The thing about magic bullets

I just read MikeAnderson's post about why he is leaving Mars Hill Church and the regret he feels for having participated in what can only be described as a church built around the personality of its leader. Evidently, this is falling apart. It calls up many memories for me.

Truth be told, I have some sympathy for Anderson's struggle and journey. He is struggling with the fact that this group and Pastor Mike Driscoll, was  crucial to the formation of his faith, but also coming to terms that the place was no longer a healthy place. It was killing him inter-personally. It was wrecking his faith. It was time to go. He evidently left before all the scandal broke and reorganization set it. 

Now I have no direct, personal experience with any of the Mars Hill Churches. The "resurgence" movement about which they wrote, blogged and sold books did cross my path regularly. Usually in the hands of an enthusiastic lay person--sometimes even a cleric-- with the enthusiastic wish that we could somehow use what Driscoll did to "revitalize" our parish. I would usually make that into a conversation about what "vitality" in Christ looks like and that would become a discussion about whether we are merely propping up an organization or if we were using the tools (and challenge) of the local parish to create, nurture and support vital Christian people in community. 

When I left the brand of evangelical Christianity that did so much to nurture my young faith and orient me towards Christ, it was like a death. I had a brief re-union with that group four years ago, and I am still friends with some of the folks from that period, and it is very good. 

But at the time I also had to grieve the loss, realize that I no longer fit in, discover new ways of being fed and nurtured in my faith and develop new faithful friendships. 

So my response to Driscoll is the same as my response to all the other religious celebrities that have come and gone with their books, videos, seminars and mass-mailings: there is no magic bullet. There is only life in Christ in community in the place where God finds us.

Lately, I have been talking with some young people who went off to college, found Jesus in the local campus evangelical Christian group, grew like wild-flowers in their faith and "bam!" ran smack dab into their version of personality-based leadership. Or into judgmentalism. Or bigotry. Or mega-resistance to gays in meaningful relationship or women in meaningful leadership or both. Sometime I hear about the more mundane, but still deep pain that comes when they realize that they've already outgrown the kind of literalistic biblicism that some of these groups teach. I am glad they have a parish to come home to. I am glad they have tweeted or spoken to me. For one thing, their struggle feels familiar.

I don't care what flavor Christian you are: we all must engage the culture. We must listen to the culture we are in because this is where God has put us and it is the venue where we must live out the Gospel. But when we start to simply parrot the culture--and whatever trappings the culture brings us...celebrity, entertainment, materialism, political expediency, you name it-- we are dead in the water. If my kind of Christianity gets too hung up on Gothic buildings and ancient liturgies, then evangelical Christianity is tempted to get too hung up in trying to be "cool." 

We all have to come to terms with our own idols.

And idols have this way of looking like magic bullets for Jesus.

Which brings me back to Mars Hill.

You know, I have been curious about their choice of "Mars Hill" as the name for their churches. They are trying to say in their name that they are engaging the culture on their terms with the Gospel just as the Apostle Paul did when he went to Athens as described in Acts 17:16-34.  It is the only story of we have of Paul starting a church where there was not already an existing Jewish community as the basis for his mission to the Gentiles. The idea is to start from scratch. So I get that. 

The problem is that Paul's encounter on Mars Hill was a failure. At least by the measure of what we know about the Pauline mission. The author of Luke-Acts, always willing to magnify Paul's successes, says that only "some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them." Now small isn't bad, but basically the folks in Athens gave Paul a respectful hearing and then went about their business. They apparently scoffed at the idea of resurrection and Paul did not or could not engage them on the point. They reached an impasse. Perhaps he was unprepared to deal with the way debate happened in Athens. Perhaps the gap was too big between the Athenians and Paul, what with their wildly divergent backgrounds. Maybe the Athenians, in their theological market-place, did not catch the life-changing urgency of Paul's message. For whatever reason, they didn't connect. So Paul left. 

Now just because we have no extant Epistles of Paul to the Christians in Athens doesn't mean that there weren't any. And it doesn't mean that was not church in Athens. But it does probably tell that whatever letters that might have been written weren't memorable enough to end up in the folio that would become the New Testament. 

Which leads me back to the rough seas that Mark Driscoll and his "movement" is experiencing. The group that Paul left behind in Athens was small. They probably had to patiently learn how to do the small day to day things it takes to grow a community of faith. They had to learn to pray together, to get to know one another, figure out the nuts and bolts both of following Jesus and being in community...all while going about their daily lives. And where they went after Paul left...? Only God knows. 

Driscoll's sermons are filled with Big Ideas proffered in Big Ways. This is a man with all the answers--and he is now coming to terms with the results of some of his choices. In the real Mars Hill, there was only a small group finding their way and Paul's Big Idea didn't go very far.

Paul may have imagined that he was just what the Athenians needed. But not even the Apostle Paul was the magic bullet. If Paul's goal was to get Athenians to kick the idol-habit, he failed. He did not change the temple to "the unknown god" into a church. Another failure. Paul failed to leave behind a movement and he certainly didn't publish any books out of the experience. 

Instead, he left behind a handful of believers who became the nucleus of whatever gathering of Jesus' followers grew up in that city.

That's the real lesson of Mars Hill. Paul went in wanting to show these really smart, worldly well-educated Athenians how it really was. He left with his tail between his legs. A failure by every reasonable measure. 

Except for that handful of faithful followers of Jesus who because the nucleus of a congregation we know nothing about. 

In other words, God's kind of success.