What a Sunday Morning with Driscoll looks like…
Feed: Musical Catechesis
Posted on: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 8:16 AM
Author: timshew
Subject: Our Trip to Mars Hill
My wife and I recently took a trip to Seattle, Washington so that she could attend the American Pharmacist Associaton conference. We were there over the weekend and, as there was not a faithful congregation nearby where the Gospel was purely preached and the sacraments faithfully administered, we decided to attend Mars Hill Downtown, a short walk from our hotel. It's a very influential network of non-denominational churches founded in Seattle under the leadership of Pastor Mark Driscoll, a fiery and uncompromising preacher. Mars Hill Downtown is located in an old red brick building that from the outside looked like it was abandoned. It would appear from the structure that they are trying to reach out to the poor and disenfranchised of the city. I was a little surprised, then, that there was a security guard at the entrance, put there to keep the homeless and poor out and the young yuppies in. Once inside, the building was a hybrid of coffee shop and contemporary art gallery. The floors and walls were black, without any decoration, crosses, or other symbols that would lead the visitor to think that this is a place to worship the Triune God. There was a gathering area with good coffee, information about the church, and a bookstore which consisted mostly of books written by the Mars Hill staff. While getting our coffee, we were greeted by a very friendly man in his twenties, dressed in Urban Outfitters jeans and trendy buttoned down shirt, who kindly asked where we were from, how we heard about the church, and told us that he was glad that we were there. The worship space was darkly lit with a stage in front. At the back of the stage was a curtain especially made for projection, and an advertisement for a church trip to Turkey was looping. The equipment was set up for the band, and we sat down and had a seat about ten minutes before the service was about to start so that my wife could read through their booklet on what they believed. After we sat down another young man in his twenties, dressed in Urban Outfitters trendy jeans and button down shirt, sat down in the seat in front of us, asked us where we were from, and told us how great the church was. He had been attending Mars Hill since he moved to Seattle about 4 years ago and since attending there he had started taking his faith much more seriously, had learned much more about theology, and had become a better man and a better husband. The service started with two songs led by a rock trio of guitar, keyboard, and drums. The first song reminded me vaguely of Psalm 51 and the second song was the David Crowder arrangement of "All Creatures of our God and King". I appreciated the hymns, as they were the only songs in the service that I would call sing-able congregational song. After the opening songs, we had about 20 minutes of announcements. It was during this time that most of the church attendees came in. The people attending the church were nearly all young, white people in their 20's and early 30's. There were no children as they were sent elsewhere, and there were no middle aged or older folks. There were also no teenagers. The announcements were part announcement/part pep rally. We clapped several times at all the amazing things that God was doing at Mars Hill. We were introduced to the staff, all of whom were dressed in Urban Outfitters jeans and shirts, and we learned that the Easter service was going to be combined with all Mars Hill campuses and held at Qwest Field (the home of the Seattle Seahawks). The feeling of incredible excitement and happiness filled every moment of the announcements. After the announcements, they took up the offering and we sang the hymn Amazing Grace. Now, a full 35 minutes into the service, we were ready to hear from the Man himself, Pastor Mark Driscoll. As Mars Hill consists of several campuses, we watched a video of his message which was broadcast from another campus. Pastor Driscoll was nicely dressed in Urban Outfitters jeans and buttoned down shirt. His hair was just slightly messy and he had the two-days-without-a-shave beard. Mars Hill was making their way through the book of Luke (and taking two years to do it), and this week's message was on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. While the irony of reading that parable while a security guard stood at the entrance to the church and kept the poor people out was not lost on me, the focus of the day's message was on hell. There are some very positive things I have to say about Mark Driscoll at this point. First, unlike many mega-churches, he does not do Christianity-light. He does the best he can to preach the truth to the people he can reach. Secondly, he did appear to be genuinely concerned about the people in the campus churches and in the community regarding their eternal salvation. He began his teaching on hell by showing very clearly from Scripture that we consist of body and soul, and that at death the two are separated but will be re-united at the resurrection. Everyone will either spend eternity in heaven or will spend eternity in torment in hell. He then went through several false teachings such as universalism, annihilism, reincarnation, naturalism, and purgatory and showed how they were false. While he was good to this point, he began repeating a phrase that he repeated throughout the entire 45 minutes message that really began to sting. He said, "It's my job to tell the truth. It's your job to make a decision". He spent the bulk of the 45 minutes making it abundantly clear that if you did not make the right decision you would, without a doubt, spend all eternity in torment in hell. The Lutheran in me kept expecting him to get around to the Gospel. Unfortunately he never really did. If I make the right decision I go to heaven, if I don't I spent all eternity in hell. I'm sorry Mark Driscoll, but that's not the Gospel. My wife leaned over to me at this point and said, "There's no grace!" The Gospel was so tainted with decision theology that there could be no assurance of forgiveness besides your own personal feelings of conversion. This is the problem with decision theology: it separates the forgiveness of sins from the death and resurrection of Christ and places it on the decision of the individual believer. Yes, Jesus died for you, BUT, it all really depends on your ability to make a decision to BELIEVE that and to have a true conversion experience. I am so thankful to belong to a church that preaches pure Gospel, where I simply look at Christ and trust that I am saved by His grace, brought to faith by the Holy Spirit, and nurtured daily and weekly through Word and Sacrament. I think an important outreach for the Lutheran church could be to reach out to those who get burned out by this all-law, emotionally draining approach to Christianity, and give them the comfort of the pure Gospel. Following the message, they celebrated communion. Pastor Tim got up in front of the congregation and explained their beliefs on the Lord 's Supper (it's an act of obedience to remind us of what Jesus did). He also tried to reach out to those who were committing the cardinal sin of evangelicalism; knowing the faith but not REALLY believing it. You could also use communion as a way to rededicate yourself to Jesus. However, Pastor Tim did not mention that communion gives us forgiveness of sins and salvation and he did not recite the Words of Institution. It was interesting to me that we were not ushered row-by-row, but people came up and received the cracker and juice or wine as they felt moved to do so. The band played a song during this time that made a few references to the Passover (the song was called "Pass Over Me"). The song went on during the duration of communion and led to a very, loud, mystical, and moving climax as communion finished. Pastor Tim then led us in prayer and told us that the staff was available to talk if anyone had questions about the faith. Then we left, feeling like we had been spiritually beaten by 90 minutes of law. We stopped by a near-by chocolate shop to cheer up my wife, which just goes to show that emotional "spirituality" can be edified with Hershey's. The best thing was probably the coffee. It was quite good and you could drink it during the worship time. It really made the 45 minutes of hell-fire much more relaxing. As a 20-something I really did feel like I could belong there if I just gave up the pure Gospel and my Lutheranism. Mars Hill has the following things that the Lutheran church could emulate: good coffee, very welcoming people, a positive environment, well-executed worship times, and a good use of technology such as their website and their use of the web 2.0. Besides that, it is beyond my understanding why we would want to imitate the Mars Hill experience in the Lutheran church. What they practice in worship clearly supports their doctrine. Really, it does! Perhaps this will help: The Spirituality Paradigm of Evangelicalism
Music and media may be at the bottom of this chart, but they fit very well within this system. Mars Hill has the emotional and subjective down to an art. I would say, whether intentional or not, it is emotionally manipulative. Let's review the service:
All of these things, from the evangelical perspective, are simply there in worship to help people connect with Jesus. And these are all standard practice. But what were we so excited about? What was the substance of the service? Let's review everything in the service again, looking for biblical content. This was a bible believing church after all.
That's it. Really, that was it. Now let's look the Lutheran Spirituality Paradigm
Where does the intense, emotional, personal manipulation come into play? It doesn't. It doesn't come into play because we believe that we are saved by grace through faith, and not through our good works or the personal emotional intensity of our conversion experience. It is worth noting that the Lutheran paradigm fits perfectly with the Liturgy of the Christian church, which itself grows out of the synagogue service which was familiar to Jesus and the early church. While Jesus rebelled against the excessive legalism of the Pharisees and academic disbelief of the Sadducees, he never rebelled against the synagogue service. Rather, it seems that he attended regularly, preached within it, and never made an attempt to make it into a subjective, personal, and emotionally manipulative event. Having established the Lutheran faith paradigm, let's look at how much biblical content we find in the Liturgy which we call the Divine Service. 1. Introit (opening Psalm) 2. Biblically literate, Christ-centered hymnody. 3. A reading from the Old Testament. 4. A Psalm of the Day 5. A reading from the Pauline Epistles, Revelation, or the book of Acts 6. A reading from the Gospels. 7. Prayers that petition God on behalf of the world. 8. The sacrament of the altar. 9. The sacrament of Holy Baptism on certain occasions. 10. The Sanctus, Nunc Dimittis, Kyrie, Agnus Dei, and Alleluia, which are all taken right from Scripture. 11. A sermon, in which the reading of the day are explained. 12. The Lord's Prayer 13. Confession and Absolution, which is clearly taught and commanded by our Lord. In other words, we can see how in the Divine Service we are practically swimming in the Word of God. Because we believe that the Holy Spirit works through Word and Sacrament, we submit ourselves to the way He normally works, rejoice in the sure salvation won for us by Christ, and we respond with our songs and prayers. This is why the Lutheran confessions state that seeking God apart from Word and Sacrament is of the devil. The big question in the Lutheran church in the past thirty years had been whether we can take the emotionally charged, subjective elements from the Evangelical faith paradigm and insert then into the Divine Service without destroying the Lutheran Paradigm. I think the wisest answer is a clear no. We cannot important elements of the paradigm without eventually seeing a full shift to that paradigm. Attempts to mix the two will inevitably be met with conflict because we attempting to believe two contrasting things at once. I know that parting from the Evangelical faith paradigm is not an easy thing, yet we leaders in the church must think pastorally. It is possible that allowing our dear lay people to live with the Evangelical paradigm for years has given them an Evangelical approach to the Christian faith. Dear brothers and sisters, this is not okay! We must slowly, deliberately, and lovingly restore (or in many cases, teach for the first time) the Lutheran spirituality faith paradigm, not for our sakes, but for the sakes of our dear brothers and sisters in Christ who will be and are already being led astray by the loud, steady stream of American Evangelicalism which leads to nothing other than a mixing of law and Gospel and terrible burden on the consciences of God's own people. I know the temptation to copy and paste what we see in Evangelicalism is strong. They do, after all, attract thousands of young people. So let's copy it; let's copy the good coffee, positive environment, and accept nothing less than excellence from those who lead worship; even from the volunteers. Let's leave the emotional manipulation, co-mingling of Law and Gospel, and un-biblical spirituality right where we found it.
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