alive.

This is again something I need to repent of. I used to think that big churches were a good thing. While I am not quite ready to say they can’t be good, I have a growing conviction that they necessarily create some unhealthy dynamics: pastors who act like local celebrities, congregants who act like consumers, accountability for no one, and a monoculture that fails to reckon with the full diversity of life that God created. Smaller churches at least get off easy in these respects. Without global reach the pastors are less tempted to delude themselves into thinking they God’s chosen instrument. The congregants probably know the pastor and each other well enough to be in each others lives, making consumerism-inflected Christianity difficult. Counterintuitively, because smaller churches tend not to organize around terse vision and mission statements they have an easier time embracing diversity.

Smaller churches also cannot afford to buy the equipment and hire the staff necessary to build a world-class media empire, and I am saying that might be a good thing. It means they do not attract the kind of pastor who doesn’t really want to be a pastor at all but just wants to be a celebrity.

So are there healthy megachurches? Probably, but that outcome depends on the character of the pastor. Mars Hill fell because in the end its pastor made the church about himself. He did that by cleverly masking his anger and misogyny behind just enough humor that well-meaning people could laugh it off, or could even think he was being “irreverent,” and that the church needed more of it. He did it by turning the church from a place where people were gathered, formed, and sent into his own personal brand: his sermons, his books, his vision of a good life. Or at least that’s what I picked up from listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. To the extent that picture is correct, I hope the American evangelical church will learn from it.