Mark Driscoll Follow-Up: An Interview With Phil Johnson

And we've reaffirmed our friendship. Mark, I want you to know, you're a gift to the kingdom.

You're a gift to James River. You've been a gift to Debbie and I. You've helped us in things.

You've been kind to my family, mentored my sons. And I love you. And your sons are great, man.

I love you and I love your sons. And when I was teaching, I just kept saying that.

And maybe it was a learning. Maybe it's just me and I'm peculiar. I was thinking about it. It wasn't in my notes.

I didn't intend to go there. I was up late praying for the men. I just kept saying it. And I should have, between sessions, talked to you, rather than just verbal processing on the stage.

And as the father and the head of the house, you could have given me a thumbs up or down. And I need to honor that as spiritual authority.

I honor your spiritual authority. Mark, we are calling you to publicly repent for trying to create division in the

Lindell family, all the while saying you love us. Mark, we are calling you to publicly repent for trying to destroy

James River Church through attacking its leadership. To those who follow

Mark Driscoll Ministries, in light of what has been presented, you should reconsider your relationship and support of Mark Driscoll Ministries.

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today.

I want to thank you so much for joining me. Wow, what a whirlwind it has been over the last week or so with Mark Driscoll.

He took the platform and rebuked the Jezebel spirit told he was done by the pastor of the church and host of the conference.

He walked off the stage, headed home. And then next thing you know, a few minutes later, Mark Driscoll and John Lindell, the pastor of the church, they're back on the platform together and they are affirming their love for one another, appreciation for one another.

Everything seems fine. Mark Driscoll is going to be back to speak again. And then just a few days after that,

John Lindell is in the pulpit of his own church enacting church discipline on Mark Driscoll.

My goodness, it's like a theological soap opera that's been going on for the last week.

And so I did one video on this and I wanted to revisit it because a lot has developed and I wanted to interview

Phil Johnson. Phil has interacted a lot with Mark's writing and preaching and teaching and he knows a lot about the ministry and philosophy of Mark Driscoll.

So I wanted to interview Phil and that will be the first hour and 10 minutes or so of this video.

And we're going to talk about Mark Driscoll and I'm going to ask Phil his estimation of him. Is he qualified or not to be a pastor?

And Phil is going to shed a lot of light on this subject matter for us.

And I really appreciate Phil and his friendship and his expertise here. And then after the interview with Phil is completed, then

I'm going to show you some clips of John Lindell taking the pulpit of his church and enacting church discipline or his version of that anyway, on Mark Driscoll and telling people that Mark Driscoll is a liar and causing division in his own family, in Lindell's family and in the church and the body of Christ at large.

And boy, this has just been a mess. I'm going to show some clips of that and I'll interact with some of what he taught along the way.

And then when all of that is over, I will have some concluding thoughts. And please do watch that.

I will put timestamps down below in the description so you can navigate this a little bit more easily.

And also links to some pertinent resources, videos, articles about all of this related to all of this.

And in my conclusion, I will address Alex Megala, the guy that's kind of been at the center of all of this, the focal point of the controversy.

So please do watch the whole thing. I know it's a time investment, but there's a lot here.

So without any further delay, dear ones, here's my interview with Phil Johnson. We recorded this on the evening of April 17th.

Well, Phil, brother, thank you so much for giving us your time tonight. How are you doing? And within that question, many of my viewers know that you've had some health challenges.

So can you give us an update? Yeah, thanks for asking. I've been out of the hospital for one week.

I still have a permanent dialysis port that they've put into my chest.

I would show it to you, but it's too gruesome. I mean, it looks like I lost a knife fight, frankly, and I've been having kidney dialysis because I had shoulder surgery to repair a 50 -year -old injury to my shoulder.

So I had a complete shoulder replacement. They put, you know, metal pieces in there to fix it. And I'd been prepped for the, even the surgeon who did it said, this is going to hurt, and it's going to hurt for several weeks before it gets better.

The funny thing is the new shoulder hasn't hurt me at all. It hasn't caused any pain, but I developed what they call a pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot that travels into your lungs and it affects your ability to breathe.

And if it's big enough and stays, it can be fatal or it can just, it'll be there for months before it melts down, affecting your ability to breathe and all that.

So they put you on blood thinners and that, you know, and in the midst of being treated for that, they took a blood sample and discovered that the creatinine level in my blood, which is what measures how well your kidneys are working, the creatinine level is supposed to be one or below.

Anything higher than one is abnormal. Mine was 17 and I mean, it was nearly fatal.

And they, they immediately hospitalized me and said, your kidneys are not functioning at all. They put in a dialysis port and started putting me under dialysis three or four times.

And then they sent a kidney specialist in who looked at me and said that she'd seen it before.

It's, you know, not really common, but it happens. Your kidneys get shocked.

She, she described it like a heart attack with your kidneys rather than your heart. It just stops working and said, if it's not permanently damaged, it'll come back online.

Just give it time. So that was like two and a half, three weeks ago. And just on Tuesday, two days ago, or Monday, I guess two days ago,

I got the news that my latest blood tests show that the kidneys do seem to be coming back on.

So I have another blood test tomorrow. And if that creatinine number is lower, if it's down to normal, then early next week, they'll remove the dialysis port and I can begin to get back to life and, you know, with a sense of normality, but it's been terrible.

I can't sleep and take the blood thinners, makes everything bleed.

It makes everything taste bad. It's just, it's, it's a miserable way to live.

My compassion is great for people who have to live with, you know, chronic kidney problems and people who have lived on blood thinners for their whole life.

That happens as well. Yeah. Be glad to shed both of them. And it looks like I'll be able to.

So that's a great answer to prayer people. I think all over the, all over the world have been praying for me.

And today I went into the grace to you office and recorded two weeks worth of radio broadcasts.

So grace to you won't, there won't be episodes of grace to you without my voice on it, which is, which is

I'm glad for, I don't want to lose my job. Failed kidneys. So, right.

So that was, that was also good to be back doing something normal. I bet.

Beginning to feel normal. I washed my hair or any of that. Actually, Darlene took me to the barber a couple of days ago and had them wash my hair and the barber clipped it a bit.

So I got it wet tonight and combed it for you. Like a homeless person.

Yeah. I've been joking that, you know, the most comfortable thing is a John Fetterman costume.

That's what I've been wearing. I saw the cartoon that someone drew comparing Fetterman.

Yeah. That's Chad Fry. He was an artist for Disney. Great artist. Is that right? Yeah. Scratched out that little caricature of me and John Fetterman.

That's funny. That's funny. Well, brother, I'm so glad you are on the mend.

I and Kathy and so, so many people have been praying for you. And I think

I texted to you one day. I wasn't ready for you to go to heaven just yet.

We need you down here. You know, it's funny because I get what the apostle Paul wrote about. I'm not afraid of dying and I'd love to go to heaven and be with the

Lord. But there are so many unfinished things here. I didn't want to leave precipitously.

Yeah. And so I'm glad to be, it looks like I'll be able to live another, another span anyway.

Yeah. Well, praise the Lord. People don't often recognize that.

I think a lot of people think I'm a lot younger than I am, but I'm 70 years old. So no matter how you do the math,

I'm not going to be here many more decades. So I want to redeem the time and make the most of it.

And that's really, to me, spiritually, the best, the chief benefit of this entire trial is it has sort of made me unable to see anything other than the brevity of life and the importance of redeeming the time.

Yes. If you're not careful, your life begins to become a search for leisure and pleasures.

And those are the things we're not supposed to do as Christians. I mean, it's okay. God gave us richly all things to enjoy, but that can't be the goal of your life.

Your goal of your life has to be to glorify Christ. Yes. I think sometimes suffering helps us refocus that way.

And I hope that's the benefit of all of this for me long term. Indeed.

Indeed, brother. It's like David said in Psalm 119, 71, it was good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.

There is an experiential learning of God through suffering that just doesn't come in any other way.

Yeah. Amen. Yeah. All right. Well, Phil, on to the subject matter at hand.

So much in the news in the past few days is the brouhaha of Mark Driscoll getting up on the platform at the

Stronger Men's Conference that is hosted by James River Church in Springfield, Illinois, and calling out the

Jezebel, the Jezebel spirit. So I kind of want to, you're very familiar with this. You've seen it all.

And I want to walk through this a little bit with you. The first thing that struck me about what

Driscoll said, first of all, James River Church, I said publicly, this is a heretical, wackadoodle church, right?

Yeah. Have you ever seen it? Yes. I've never been in it, but Darlene's parents used to live in Branson, Missouri, which is just south of Springfield.

And the churches between Springfield and Branson used to drive by there. And I remember being there in about 2008,

I think. And they announced while we were in Missouri for visiting her parents, they announced that they were going to have

Mark Driscoll come and speak. So I think that may have been the first time he spoke there, 2008. So he's been going there more than a decade, has a close relationship with that church.

And it's one of the big, you know, mega churches that you don't hear much about.

I mean, they don't get as much publicity as, you know, Groeschel or some of the others, but they're big.

They are influential and they get all kinds of people in there from, you know, people like Driscoll to,

I think they've even had Bill Johnson. Yeah. Bill Johnson. Stetzer, it's like a zoo of people that I would never have platformed.

Right. That's right. Stetzer said, and this was in their like kiss and make up video, but he,

John Lindell said that Ed Stetzer said, and I quote, I know of no church in America that has a wider group of affiliations.

So yeah. See, that's the kind of thing that appeals to Ed Stetzer, a sort of ecumenical breadth where doctrine doesn't matter.

It's just that we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. And he loves that. It's what,

I mean, Stetzer has championed every wrong cause as long as I've ever known him. When I first heard of him,

I think it was, he was into the emerging church. Yeah. I called him the

Fagin of the emerging church, you know, Fagin from Oliver. Fagin was the creepy guy that recruited all the little boys to be pickpockets.

Okay. It's been too long. Ed Stetzer was like Fagin. He would, he would lead all these young men, seminarians into the emerging church movement, telling them how great this was and how this is the future of Christianity.

And it holds more promise than old style, old school evangelicalism. And he, so he was championing that he actually, pretty much everything he's ever stood up for and challenged or championed, rather, has been a failure in one way or another.

How somebody who can be wrong as often as he is, can attain the level of influence that he has attained.

Isn't that the truth? I don't understand. Yeah. I don't know that he's ever done anything right. He was the interim sort of,

I don't know, voice of guidance for Moody church when Erwin Lutzer left. While they were looking for a new pastor,

Ed Stetzer stepped in there and, you know, got rid of the choir and the pulpit and pretty much everything traditional about that great traditional church, changed the whole character and flavor of it.

And it just, I mean, that's my former church. So I took it kind of personally.

Yeah. It's a rule of thumb of mine. If Ed Stetzer tells you this is really, really good, steer clear.

Yeah, steer clear. That's a good rule of thumb. Yeah, you're right. He has been wrong on literally every major position he's staked out.

He has been wrong on and proven to be wrong. So if he ever says something positive about me, then

I'm going to be worried. I'm going to be concerned that I'm not doing something right. Yeah, I don't think there's any fear of that.

I don't think so. No, no, I don't think so. So, Phil, so Driscoll took the stage at this men's conference.

And the first thing he said was that he was hoarse because he's been up since 1 a .m.

praying for the people. That immediately struck me as like,

I don't believe that. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I'm trying to picture how he would pray in such a way that it would make him hoarse.

In a hotel room, no less. Especially if he's in a hotel room as a guest. Right. If he's in a hotel next to me praying loud enough that it's going to make him hoarse, as much as I love prayer,

I think I'd be banging on the walls and asking him to pray silently. Right. But I don't know what he meant or why he was hoarse.

I noticed that right away. I thought his voice doesn't sound right. Yeah. He immediately acknowledged that and said he'd been up praying for this church, which raised another question in my mind.

He was about to criticize this circus act that had gone before him. But he's saying,

I've been concerned about you guys all night. So does that mean he knew that this circus act was coming and he waited till it all happened and he got on stage before he dumped his criticism of it?

I don't know. I don't know how to read it. I don't want to read too much between the lines. I actually, as he was rebuking it in my head silently, and I don't tell many people this because it doesn't happen very often.

I'm watching him do it and going, Hey, that a boy, you know, somebody needs to say something. But then he gave it up as soon as somebody told him he was out of line.

And he came back then and made the most abject apology that undid any good that his rebuke might ever have done.

We're good friends. When Mark came here back in 2008, you were riding the high levels of Christendom in your ministry.

He was speaking around the country during conferences. I mean, listen, nobody really,

I mean, Jim, Jim is a good church, but nobody really knew much about us. You know what

I remember about you? You asked what I was preaching on. Yeah. And the next week

I had a box of books. That he mailed to me to help me.

I never forgot that. Mark and grace have been friends through the years.

When there was trouble at Marcel, Debbie and I sat on our couch and our family room. And you guys have been some of the greatest friends to me, my family through the hardest seasons of our life.

And I thank you for being a good pastor. I love this guy.

I believe in this guy. Let me tell you what I said to my sons. As we were sitting over there,

Mark was talking. You want to know what John the Baptist was like?

Generation. Nothing about what was said changes that.

And I, Mark and I talked. We went outside where we could be alone and we could talk.

And we reaffirmed our friendship. And Mark, I want you to know you're a gift to the kingdom.

You're a gift to James River. You've been a gift to Debbie and I helped us in things.

You've been kind to my family, my sons, and I love you. And I told

Mark, listen, he says, I'll do whatever you want. I said, well, if you're willing and we can come in and talk, we'll let him talk to you in a moment.

If you're willing, I want you to speak again. I want to find out about Elijah. Thank you.

I honor, respect and love and admire you as the father of this house.

This is the greatest men's event. I believe in the country right now. Stay pure for a long time.

And I want to thank you for having such a great heart for men. And I want to thank you. That starts with your sons and your sons are great, man.

I love you. And I love your sons. And when I was teaching, I just kept seeing that.

And maybe it was a learning. Maybe it's just me. And I'm peculiar. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

I believe what I should have done since I had another session. I was thinking about it. It wasn't in my notes. I didn't intend to go there.

I was rarely praying for the men. I just kept seeing it. And I should have between sessions talk to you rather than just verbal processing on the stage and as the father of the house, you could have given me a thumbs up or down.

and I need to honor that as a spiritual authority. I honor your spiritual authority. Right.

So I don't know what to make of it, other than that lots of people have said they think it was a pre -planned publicity stunt.

And based on what I know of Mark Driscoll, that makes perfect sense.

It wouldn't surprise me at all. That is his style. He's a publicist and himself kind of a circus act.

So it wouldn't surprise me. I don't know. I probably will never give it another thought.

I think they discredited themselves, which is appropriate. Yes, they got a lot of publicity out of it, but it's hard for me to imagine that an episode like that is going to increase their following.

I don't see how that's gonna happen. And if it was a publicity stunt designed to draw attention to the book that he's about to release,

Driscoll's written a book on the Jezebel spirit, I guess. Is that right? Yes, he has. I don't know.

I've seen some people say that it's just now coming out. I think it's actually been out for a few months.

Oh, really? Okay, so whatever. He's got a book that he's promoting and it would be very much like his track record for him to cook up an incident like this, a scandal, thinking that's good publicity for the book because there's no such thing as publicity.

Although it really hasn't worked well for him in the past. He's made the New York Times bestseller list, but we know that he did that because he illegitimately bought a bunch of books for his own church with their own, with a donor's money, just to elevate the sales of the book.

I don't know anybody that keeps his books on the front shelf and says, oh, these are so good, I got to refer to them again and again and again.

It's typically either very superficial.

I know he has a editor or a ghostwriter who works on his material and tries to make it better, but yeah,

I don't think all that is to say, I don't think he's written anything that's truly important. His book on marriage was a disaster because if you just step back and took the big picture, he did a lot of talking about the problems in his own marriage, and it came off looking like he just wrote that book to sort of formally lay the blame for all the problems in his own marriage on his wife.

Really? Yeah, and it was - Never read it. I wrote a review of it at the time. I think it's still on my old blog,

Pyromaniacs. Oh, okay, well, I'll put a link down there below in the description then for folks to read that.

Yeah, in fact, I won't tell you the full story, but it's kind of funny how I got a pre -release copy of the manuscript on that.

It was sent to a well -known Christian leader halfway across the country from me, and he somehow got my phone number while I was on vacation in Oklahoma, called me up and said,

I want to send you this package. He didn't say what it was, and when I got it, it was the manuscript to Driscoll's book, and he said,

I'm hoping you'll review this because he knew it was a bad book, and he knew that I wouldn't give it a good review, and he just didn't want that on his own record because that was in the day when you just weren't allowed to criticize

Mark Driscoll. If you whispered any kind of concern or criticism about him, you would be assaulted from all sides, from people saying, judge not lest you be judged, and who are you to touch the

Lord's anointed, and you don't have half the influence that Driscoll has, what are you jealous, all those sorts of things, but to me, the just deep down badness of that book just made it inescapable that somebody had to write an honest review of it, and fortunately,

I wasn't the only one. There were others who reviewed that book. I don't think it got any really good reviews, and I think it was a failure as far as the publisher was concerned, but I think that's been the case with a lot of Driscoll's books, and his approach to creating scandals to sell books isn't going to be a very fruitful way to increase his readership.

Yeah, no, and I was gonna ask you this later on in the interview, but since you've kind of already brought it up, there's a pattern here with Driscoll doing that very thing because that's what he did at the

Strange Fire Conference back in 2013. You know, I interviewed Travis Madeline. I missed that whole thing.

What's that? That's one of the regrets of my life is I missed all of that because Driscoll chose the moment to come to the

Strange Fire Conference when I was doing my one plenary section. I was the speaker of that moment, and he came up on the backside of the campus, and I didn't know anything about it until my message was done.

The whole thing was over, and he was tweeting lies about the security staff at Grace Church confiscating his books when he had, on video, he knew people had videotaped it.

He had insisted that they keep those books. He wanted them to be a gift to our church, and then.

Mark, I just wanted to introduce you to our head of our security, Tom Hatter. Tom Hatter, nice to meet you.

Whether you're putting them in people's hands or whether people want to get the books, so James McDonald's over there.

Can we just put them in the Mustang? He'll take them. Why don't you guys just take them, do whatever you want with them? We're gonna put them back in the

Mustang. Yeah, we want to give them back to you. Great, that's fine. Okay. I'd like to give them as a gift.

So just take them as a gift. Well. Yeah, yeah, just take them as a gift. Yeah, yeah, just take them as a gift.

Good enough. Yeah, thanks, guys. No, I'm from Seattle.

I'm not. I'm smoking. I'm not. No, you are. All right, thanks, guys. All right, we'll go ahead and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead and take them.

All right, thank you, Mark. As he drove away from the church campus, he tweeted that the security men at Grace Church had confiscated his books.

He's just a. That to me. Yeah, that to me just speaks volumes about the man's character.

I mean. Yeah, well, it was the beginning of his downfall, actually. It was just. Yeah. A few days after that, maybe two weeks, three weeks.

I don't remember exactly, but again, I was in Oklahoma. I'd just flown into Oklahoma City and I was driving to Tulsa in a rental car and I plugged in my iPhone with,

I don't know, podcasts that I download and reading things and discovered that he had been publicly embarrassed and humiliated in such a way that it probably was spelling the end of his ministry on Janet.

Mefford. Mefford's radio broadcast. And she had sliced and diced him.

It was beautiful, actually. I love Janet Mefford for her courage because she did not back down, although he tried his best to intimidate her.

And I say, he's very good at intimidation. Yeah. But she didn't back down. And it did turn out that that was really the thing that began seriously unraveling his public persona.

And from that point on, it ceased to be, there ceased to be any stigma to the idea of criticizing him.

And suddenly critics of Mark Driscoll crawled out of the woodwork and the worst critics or let's say the most vehement critics were men on his staff, the people closest to him, revealed sort of what a cad he was when it came to dealing with people.

So he shouldn't be in ministry. I think a lot of us have known that for years. We should be honest about it.

But he does not qualify for public ministry under the biblical requirements for an elder.

And yet he's refused to step out of that role, even to the point of just starting a church of his own with no leadership over him, no accountability that could ever inspire him.

And he's just counting on his own personal charisma to draw crowds and try to elevate himself back to where he was before.

Because he felt like his earlier downfall, rather than seeing it as the fruit of his own sin, he believed it was owing to subterfuge created by the elders of his church.

So he's now wary of eldership completely, refuses to be accountable to anyone.

And he's just such a arrogant person that he believes. And I think he really genuinely believes that whatever he thinks is right, and what he ought to do is just command every situation.

And he will not tolerate any disagreement, questioning or counter opinions from anybody else.

Right, yeah. And you mentioned that he's not qualified to be in ministry. There was a statement that came out,

I believe in 2014 or 15 of his elders saying that he's unfit for ministry.

But then in 2021, apparently they kind of reaffirmed that some 40 former elders in 2021.

Yes, because he's been so persistent in trying to thrust himself back into a position of influence.

And honestly, I haven't, since the Janet Mefford episode, and I could see his life is about to unravel.

I pretty much laid off him. I think I haven't written any new critique critiques of him or said anything else about it.

I don't need to, I think the Lord has exposed him. And so this is probably the first extended criticism of him that I've issued.

The only other thing was he had this video where he claimed the

Lord was giving him these visions into people's private sexual sins to the point where he, as he described it, his descriptions were practically pornographic.

I mean, it was offensive, it was horrible. And he claimed that the Holy Spirit had revealed these pornographic visions to him.

And somebody sent me that video and I thought that's appalling. And so I put it on my web, on my podcast and gave a little analysis of it.

And I called it pornographic divination. It's still there to this day, but unbeknownst to me, because it was a

YouTube video, I'd put it on my YouTube channel. Unbeknownst to me, about two years ago, maybe, he wrote to YouTube and claimed that that was a copyright violation.

He owned that material and I had no right to put it on my YouTube page, which is not entirely honest because part of fair use under copyright law is you can, for purposes of critique, use excerpts from somebody's video or whatever.

And as long as you're critiquing it and you're not profiting off something that they would otherwise profit on.

Copyright law is designed to protect the ownership and property of, it's not designed to shut up critics.

So copyright law has always been very sympathetic to critics. You can quote things and criticize them without permission from the author.

So I have that video there, excerpt of the video that he had posted himself. He took it down after it became a scandal, but I had left it up over the years.

And he got YouTube to take it down. Nobody warned me about it. Nobody said anything to me. I just went one day because somebody asked me what happened to that.

And I looked and it was gone and I got a note and I started digging into the record and found YouTube had sent me a takedown notice and given me a strike on copyright violation.

So I think he thought he had finally destroyed the last copy of that video, but I still had a backup copy of it.

So I redid it with my criticisms verbal criticisms voiced over the video itself rather than in the text below.

And I put the exception from the copyright law at the front of the video but it's the same video that's been there forever.

And of course that's been there. That gets a lot of traction because it is of all the things he's done that scandalizes people.

That's one of the hardest to justify. The fact that he is claiming that God gave him full color.

The way he describes it, it's like a huge television set. He can see exactly what's going on. And then as he describes it, it's this just unseemly detail about other people's sexual exploits.

Complete with like the description of the hotel room where this adultery took place and the body type.

Yeah, it's gross. It's pornographic, it is. It is.

So some people actually see things. This may be gift of discernment. On occasion,

I see things. I see things. Like I was meeting with one person and they didn't know this but they were abused when they were a child.

And I said, when you were a child, you were abused. This person did this to you, physically touched you this way.

He said, how do you know? I said, I don't know. It's like I got a TV right here and I'm seeing it.

I said, no, that never happened. I said, go ask him. Go ask him if they actually did what I think they did. And I see that they did.

And they went and asked this person, when I was a little kid, did you do this? And the person said, yeah, but you were only like a year or two old.

How do you remember that? I said, oh, Pastor Mark told me. Okay, I'm not a guru.

I'm not a freak. I don't talk about this. If I did talk about it, everybody'd wanna meet with me and I'd end up like one of those guys on TV.

But some of you have this visual ability to see things. There was one woman

I dealt with. She'd never told her husband that she had committed adultery on him early in the relationship.

I said, you know, she's sitting there with her husband. I said, you know, I think the root of all this, I think Satan has a foothold in your life because you've never told your husband about that really tall blonde guy that you met at the bar.

And then you went back to the hotel and you laid on your back and you undressed yourself and he climbed on top of you and you had sex with him and snuggled up with him for a while.

And deep down in your heart, even though you had just met him, you desired him because secretly he is the fantasy body type.

I said, you remember that place? It was that cheap hotel with that certain colored bedspread. You had sex with the light on because you weren't ashamed and you wanted him to see you and you wanted to see him.

She's just looking at me like. So I, you know, in the past two years,

I redid that video and put it up. But other than that, and this right now, I don't think

I've written or said anything that's critical of Mark Driscoll since he embarrassed himself on Janet Mefford's radio broadcast.

I just didn't need to do it. But it's interesting that as this came out and I made one comment about, you know,

Driscoll's, I don't even remember what I said. I don't think it was particularly, the original comment

I made wasn't particularly critical of Driscoll. I just pointed out the fact that he had,

I think what I said was, if you can, in the name of masculinity and manhood, cross a line that offends

Mark Driscoll, you've crossed a line that there's no coming back from or something like that.

And I got hit with a ton of responses from people who said, all you ever do is pick on Mark Driscoll.

It's like you live to pick on Mark Driscoll. So I try to be pretty measured in what

I, I wouldn't even be doing this with you if you weren't a good friend and you asked me to do it. But it does, it is stuff that needs to be said.

There are things here that need to be pointed out because it amazes me that after all these years and all that's happened and all that's documented, there's still a lot of young guys who somehow think he's a good example to follow.

Yeah. And I don't get that, but okay, somebody needs to keep saying, this is not a good example to follow.

Right. No, it's not. And he's, you know, he's made quite the resurgence. He's speaking at this conference with,

I don't know how many thousands of people, but clearly many, many thousands of people.

And so he's, yeah, he's, and now he's in with the, well, he kind of jumped theological tracks and now he's in the charismatic movement.

He's - Yeah, that's right. The demon slayers and all. Yeah, back around, well, what was it, 2012 or so,

I think it was, Time Magazine did an article where they talked about the 10 ideas that are influencing the world now.

And one of them was Calvinism, the new Calvinism, they called it. And so then there was all this publicity for a few years about young wrestlers reformed and the new

Calvinists. And he stepped into it and said, you know, he's the leader of that. He's the spokesman for that.

And so he felt like he had the authority to define what's new about the new Calvinism.

And then basically in a thumbnail, it was the new Calvinism is charismatic, whereas the old

Calvinism was cessationist. Yeah. We're not, we believe in the miracles and tongues.

And so that was it. But he pretended that he was the leader and inventor of the new

Calvinism. He wanted to be a spokesperson for it. Yeah. But then after his fall and resurgence, he came back and said,

Calvinism was, I forget the word he used, but I think it was semi -profane. But he basically renounced

Calvinism and now he's into, I don't know what. It doesn't seem like he's fully on board with the name it and claim it charismatics or the purchase of miracle types.

And, you know, to your credit, one of the things I've never really felt like he needed to be criticized for is

I don't see that he betrays any unusual love of money. He may, but if so, he keeps it hidden pretty well.

It's like, you know, some charismatics, all they ever do, some charismatics in the camp he now runs with, all they ever do is talk about money, you know, send your seed offering and all that sort of stuff.

He doesn't do that. I think his motive seems to be more that he just loves the power and influence and the feeling that, you know, he can say a thing and people jump to do whatever it is.

They think somehow that he is a representation of what the future of Christianity ought to be.

And I just hold my head in my hands and say, I hope no significant number of people ever buy that line because it would, you know, the one assurance

I have is Jesus said the gates of hell won't prevail against the church. So the gates of hell include, you know,

Driscoll -like theology, not gonna prevail, but it's troublesome anyway right now.

Right, it is. Yeah, and, you know, going to talk about the visions that he claims to get, it's not only the pornographic nature of it, but he claims that God gave him that vision.

And to my knowledge, and I think to your knowledge, he has never retracted that. He's never apologized for it.

That's - And it's the Lord who says his eyes, God's eyes are too pure to behold evil.

Not meaning that, you know, God can't see it or he's literally blind to it, but that -

He can't approve of it. The word of the rebel and stuff like that. And he wouldn't, you know, even in scripture, when we have descriptions of people's sin, it's not that sort of graphic, pornographic type of description.

I mean, even one of the things that Driscoll got himself in real trouble for was his tendency, what if you would get him, engage him as a guest speaker and not tell him what to speak for, he would always go to the

Song of Solomon and preach a sermon about sex that would be so graphic that you wouldn't want little kids to be in the audience.

Yeah, yeah. Because he was obsessed with that issue. Right. And he would go to the

Song of Solomon. I think it was John MacArthur who pointed, well, I know it was John MacArthur, who pointed out that that totally betrays,

I think John MacArthur's article on it was called the Rape of Solomon Song, because that utterly destroys the beauty of the

Song of Solomon, which uses metaphors and euphemisms to describe marital love in a way that is a pretty thorough description, but nothing at all about it is pornographic.

Right. And in his exegesis of it, he had a uncanny skill for making it either pornographic or turning it into high school humor, which was,

I thought, especially inappropriate. Right, right. Yeah, he's very graphic.

He's very coarse. In fact, I sent you, just before we started recording, I sent you this better quality video of the kiss and make up session between John Lindell and Driscoll.

And I don't think you got to this point, but Lindell - I got to the point where they were assuring each other that nobody should ever touch the

Lord's anointed, that if somebody has an anointing from God, whatever that means, you're not supposed to criticize or question them.

You may agree with Mark, you may agree with me, you may not agree with either one of us. But here's the thing, you have to be careful that you do not criticize people who have the anointing of God on their life.

Better to say nothing. Because what happens is, once you begin to criticize somebody who has the anointing on them, you're in the flesh.

Which is a recipe for huge disaster when you've got somebody of the caliber of Mark Driscoll claiming he's exempt from criticism because he's anointed.

Yeah, it's almost like their knee -jerk reaction when the scrutiny is turned up a little bit and they're challenged, touch not the

Lord's anointed. Yeah, well, you and I actually talked about this a little bit beforehand. That used to be a fairly common defense, not only of charismatics, but I think even some fundamentalists use it.

People like Jack Hiles, you can't question the preacher, you can't criticize the preacher.

And charismatics were like that as well. Touch not the Lord's anointed. You just don't criticize or question anybody who the

Lord is supposedly using. I mean, that was the whole reason for Todd Bentley's ascent and high level of popularity for so long because even the best of minds were afraid to criticize him because they didn't want to touch the

Lord's anointed. And they also didn't want to risk committing the unpardonable sin by criticizing something that the

Holy Spirit was doing, which is a terribly bad interpretation of what Jesus said is the unpardonable sin.

But nevertheless, I thought that's been debunked so much and abused so much that for, in recent years,

I haven't heard many charismatics use that argument simply because it's kind of worn out. The fact that they would drag this up on the heels of this weekend's fiasco, touch not the

Lord's anointed, it surprised and offended me. Yep, yep, that's right, indeed.

And Driscoll, so John Lindell was saying, and I'll play, I'll edit this in later, but John Lindell said that Driscoll came up to him and asked, quote, what do you want me to do here?

Meaning at this conference, what do you want me to do here? And Lindell responded, I want vintage Mark Driscoll.

And then Mark Driscoll, according to Lindell, said, I can give you the G, the

PG, the PG -13, and the R -rated. And Lindell said,

I'll take them all. He admitted that publicly? Well, apparently this was, well, yes, this was a conversation that the two of them had privately when

Driscoll said - But they're describing it to the public. Exactly, they're describing it to the public on the platform, in their makeup session.

When Mark asked, what do you want me to do here? I said, I want vintage Mark Driscoll.

He said, I can give you the G, the PG, PG -13, R -rated, you tell me what you want, and I'll take them all.

And so - I mean, read the room. How deft do you have to be?

How much self -awareness do you have to lack in order for someone of Mark Driscoll's reputation to go there, of all things?

Yeah. Yeah, that, I wish I didn't know that. Yeah, R -rated, you know, it just, yeah, what do you want?

I can give it, and Lindell said, I'll take it all. Of course he would. Unbelievable.

Yeah, because honestly, I mean, this was the whole point of that sword -swallowing act in the circus atmosphere.

They're not really interested in preaching the gospel, or they'll talk about that. They mentioned the word gospel.

They'll give a cursory explanation of some points of gospel truth, but that's not what their goal is.

Their goal is to put on a show. Yep. And, you know, R -rated shows are more memorable, so yeah, he'll take it all.

So speaking of the show, what are your impressions? Now, I've already interviewed

Gabe Hughes and Travis Allen, and, you know, we call this church, rightly, a goat farm.

James River Church is not a true church. It's a goat farm, and they preach heresy. They have false, they platform false teachers.

In fact, all the speakers at this conference are false teachers. They've had Eric Mason. They've had John Gray, on and on.

So we've condemned all of it, refuted all of it.

What were your impressions of Alex Magara, the sword swallower?

When you saw that, what were your impressions? Well, the first thing I saw was somebody put it on Twitter and said, this guy's doing a strip tease with a stripper pole.

And honestly, you know, if you don't know the context and you don't know what's going on, it kind of looked like that.

There is a, in fact, several people got upset with me because I described it as a, what did

I say? Something like a quasi -masculine display of machismo or something like that.

And it surprised me. A lot of young guys who read that said, there was nothing machismo about that.

That's gay. And then they started questioning my manhood for saying, for not saying it's gay looking.

And I get it. There's a certain effeminacy to the way that guy performed, how he took off his shirt and pranced around.

And, you know, I'm not into any of that stuff. And you wouldn't want me to take off my shirt, but especially with all the wounds

I've got right now. But it was offensive on that same level.

It's shocking to see that kind of thing in the church. And it sort of thrust my mind back to the early 1980s.

I was editing an article by John MacArthur before he did his book, Ashamed of the

Gospel, which is a critique of pragmatism in church leadership.

You know, the big mega church thing. I think, frankly, if you have not read Ashamed of the

Gospel by John MacArthur, you must. I consider it one of his three best books ever. And it's probably my personal favorite of all the three.

I know the gospel according to Jesus is better known and more people have been said that they've been converted because of the gospel according to Jesus.

But I think the more important of the books in terms of church growth philosophy, and it's been quite influential in a really good way,

Ashamed of the Gospel, John MacArthur's finest book. I think it will be in print if the Lord doesn't return for the next 300 years.

It's an important book. It is. Anyway, it was before that book was even edited and we were putting out a magazine at the time.

And we wanted to write an article on pragmatism and how this was infecting churches and turning what should be a worship service into a circus.

And one of the examples was, I think it was Second Baptist in Houston or one of the big

Houston churches had literally put a boxing ring in their church or it was a wrestling ring, something like that.

And they had these professional wrestlers come in and wrestle with the pastors and show them how to throw each other around without really getting hurt and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. We talked about how inappropriate that was. And I was at a point in the article where I wanted to use a hypothetical extreme and say, it would be like if you did this.

And so I started thinking, what could we do? And Striptease poll was one of the things that came to mind, but I thought, well, that's number one, inappropriate.

And I said to, I think it was Lance Quinn at the time who was working pretty closely with me. I said, yeah,

I don't think, that's probably a little too far -fetched. And he said, no, there are churches who've actually done it.

And he showed me newspaper clippings of churches that had done that. And I said, if that's the kind of stuff that's going on, what sort of extreme clownish performance could you ever concoct in an imaginary scenario to mock this, to caricature what they're doing?

And we honestly couldn't think of one. At this day, I've never really thought of anything that you could do in a church that is so bizarre that everybody would say, yeah, that's totally out of place.

Because everything you can think of that you would think like that, you might think, well, that's totally inappropriate, but I guarantee you it's already been done.

There really isn't anything so extreme that nobody's tried it yet. And this is in that same line.

What they're doing is looking for the most outrageous and what you and I would consider inappropriate, unchurched sort of performance, circus -style entertainment, because their real goal is to draw crowds and not to see how many people, how clear they can preach the gospel, how many people might be converted.

It's all about drawing the crowd. And then they get these fake conversions or people who have never really heard the gospel, but they're moved by the atmosphere.

And so they respond to some kind of lame -o invitation and they'll count that as a conversion.

Right. And it's why the churches today are so full of false converts. People who think they're

Christians and they've been through some experience like that, but they wouldn't have clue one if you asked them to explain how does

Christ's atoning work deal with my sin? They wouldn't know. They just don't. Right.

Speaking of which, I thought the downfall of the emerging church movement back around 2010 or so really was provoked by the fact that too many in the emerging movement began to overtly criticize and denounce the idea of penal substitution.

The idea that Christ's death on the cross was him taking divine punishment for the sins of other people, substitutionary atonement, which is what evangelicals have always believed.

It's the very point of doctrine that Spurgeon was fighting for in the downgrade controversy.

It's always been under attack, but it comes in waves. And at the end of the emerging church movement, it was such a strong movement that a group of more conservative evangelicals, groups of more conservative evangelicals began to congeal and try to talk about ways that how do we make the atonement more of a focus of our preaching?

And that's what gave rise originally to Together for the Gospel and the Gospel Coalition, both.

Both of them were founded with the idea that one of the things on their agenda was they wanted to make a credible and sensible defense of substitutionary atonement and penal substitution.

And of course, T4G has disbanded over becoming woke. That was something that accelerated the end of that organization.

The Gospel Coalition doesn't seem to care about substitutionary atonement anymore. And just this week,

I've noticed a flurry of comments on Twitter from people who are going after that doctrine as if it's never been discussed before.

They all think they've come up with a new idea that substitutionary atonement, it's just too harsh of an idea to think that God wants to punish sin because God is love, he's forgiving.

He doesn't need to punish sin because he forgives it. And they forget that scripture says without shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.

Right. So we're right back in that cycle again, which is exactly what

Spurgeon was saying in the downgrade controversy, that the cycle of apostasy is repeatable and predictable and it always goes after substitutionary atonement.

And the only difference today is that that cycle is spinning faster than it ever has because it was barely 15 years ago that the emerging church movement began to break up over that issue.

And now again, you've got a whole new generation of young Christians who want to question and redefine the principle of atonement so that they don't have to deal with the idea of penal substitution.

And it's a huge mistake. And the interesting thing is that was one of the doctrines, that was one of the few doctrines, important essential doctrines that Mark Driscoll knew to defend.

He defended substitutionary atonement. I always gave him credit for that because he was part of the emerging church movement at the beginning, but he split off from that because he was more conservative than the mainstream of emergent.

The issue that they split over involved penal substitution.

But now we're at a point where I don't hear Driscoll even bring the subject up anymore.

He's changed his focus because now he's a different group. That's right. Instead of getting all exercised about a proper biblical understanding of the atonement, if you want to listen to Driscoll and what agitates him this day, the point of doctrine he wants to argue the most is that he claims cessationism, the idea that the charismatic gifts have ceased is a kind of deism or unbelief or quasi atheism.

Yeah. And that's become his pet issue. So the continuation of the spiritual gifts is what he's defending now instead of penal substitution.

So it's a major step away from the one flimsy little thread that made him evangelical 15 years ago.

He's not really evangelical anymore. Yeah. So this weekend, it just kind of makes me sick at my stomach if I wasn't already.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I saw where someone asked him on Twitter, someone who didn't know what cessationism was.

I think it may have been a thread I was involved with. But anyway, he said, someone asked him, what is cessationism?

And he responded, and I quote, the theological equivalent of a root canal.

That was, that's his estimation of cessationism. So.

Well, saying it causes him pain, I don't regret that.

I think he deserves any pain he gets. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. So he came out,

Phil, and rebuked the Jezebel spirit. Of course, John Lindell pointed out that they had half an hour together before he ever took the stage.

So it begs the question, if this bothered him so much, why didn't he say something before?

But he comes out and he says the Jezebel spirit has already been there. And it was, the

Jezebel spirit was this sword swallower guy that took his shirt off. Yeah, that surprised me, too.

I've always thought, I mean, I've heard that expression, Jezebel spirit. I grew up in Tulsa, the headquarters of every charismatic leader, you know?

Right. And they were talking about the Jezebel, that's not a new idea. The Jezebel spirit has been around as long as I've been a Christian.

But usually it's applied to mouthy women or something like that. What is it?

Okay, we know Jezebel was a real woman who, of course, threatened

Elijah and all that, but the Bible doesn't actually say Jezebel spirit. No, it doesn't.

And the idea that somehow her spirit lives on or that there's a demon that's named after her is a bit of a stretch.

There is a reference to a Jezebel, person who's nicknamed or referred to as Jezebel in Revelation when

Jesus writes his letters to the church as he mentions that woman Jezebel. He's not talking about the

Old Testament Jezebel. He's talking about some woman who had influenced the churches in Asia Minor the same way that Jezebel in the

Old Testament had. It says of Jezebel that she stirred her husband up to do evil, that Ahab, her husband, was the worst king in the history of Israel, which had a long record of really bad kings.

And he was the worst. And then scripture says whom Jezebel stirred up. So she gets the blame and she deserves the blame for making him as evil as he was.

She was a pagan woman who hated the God of scripture and hated righteousness and just loved evil and is just a wicked woman in every way.

And so her name Jezebel has sort of often been applied to women who step out of the proper godly role

God has given to women. And she was bossy and domineering over her husband and stuff like that.

And people use her name, I think, to insult women. In a way,

I wouldn't, I don't like that. And I think there's also, because of the way scripture uses

Jezebel's name, we ought to be pretty reserved in whom we apply that to.

And because it indicates the most wicked kind of woman. It's not just a woman who happens one day to talk back to her husband.

That doesn't make her a Jezebel. But so anyway, it's normally applied to women.

And so when he comes out and says this sword swallower guy is the Jezebel, he represents the

Jezebel spirit. I was kind of surprised by that. And I was intrigued to hear how he justified that connection.

But his speech got stopped before he got to that point. So I don't know how he thought that was a Jezebel spirit, but I'm sure if you buy his book and read it, you'll find out why he thinks that's the

Jezebel spirit. I'm not interested enough to purchase the book. Yeah, nor I, nor I.

But it fits, it fits with his whole demon slayer crowd that he's running in now, because he's part of that stuff.

Alexander Pagani and Vlad Savchuk. If you've got a sin issue, you've got a demon, so.

Well, that's why he's branded himself. He's the master of the Jezebel spirit. He's the guy who will tell you how to recognize it, how to conquer it, whatever.

And that's why he specifically and purposely brought this out at a conference for men.

He thinks he's throwing around his own intrinsic authority against the

Jezebel spirit somehow makes him more manly. And he's teaching these men how to be more manly.

Basically call any evil you don't like Jezebel, connect it to Jezebel. That's his brand.

And it's, in my view, a foolish application of biblical terminology in order to sound spiritual on something that he hasn't really got a clue what he's talking about.

Right. I wonder if the Jezebel spirit and the sneaky squid spirit are friends with each other. I'm sure they are.

Yeah. Yeah, he put that sneaky squid on her head.

And what you've got is, who was the person in Greek mythology that had a head full of snakes?

Yeah, Medusa. Yeah, yeah. That's you blend the Jezebel spirit with this sneaky squid spirit and you've got yourself a

Medusa. Gotcha, Medusa spirit. There you go. Yeah, somebody feel that now and write a book about it.

Some charismatic people overhear that and we're going to have a book on the Medusa spirit. I would not at all be surprised.

And I don't say that hyperbolically. I would not be surprised. So according to Driscoll, the

Jezebel spirit was running around wreaking havoc in the auditorium there. But then he comes out, almost immediately,

John Lindell and Mark Driscoll, had this kumbaya moment on the stage.

And so Driscoll said, what I should have done, didn't have it in my notes, is talk to you first.

You could have given me a thumbs up or thumbs down and I would have honored that as you being the spiritual authority.

I believe what I should have done since I had another session, I was thinking about it, it wasn't in my notes. I didn't intend to go there.

I was up late praying for the men. I just kept seeing it. And I should have, between sessions, talked to you rather than just verbal processing on the stage.

And as the father and the head of the house, you could have given me a thumbs up or down and I need to honor that as spiritual authority.

I honor your spiritual authority, I always have. I'm sorry. So he said that, okay, he said,

I should have talked to you before I did this. And basically, if you had given me a thumbs down, well, I don't want you to do that.

He wouldn't have done it. So that begs - Not much of a prophetic voice.

If that's all it would have taken to shut him up, it's really not much of a prophetic message anyway. Right, that's exactly, bingo.

Like, how serious is this Jezebel spirit? I mean, is it serious or not?

Well, it clearly isn't. And that's why I think the bit where he comes back and they make up,

I hadn't seen that until like a day or two after the original thing. It just totally soured my view on what had happened because he's essentially taking it back and saying, well, it doesn't really matter anyway.

What's more important is we affirm one another. You tweeted that video of Mark Driscoll.

I think the caption was something like Mark Driscoll coming after the Jezebel spirit and you had this gorilla pounding and then did a 180.

I saw that and that's exactly what I thought of it. So this video of this gorilla, he starts to run into the ocean like he's angry and he's gonna deal with it.

And he gets in about waist high and the water's so cold or something that he quickly spins around.

So fast that the camera can't even follow him and runs back out of the water. And I thought that's a metaphor for exactly what

Driscoll just did. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I know, that was tweet of the year.

I thought that was hilarious. So, all right.

Lindale, this is, I told you I was gonna spring this on you and you didn't know.

So in their makeup session there, John Lindale said of Mark Driscoll, you are, and I quote, the

Spurgeon of our day. I don't have the intellect or the verbal gifts that you have, you're unusually gifted.

I've told people before, he is literally the Spurgeon of our day. Now you really have made me sick to my stomach.

And for those watching who may not know, Phil Johnson is one of the foremost experts on Charles Spurgeon.

So how does that? Well, not really, but I'm a Spurgeon aficionado. And when I got on the internet in 1995, the first thing

I did was start collecting Spurgeon sermons and putting them online. And that gave birth to what

I call the Spurgeon Archive. And it was for a long time, the largest collection of Spurgeon sermons and books and material about Spurgeon anywhere on the internet.

I mean, thousands of pages of material on Spurgeon. It's still online, but I donated this site to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, because they own, they literally own

Spurgeon's personal library, the books that he had in his house when he died. Those were bought by William Jewell College in Kansas City.

And then William Jewell used to keep them locked up. You had to make an appointment to go see them.

I went to see it once, and then it was hard to get in there. And they weren't necessarily happy with having a collection that was locked away in a room all the time.

They also owned, I think it was the Laura Ingalls Wilder collection, you know, that little house on the prairie, one of those.

And that got more visitors. So they, in a cost -cutting measure, they put the

Spurgeon library up for auction and thankfully Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary bought it and they built,

I haven't seen it yet. I gotta get out there. They built a library with all of Spurgeon's books on display and go in there and use the same books that Spurgeon studied from.

It's really quite remarkable. And so, yeah, so I, anyway,

I'm a Spurgeon aficionado, not really an expert. I love Spurgeon. I read a lot of his stuff.

I never preach on any passage without, I always prepare my message ahead of time and then

I'll read Spurgeon to see what he had to say about it. And invariably he'll say one or two things that are so poignant and so keen -sighted that I have to quote him in my sermons.

It's sort of given rise to a joke amongst the people in my flock who say that they don't think

I've really preached if I haven't given at least two quotes from Spurgeon. So I love Spurgeon and all that.

Last summer, I was in London to speak at a conference on preaching. And while I was there,

Spurgeon's college, Spurgeon had a, he started a college to train pastors. And last year they announced while I was in London that they were going to appoint

Rick Warren to be their honorary chancellor. And they had him in an academic costume.

It looked dumb on him. And their president now at Spurgeon's college, it's not really taught what

Spurgeon taught for several decades. So it's not a real strong, it's not really kept a strong commitment to Spurgeon's Calvinism or his evangelicalism or any of that.

And their president is a woman. And as she inaugurated

Rick Warren as their chancellor, she made the comment, and this was right after Rick Warren had made his appeal to the

SBC for women to be ordained as pastors and all this sort of stuff. This woman who was the president of that college made the comment that Rick Warren's philosophy of ministry is exactly like Spurgeon's, which is 180 degrees wrong.

He is, if anything, the polar opposite of Spurgeon. Polar opposite. Irritated me that they did that.

But someone to call Mark Driscoll the equivalent of Spurgeon is, again, it's an insult to Spurgeon's memory.

Shame on them. Yeah, indeed, indeed. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't punch that that far.

I know. I probably would have been so upset, I would have said, I'm not gonna do this podcast. Well, I'm glad you didn't get this far, get that far.

Yeah, but we're finished now. Yeah, yeah. I'll go as long as you want. Yeah, well, yeah, what a travesty.

And to compare Mark Driscoll to Spurgeon, I mean, and you know, one of the ironic things,

Phil, Driscoll is all about manhood and being a man.

It's an artificial manhood. Thank you, it's artificial, why? Tell us why. Because it isn't biblical manhood.

I mean, biblical manhood is defined very clearly in Ephesians chapter four, we're to mature into a full man.

That is the likeness of Christ. The picture of true manhood in scripture is

Christ. And it doesn't take a real keen eye to notice that the character and style of Christ is not at all like what you see with Mark Driscoll.

Yeah. I mean, to my shame, I think you'd probably say the same thing about me, that I fall short of perfect Christ likeness, but like Paul said,

I press towards the mark. That's what I want to achieve. And the problem with Driscoll is,

I think he thinks he is the ideal man, that if you wanna be a full man, you gotta be like him.

In effect, then it destroys genuine godly manhood, which has a dose of humility in it.

It has a dose of compassion and care and the love of Christ.

And sure, there's a zeal for the truth. There's Christ who was the one who of course, turned over the tables in the temple twice in his ministry, once at the beginning, once at the end.

So there is that streak of zeal in Christ and sometimes even anger. But what characterized him by his own testimony is that he was meek and lowly in heart.

Yeah, right. In a real man, a real biblical man, going back to something you said earlier in the interview, a biblical man, number one, doesn't blame your wife for marital problems.

A biblical, a real man doesn't do that. A real man doesn't lay at the feet of the

Holy Spirit. And especially publicly like that, you know? Yeah. Never hold my wife up to public ridicule.

No, not in a million years, not in a million life. I'd rather die before I do that.

Yeah. So a real man doesn't do that. A real man doesn't lay at the feet, anthropomorphically speaking of that, doesn't lay at the feet of the

Holy Spirit, pornographic visions. A man doesn't do that.

A man doesn't create publicity stunts like he did at Grace Community Church and lie.

I mean, I watched that video. I usually probably saw it too, I'll put it in there. Travis Allen and Tom and those guys, they could not have been any nicer to Mark Driscoll.

Yeah, and you know what? You talk about men, real men, those two guys alone,

Travis Allen, former Navy SEAL, he doesn't like people to say that about him because he's too humble to admit it.

He's the guy you want watching your back. And then Tom, who is head of security at Grace Church, Tom Hatter, he is the most gracious, kindly, loving, caring person

I know with the backbone of strength that he's got. He's not somebody

I would want to fool with. So you've got these two guys who are really epitome of true manhood and they're trying to be as polite and kind to Driscoll as he possibly can.

He's acting like a clown. And as he drives away, he lies in a way that's designed to impugn their character.

Hi Mark. Hi Mark. Tom Hatter, nice to meet you. Whether you're putting him against his fans or whether you want to get him out of the box, it's the same thing.

So he's going to take the book, so James McDonald's over there, we can just put him in the Mustang. He'll take the book.

Why don't you guys just take him, do whatever you want. We're going to put him back in the Mustang. Yeah, we want to get him back. Great, that's fine.

Okay. I'd like to give him as a gift. So just take him as a gift.

Yeah, yeah, just take him as a gift. Yeah, yeah, just take him as a gift. I'm smoking,

I'm not mad at you. Okay. Thanks guys. All right, we'll go ahead and -

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it. All right. Thanks Mark. Yes.

That's not manhood. And the irony of it is, he was in Los Angeles that weekend to do a conference that was called

Act Like Men. Mm -hmm. Yeah. And now he's pulling this story stunt last weekend at another men's conference.

I think he ought to be banned from men's conferences forever because it's - Draw out misbehavior in the man.

Right. I mean, that's what's so ironic. If you want to show all of your conference attendees what biblical manhood looks like,

Martin Driscoll would be the last example of that. Yeah. Yeah, that's more like you want to show them what an adolescent out of control is.

And just for the record, Martin Driscoll did that. He flat out lied, bald face lied about what happened and slandered you guys.

Has there ever been an apology? Oh no, no. No. Therefore -

I'm sorry, what? I don't think any of us have ever heard from him again. Yeah. Okay.

So there's never been an apology and therefore, biblically speaking, there's been no repentance.

Right. Although that's really the least of the issues, frankly. I think the laundry list of things that his own elders brought up against him as his ministry began to unravel, some of those things were shocking and abusive of people in his church in ways that there's just no way to justify it.

And I don't think he's any, I don't think he's ever really expressed any kind of genuine repentance to that either.

And a lot of it's on the record. His comment about kicking people off the bus and the bus runs over him and pile of dead bodies and by God's grace, he says it's gonna be a bigger pile of dead bodies.

He glorified the fact that he destroyed the people around him. He thought that was some kind of expression of his machismo.

And it was just, it was distasteful and shameful. And what he did at Strange Fire was more of a clownish act.

I don't care if he never brings that up again, but he definitely needs to repent for the abusive way he dealt with other people who were actually trying to be supportive of him in ministry, even to a fault.

And he abused them terribly. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that's not what a man does.

A true man admits when he's wrong. A true man apologizes where apologies are needed.

Were you gonna say something? Nope. Oh, okay. Oh, I'm listening to you with great profit here.

Oh, okay. Yeah, well, that's what a true man would do, but would be humble enough to admit he was wrong, admit when he's lied, admit when he's slandered people's character and apologize, but that's not happened.

So I agree. Yeah, he shouldn't be anywhere near a men's conference, not even in attendance, much less as a speaker.

Yeah. So, and by the way, Phil, as we kind of land the plane here, we're not, neither one of us is doing this video interview because we hate

Mark Driscoll. A lot of people I saw comments, you hate Mark. I don't hate Mark Driscoll.

I don't hate Benny Hinn. I don't hate Kenneth Copeland. You don't hate these men. We're doing this interview and engaging this subject because we're concerned for the people that follow him and learn from him, right?

That's right. I would love it if Driscoll actually did repent. I would rejoice and I would embrace him.

And he would be, you know, as would I. As would anybody else at our church. But that's not really the issue.

The reason I even talk about any of this is not to needle him. It's not to rankle him or embarrass him even.

It's to warn the people who see that sort of stuff going on. They don't know what to make of it.

And sometimes they're influenced by it in ways that they think, well, okay, well, look at what a big crowd this guy draws.

Look how many people respond to. I mean, you look at the crowd in that circus atmosphere this weekend, and you think if your judgment on where the

Lord is working and where he's not is based on the number of people that attend. And that is sadly how most

Americans think of it. The bigger crowd you draw, the more they think it's a sign of God's blessing.

And it isn't, but they think that way. And as a consequence, they're influenced by this.

No matter how bad it gets, they think, well, the Lord's using it. I mean, that's the Todd Bentley story again, right?

Everybody was, you couldn't devise a character more odious than Todd Bentley kicking old ladies in the face and stuff and boasting about it.

It was just on the face of it, ungodly and cruel and just distasteful in every sense of the word.

And yet, even some respectable Christian leaders were afraid to be publicly critical of it because it was like, well, what if the

Lord is doing this? I don't know how anybody can think that way, but apparently they do. And as a result,

I think those of us who understand the dangers of that kind of thing, really it's incumbent on us to speak out.

And I realize that you and I both probably get a reputation that we're critical a lot.

And it's true if all you ever see is my online presence, you might think, well, this guy's just a full -time critic.

Because I do criticize things like this when they come up because nobody else will say it.

If you listen to my teaching in my Sunday school class or any of that, you'd get a better picture of my balance.

But somebody needs to speak out about these things and not enough people have the courage or desire to do it or the willingness to do it.

Yeah, that's right. 26 of the 27 books in the New Testament directly warn about false doctrine and or false teachers.

So, and they do a lot of harm. What's that? You've got a T -shirt with the pyromaniacs, because again, we started that blog mainly to criticize the emerging church movement, which had no outspoken critics at the time.

Everybody was just going along with it. And so we had these T -shirts that said, because somebody needed to say it and nobody else would.

Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Well, brother, I'm glad you're still in the fight.

Me too. And thanks. Thanks for letting me do something a little bit more than just lie in bed and moan over the pains of health problems and stuff.

It's good to see you. It's good to see you too, brother. It sure is. Thank you so much. All right. Okay. Okay, dear one.

So that concludes my interview with Phil Johnson. We recorded that on the evening of April 17th,

Wednesday evening. And what neither one of us realized at the time was right about the time we were recording that,

John Lindell, pastor of James River Church, came out and publicly rebuked

Mark Driscoll. In fact, executed his own version of church discipline on Mark Driscoll and just ran right through the steps, one, two, and automatically to three.

Just lickety split there, which was a whole other conversation about how that was a misapplication of Matthew 18, but at any rate.

So, and after I interviewed Phil, after the interview, then I saw that, I'm like, what in the blue -eyed world?

Like they just, I thought they kissed and made up and they were just slathering praise on each other and everything was fine, kumbaya.

You know, and now all of a sudden it's like a 180 and John Lindell's in front of his entire church rebuking

Mark Driscoll. So I downloaded that. And so we're gonna, I'm gonna play clips of this.

And as we go through, I'll stop for a couple of comments. Tonight is about following Jesus' plan and path for unity in the church.

We are following Jesus' plan in Matthew 18 in response to the things that have been done by Mark Driscoll.

Matthew chapter 18 and verse 15, and we'll have it on the screen for you. Jesus said, if your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault just between the two of you.

If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.

If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

In those verses, Jesus gives us a three -step process for resolving conflicts, not just conflicts between believers, but a plan for confronting sinful behavior.

Step one, you go to the person and point out their fault just between the two of you. Step two, if the person does not repent, you involve one to two other people.

Step three, if they refuse, you tell it to the church.

So with great sadness that I'll let you know we are at step three.

Let me just say that I've known Mark since 2008. When the church that Mark pastored,

Mars Hill, fell apart and Mark had very few friends, we stood with Mark and Grace to encourage them.

We shared our platform with them when almost no one else would. Eventually, Pastor Robert Morris and Pastor Jimmy Evans worked with Mark and Grace as spiritual overseers to help them reestablish their ministry in Scottsdale, Arizona through the planting of Trinity Church.

Having Mark Driscoll at the Stronger Men's Conference was simply a continuation of our friendship and our relationship.

But at the conference and in the days that followed, Mark has repeatedly engaged in sinful behavior.

Let's start with Alex Megala, the sword swallower. Alex is a born again

Christian and has been for approximately 10 years. He is married, has children, and attends

Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, California, where Erwin McManus is the pastor.

Okay, dear ones, none of what John Lindell just said about Alex Megala is true.

There is an article that was posted today, I believe. Yes, today. And it was written by a man named

Jesse T. Jackson. He writes for church leaders. And he actually got in touch with me, texted me.

He got my phone number through a mutual friend, but anyway, texted me, and so I called him back. He wrote an article. It was a very helpful article here.

And he interviewed Alex Megala. He spoke with him on the phone. And so I want to show you some excerpts from this.

Link to the article down below in the description if you'd like to read the entire thing, but just a few more pertinent parts here.

So as I said, none of what John Lindell just said about Megala is true. So here in the article, the 34 -year -old

Megala clarified that he is married and lives with his wife in Moldova. In contrast to previous reports, he said that he has no children.

Okay, so Alex Megala does not have children. He does not live in California. He lives with his wife in Moldova.

It's over by Ukraine. So apparently he comes over to the United States for events and whatnot from time to time, but this is not his home.

His home is not in the United States of America. It's across the ocean in Europe. So that's not true.

Well, what about him being a Christian? John Lindell said he's been a born -again

Christian for 10 years. Well, that's not true either. While he addressed his faith in God, Megala said that, quote, some sources say that I was saved by God around 10 years ago.

That is not correct, he explained. I'm an Orthodox Christian. Orthodox Christian means that I get through the ceremony of becoming a

Christian as a baby, Megala added. So pretty much all my family is an Orthodox Christian and me as well.

So you see, dear friends, Megala, this is not a testimony. Megala says, no, he wasn't saved 10 years ago.

He thinks he's a Christian, Orthodox Christian, simply because he was baptized or had a ceremony of some sort when he was a baby.

That's why he thinks he's a Christian. That does not a Christian make at all.

In fact, later in the article, let's just look at it now, he shed some more light on his faith here.

So let me read this to you. Additionally, Megala said that the pole he climbed at Stronger Men's Conference was not a stripper pole.

It's a Chinese pole that has origins dating back to the ancient Chinese circus. Megala explained to church leaders that he has to wear special pants and perform a stunt shirtless in order to correctly grip the pole.

Concluding his video, Megala put up a video on social media. Concluding his video,

Megala shared that his performance is an expression of his faith. And he says, and I quote, "'When

I perform, I swallow a sword "'and attempt a death -defying stunt, "'climbing on top of the pole and then going upside down.

"'The moment when I drop down, "'that to me is when I give my life to God,' Megala said.

"'And the moment when I stopped one inch "'before hitting the ground, "'that's the moment when

I get saved by God.'" Just wanted to say that I owe no explanation to anyone about my faith in God, about what

I'm doing, about my past, but just wanted to clarify some details. So after watching a video yesterday from John Lindell explaining and just defending me,

I just wanted to clear some details. So first of all, I have no kids.

I have a family. I have no kids yet. So that's number one.

And secondly, some sources say that I was saved by God around 10 years ago, which is not correct because I'm an

Orthodox Christian. And I'm sorry if I'm wrong in terminology. I just,

English is my third language, so I'm trying, but just bear with me. So Orthodox Christian means that I get through the ceremony of becoming a

Christian as a baby. So pretty much all my family is an Orthodox Christian and me as well.

With that said, I had no problem going to attending a Baptist church in Los Angeles, Mosaic Church with Pastor Erwin McManus, primarily because my friends were going there and just in general, there are good people.

And in Los Angeles, it's really hard to find honest and just in general, good people.

And I hope so you find God in your heart because I know my way of expressing my faith is different.

And let me explain just like real quick. When, that's how I see it.

When I perform, I swallow a sword and attempting a death defying stunt, climbing on top of the pole and then going upside down.

The moment when I drop down, that's to me is when

I give my life to God. And the moment when I stop one inch before hitting the ground, that's the moment when

I get saved by God. God bless everybody and book my show.

Dear friends, that's not the testimony of a Christian, not at all.

This is someone who does not understand the gospel. So John Lindell is, you know, for all of his calling out of Mark Driscoll, well, he should, you know, he's sinning himself.

You know, he gets up there so confidently talking about how Alex Magal is a born again Christian and apparently evangelizing in the airport.

The man clearly doesn't even understand what being a Christian is. He doesn't understand the new birth, doesn't understand the gospel, substitutionary death of Christ on the cross, repentance and faith in him.

He doesn't understand these things. He thinks when he slides down the pole and stops right before he's impaled on the sword, that's him getting, that's when he gets saved by God.

Church leaders asked Magal how he felt after hearing how Driscoll described his performance. It didn't really bother me because I know that the guy got lost,

Magal replied. He got lost in the translation of what this act was actually meant for.

He got lost in interpretation of what kind of pole it is. And on top of that, he didn't mention the other performers who were topless.

Magal was referring to the Ramadan Brothers, fellow AGT performers, who also performed on Friday night at the

Stronger Men's Conference. So as best I can tell, the Ramadan Brothers, and it's kind of strongly suggested even in the name, these are professing

Muslims, professing Muslims. So what are they doing at a

Christian men's conference? But I digress. Magal shared with church leaders that when he is in Los Angeles, he attends

Mosaic, a nondenominational church founded and led by Erwin McManus.

So Erwin McManus, he's the pastor of Mosaic Church. And Mosaic Church on paper is a

SBC church, but Erwin McManus is not a sound guy at all.

In fact, I dealt with Erwin McManus in a video a couple of years ago that I did on First Baptist Orlando, Florida, related to their complete capitulation on homosexuality and baptizing homosexuals.

And the pastor of First Baptist Orlando is a guy named David Youth. And David, on a particular

Sunday morning, read an article in which Erwin McManus is quoted.

And listen to what Erwin McManus says that every healthy church should have.

So let me read you an article I came across. I thought this was very interesting, the timing of it. This is an article that is in Outreach Magazine.

It's a trade magazine. Some of your businesses or professions where you have trade magazines. I remember my father -in -law, a physician, used to always hand the

American Medical Journal to me. And I'm like, why do

I need this? He said, well, this is stuff we get all the time and we read it to try to be better doctors. Well, this is a magazine to help churches be better churches.

It's called Outreach. Listen to the, I'm quoting an article, okay? When a non -Christian is allowed to be a full participant in a community and get an up -close look at what difference the gospel actually makes in people, he or she is given a front row seat to the working of the

Holy Spirit in our midst. To say people who don't yet know whether they wanna give their lives to Jesus, you can't serve here, your voice won't be heard, that's a quick way to shut down the process of their discovering whether or not

Jesus is even someone they wanna give their life to. I once heard, he quotes somebody, and the somebody he quotes is from this church.

He grew up here and he pastors a church in California. His name is Erwin McManus.

He quotes, the article quotes him, listen to this. I once heard Erwin McManus say, every truly healthy church has two things, heretics and people who are sexually immoral.

To translate, a church that consists of only committed Christians probably has lost sight of its mission and resembles more the frozen chosen than the messy community that God has in mind that journeys with people as they discover

Jesus. So Erwin McManus says that a healthy church should have heretics and sexually immoral people.

So that gives you an idea of who Erwin McManus is and what he teaches. He is not a sound teacher at all.

Let me just add this. If people aside from Mark Driscoll had been offended by Alex's performance on Friday night,

I would have been hearing about it the rest of the night. I did not receive one text, one email or one phone call and no one came up to me in the arena during the boxing to share their concerns.

Furthermore, not one of the hundreds of hosts we had serving around the arena received a complaint about Alex's performance.

Although Mark knows that Alex is a Christian, he has done nothing to quell the furor over Alex's past.

Mark could have easily contacted one of his own congregants to find out more about Alex or even contacted

Alex's manager. But it seems that Mark is more interested in the controversy that will sell books, gain clicks and increase donations to his ministry.

Okay, so I did find out that Mark Driscoll's book on the Jezebel spirit, or at least it talks about the

Jezebel spirit has been out since July of 2023. And he apparently is giving away the books for free, but it's not as altruistic as you might think because the way this apparently works, you can get the book for free, but in exchange, you give

Driscoll's ministry your contact information, your email address, phone number, whatever, all that stuff.

And then they compile all of these names into their database and solicit people for donations and for money.

So yeah, it's not as altruistic as it might seem. And for all of the theological issues with John Lindell, because he is a false teacher as well, but he is right, if Mark Driscoll had such an issue with this, the performance was on a

Friday night. Driscoll preached on Saturday. So he had a lot of time, more than enough time to go up to Lindell and express his concern, but he did not do that because he wanted to make a scene.

Let me provide some background on what happened at the Stronger Men's Conference on Saturday morning.

When I came into the green room, I visited with Mark Driscoll. We talked for about 20 minutes.

He talked about how much he loved our family, loved the church, and how he was a few years behind me in age, but wanted to get together in the coming months to discuss church leadership transition so they might learn from us.

As well, we talked about what he would be speaking on. He stated that session one would be about Ahab and Jezebel.

At no time during our conversation was there any mention of his angst over Alex Megala's performance or his concerns about the event.

Mark could have easily mentioned Alex, but he did not. After I stopped

Mark's message and calmed the crowd, I ran backstage to find Mark and was told that he had left for the airport.

I ran into the parking area and Mark got out of the car. As he came up to me, he said, well, that didn't go very well.

To which I responded, Mark, you were out of line. And he said, no,

I don't think so. I said, Mark, Matthew 18 is really clear on this.

If you were offended by last night's performance, you should have talked to me about it first. Because in Matthew 18, it says, if your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault.

Just between the two of you, if he listens to you, you have won your brother over. To which

Mark responded, well, I couldn't help it. The spirit of God came upon me.

My response was, Mark, that's not true. Lindell is right about that.

The spirit of God did not come upon Mark Driscoll. Because if the spirit of God had truly compelled

Mark Driscoll to say what he did about the Jezebel spirit, then he would never have apologized for doing what he did.

I mean, how can you apologize for doing something the Holy Spirit of God led you to do? So Lindell's right.

The spirit of God did not come upon Mark Driscoll. And that begs another question, raises another issue.

If the spirit of God did not, in fact, come upon Mark Driscoll, then he obviously does not even know what it means for the spirit of God to come upon him.

He wouldn't know it, even if it had happened. He doesn't know how to sense that using charismatic lingo.

So again, charismatic lingo, not my lingo. But you see the logical inconsistencies of their own theology.

The Bible says the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.

So don't say you couldn't help it, because that is not what the Bible says.

And the Holy Spirit is never going to encourage you to do something that contradicts his word.

Nor would the Holy Spirit lead you to platform false teachers at your church, like Bill Johnson, Randy Clark, John Gray, and others, nor would the

Holy Spirit lead you to lie to your people about fake miracles.

Show me the toes. Mark, you should have talked to me first.

We talked a bit more and Mark agreed to dialogue on the platform. I know that some have said that Mark apologized on stage at the conference.

He did not. Jimmy Evans, who has served as Mark's spiritual advisor, watched the video and confronted

Mark on this point. Mark mentioned that he should have come to me, but acknowledging what happened is not the same as apologizing.

Following our platform discussion, Mark and I visited backstage while Pastor Jabin Chavez spoke.

I told Mark, I love you and I want to continue to be your friend. Mark said, well,

I've just crapped all over your event. And I said, I still want to be your friend. Mark responded by saying that he loved our family and the church and would never want to hurt us.

We suggested having a picture taken that would show us together. Mark insisted that he be the one who posted it first.

And you can see it there. And it is obvious that he collabed us on the photo.

So it's a post by Mark. The picture was posted shortly after it was taken. At that point,

I was thinking that things were settled. When Mark returned to Scottsdale, Arizona, he sent me the following text at 5 .10

p .m. Pastor John, it's Mark here. I just landed back in Phoenix.

I feel like I'm watching a strange Netflix show I happen to be in. Thank you for 16 years of deep deposits and friendship.

I love, appreciate, and respect you very much. My online team is deleting all negative.

I'm not responding to anyone or anything, including text. I'm honored to talk about whatever, whenever.

I'm genuinely praying James 1 5 for you and mean that sincerely. I deeply love you and your family and church family and appreciate the maturity and seasoned grace of your response under great pressure.

Your character was proven and I'm grateful for you. But later that evening, he started sending a string of texts to my son,

David Lindell, about Alex and his past. On Saturday night at 10 .30

p .m., Mark texted David, I'm not sharing this with everyone, but I'd expect a media discovery.

I'm very sorry. Then he sent another text that said, anyone.

It seemed that Mark had been embarrassed publicly and he was getting ready to create a firestorm.

On Saturday night at 11 .26 p .m., Mark texted David. He, that's Alex, posted

James River on his social media with your gals, gay porn stripper, Jezebel.

He sent another text two minutes later at 11 .28 p .m. My team has a file.

I'm very sorry. It's completely demonic. In total, Mark sent eight texts to David Lindell that stopped at 12 .30

a .m. on Sunday morning. On Sunday after church, I texted

Mark the following text at 1 .48 p .m. Mark, I wanted to respond to your text.

For additional context, Alex Megala is a believer and participated in worship at every opportunity.

He is a Christian regardless of the sin of his past. His shirtless performance was similar to the

Ramahati brothers. As for the pole, it is a Chinese acrobat pole.

The Chinese pole dates back to at least the 12th century, around 900 years ago. By contrast, women's erotic pole dancing is less than 100 years old.

To suggest that a professional acrobat using a device that's been around for 1 ,000 years is in the same categories an erotic dancer is at best misinformed or uninformed.

We stand by the decision. Because Alex is a believer, I will defend him in the same way

I have repeatedly stood by you and defended you. To that end,

I'm asking you to bring to an end your pursuit of the situation. Should you continue to make it an issue,

I will seek mediation. I love you and your family. You may or may not want relationship with us, but we would still desire to be friends.

I pray we can all move past the events of this last weekend. Within minutes after sending that text, the post with our picture together was removed from Mark's account.

On Sunday evening at 7 .43, Mark texted Pastor John, thank you for your response.

I love you and your family as well. My plan is to be saying and doing nothing but praying.

I texted back less than an hour later at 8 .36 p .m., Mark, thank you, that's great,

I love you. Do you see the deception? Mark expressed love on the one hand, but took the picture down.

He knew that Alex was a Christian, but it would seem that storyline would ruin his ability to generate clicks and sales.

Instantly on Monday, the word spread like wildfire about Alex. One can only wonder how that happened.

To take it a step further, Mark had not only texted my son David, but he called David on Saturday night at 11 .37

p .m. and left this voicemail. Hey buddy, this is Driscoll. I love you very much.

I feel like throwing up and crying. I'm very, very sorry. I sent you some texts.

I'm not gonna say any of that. I'm not going to share any of that. I'm not gonna do anything.

I love you guys and guys and I wish I was wrong, but I have my team quadruple check it unless they have completely messed up.

This is a major crisis for you and James River. And so yeah, just check your text thread.

I CC'd your dad. I'll do anything I can to help. I'm not gonna say a word.

I'm not gonna say anything. I'm not gonna do anything. I've been the guy who is getting melted to the ground.

The very last thing I wanna do is be anything but a shield to love and protect you guys because I care very much for you and you guys mean the world to me.

So I just wanted you to hear it from me that I'm very devastated, very broken heart.

I love you guys very much. I'm for you. And if there's anything I can do to help without making things worse,

I'm open to that. Know that I feel absolutely terrible and I'm praying.

Yeah, and I just really appreciate the way you treated my son and son -in -law. You're a good man, David. I love you, buddy.

Thank you. Mark called David again on Monday at 11 .25 a .m.

but left no message. Given Mark's response to me, I suggested that David should as a courtesy return

Mark's call, which he did at 12 .03 p .m.

on Monday. On the call, Mark reiterated what he said in the voicemail on Saturday night.

He ended those statements by saying, I am not wrong. He followed that up by saying the following to David.

And David, this is as David remembers it. Number one, there is something wrong at James River Church.

Number two, the leadership with you, your dad, and your brother is enmeshment.

Enmeshment to Mark means that's a group of people, any group that is against Mark or that Mark doesn't agree with.

Number three, there is something evil at work in the church. Something is different since the last time

I came. There is a mixture of the sinful and the sacred. Number four, the reason that God is still blessing is because of the foundation of grace made by years of Bible teaching.

Number five, and I'm numbering them because these are statements David remembered. David, you need to differentiate.

What Mark means by that is you need to separate yourself. And if you don't, James River Church may cease to exist.

Number six, this is a word from the Lord for you. This may be the most important moment of your life.

Number seven, Brandon is a broken man. The fact he could watch that guy in rehearsal and say nothing says something is wrong.

Something is wrong with him. He went on to accuse

Brandon of a list of dark sins. But you need, number eight, to differentiate and become the leader of James River Church.

This is your fulcrum moment. What kind of person says those things?

Let me say this, Brandon is a man of God in every sense of the word.

In fact, I will take it a step further. David is a man of God in every sense of the word.

You can imagine that when David told me what had been said,

I immediately wanted to text Mark. At 1 .33

p .m., I texted Mark the following, Mark, what in the world?

Your call to David was ridiculous. I thought your plan was to, and I'm quoting his last text to me, to be saying nothing and doing nothing but praying.

So which is it? Where is your integrity? At 1 .34

p .m., Mark responded with this text. I did not call David, he called me. I left a voicemail days ago.

What Mark had done at this point was so egregious. Attempting to tear down the leadership of the church, attempting to create doubt and friction between brothers, attempting to sow discord between a father and a son.

It seems demonic to me. And honestly, it makes me very, very concerned for Mark.

At that point, we moved to step two in the Matthew 18 process.

Matthew 18 .16, but if you will not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.

Within an hour, I called Dr. Jimmy Evans, the founder of Marriage Today, the

Tipping Point podcast, and the founder and president of XO Marriage. Jimmy Evans, if you do not know him, is one of the finest

Christian leaders in the United States of America today. Jimmy had at one time served as a spiritual advisor to Mark.

Those I sought counsel from said that Jimmy was very likely the only spiritual advisor that Mark would listen to.

Dr. Jimmy Evans called Mark on Monday afternoon and Mark returned to his call on Monday evening.

Dr. Evans repeatedly told Mark Driscoll that he needed to repent. Each time, all that Mark would say is that Jimmy was a spiritual father to him and a friend that he loved.

But Mark was unwilling to repent and still has not repented.

As well, Dr. Jimmy Evans informed Mark that what he was doing and not stopping these things regarding Alec's past and James River Church was resulting in death threats and horrible abuse to our

James River Church receptionists. So much so that for the first time ever, we shut down our switchboard and put all calls to voicemail.

Our receptionists were frightened and were in tears. Yesterday, I was preaching in Arizona where the

Assemblies of God General Superintendent, Doug Clay, was also preaching.

Following our preaching, he asked to visit with me and said that the national headquarters of the

Assemblies of God had also received violent threats and such disturbing interaction with callers that they too shut down their reception.

To this point, Jimmy encouraged Mark to say something to calm things down.

To this point, Mark has done nothing to calm down the vigilante acts of his followers. You know,

I do not doubt that in the least because in the first video I did on this when

I interviewed Gabe Hughes and Travis Allen about Mark Driscoll, the comments from Driscoll's supporters were absolutely appalling.

Ripping me up one side, down the other for not condemning the act from Alex Megala.

You know, I thought that when we called James River Church a false church and a goat farm, which it is, this is a word -faith

NAR church. I mean, they platform known false teachers. So this is not a biblical church at all.

So I'm not defending James River Church, but what John Lindell, I realize

I was mispronouncing his name at Lindell, but anyway, John Lindell, what he was saying, I don't doubt that at all.

The vitriol from Mark Driscoll's supporters, absolutely appalling. But I thought calling this a false church, a goat farm that platforms false teachers, and in that video with Gabe Hughes and Travis Allen, we repeatedly said that this is, all of these stunts and acts are gimmicks and they offer absolutely no spiritual benefit at all.

And this is not a real men's conference. This is not a biblical conference. And I was just,

I was quite honestly stunned by it. So I'm not commending or endorsing the act on any level.

I think the whole conference is unbiblical. I just don't happen to think that Mark Driscoll was right when he called out the

Jezebel spirit that was running around, said the Jezebel spirit has already been here. Well, no, she hasn't because the

Jezebel spirit doesn't even exist. So this is what you get when you have bad theology on both the church's part and Mark Driscoll's part.

Which brings us tonight to the third step in Matthew chapter 18. Matthew 18, 17 says, if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.

And if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

That means if he doesn't listen to the rebuke of tonight, any believer should not have anything to do with Mark Driscoll.

Let me say this, I get absolutely no joy or delight out of doing this to someone that I've called a friend.

Mark, if you are listening to this message, we love you and it's with a heavy heart that we are calling you to repent.

Jimmy Evans has called you to repent. In the presence of God and of Jesus Christ who will judge the living and the dead and in view of his appearing and his kingdom,

Mark, we call on you to publicly repent. We are calling you to publicly repent for refusing to stop the spread of lies regarding Alex Megala, a

Christian brother. Mark, we are calling you to publicly repent for sowing disunity in the body of Christ.

Mark, we are calling you to publicly repent for covertly trying to divide brothers and making false and slanderous accusations against Brandon Lindell.

Mark, we are calling you to publicly repent for trying to create division in the

Lindell family all the while saying you love us. And I must agree with John Lindell there because Mark Driscoll is clearly two -faced.

And I think it is despicable and reprehensible what he was trying to do in trying to sow division within that family, theologically as misguided as they clearly are, but that is absolutely reprehensible and Mark Driscoll is two -faced.

Mark Driscoll is out for Mark Driscoll. Mark, we are calling you to publicly repent for trying to destroy

James River Church through attacking its leadership. To those who follow

Mark Driscoll Ministries in light of what has been presented, you should reconsider your relationship and support of Mark Driscoll Ministries.

To those who have passed on information from social media and other sources that tonight has been shown to be false, you too need to repent.

And not just before God, that is certainly where it starts, but repent by going to those with whom you have shared false information and set the record straight, doing it through the same manner and with the same platforms as you spread the false information.

Finally, to our James River family. We love you. We love you. Okay, dear ones, here is the conclusion.

I want to land the plane. This video has taken me several days to put together with other obligations that I had a lot to put together.

So anyway, in showing you all this, here's kind of the summation of it all. Number one,

Mark Driscoll is not qualified to be a pastor elder. He does not meet the biblical qualifications of an elder found in 1

Timothy 3. He is not temperate by any stretch. He is not above reproach.

When you have 40 former elders all saying, who know him and served under him, they all say that he is not fit for ministry, then that says something.

That speaks volumes. He is not respectable. He definitely is not considerate, does not have a good reputation with outsider.

He is not honest. A bald face lied about what happened at the Strange Fire Conference and did so with the intent of puffing himself up and slandering the reputation of elders at Grace Community Church who could not have been any nicer to him.

All of this, not to even mention his plagiarism that Janet Mefford uncovered, not to mention him claiming the

Holy Spirit gave him pornographic visions. The Holy Spirit emphatically did not do that.

I did a video on my YouTube channel a few months ago about this. It's more in depth if you want to read it.

I'll put a link down below in the description. And it's not even plausible.

Even if you're charismatic, even if you're a wild -eyed charismatic, what he said doesn't even pass the common sense test.

He lied about all of it and laid that at the feet, anthropomorphically speaking, of the

Holy Spirit of God. So this is not a man qualified to be in the pulpit. And for all of his manly bravado, he does not act like a man.

A real man does not blame his shortcomings on other people. A real man does not blame the issues that he had in his marriage on his wife publicly.

I can't even imagine that. In fact, again, down below in the description is a link to Phil Johnson's article that he wrote for Pyromaniacs dealing with Mark Driscoll.

And so that is linked below. You don't have time to go into it all here on the video. Make the video, too.

It's already over two hours long as it is. So all of that will be linked down below.

And as far as this circus act that happened at the

Stronger Men's Conference, he claimed the Spirit of God compelled him to call out the

Jezebel spirit that was apparently introduced to everyone there by Alex Megala, the sword -swallowing guy.

But then, so that's what he told John Lindell. He was compelled by the Spirit of God to do that.

But then, literally minutes later, he's up on the platform apologizing for what the

Spirit of God compelled him to do. Dear friends, there is no world in which you can make that make sense.

That is completely and totally illogical. It is impossible to reconcile those things.

The Spirit of God did not compel him to call out the Jezebel spirit, which does not even exist, by the way.

There is no such thing as a Jezebel spirit. But it's impossible, again, even if you're the most wild -eyed charismatic, it is impossible to reconcile those two things, him claiming the

Spirit of God compelled him to do it, and then minutes later apologizing for what the

Spirit of God supposedly told him to do. You cannot reconcile that. And for all of those who left all of these angry comments on the first video

I did, I am not defending anything about this men's conference.

You know, I thought that would have been abundantly clear in my first video when

I, along with Gabe Hughes and Travis Allen, when we called this, when we called

James River Church a false church, when we called it a goat farm, because it is.

It does not meet the biblical qualifications of a church. We're not defending anything about the church.

I'm not defending anything about the conference. I'm simply saying that there was no

Jezebel spirit out there running around wreaking havoc on the men at that conference.

Jezebel spirit does not exist. This was a publicity stunt by Mark Driscoll.

He is known for that. He has a pattern of that. So I'm not, I am neither defending

Mark Driscoll nor James Lindle or James River Church. James River Church is not biblical.

They, John and his wife are listed as pastors. They have female pastors at the church.

So if you have a female pastor, you do not have a pastor, nor do you have a church. They are wild -eyed, charismatic, word of faith,

NAR, James River Church platform, some of the most obvious and egregious false teachers out there,

John Gray, Randy Clark, Bill Johnson. I mean, these guys are as bad and as heretical and unqualified as they get.

So I'm not defending anything about any of this mess. And I will say the same thing to Mark Driscoll and John Lindle that I have said to other false teachers,

Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and Bill Johnson and many, many, many of my other videos, Joel Osteen, all of them, even quote unquote

Christian celebrities like Kanye West, who is not a Christian. I don't hate you. I don't hate you at all.

I don't, Mark Driscoll, if you happen to be watching this, I don't hate you. John Lindle, I don't hate you.

I don't hate, I don't hate anyone. I do hate false teaching.

I do hate deception, but I love y 'all enough to tell you the truth.

And Alex Megala, I don't hate you. Actually, I feel sorry for you that you are at this men's conference led by supposedly evangelical

Christians which claim to preach the gospel. And yet I'm pretty confident you never heard the gospel.

No one even looked into your testimony to see that you're not a Christian.

And Alex, I have no animosity towards you. But please understand that just because you were baptized or went through some kind of ceremony as a baby, that does not mean you are a

Christian at all. That is not the definition of a Christian. Here's what the true gospel is,

Alex. And to anyone watching, here's the gospel. You are a sinner.

All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We have all broken God's laws, the 10 commandments.

Thou shalt not lie. Have you ever told a lie? Of course you have, we all have.

Thou shalt not steal. If you have ever taken anything that does not belong to you, you're a thief.

Thou shalt not commit adultery. Jesus says, he raises the bar on this. He says, if you look at a woman with lust, you've committed adultery already in your heart.

So if you've ever looked at another woman or anyone with lust, and women, if you're watching, whether you've looked at other women or men or whoever, if you've ever looked at another person with lust, then you've committed adultery.

You are an adulterer at heart. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

And taking God's name in vain is far more than just saying OMG or some derivative of that.

We take God's name in vain in word. We take his name in vain in deed.

We take his name in vain in thought. We sin against God in actions, in our deeds, in our words, in our thoughts.

And just like when you break laws on earth, there's a penalty to be paid, how much more so when we break the laws of God.

But because we have sinned against God, who is eternal and infinite, the punishment of that sin is also eternal and infinite.

And if we die in our sin, we will very rightly, very justly go to a very real place that the

Bible calls hell. The worm will not die. The fire will not be quenched.

There'll be wailing, weeping, gnashing of teeth. And the full undiluted fury of God's wrath will be poured out for all of eternity and it will never ever end.

That is what your sins have earned you. And there is no amount of good works that you can do to overcome the debt of sin, that the debt that your sin is owed to God.

There's nothing that you can do to save yourself. You can't do enough good things. You can't help enough little old ladies across the street.

You can't work at the soup kitchen enough to overcome the enormity of the debt that your sin, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of sins have incurred against a

God who is infinite, eternal, thrice holy. Our works are as filthy racks before God.

God made a way for you to escape His wrath. God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to this earth.

And Jesus lived a perfect life, the Son of God and the Son of Man.

He was one person with two distinct natures, truly God, truly man.

And as the God -man, Jesus lived a perfect life. He never broke any of God's laws.

And then Jesus willingly laid down His life on the cross. His life was not taken, He gave it.

And on the cross, this perfect person offered His perfect life as a perfect sacrifice to perfectly satisfy the perfect wrath of God.

Died on the cross, three days later, bodily raised from the dead, proving Himself to be who

He said He was, God in human flesh. And if you will repent of sin, the Bible speaks of repentance.

That means turning away from sin. It doesn't mean that we will be perfect, sinless perfection, but it does mean that our hearts are changed.

We have new desires, new affections. We begin to love what God loves and hate what

God hates. And one of the things, the thing that we hate the most is sin. So turn away from sin and place your trust in Christ.

Trust in Him, in what He accomplished on the cross, who He is, His person,

His once for all sacrifice on Calvary Street, where Jesus paid the penalty of the sins of His people.

And if you will trust in Him and turn from sin, He will grant you a new heart.

He will take out your heart of stone, put in a heart of flesh. And Alex, you'll have a new heart with new desires, new affections.

And you will love what God loves and hate what God hates. You'll have a desire to grow in the grace and knowledge of the

Lord Jesus Christ. You'll have a desire to pursue holiness. And holiness is not what has been on display at this

Stronger Men's Conference, anything but. But you'll have a desire for holiness and you'll pursue that.

You'll want to know Christ, want to know Him. It's being a

Christian is not just being baptized as a baby or baptized as an adult.

Has God granted you a new heart? And if you will come to Him, Alex, empty -handed, seeking

Christ, seeking a Savior, not only from hell, but seeking a

Savior from your sin, then He will save you. He will save you.

And when your life is over, you need not fear hell. You need not fear the wrath of God.

When this brief vapor of a life is over, you will have all of eternity to live with Christ.

And He is our reward. He is our reward. Being a biblical man is not about all this bravado stuff.

Being a godly man is about loving Christ, loving our wives as Christ loved the church, serving her, serving our families, ultimately pursuing

Him. If we pursue Christ, we will be godly husbands to our wives and godly fathers to our children and families.

And Alex, I must say that I am sorry that you were surrounded by so -called

Christians who did not love you enough to investigate your testimony, quite possibly didn't even know enough of the

Bible to even do that, but did not give you the true gospel. So that's unfortunate, but this is not what

Christianity looks like, Alex. The stuff that goes on at that men's conference, that's not true

Christianity. These are false teachers and false churches. So if the

Lord does soften your heart and you do come to Christ and trust Him as Savior and Lord, then please do reach out to me or reach out to someone at Grace Community Church or even the

G3 Ministries. But you can contact me through my website. I'll be glad to send you a list of some theological resources that I recommend to people that will help you and will help you to grow in your relationship with the

Lord Jesus Christ. And reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you find a good doctrinally sound church somewhere near you.

I'm sure there's gotta be at least a few of them in Moldova. And I will do my best to help you find a good church and find you a good church here in the

United States when you come to visit here in the States. There are good churches around, but Mosaic Church is not one of them.

You need a doctrinally sound church that is committed to expositional preaching, that is led by a plurality of elders, men who meet the biblical qualifications to be an elder, a church that practices the

Lord's Supper, believers' baptism, church that does church discipline in the correct way, not the way that James River Church just did.

By the way, that was not appropriate, not the biblical model, but the correct way.

So reach out to me. I'll be glad to help you any way that I can. All right, dear ones,

I guess I've said about everything I need to say or want to say, certainly about this brouhaha.

Anybody that would think I was in any way defending any aspect of the Stronger Men's Conference, any aspect of it,

I don't know. That's just beyond me. That is incomprehensible to me. Apparently don't know me very well, know my theology very well, or know my philosophy of ministry very well.

My idea of a men's conference would be something like the Shepherd's Conference, where you have a whole bunch of men, four, five, maybe 6 ,000 men gathered together.

And you know what? No motorcycles, no tanks, no boxing matches, no weightlifting, sword swallowing, or any of that stuff, because that's not what the men are there for.

That's not what they're hungry for. They're hungry for the Word of God, and they hear the Word of God preached, and they have fellowship with one another, fellowship around the

Word, and they encourage one another. That's my idea of a men's conference, and nothing worldly about it, centered around the

Word of God with God -glorifying music. And speaking of which,

I'll just end on that note. Watch this clip. This is from this past Shepherd's Conference in March of this year, 2024.

And this was the final song of the Shepherd's Conference.

All of the men came in, even those who couldn't fit in because of the space limits, they came in.

There was a bunch of men outside who had to watch on screens outside, but we all came in. We all squeezed together inside the auditorium there at Grace Community Church to sing.

And Grace Community Church had their choir up there, men and women in the choir, but they just brought them in for this final worship service.

But everyone in the congregation, all men, I don't even know, like 4 ,000 or so men, all singing this hymn together, and I was there.

And it was absolutely beautiful. This is my idea of a men's conference.

♪ Do you feel the world is breaking apart?

♪ ♪ Broken? You ♪ ♪ Do you feel the shadows deepened?

You ♪ ♪ Do you know that all the dark will stop the light ♪ ♪

From getting through? You ♪ ♪

Do you wish that you could see it all made new? You ♪ ♪

Is all creation groaning? You ♪ ♪

Is a new creation coming? You ♪ ♪

Is the glory of the Lord to be the light within our midst?

You ♪ ♪ Is it good that we remind ourselves of this?

You ♪ ♪ Is ♪ ♪

Is anyone worthy? Is anyone whole?

♪ ♪ Is anyone able to break the seal and open the scroll?

♪ ♪ The Lion of Judah who conquered the grave?

♪ ♪ And the lamb who died to ransom the slain ♪

Is he worthy ♪ Is he worthy ♪

Of all blessing and honor and glory ♪

Is he worthy ♪ Of this ♪

Yes ♪ He does ♪

Does the Father truly love us ♪ He does ♪

Does the Spirit move among us ♪ He does ♪

And does Jesus our Messiah ♪ Hold forever those he loves ♪

He does ♪ Does our God intend to dwell again with us ♪

He does ♪

Is anyone worthy ♪ Is anyone whole ♪

Is anyone able to break the seal ♪ And open the scroll ♪

The Lion of Judah ♪ Who conquered the grave ♪

He is David's fruit ♪ And the lamb who died to ransom the slain ♪

From every people and tribe ♪ Every nation and tongue ♪

He has made us a kingdom and grace to God ♪ To reign with the

Son ♪ Is he worthy ♪

Is he worthy ♪ Of all mercy and honor and glory ♪

Is he worthy ♪ Is he worthy ♪

Is he worthy ♪ Of this ♪

He is ♪

Is he worthy ♪

Is he worthy ♪ He is ♪

He is Until our next time together, may the grace of our

Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit be with you all.