Rise and Fall of Mars Hill | Theocast

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocasts, we are going to be reviewing the rise and fall of Mars Hill.

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This is not necessarily a podcast about criticizing Mark or his ministry, but it's more about looking at history and theology and examining the motives of the church and the mission of the church.

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We try to give you some helpful ways to understand how it is we get here, not only with this particular church, but with a lot of churches that have seemed to be fallen and ministers who have been falling recently in history.

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We hope you enjoy the conversation. If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

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You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging worried pilgrims to rest in Christ.

01:03

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are three pastors.

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We have Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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And just below me, so below Nashville is where I'm at. And below me in Spring Hill is our guest today.

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First time on the podcast, not new to Theocast, but new on this podcast is Patrick Crandall.

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He is the pastor of Covenant Grace Church or Covenant Grace Columbia, as it's correctly known in Columbia, Tennessee.

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Patrick, we were able to send him down there with about 60 people back in the first week of June, and you are three months officially into church planting.

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And so, Patrick, it's good to have you here, brother. Tell us a little bit about you, the church, and well, but let me continue.

01:56

Actually, there's a little bit more about Patrick, and then we'll ask him some questions. But first of all, just so you guys know,

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Patrick, he is a graduate from Westminster. You graduated in 2014, and was already working at a church, the

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Fields Church down in what's technically, what city was that in? Carlsbad, California. Carlsbad, California.

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Was there eight years on staff? Oh, 10. 10. 10 years as an associate there when the church was below 100 and part of the

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Acts 29 network, and has moved out here last September, joined working with me, and we started men's and women's

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Bible studies. And in June, we didn't think it was going to happen in June with the pandemic.

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But in June, the Lord blessed us, and you are now meeting in Columbia in a

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Christian school and up over 100 people now. So, anyways, that's Patrick. And well,

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Patrick, tell us, brother, one of the things we're doing now is talking about what we're preaching.

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So, what are you feeding your sheep right now? Yeah. Thanks, guys. Thanks for letting me join the conversation.

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John and I get to have conversations every week. He has to deal with me. But it's great to be able to do this.

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I've been blessed by Theocast over the years and glad to be part of the conversations here.

03:17

Thanks, bro. Yeah. So, we've just hit our three -month mark since we started services out from Grace, and we've been working our way through Ephesians.

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I couldn't really think of a much better book to start a church point with, with that rich theology of the gospel for the first half, and then the practical realities of how it plays out, starting in chapter four, which is what we just got to.

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So last week, we did the first part of chapter four, talking about the priority of the unity of the body, which is really good, and kind of pushing back the idea that Christian maturity is about strength and independence.

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It's actually about humility and love and gentleness and pursuing that unity, which is really good.

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And this week, we move into the diversity of the church, right, the gifts that God gives for the building up of the body.

04:05

Ephesians 4 makes yet another appearance on VODcast. I think we might be at a hundred episodes.

04:11

Speaking of, this is episode 101. This is episode 101. Last week was 101.

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We really dropped the ball on celebrating our 100th episode. Last week, we realized that after we recorded, we were like, well,

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I mean, there that went, it came and went. We didn't really say anything about it, but here we go. The other thing is,

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I forgot to mention that Patrick is actually in studio with me. So this is my first ever in -studio, in -person recording.

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Jon, do you want to say anything about just Patrick and his role and the fact that people may see him on the show from time to time? Yeah. So two things.

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While we have him on here today, Patrick is obviously been a pastor for over 10 years, now church planting, which is always fun to have church planters on the

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Theocast podcast. But also he is going to be a regular contributor here going forward, which means we'll get to see him every so often covering certain topics.

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We're going to have him back on. We're going to talk about evangelism, every church planter's favorite thing to do. And maybe how we have misinterpreted what that means in the

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New Testament and how maybe sometimes the fear that we have is not scripture -based.

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So that'll be in a few weeks, specifically why we brought Patrick on as this episode and the first one. We'll let Justin, you can introduce the subject.

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But Patrick actually was a part of the Acts 29 network that Mark Driscoll started back when it was in just the early stages.

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I think you were in the first 20 churches, that's correct? Yeah, really first 20, 30. So Patrick's kind of been up close and personal, kind of watching the growth of the ministry and the fields church that he's at, it's an excellent church.

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Pat, Justin and I both have been there. We had our first Theocast live event there about two years ago, which is where we met

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Patrick and started our conversation. And not long after that, I got a phone call from him saying, hey, so what do you think about doing a church plant?

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To which I said, sure, figure out how to get the money and we'll do it. And somehow I figured out how to get the money.

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So yeah, apparently he's a gangster in LA or something like that. So no, just kidding. Something like that.

06:23

Hey, let's jump into this. This is an important topic. So Justin, please explain why we would want to do something.

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It's pretty different for us. This is not an unusual podcast. So talk to us. We occasionally do things like this, but it's quite rare to your point.

06:38

So the title of the episode, I'm sure has been a dead giveaway for people. We are not trying to just do something that's in the realm of clickbait by talking about the rise and fall of Mars Hill today.

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The podcast put out by Christianity Today has been listened to by a lot of people. That's probably an understatement.

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And I know even in my own local church, there are a number of individuals who were very impacted by Mark Driscoll, by Mars Hill Church, even by Acts 29 and that whole movement in its early years.

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People have been affected by the fall of Mark Driscoll over the last half dozen, seven years or so.

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We thought it could be good for us, given that everybody is currently listening to this content.

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People who are very familiar with Mars Hill are listening to it. People like myself who were not familiar with Mars Hill and really had never listened to Driscoll preach.

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I'm probably one of the anomalies who encountered Calvinism in the 2000s and wasn't affected by Driscoll very much.

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But it doesn't matter. Everybody's listening to this podcast, and it's a good listen. It's well done.

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The content is engaging, it's troubling, it's heartbreaking.

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It's all of those things, and people are having strong reactions to it. The three of us are not an exception to that.

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We're listening to it, and we have a lot of thoughts about it as pastors, as church planters. What we thought we would do today, we don't want to oversell what we're doing.

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You guys, this is not a planned episode. We haven't mapped this thing out at all. We've talked about a few of our main thoughts with each other before we hit record this morning, but you're being invited in on a conversation amongst the three of us as we are reacting to and interacting with the content that we've listened to that is the rise and fall of Mars Hill, the podcast.

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I'm going to kick us off just very quickly with an observation about history and circumstance that's not all that important in terms of some of the things that we want to get to.

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So I'm just going to acknowledge this and then move forward from here and get into more theological takeaways.

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I think one thing that did strike me, guys, as I listened to the podcast, particularly episode two,

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I think outlines this really well. The pump had been primed for a movement like Mars Hill Church and for a man like Mark Driscoll to become what he and it became.

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You had the rise of the megachurch movement in the latter part of the 20th century that I think the podcast does a good job of outlining.

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You had a lot of people in the 90s who, that's our generation, guys.

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We came of age in the 90s, disenchanted with cultural Christianity, disenchanted with moralism and all this kind of stuff that we had grown up with in the church, and we were all looking for something more substantial.

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Then comes along Mark Driscoll, who is bright, he's smart, he's insightful, he's a big personality, he's an engaging speaker, he says the quiet part out loud, he's antagonistic against the things that many of us had wrestled with and kind of hated ourselves, and then man, he really taps into something.

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It's not a mystery, historically, circumstantially, as to why Mars Hill exploded like it did and why he became such a larger -than -life persona and personality in the evangelical church.

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That definitely happened, and there's a lot of fallout from that, and there's a lot of other stuff that flows out of that that we're going to get to now.

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I just thought I'd kick us off with that observation. It's not surprising. It makes a ton of sense when you think about it historically and logically, but now let's talk maybe more about some other significant thoughts that we have and ways that we want to interact with the content.

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I had someone describe it as kind of like a car crash. It's hard to look away, and I had several people tell me about it, and I really wasn't interested in listening to it at the moment.

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Then I was driving one day, and I was like, well, I don't have anything to listen to. I guess I'll see what this is about, and I couldn't stop listening.

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Well, it's well -produced. It is. Well done. Then it got to that moment where I was taken aback.

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There was so much I didn't know. I was obviously aware of Mark Driscoll, obviously aware of his ministry.

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Early on, when I was in seminary, there was this big debate between him and MacArthur, and I was there for all of that.

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I appreciated a lot of the emphasis that you could see more kind of regaining some traction as it related to godliness, standing up for women, standing up for the truth of the gospel.

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So, some of the material that I engaged in, it's not how I would probably say it.

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It's not how I would necessarily communicate it, but I appreciated that there was somebody who had a platform and was communicating things that needed to be communicated.

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I kind of just left it at that, and then as the years went on, I remember reading his marriage book, and that's when

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I went, oh, wow, this is not good. At that point,

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I had been really engaging in covenantal theology and reform theology, and so Mark really didn't fit that brand.

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He was definitely a part of the neo -Calvinist movement, which

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I wasn't really intrigued by. I wasn't really inspired by that movement. It seemed like their history of how far back they read was not far back enough, and so when

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I first engaged the marriage book, that's when I became pretty concerned and not really a big fan of his anymore.

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Anybody who would ask me about his ministry, I would say, yeah, I'm a little concerned about how he decides to communicate things that seem to be very, very unbiblical, but that's the initial reaction.

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When I started listening to the podcast, I had no idea how bad it really was.

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I know there's a lot of people that have been hurt, and this is pretty shocking for a lot of people.

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Anyways, that's my first initial thoughts. Patrick loved to hear from you as well. Yeah, so my journey with things,

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I grew up fairly Calvinistic, and I had this long process of figuring out how exactly to put those pieces together, but it really come all the way together until I went to Westminster and got some of the categories that they gave me, like confessionalism and ordinary means of grace and things started to come together.

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Yeah, but until then, it was kind of jumping from guy to guy within the

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Calvinistic camp, trying to make sense of these different things and finding different things that resonated and kind of glomming onto that for a while until something didn't work and then finding the next guy.

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And so Driscoll was a big part of that for me in my college years and right after that, loved all the stuff that everybody else loved.

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I loved that he was willing to say things that other people wouldn't say. It pushed back against kind of traditional legalism, and that called, you know, you can't drink, you can't dance, those kinds of things.

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It had an edge to it. It was appealing. Right. Yeah. And it also wasn't the soft and fluffy

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Eva stuff too. It seemed like a third way and a different way. For somebody who didn't have all those reformed confessional categories, it looked like, hey, this might be the thing

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I've been looking for and trying to put my finger on. It really wasn't until I got to Westminster and started to get some of those categories where it all started to click and some of the stuff

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I saw coming out of Marceau and Driscoll, it started to rub the wrong way. Like, oh, this seems a couple of degrees off.

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Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to give just a couple of my you guys have sort of done this.

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I haven't yet. I want to talk just viscerally for a second and then I want to maybe move into my first big theological, pastoral concern in listening to this.

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So I found that in listening to this content, I often was listening to it when I was riding my bike or working out or something.

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And I had so many audible, out loud moments listening to this where something would be said.

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I mean, a clip of Driscoll speaking or something, and I had an audible reaction with my earbuds in my ears.

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Like if somebody had walked by me or something, they'd be like, what is that guy listening to? So it hit hard.

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And I'll just go ahead and say this. I think some of my most visceral responses were in the episode to two things, the episode about women.

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John, you mentioned this. I think there's a great irony in this, this

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Driscoll thing where he early on was saying things that I think at least on the surface appear to be an attempt to protect women from weak men and from men that would harm them.

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But then the heartbreaking sort of ironic turn in this is that it seems to me that so much of what was created by Mark and what he was advocating and what ended up happening at Mars Hill ended up being a culture that was very abusive toward women and actually ended up demeaning them unintentionally in very significant ways.

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I was just greatly perplexed by so many things that I heard in particular in that episode.

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We're going to get to this maybe later. The binding of the conscience in the bedroom, like what you need to be doing there, was just hard to listen to.

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So that was one just visceral reaction for me. The other was just shocking to me how he spoke so aggressively, antagonistically, like machismo style about how, look, you either get on the bus, you sit down, shut up and play nice, or we'll throw you off and run you over.

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It was just like, I rewinded, did he really say that? Oh my gosh, bro.

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So those were just some visceral reactions I had. May God be gracious to us and protect us and keep us from error.

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The first big theological reaction, though, guys, if I can kick us off with this, because I assume we may talk about this for a minute, is we all the time are advocating confessional theology.

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By that, we mean a whole host of things, but one of the things that means is that we are in a self -conscious way trying to be unoriginal and are aiming to simply tap into the faith once for all delivered to the saints as outlined by saints through history in historic confessions of faith.

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There's a lot more to being confessional than that, but it is never less than that. So I think as I'm listening to this,

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I am struck by what I would call the contrast between a confessional stream of thought and then what

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I would call the big evangelicalism, the big Eva kind of ethos and philosophy, where we tend, even if we don't mean to do this on purpose, we tend to, in the evangelical church, build a theology and a movement in a church on the personality and the convictions of one man.

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Right now we're talking about Mark Driscoll, but literally you could plug your guy, like insert your dude, whether it's

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Driscoll or whether it's Piper or whether it's James MacDonald, pick the guy,

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Perry Noble, any of them. It's not any particular issue or point of doctrine per se that troubles me.

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It's the whole ethos of the thing, where it really is a cult of personality, and this one leader effectively becomes our confession.

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It's like what he says goes, as though he is a prophet, like literally is a conduit straight from God, and it's almost like there is just unchecked, unquestioned, thus saith the

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Lord authority in this leadership person, this person of leadership and influence.

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It's frightening. That was just an initial thought. I think confessionalism and a confessional way of thinking about theology that's inherently corporate with people who are alive and with people who are long dead is one buffer and insulator from this really dangerous place.

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That's right. When episode two, I thought probably should have been what the entire podcast should have been about.

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I loved episode two. We'll let Christianity Today know that. I'm just kidding.

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Well, they did reach out and asked if we wanted to advertise on their podcast.

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Maybe we should have done that. I don't know. Maybe. We declined. The episode,

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I thought, was very helpful because it really exposed the problem. I didn't know it was about Mark, but Mark's not the issue.

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The issue is because J .D. Koch and their podcast, it's about Stanfirm, it's an

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Anglican, I call it the Anglican version of Theocast. He said a statement in there that the church has really failed to catechize its people.

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It's true. Because we don't understand historical theology, we don't understand the debates that have come before.

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The easiest way to say that is creeds and confessions are the clarity of heresy. This is what's heretical.

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How do we know that? Because of the debates the church has been in before. Almost all of the episode two, you will see every single one of those men or those leaders, they aren't basing their teaching off of anything historical other than what their conclusion is to be.

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Almost all of them are dispensational. When you have guys who are coming at it from,

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I just believe what the Bible says, but really it's whatever I interpret the Bible to be, your confession at that moment goes as far back as the guy standing in the pulpit.

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In other words, you can't say that you can hold the preacher accountable to what he says because whatever he says goes.

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When some people say, I don't believe in confessions, I just believe in the Bible, yet they're holding a Bible with a man's name on it with his commentary in it, which is a confession.

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Justin Perdue You're waving your study Bible in my face. It's like, where do you think those notes came from? Jon Moffitt That's right. The danger of when the guy in the pulpit, you can call him the senior pastor, they have all kinds of names now, visionary pastor, visionary caster, whatever you want to call him.

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Some of these guys are good teachers, they're faithful teachers, but they aren't.

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Justin Perdue They're usually very good leaders. They're usually very engaging personalities. Jon Moffitt I remember listening to James McDonald over 20 years ago when he was teaching in the radio, and I was benefited greatly by a lot of his teaching because it was verse by verse, it was helpful.

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But when you have guys who there's no structure, there's nothing there that they can be held accountable to for their own sake and their own sanity.

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You do have the craziness that things like James McDonald, and man, I even listened to a podcast that was talking about the stuff that was happening at Liberty University and all of that nonsense that goes on over there.

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Christianity, it seems to repeat itself over and over again when it doesn't pay attention to history. One of the things

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I do with my children as I sit down weekly and we work through the to hear, don't believe this because dad told you to believe this.

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You need to understand that if you believe in Christ and you've been baptized into his church, here's your history.

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This is how we got here, and these documents have been handed to us to make sure that we don't fall into the same traps.

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Mark Driscoll and James McDonald aren't the first leaders to lead people down a path that is to destruction, and technically they're not heretical teachers.

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They weren't teaching another gospel, but they definitely got off track on what was the priority of the local church.

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If I want to say anything about the Rise and Fall of Marcel, the whole podcast, and we'll get into this, but when you lose the focus and mission of the church, which

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I think the confessions help you do that, man, that church can go into any gutter that's on either side of the road.

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I think we saw that with both James and lots of churches, unfortunately.

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If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith vs. Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest.

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And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

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Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at Theocast .org

24:09

slash Primer. Yeah, I echo everything you guys said, and I think what happens in most evangelical churches is you have a doctrinal statement, right?

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But it's like a one -page doc. It's basically a couple sentences tacked onto the Apostle's Creed. Or it's something the lead pastor put together.

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Right. Yeah. So it has almost no history, and it's incredibly minimalistic. But the bottom line is, no church is doctrinally minimalistic.

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You have more beliefs and more things that are set than that. And if they're coming from a confession or something like that, those blanks are being filled in by the guy who's teaching, right?

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And with whatever he wants, because there's nothing kind of constraining him and kind of fencing him in to a box.

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And I mean that in the best way. It's one of the things I love about being confessional. I talk to my new church is how the confession protects them, right?

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Because this is what we have agreed on, this robust view of doctrine and theology that they can hold me to without being theologians, without having gone to seminary.

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I can't pull that trump card and just say, well, you guys just don't know as much as we do. They can say, hey, this is what we affirm as a church, and you've gone outside those bounds.

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So it helpfully boxes me in and constrains me to a definition of the faith that has come down through time, that has answered heresies, that has been tested by many people, many churches versus what

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I got into a room with a couple of guys and threw together. Yeah. A couple of thoughts on what you guys are saying.

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One, I agree, John, with what you were talking about, how having a confession of faith or being confessional actually protects the mission of the church and keeps it pure.

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And I mean the mission of the church at its most basic level, as we agree on all the time, is the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments for the salvation of God's people.

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And so ultimately, it's Paul in 1 Corinthians 2, like, I desire to know nothing among you except Christ and Him crucified.

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I mean, that is the mission at the most basic level of the local churches. This is about Christ. This is about Him and the people who need

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Him. And then we can, with the best of intentions, right, we can turn and just slightly redirect the trajectory of that mission and turn it into this kind of movement where we at such and such a church or we under this guy's influential leadership, we have really tapped into the secret.

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Like, we've got the special sauce that nobody else has, and we've got the corner on the market as far as how to do church, and we're going over here, and we're going to win the city.

27:01

You know, like that becomes... It's a little bit Gnostic in that way. Yeah, it becomes the mission. Like, as I was listening to the podcast over and over again, it becomes this very kind of wartime, and I understand that the scriptures use this imagery, right, but it's very much this, like, wartime paradigm of we are going into battle perpetually, it seems, to win the city.

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And the way that we're going to do that, it's like, yeah, we're going to preach Christ. That's almost assumed. Like, we want people to come to Jesus.

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That's stated sometimes, assumed at others, but we're going to do that by, you know, getting people married and by people having a bunch of babies and by people buying houses, and we're going to, you know, we're going to get jobs in the city, and we're going to take over the city for Jesus, becomes the mission, rather than,

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I think, something... You want to sort of back that up and always keep the heralding of Christ and the loving of one another in the forefront of your mind as a leader in the church.

27:55

And I mean, while we're talking about that mission thing, another reaction

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I had that's very much related to this as I was listening is, I think that there was a decent amount of over -spiritualization going on as I listened to Mark speak, as I listened to him preach and teach, where literally, what

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I mean by that is, we are turning everything into a spiritual matter. We are taking things that are not inherently spiritual or even inherently moral and turning them into spiritual and moral issues.

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And you could hear this a lot in the way that he would frame everything in terms of, yeah, it's war.

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Like, we're in the midst of war, guys. Everything is about your fidelity to Christ, including, like I alluded to earlier, like what you're doing in the bedroom and whether or not women should work outside the home or fill in the blank.

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Like, it's all about the mission, and we've got to be on mission. And I mean, he even uses this language about firing pastors and whatever.

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It's like, they got off mission, so we threw them off the bus. And so everything becomes about the mission, like literally everything.

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And I'm like, man, there's no room whatsoever for just ordinary faithfulness, it doesn't seem.

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Like, this is just another way to repackage that kind of radical stuff that apparently we're all called to in Christ and simply to trust

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Jesus, love the brethren, love my family, be an honorable employee where I work.

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Apparently I'm still not. I might do all that and not be on mission, you know? Yeah. And I think those things are really tied together in this sense.

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I was in the military before I went into ministry. And if there was one thing I took away from my military training, it was pure training in pragmatism.

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Because when you are in the military, your job is to win. And there is no box.

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You do whatever it takes to win. And that is the goal. It is the goal. There is nothing else.

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You sacrifice everything to that goal, right? And that's where some of that over -spiritualization that happened with Mark happened.

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And everything now has to serve the mission. So you will make things imperatives.

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You'll bind people's consciences to things that the Lord doesn't because it serves that mission. Because it serves the mission.

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And so when everything is about the mission, it really opens the door to a pragmatism where we end up with a, the ends justify the means church.

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And if you read the New Testament, we have the exact opposite. The ends are what

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God does through the Holy Spirit. And he decides what he wants to do. What we're told about over and over again is what we are to be doing and how we are to be doing it.

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He produces the increase, whatever he wants to. But there's a whole lot more about the manner in which we do things and the stuff we're supposed to be doing along the way versus what we are supposed to produce and show at the end.

30:54

You hear multiple times in the podcast about the results, right? And the results really justified the means, no matter what was going on and no matter how out of control

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Mark may have been, it's like, look at, look at what we're doing. And you could hear, look at the fruit, that's right.

31:09

You could hear the staff and the other pastors when they're being interviewed saying it was really hard for us. I mean, it brought tears these days where we saw all these baptisms and see all these people coming to Christ.

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And you even hear these stories about people who wanted nothing to do with church and left the church and now back in the church and love the church.

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And those, those stories are hard because I think those people are genuine believers.

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And what can be so complicated about Christianity is that people say, well, you, you're just being critical because, you know, your church is small and their church is big and you know, what threw me for a loop and I remember calling

31:45

Justin and we talked about this. I said, man, when, when, when someone asked Mark, who, who, like who's, who's mentoring you?

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Who's kind of like watching you? They mentioned Piper and his response was, well, and I'm assuming this is a legit conversation.

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And his response was, well, you know, Piper's church is smaller than me. How can he mentor me? And it became not about the nature and the character of a man and as a shepherd and as a guy who needs to be watched over unless he to stumble, it became about the game of a size and how big it became.

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And that is, it's so dangerous. We all want to see multiple people rest in Christ, but ultimately that is

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God's responsibility. We all want to see fruit. We all want to see fruit. Sure. That's right.

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And it's, you know, we can be, we can become discouraged about, oh, well, you know, I only had 30 people in my church or 300 or whatever the number of it can be.

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But this is, this is the, I think the result of the modern evangelical church that a successful pastor,

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I think there's, you know, Patrick, you can speak into this, but in Acts 29, they kind of talk about like, if you're not at this size by this year, your church is a failure.

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I'm like, I'm sorry, but there's nothing in the New Testament that tells me where a successful church needs to be at, at a successful timeframe and a successful moment.

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And when I see, when I see the command of a pastor, he has to feed his sheep, he has to tend his sheep, and he has to love and care for them.

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And God gives the increase. I mean, Paul literally says some plant and some water, and God brings the increase.

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So if a pastor is faithfully shepherding his flock by feeding them and tending them, then that he is a successful man.

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It's not his responsibility to determine what the size of a church is going to be. He cares for people, he evangelizes, and he lets

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God bring the increase. But the problem is, in a results -driven world, that just doesn't work.

33:37

I hate when I'm around other pastors, when you get that question of like, well, how big is your church? It's like, why does that matter to you?

33:45

What's the significance of that? Who cares? Who cares how many churches you've planted?

33:51

That's an age -old dilemma, though, John, because there's a quote from John Brown.

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This is back several hundred years ago, Puritan era, where he writes to a younger minister and says,

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I know that you will be tempted to be ashamed at the size of your congregation because it's so small, but please know that when you stand before it on the last day, you will know that you've had enough in terms of enough people to care for.

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So don't be wigging out about the size of your church and the size of your assembly. We all are prone to do that.

34:23

My goodness. We're three pastors, three church planters here, and it is so easy for your identity to be wrapped up in how many people show up on Sunday.

34:34

That just speaks to the frailty that's in all of us. That's not to our credit. That's to our shame that we think in those ways.

34:43

I thought one thing, too, guys, as I'm listening to you talk and as I reflect back on my experience listening to the podcast,

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I was struck over and over again by, like you were talking about, John, the baptisms and all the people coming to faith and people who hated the church are now in the church and love the church.

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It's like, look, it's clear that the Lord did some really great stuff through this. I don't think that can be debated because the tendency amongst evangelicals, too, is when there's a failure and when this kind of expose piece comes out, it's like, well, we need to literally burn the whole thing down and act like it never happened.

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We need to so distance ourselves from Driscoll and Mars Hill that anything that ever took place there couldn't have been from God. You can't do that in a fallen world because, if anything, the

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Scriptures bear witness to the fact that he's always used broken vessels to advance his purposes, and that's true.

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It's been true for millennia. I think it's better for us to say, you know what? The Lord obviously was a part of this.

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He, in spite of the sin and failure here, did some phenomenal things, brought people to Christ, stoked a fire in people's hearts in terms of love for the church and love for their brothers and sisters.

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That's the Lord's doing. It ought to humble us all that he accomplishes this stuff through our sin and failure, not in spite of it or apart from it.

36:00

Part of the Reformed tradition, which all three of us here espouse and hold to and believe that it is biblical, is a plurality of leaders or, as we say, a plurality of elders.

36:09

I grew up in the Baptist world, Fundamentalist Baptist world, where the

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CEO, pastor, you don't question him and his word.

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I saw the impact that had on my own dad. He was a pastor. The pressure that put under him,

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I see how it can affect other churches. Even though Mark had elders, unfortunately, you can see the structure where those guys weren't keeping him accountable.

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In many ways, they couldn't because of the way in which the structure that was set up there. It is scary when one man has that much influence and that much power.

36:53

Justin Perdue And we're even changing the bylaws to give him more. Jon Moffitt Exactly. I don't want to make this just a bash of Mark Driscoll.

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I think it's a broader problem where we become more concerned about running the church like a business, where you have a business model and you have a

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CEO and mores. It's more about the decision -making process where pastors become businessmen instead of shepherds.

37:21

They're more about leading this movement. You can hear, going back to your point,

37:27

Justin, that everything is about the mission. Everything is about what are we trying to accomplish, which

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I agree. The church should be on mission, but the mission that was handed to them by God. It's not this transformation of city.

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You get lost. Justin Perdue It's to preach Christ. Jon Moffitt That's right. When you look at Ephesians 4,

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I know we mentioned it, but when Paul seems to give us the clearest mission of what the church is, it's like when we all function as we should, we are building each other up into the maturity of the person of Christ.

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Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon on the shattered church or shattered by the church. Because the church has lost one, its history, and two, its mission, it runs people over.

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Mark is just an example of hundreds of churches that just run people over. If you show up and you have problems and you are weak and feeble, and this church is moving somewhere and you are going to drag them down, they just don't have time for that.

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They don't have time for counseling. They don't have time to carry your burden. They don't have time to sit and weep with you. The thing that Paul says is, weep with those who weep.

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The church should literally, if someone is hurting, then we hurt with them. But in today's movement, you can't do that because it's more about growth and movement and power and more campuses and more, more, more, more, more.

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I'm looking at going, look at how many people you have left in the wake of your mission. How can that be the mission of the church?

38:56

Really quick, before I toss it to Patrick, I think it's clear that in the early years, a lot of that was happening based on my listening to the podcast.

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But then as it evolved and the thing got bigger, it became all about the growth of the platform. That's one of the more humbling, sobering things that we all need to be mindful of, for sure.

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As we're thinking about leading churches and loving people, that just struck me,

39:25

John, as you were talking about it. I agree with you. It seems like that was happening, but that was lost somewhat over the course of years.

39:34

Yeah, just a couple of thoughts to piggyback on what you guys have been saying. One of the things I've heard over the years is healthy things grow.

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That is true in part, but it depends on how you define growth. First of all, are we defining that growth by the way that scripture does versus our self -defined mission and the way that we've kind of changed the mission and purpose of the church?

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The other thing is unhealthy things grow too, right? The wheat and the tares grow up together.

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So to start using the appearance of fruit as justification for doing anything, essentially, it really is a manifestation of a theology of glory, that the advance of the church looks like this.

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It's this magisterial, glorious thing where we're kind of taking things over instead of a theology of the cross, where we are simply proclaiming

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Christ, caring for each other in a broken world where we're going to have trouble, where the things of the world will flourish at times, and our glory is to come, not here.

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And so I think that is how we define some of those things we talk about is so important in making sure we're constrained by scripture.

41:01

Justin Perdue Yeah, I think a couple final observations from me, and then you guys maybe make yours too.

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One, I was astonished to listen to, almost like to hear Driscoll speak with pride about the number of bodies that laid behind the

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Mars Hill bus. And he said, by God's grace, it'll be a mountain when we're done. And I'm like...

41:24

Justin Perdue I mean, just to interject on that, there's another podcast that interviews about his new church, and they literally have a bus parked in the parking lot for that visual purpose.

41:34

Justin Perdue Yeah, so I'm like, man, I understand to some extent that at times there will be people that are in the church that are actually not of us, and that's why church discipline exists and those kinds of things.

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We all agree with that. But the fact that you are wearing this like a badge of honor, that you're not excommunicating people for unrepentant, hard -hearted, obstinate sin.

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That's not what this is. That's not what he means. If you're not on the mission, if you're not buying into this particular vision and what we're doing, and you're not abiding by all of these various things that we do here, then we're going to throw you off and run you over, and it's going to be because we're doing

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God's work that we're doing that. In the name of God, we're going to throw you off and run you over, and this is obviously a good thing.

42:25

I mean, look at Paul. He had to get rid of people at points. It's like, homie, I don't think that's faithful exegesis.

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I don't think that's what the Lord is telling us to do. If we're going to strive to do anything as pastors, ought we not strive to keep people in the fold for goodness sakes, and preach

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Christ to them and love them in such a way that we would see them restored rather than taking pride in the fact that we threw them off. So that was the last thing.

42:49

It's very much related to some of the stuff we're talking about. John, you were mentioning counseling and weeping people and all this other stuff.

42:56

Ike was shocked at how much—and it all serves the mission, so it makes entire sense because we're all about this particular mission, this particular brand.

43:02

Here's how Mars Hill does church. There was so much gross binding of the conscience that goes so far beyond Scripture.

43:10

It was wild. I think example after example of what I would call very significant pastoral overreach, where it's really an abuse of the pastoral office and an abuse of the pastoral authority that the

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Lord has given us. We deal as pastors in the areas of the preaching of Christ and the administration of the sacraments, and then we deal in the areas of sin and repentance.

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Period. For us to then go and tell people, you're going to do this intense premarital thing.

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You want to get married? Okay, well, you're going to meet with a mentor couple and this and this and this may happen, and you're going to have to tell them everything about all of your failures sexually and your whole life.

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Then they're going to assess it, and they may very well tell you, you can't get married. That's one example.

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Here's how you need to conduct yourself as husband and wife. Here's what it is. Like women, there are certain roles that they need to occupy.

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If they're working outside the home, clearly you're in sin. The male's failed because he's not leading the right way. It's just over and over and over and over again.

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All these things that the Bible doesn't speak to definitively at all, yet we're telling people that they must do it this way.

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That is a way to abuse people and really throw a bunch of clutter on top of the gospel.

44:29

I think that occurred, sadly, from what I listened to anyway. Yeah, that was a huge thing that reformers pushed back on because that was what was going on.

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Because Rome was doing that. Rome. The view of the church's authority was it was magisterial authority like a king.

44:45

It was authoritative because they said it. And ecclesiastical courts were a thing.

44:51

Right. To your point. Inquisitions and that whole deal, right? Yeah. And then on the other side, you had the

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Anabaptists who are essentially spiritual anarchists. Nobody has any authority, right? It's just me in my woods with my

45:03

Bible, whatever I feel like it says. Yeah. The reformers pushed back on both, right?

45:09

There is authority within the church, but it is ministerial authority. The church has authority as it faithfully ministers the word of God.

45:16

And that authority stops where the word stops. We can't bind anybody's conscience beyond where the word of God does.

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And so I'll even do this when I'm counseling people. I make a very clear distinction when I'm telling them, hey, thus saith the

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Lord, you have to do this. This isn't an optional thing versus where I'm giving them wisdom.

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So I'm like, hey, this has been helpful for people. I've seen this, but I can't bind your conscience to do that because I don't have that authority.

45:45

We're not financial advisors. We're not psychologists. Bro, people that come to me seeking wisdom probably grow weary.

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They probably know that the thing I'm going to save for the first two to three minutes, I'm going to be super clear about what this is and where my authority does and does not lie in this situation.

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It's like, hey, if this is what you want for me to just talk to you as your brother in Christ and your friend about this particular thing, I'm happy to do that. There may very well be other people in this church that are way more able to speak to this than me, but I'm happy to talk to you about it, happy to process it with you.

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But I have no unique authority or wisdom to offer here. I'm sure people are like, okay, he's saying that again.

46:22

But I think to your point, Patrick and John, I know you do the same thing. We do need to help our people know where our authority lies and where it doesn't, because we are not just unilaterally making decisions for everyone in our congregations about every single thing.

46:39

God help us. Jon Moffitt Good friend of mine, Mike Ebendroth, on a podcast recently said, unfortunately, congregants look at their pastors as if they are competent in all things, and we are not competent in all things.

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We are called to be competent in few things, and that's to be able to properly administrate the

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Word and shepherd the flock. That's what we're supposed to be competent in if we're going to be put in that position. This is why

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James says not many of you should be teachers, because you're probably not competent to do it. So, it's hard when we do get advice for a lot of things, and even when it comes down to certain areas of counseling,

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I tell people, I'm not competent to handle that. That is outside the realm of a theological issue. That is a domestic issue.

47:23

Jon Moffitt That's a civil issue or whatever it is. My last shot here,

47:28

I know we're going over time, is for someone who's been rocked by this, my encouragement to you is

47:34

I too have experienced this. I have lost mentors. Unfortunately, I grew up at a pastor's home, and in the

47:42

Fundamentalist Baptist world, there's been a lot of guys in the news over the years. I've seen this happen, unfortunately, more often than not.

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The news just loves this. They love to see the fall, and being one that has experienced people that I love go through this, it is a good and helpful check to remind yourself of your motivation.

48:04

So, if you're a pastor and you're listening to this, my encouragement to you is these are healthy moments from the Lord for you to examine your own motivations and ask yourself, how am

48:13

I being held accountable? Can someone call me on the carpet? Who can confront me if I'm being arrogant and prideful and out of control?

48:20

I tell my congregants in all of our new members class, the reason why I have you read the confession and agree to it before you join our congregation is that you're going to hold me accountable to this confession, and I'm going to hold you accountable to it, and it protects the both of us.

48:34

This is a historical document that's been handed down by the churches and affirmed by thousands and hundreds of people, and I think we should pay attention to those kinds of things.

48:41

Now, listen, not every confessional church holds the priority of plurality of elders in a confession.

48:48

You can walk into a confessional church, and that church will absolutely fail you if they don't see the history and the importance of what is there, which,

48:55

Justin, means we need to do a church podcast soon, which we have scheduled on confessionalism, which maybe we'll bring

49:02

Patrick in for that one as well. Justin Perdue Yeah, maybe. One last shot for me, too. I'm sorry. I'm just—

49:08

Jon Moffitt No, you're done. You hit your quota. Justin Perdue I don't want to leave this regular episode without saying this. We ought not listen to a podcast like this just assuming that we have it all together and that we have the moral high ground and that we have the answer to every problem that ails us.

49:21

That is not a healthy posture. We ought to listen to it with humility. We ought to grieve when we hear of things like this.

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We should weep with those who have been hurt by this, and we should pray, frankly, for the grace of God that he would keep us from error and from wounding other people.

49:38

We don't want to come in with that condescending mindset of, well, if they would have just understood this, this, this, and this, then clearly this wouldn't have happened.

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We've got it all figured out, so this isn't going to happen here. Galatians 6 .1, the second part of that verse is that we ought to keep watch on ourselves lest we too fall.

49:56

Jon Moffitt To that point, Justin, I sent this to all of my leaders and elders in training and said, you guys need to listen to this because we need to make sure that we don't fall into the same traps.

50:08

As Paul says, these Old Testament failures were given as an example that you too may not fall in them.

50:15

I think it's helpful to see the failures of others and say, hey, I think we need to pay attention to that. The frailty of the flesh is real.

50:22

Justin Perdue That's right, and don't harden your heart. Justin Perdue Yeah, that's right. Justin Perdue And just remember just the tendencies of our flesh of wanting to look at the other people's failures to feel validated, vindicated, self -justified, and that is so prevalent in our culture, in the church, outside of the church.

50:39

This is what social media exists for, it seems like at times, is to look at everybody else's failures and fallings so that we can say, well, it's not me.

50:48

Jon Moffitt Well, we're going to move over to the Simper from Monte podcast. We're going to be talking over there about multiple other things, but how does the church respond to things like this?

50:56

Do we have responsibilities to go after something like a Mark Driscoll or a Janis McDonald? How, as shepherds, do we shepherd our own congregation?

51:05

What if you find yourself in a church where it is more of a dictatorship? How do you handle that as well?

51:11

These are what we call a little bit more intimate and what we call team conversations. Simper from Monte are those who have partnered with us to spread the message of confessional theology, reform theology, not only to strengthen our own hearts and our own communities, but to really build up the local church.

51:27

This is really what the design of this ministry is for. If you'd like to learn more about it, you can go to theocast .org and that's where we have our app, our podcast and local and online groups to meet for the sake of edification that we might build each other up and the church.

51:41

So if you'd like to participate in that, we'd love to have you there. Patrick, welcome. It's good to have you here. We look forward to having you back as well as Jimmy.

51:48

Jimmy should be back here in a few weeks as he gets his schedule up and going. These two are our new, what do we call it?