Interview with Mark Driscoll by Dr. Ed Stetzer
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This Blog has an accompanying audio podcast made available by and used by permission of National New Church Conference. The audio can be accessed on the National New Church Conference website. The National New Church Conference is a cross-denominational gathering designed to connect, inspire, equip and challenge church planting leaders. The conference will be held in Orlando, Florida April 23-26, 2007.
Mark Driscoll Background
Mark Driscoll is the Founding Pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA. Mark planted the church in 1996. He is currently 36 years old. He is the author of Confessions of a Reformission Rev, The Radical Reformission and Listening to the Beliefs of an Emerging Church. He is co-founder and current President of Acts 29 Network and the founder of Reformission.
Mars Hill Church just exceeded the 6,000 attendance mark in January 2007. Now the elders are architecting how to go to 10,000 attendees. Mars Hill is currently meeting in 3 locations with 7 services and is planning to go to 13 services in 4 locations in the fall of 2007.
Mark is one of the most influential pastors-particularly among young pastors. He has written three books and his podcasts are downloaded by the thousands each month (over one million every year). Yet Mark has continued to grow and change and be transformed.
Mark talked to his friend Ed Stetzer and he reflected on several areas of his life and ministry.
As a Husband and Father and Pastor
As I read 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 about the qualifications of an elder it provides the mandate for pastors to follow with respect to their character. It addresses what kind of Christian, husband and father a pastor is to be. I want to continue to reach out and grow a church and reach lost people with the gospel but I can't put my marriage and my children on the altar of growing a church. I have 5 young children ages 1-9 so my job is exceedingly difficult as a father of young children. These formative years are incredibly important for my children and I have to be actively involved. Every month I print out the previous month's calendar and with my wife and my assistant go over the things I should not have done and the things I should do.
As a Church Planter
I am still a church planter. Every fall I view my current membership as the core that is responsible to launch a new church as it were. After ten years I am still planting this church every year and it continues to look differently.
We used to open our home as an extension of the church. As the church grew this became impossible. We still practice hospitality but every day isn't an open house for anyone to drop by unannounced.
I have an office at the church and a study at home. So when I am studying, reading and writing, I can do it from my home office. My office at church is used for strategic meetings. I don't even have a desk there. I have chairs conducive for meetings. At my home office I answer e-mails, talk on the phone, think and write. This allows me to have meals with my family regularly and if I have a deadline, I can tuck the kids in bed and then go to my home office and complete any remaining tasks. Plus my kids can see me interacting with my Bible. I want them to see me studying and reading God's Word. My older kids are now using my library at home. My daughter is learning to use commentaries, dictionaries and concordances to do a book study. My son grabs my commentaries and takes them to his bunk bed to read and try to figure things out. There is a lot of benefit to a family to be a Dad being there present for the children as an example.
My Theology
I was raised a blue color Irish Catholic where my mom was saved in a Charismatic Catholic renewal of the 70's. My father did not know the Lord. At 17 years old, I met a pastor's daughter who first exposed me to evangelical Christianity. She gave me a Bible and I read it and was saved. The verse that led me to Jesus was Romans 1:6, "And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ." I then went to an Evangelical Free Church with a great pastor (Doug Busbee). It was from him that I learned about Jesus, prayer, family, Scripture, balanced theology and mission. At that time I began reading the Puritans and was already moderately reformed. I loved the writings of John Stott, Francis Schaeffer, Billy Graham, Dietrich Bohnhoeffer, John Calvin and Martin Luther.
When I moved back to Seattle I worked in a church for a year before starting Mars Hill. The thing that pushed me over into reformed theology was by preaching through Exodus, John and Romans as I saw the sovereignty of God in salvation. I have become more precise and resolute in my theology over the last ten years.
The Emerging Church
I started the church in the Fall of 1996 without any theological training and with no pastoral experience in one of the least churches cities in the United States. I received a call from a young pastor in Texas who invited me to come to a Leadership Network conference where other pastors were gathering. I was excited to meet other young pastors and learn from them because I had no idea what I was doing. They asked me to be a plenary speaker at a pastor's conference in Mount Herman, CA. I had never been to a pastor's conference and I was one of the main speakers. At that time our church was only running about 100 people so I am not sure why I was even invited, much less to be a main speaker. I preached on the transition from a modern to a postmodern world (The Flight from God) that opened up a whole new national platform for me to speak all over the country. I became a part of a speaking team that included some men I continue to love like Chris Seay, Doug Paggitt, Tony Jones and Brian McLaren. This movement grew even though we were diverse theologically. I bailed out when they started the Emergent Village because I didn't want to be a fly in their ointment due to our strong theological disagreements. I still have a foot in that world because I started in the early stream.
I recently contributed to Listening to the Beliefs of Emergent Churches which is a point-counterpoint treatise on the Trinity, atonement and Scripture. I have a foot in the emerging world, a foot in the reformed world, have a lot of friends of mega-churches and I tend to get shot at a lot from everyone because of my convoluted theology.
Mark the Cussing Pastor
This infamous phrase is like the high school photo in the yearbook that you hope no one sees. In 1997 as the church was just getting started, a man came up from Oregon having heard what we were doing and was considering moving to Seattle to be a part of Mars Hill Church. Donald Miller was just getting started and had not published a book yet. At that point our church was very small and visitors stuck out. I took Don out to dinner to try to entice him to come back to our church. We went to a pizza place afterward and talked about the church. He really wanted to stay in Portland if a church like Mars Hill existed there. A friend of mine Rick McKinley did start a church in Portland and Don became a member there. For the first few years his book, Blue Like Jazz didn't sell many copies. He didn't even talk to me about the book but I must have said something over dinner that led him to label me as the cussing pastor. So over a decade later at a casual dinner my brand was immovably affixed. Don is a friend of mine but I just wish an off-comment at a meal isn't my defining moment.
What gets me into trouble is my humor. It is what keeps me sane. I have a stressful life and I fear that I will be the guy that shows up at work unknowingly with his underwear outside of his pants. The pressure and stress is great. I receive death threats. Our church has gone from 1,200 to 6,000 in four years. It is very intense. I have had no one else to lean on. So for me, telling jokes and being light hearted is my way of coping with stress. But sometimes when I get overly stressed, my mouth and anger gets me into trouble. My tone, my attitude and my mouth are indicators of how closely I walk with Jesus. I have come to realize that I speak for more than just Mark Driscoll. I speak for Jesus. I know I can't be this foul-mouthed, gunslinger for Jesus. I still think strong language and a prophetic edge is appropriate. But shock-jock language isn't.
My Walk with the Lord
I am big on the spiritual contemplatives: prayer, silence, solitude, fasting, meditation and study. I 
am not an extrovert because people drain me. It is not that I don't love them; it is that I love them so much that when I hear about their trials (rape, divorce, etc.) I get emotionally devastated. I get energized with the spiritual disciplines. I get 24 hours a week of total silence where I pray, write, fast, meditate and clarify God's direction for me and for the church.
For two years of my life early in the church plant I was preaching 6 times a Sunday and driving to 3 different locations. I was literally preaching 8-9 hours on Sunday 50 Sunday a year. I was the only paid pastor on staff until we had 800 people. I was working seven days a week and 80-100 hours. I did everything I could to make ends meet with outside speaking engagements. My anger, my burnout, my frustration and my mouth got the better of me and I sinned.
Today, I have a good staff and I have a good schedule but I have a hard time turning issues off in my mind. I am constantly thinking about leaders to develop, people that need Jesus, problems that need to be solved and things left undone.
My Future
I want the name of Jesus made much of. I don't care if people know me, but I want people to know Jesus. I try to do this in a creative and strategic way. I am writing books and investing in the Acts 29 Network but pastors come and go; churches come and go; networks come and go; books come and go but the name of Jesus remains the same-yesterday, today and forever. That is what I want my legacy to be: that he made much of Jesus.
Young Church Planters
When I first started out people were defining themselves by what they were against. We should define ourselves by what God has called us to be and to do. The main thing is humility. Young inexperienced pastors are sometimes insecure, proud, self-righteous and scared. We can learn from others even if they think or act differently than us. We have to be humble enough to learn. Even our critics can become our coaches. We can hear from the Holy Spirit if we allow God to speak to us through others who we are not like or who we are in disagreement if we are humble. Our insecurity causes us to be brash and critical and to fight and to miss out on hearing from the Holy Spirit.
Final Admonition
It is easy for Christians and Pastors to move away from Jesus toward another cause. All of our theology is practically connected to Jesus. All of our preaching and teaching is Jesus. It is seeing Jesus in both his humble state of incarnation where he came as a missionary sent by God (referenced over 40 times in the Book of John) and as the reigning King of kings. What I appreciate about the emerging conversation is their emphasis on Jesus as the incarnate Christ. Jesus was sent on a mission to accomplish a task. He humbled himself. He had friendships with sinners. Today Jesus reigns in glory over all of His creation. This Jesus is worth praying to, worth worshipping and is worth living for and is worth dying for. We minister to others as the humble Jesus but come in the authority of the exalted Jesus. The two aspects of this Christology: exaltation (worship, prayer) and incarnation (humility, servant, missional, friend of outcast). My fear is that one is emphasized over the exception of the other. They must be kept in balance.
For more information and resources:
Mars Hill Church
Resurgence
Acts 29 Network
National New Church Conference
1 Comments | Login to Post Comments
Denny Sullivan on Mar 6, 2007 5:26am
This blog is extremely helpful for me as a young church planter. I found Mark's warning to be very wise: "I want to continue to reach out and grow a church and reach lost people with the gospel but I can't put my marriage and my children on the altar of growing a church."
I plan to heed that advice.
Thanks for all you are doing for church planters all across the nation (and world).