Evangelism meets Seattle: the view from Mars Hill

Two years ago, Shannon Walker of Oakland Googled "Mars Hill," looking for the Seattle church she'd heard about. The search led her instead to the Web site of the city's graduate school of the same name. The 30-year-old speech pathologist discovered her error, but, intrigued, she decided to visit the school. She attended a lecture by a professor "incredibly passionate and vulnerable and heartbreakingly honest" and enrolled in the school's Master of Divinity program.

It's not the first time the two Mars Hills have been mixed up. They are not really related, though they share a name and a city, and they both belong more or less to the emerging church, a sort of decentralized postmodern Christian movement that seeks to live in conversation with the mainstream culture, rather than in isolation from it. If that sounds like a mouthful, fair enough: Insiders have been debating what it means for some 15 years without reaching consensus.

The similarities between the two Mars Hills end pretty quickly. When I meet students of the graduate school, they typically introduce themselves with a disclaimer: "It's not related to the church." They don't mention what the church is most known for — its charismatic, controversial pastor Mark Driscoll or his encouragement of married women to leave the workforce and raise children full-time — but it's a way to clear the air of preconceptions just in case.

For members of Mars Hill Church, distinguishing themselves from the Belltown seminary is less imperative. With 3,586 members and an average of 7,500 weekly attendees, the church is a far larger and better-known institution. It's added satellite campuses, pastors, and an organized network of active community groups swiftly enough to become Seattle's largest church just 12 years after it started in a rental home in Wallingford. So let's start with a look at the church.

A few weeks ago, I visited the church's Lake City campus, one of four the church has opened just since last fall (the others are in Belltown, Bellevue, and Olympia). In front of a large projection screen, Pastor James Harleman greeted the mostly white, mostly under-40 crowd. A well-rehearsed band led the gathering into folk-pop praise songs, and I listened for clues to the church's theology. They were impossible to miss. The second song, "Destruction," began:

From the first time you flooded the earth
To the last time you burned off the curse
To the way that you hated your Son,
When you hung all the sins of the earth

... Heaven will disappear with a roar
The host of God will come to destroy
Sin is a declaration of war
God will have his glory one way or another.

I'd been expecting to find that the church's hip, urban image, like its reputation for being unusually rigorous and demanding, was something of a veneer. I'd expected to see conventional suburban evangelicalism dressed up in tattoos and skinny jeans. But "the way that you hated your Son" — the notion of God the Father hating God the Son — you don't find that in most evangelical churches. The Sunday morning crowd sang right through it, though.

Pastor Harleman announced a film-and-discussion series. (The emerging church loves faith-meets-film discussions; so does the graduate school, and after ten minutes of local church, the projection screen transported us, through an anime-inspired short video, to Mark Driscoll.

The 38-year-old Driscoll has acquired the nickname "The Cussing Pastor," as if mere foul language were enough to build a following. (If it were that easy, the pastors of Seattle's struggling mainline churches would gladly salt-up their language.) But Driscoll's a tremendously skilled communicator. Pacing the stage at the main Ballard campus, he delivered a sermon on marriage roles as he saw them set forth in the Song of Solomon. He told stories from his own marriage, offered statistics, and dropped jokes without their feeling forced. Every few minutes he would sniff in a thoughtful, practiced sort of way. This untucked, down-to-earth demeanor was the opposite of a huckster televangelist, but polished in its own way. It makes the guy easy to listen to.

The words that seem to come easily to Driscoll have also gotten him into trouble, particularly through his blog. When prominent Evangelical leader Ted Haggard was accused of hiring a male prostitute and buying methamphetamine, Driscoll wrote, "A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either." When the Episcopal Church elected a woman as its presiding bishop, he wrote, "If Christian males do not man up soon, the Episcopalians may vote a fluffy bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God's men." Those comments, for which Driscoll later apologized under pressure, have told many all they need to know about the church.