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Apparently, back in the late-1990s-to-early-2010s, Seattle had its very own bona fide megachurch—a fact that shocked me when I learned about it, a few years after the collapse of said megachurch, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a less churchy city in the US. Where I grew up in Kentucky, "where do you go to church?" was considered a perfectly normal, polite question to ask someone at a barbeque or a book club, roughly equivalent to "so what school do your kids go to?"—Christianity was so culturally assumed that this was just a way of making conversation and orienting someone in space, and there were plenty of megachurches (and smaller churches) to choose from. In the circles I run in in Seattle, though, asking that kind of question would earn either an icy glare or total bafflement—it's just not part of the mainstream culture here.
Which is how I prefer it, all else being equal, but apparently Mars Hill, during its 18-year run, managed to attract over 10,000 attendees per week at its main Seattle location alone, preaching a distinctly "macho" brand of Christianity that would seem pretty at odds with the surroundings. (The church's founder and head pastor, Mark Driscoll, wasn't even doing this in the suburbs, which tend more conservative than Seattle proper, but in the Ballard neighborhood, which tends to be younger, queerer, and more progressive than the city as a whole.)
And then it collapsed, almost at quickly as it rose—it turned out the superstar pastor, behind closed doors, had been a bully, had been abusive and manipulative toward his staff and his wider congregation, and had badly mismanaged church funds. The church elders finally bit back, compelling Driscoll to leave abruptly, and he never returned to Seattle again. (The church, being largely a cult of personality, fell apart soon thereafter.)
So when I saw The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, I was curious to hear about how this historic curiosity took root, and why it fell apart, and I got that—but, man, I got so much more.
( Read more... )
Which is how I prefer it, all else being equal, but apparently Mars Hill, during its 18-year run, managed to attract over 10,000 attendees per week at its main Seattle location alone, preaching a distinctly "macho" brand of Christianity that would seem pretty at odds with the surroundings. (The church's founder and head pastor, Mark Driscoll, wasn't even doing this in the suburbs, which tend more conservative than Seattle proper, but in the Ballard neighborhood, which tends to be younger, queerer, and more progressive than the city as a whole.)
And then it collapsed, almost at quickly as it rose—it turned out the superstar pastor, behind closed doors, had been a bully, had been abusive and manipulative toward his staff and his wider congregation, and had badly mismanaged church funds. The church elders finally bit back, compelling Driscoll to leave abruptly, and he never returned to Seattle again. (The church, being largely a cult of personality, fell apart soon thereafter.)
So when I saw The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, I was curious to hear about how this historic curiosity took root, and why it fell apart, and I got that—but, man, I got so much more.
( Read more... )
