A few Notes on Jesus, Empire, and Mark Driscoll

I would just like to state publicly that it was not my intent to sound condescending when talking about Mark Driscoll a few days ago.  My goal was to talk about some possibly fallacious statements that the church has been kicking around for the past 100 years about male vs. female sexuality.  We have been taught for so long that males are more visual than females, but have failed to deal with the fact that many women are struggling with porn, lust, and other traditionally “male” issues in our society today.  It might not be something that is talked about in church, but one study has even shown that women are more vulnerable to a variety of pornography (men are usually bound to porn that fits with their sexual orientation, but it appears that women are often aroused by both heterosexual porn and lesbian porn).

This is not really about Driscoll anymore, and I am working on a larger post still dealing with major sociological trends, but it appears that our cut and dry men’s and women’s issues are more and more become one.  With this increase in visual stimulus all around our world, it appears that women are beginning to deal with many of the same things as males, and we cannot, as so many evangelical leaders do, treat it as a simple “man” issue that women don’t struggle with.

We have to look for a new way to think about these issues….

More coming on this in the future.

Mark Driscoll’s ‘Dance of Mahanaim’ XXX

After reading what Mark Driscoll said about Australia, I began thinking I should listen to his podcasts to make sure that I was not treating the guy unfairly.  This week his sermon was a continuing series on ‘the song of songs’ coming to a portion of scripture known as ‘the dance of Mahanaim.’  It was a sermon on sexuality in the highly erotic biblical book.

I have to begin with the positives of the sermon.  Ironically, the end of his sermon provided the strongest part of his sermon.  He talked about how porn is destroying the marriage relationship, how men are sometimes too negative, and how performance and fear can sometimes get in the way of a healthy marriage.  We do need to recognize that porn is destroying our nation and that the ‘performance’ being all important (as touted in most Hollywood sex scenes) sets an impossibly high standard.

But Driscoll also had an extremely high number of unnerving points in his sermon that made me squirm in my seat.  Making the same mistakes as evangelical pastors (such as those who propogate the myth that Charles Darwin recanted on his death bed), he makes a blanket statement, supported with no ‘biblical’ evidence, saying “all men are visual.”  It took me a total of five seconds to search on google to find a scientific study that disproved this pop myth social theory, but Driscoll used no scientific studies to back up his claim that “all men are visual.”  What is more unnerving is that Driscoll, who is known for using the bible to back up his claims, cited no scripture either in support of his “fact” that men are visual.  I am not a fan of proof-texting, but I would think that Driscoll would cite some scripture if he is going to make a claim on half of the human race.

He goes on to make the extremely sexist statement, informed by his “masculine” view on the world, that:

“Men are in a fight every minute of every day.  Women don’t understand this.”

Perhaps some don’t, but most do.  Most women are also in a struggle every minute of their lives.  But this is not the main point.  The main problem with saying this is it indirectly encourages sin. When Driscol uses the blanket word “men” and says “fight,” those men who may not feel the same way as Driscoll are now ostracized in his community.  What’s more?  Women feel that it is abnormal to struggle everyday with sexual issues.  Driscoll is institutionalizing the sin that he hates by doing this.  Some may think I am being extreme here, but there is a better way to deal with this topic:

Make this a human issue instead of a men’s issue.

Driscoll also keeps mentioning “lust” without defining it.  The largest problem in discussing sexuality is the lack of terminology that pastors “assume” people already understand.  Then they make analogies like Driscoll made in the sermon to explain Lust.  He suggests that looking at a women and considering her beautiful is not lust, but looking back at her a second time is lust.  He has just created the arbitrary sin of looking twice at a women. Thus we created men who are afraid to look at women………..

We have to come up with better terms for lust than this.  I have many more qualms with the article, but I would first like to open up discussion here:

What is lust and why is it a sin?  I’m hoping that people will be as specific as possible.  This is a very important topic.

18 Points from Mark Driscoll about Australia

Mark Driscoll was recently in Australia, and when I listened to what he had to say about the Austrialian church, I was quite alarmed.  He prefaced his talk saying that he was going to give 18 points about what was wrong with the church in Australia, but what it turned into as I listened was an American guy beating Australia saying that America knows better than Australia how to do church.  I had to stop listening after the fifth point because the points were bcoming redundant and making me increasingly frustrated.  Here are the first five points with my commentary on them below.

1. The Bible guys are not the missional guys which leads to irrelevence.  In other words, he said that there is a difference between being faithful and being fruitful.  He mentioned that there is a difference between knowing “our theological systems are straight” and “to be fruitful.”  In the talk, the only way I could understand what being fruitful meant was that you get a lot of people inside a church.  The funny thing is that Jesus rarely preached inside of a synagogue, and when he did, it was usually a critique.  Second, Jesus pushed more people away overall than he gained as followers.  Is Jesus not being faithful to God on earth?

2. The second thing he mentioned is that “socialism is bad” as is the “influence of Great Britain.”  His answer?  Be more entrepreneruial.  Basically he suggesting “cutting” all the weakest pastors.  How does he define weakness? Again, I can only gather that it came from above: numbers in the church.

3. The third thing was rewarding “good pastors.”  He called it a merit based system.  I can’t even begin to tell you what is wrong with this.  First, this makes church into nothing more than a business with some guys at the top looking at numbers rather than people and evaluating evangelism based on how many people come into the church.  Is anyone else upset by this?

4. Australian young men are immature.  How does he define immature?  Well, they live with their parents until they are 25.  It seems as though I am immature because I still live my parents and I am 22.  I am getting my fifth year credential and then I might live here even longer if need be.  Driscoll seems to be defining maturity and masculinity with individuality.  I would suggest that Driscoll search the scriptures a bit more on this subject and check his cultural and sociological baggage at the door.  He is basicallly calling all of Asia immature because their cultural values are different than ours.  This is a big problem with Americans going to other countries and “diagonosing” problems there.

5. Church planting is not wide-spread or welcome. He suggested they need more “pioneers.”  While this may be true, the way he described again is such an American way of understanding church planting.  Certain countries look to their denominations for understanding and this is not bad or wrong, it is just different.  Again, he seems to think that “new” is better than established denominational traditions.

All in all, Driscoll needs to be careful how quickly he is condemning things because they are different than America.  He needs to seperate his theology from his country.