The former senior pastor at Mars Hill Church has a new website name and an e-book out for Easter, as Mark Driscoll tries to resurrect his ministry more than five months since quitting the Seattle-based mega-church he co-founded.
Mark Driscoll Ministries has replaced “Learning for Living,” and Driscoll offers a free e-book themed to the most sacred week in Christendom, entitled “It Is Finished: Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.”
“The comeback appears to be percolating,” Warren Throckmorton, a Pennsylvania college professor who tracked the implosion of Mars Hill, wrote Wednesday on the Patheos website.
Driscoll will assume a much higher profile this summer at the Hillsong Conferences, major gatherings of evangelical Christians in Sydney, Australia, and London.
He is billed by Hillsong as “one of the most popular preachers in the world,” and will be interviewed by Brian Houston, the Australian-based founder of the megachurch, which has branches in Europe, the United States and Down Under.
But the road back is beginning in relative modesty. After all, Mars Hill once numbered 15 “campuses” in five states, and drew more than 20,000 people to its Easter services. Driscoll would preach from giant screens.
Nowadays, the website states: “Pastor Mark Driscoll is a Jesus-following, mission-leading, church-serving, people-loving, Bible preaching pastor. He’s grateful to be a nobody trying to tell everybody about Somebody.”
The “people-loving” part would be debated by some former Mars Hill members. Twenty-one former pastors and leaders accused Driscoll of domineering and abusive behavior toward subordinates.
Former pastors at Mars Hill have issued emotional mea culpas for the shunning of former church leaders after they were purged from the leadership.
An internal investigation — its results never published — sustained charges of un-Christian behavior leveled against Driscoll.
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SOURCE: Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Joel Connelly
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