It is a must listen for every man who hungers to be a godly husband. Posted in Marriage Tags: marriage sermon.
You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Jeremiah The revealer of hidden things. On September 30th , you were both terminated from your employment as pastors at Mars Hill Church.
Within hours, Paul, you emailed all of the elders to notify us of what had happened to you that night. We had the opportunity and the responsibility to intervene, to care, to listen to you, and to make sure that any harmful treatment against you was corrected.
Instead, we allowed the process of your investigation and trial to continue unimpeded and we participated in it. By failing to intervene and by participating in that process without protest, we implied to the members of Mars Hill Church, to each other, and to you and your families that your termination was above reproach. We stood by as it happened, and that was wrong. We now believe that you were grievously sinned against in that termination.
Hearing each of you recount your experiences of this meeting is shocking and sad. We now understand that these sorts of overpowering actions against elders were some of the very concerns that you had each expressed regarding some of the pending proposed changes to the bylaws. It is tragic that you were proved right by your own experiences. The harm permitted by our failure to protect you has had a devastating and lasting impact on you, your families, Mars Hill Church, and the watching world.
Paul, On October 15, , all twenty-three elders at the time—including most of us signers of this letter—voted that you were in violation of the biblical qualifications of eldership. All but two of the elders then voted to remove you from eldership based on these perceived violations. We now believe our decisions were invalid and wrong. The entire investigation and trial process was skewed by the implication that your termination was above reproach and for just cause.
If there had been sin in your life that might have warranted a warning about possible disqualification from eldership, we should have patiently, carefully, and directly addressed it with you before the matter became so extremely escalated. By reporting our wrongheaded assessment to the church, we put doubt about your character in the minds of church members, though you had done nothing to warrant such embarrassment and scrutiny. By doing this, we misled the whole church, harmed your reputation, and damaged the unity of the body of Christ.
We also unanimously approved that, based on your repentance, you would remain an elder of the church on probation. We were wrong to have insisted that you repent of this lacking trust as a condition of your continued eldership, because it was not sinful on your part in the first place. Bent and Paul, you each had every right as an elder to openly express your strong concerns about the bylaws and to influence our thinking so that we might have made the most informed decision possible.
These were not sinful acts of mistrust on your part, but reasonable acts of due diligence. We needed to learn from you at that time and we should have trusted you and respected your spiritual authority as elders of the church to educate us about potential problems with those bylaws.
Instead, we silenced your voices through our complicity in your terminations and our decisions to remove Paul as an elder and keep Bent on probation instead of examining the issues more closely. Paul, On December 5th, those of us who were elders at the time voted to instruct the members of Mars Hill Church to treat you as an unrepentant believer under church discipline after you had resigned your membership from the church.
This disciplinary rejection led to great loss to your family in extreme financial hardship, sudden loss of long standing friendships, spiritual and emotional trauma to your family, and the public shaming of your character.
We share responsibility for those losses due to our participation in the vote. A church disciplinary act of this magnitude is extreme. We now think that motion was hasty and harmful. We should have challenged the motion rather than approving it. Instead, we used our voting power as elders in a way that resulted in further harm to you. Further, we brought disrepute on the Church and its responsibility to exercise church discipline in a godly, loving and redemptive way.
We failed to love you as a fellow elder and brother in Christ. Confessing our sins against you has been a process that has taken us some time. We have engaged in self-examination, challenged our memories of what happened by reviewing the documents and interviewing one another, and spent time listening to you and your wives tell your heartbreaking stories.
Many of us have met personally with each of you over the years to confess our sin and to seek forgiveness for our sinful actions and inaction. Our desire is to clear the reproach from your names. We hope that our confession also brings healing to the many past and present members of Mars Hill Church whose hearts were broken for you and your families as a result of our sin.
As part of our commitment to walk in repentance, we invite anyone who has been impacted by our sins against you to contact any of us so we can continue to walk in repentance by listening, confessing, and asking for forgiveness.
We hope that you will forgive us. May the peace and grace of our Lord heal our hearts. Additional Mars Hill Elders as of December 5th, The unfolding distortions of power, authority and obfuscation of factual information now seen at Mars Hill Church were identified by many going back to It was experienced by just a few then, since the church population was small and not enough instances of deception, bald-faced lying and hiding salient information had been exposed to determine a pattern.
In subsequent years there were statements made by Mark Driscoll in which he was aware of his need to be restrained and accountable to others locally. He would speak about structures implemented to maintain accountability.
He would also complain. He feared the power those around him had to censure him and even dismiss him. He knew in those days restraint was real and he did not like it. There were long stretches of time that Mark was hedged in. Mark Driscoll, however, maintained the power to frame the message and hide his behavior. His attitudes leaked constantly in his sermons. He isolated his victims from others.
He held messaging jealously. As long as he could frame the communication, he could spin events, characterization of people, and his own actions to appear innocent through blame shifting. The one being dismissed or characterized never had the same access to venues of communication. Mark held and kept the microphone. Some of us spoke at various times to Mark about his behavior and language, but far too infrequently. We allowed an environment in which Mark could intimidate and insist on control of vision, and the means of building that vision.
We allowed Mark to become progressively more outrageous and dysfunctional. When it was too much it was also too late to shift the inertia. Nathan feared for his life. When dismissed or fired, some believed fervently, as I did, that it was important to not complain in the public media. The silence that subsequently followed from Acts 29 or other networks was vacuous: they appeared to be totally impotent in exercising, if it had ever crossed their mind, 1 Corinthians 6.
The result? Those harmed were silenced, lonely, and wounded, not trusting their own ability to discern perpetrators of abuse from those that are kind guides. Still countless others will not darken the door of an organized church for fear of what they already have come to know.
The attitudes and behaviors Mark Driscoll exhibits, as well as those of too many of his staff, trickle down to community group leaders and into every crevice of the church. Women have often been the first to stand up to Driscoll. At right: Mark Driscoll's moment of high school yearbook fame. Photo: Cheryl Hammond. It was during this period, around the mids that Driscoll started using more violent language to discredit people.
She recently helped start the website "We Love Mars Hill," one of many sites where former members are posting stories, and has her own blog Theology for Women.
Driscoll would talk about an ex-elder having been "put through the wood chipper. I learned to rein in my own voice. Church cofounder Lief Moi has recently published an account of his departure from the church , also during the period. He is the one who describes himself as acting out of narcissism, and describes a philosophy of growth at any cost.
I know where this kind of thinking came from because I believed it to be true and was in full agreement," Moi writes. Driscoll demonstrates a passing familiarity with narcissism in his most recent book, Real Marriage. The book gained notoriety when leaked documents showed that the only reason it skyrocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list was because church executives used church money to pay a marketing firm to game the system.
Church executive pastor, Sutton Turner, later allegedly sent an email to a member, asking for a pardon. It was standing up for Petry's husband that caused the Smiths to be put under church discipline and leave. Petry describes how she and her family were eventually shunned by all but a few friends, but, before she knew the pain of being the receiving end, she also describes practicing it herself, when a friend of hers was fired by Driscoll.
I was afraid of what it might mean for me if I continued as her friend. It was never spoken but rather understood that to remain in contact with her would be unwise. So with fear and pride in tow I conformed to the toxic system in order to show respect and loyalty. I really didn't want relationships," she said. It was also around the mids that members noticed Driscoll's growing preoccupation with sex.
Driscoll also started to preach more about male privilege and sexual entitlement. This had a damaging impact on many marriages, said Rob Thain Smith, who, with Merle, was acting as an informal marriage counselor to many young couples.
All these men are seeing his hot wife, and are thinking he's got it made. Mark and Grace Driscoll and their kids are honored for Mark's 15 years of service to the church at a Mars Hill service. In Real Marriage , Driscoll bitterly describes a largely sexless marriage, and seems to imply that he's been acting out all these years because he was sexually frustrated at home. Smith discouraged me from reading the book. In the book, co-written by Grace Driscoll, she is frank and forthcoming about the abusive relationship she was in prior to meeting Mark in high school.
This previous boyfriend was possessive, controlled her schedule, stalked her, and sexually assaulted her. This abuse contributed to her emotional numbness and dissassociation during sex, she said, and she kept the story hidden for most of her life, out of a sense of shame. She seems to be in the middle of her healing process, and does not seem to have a clear idea that being sexually assaulted was not her fault.
While Mrs. Driscoll is bravely bringing to light extremely personal struggles in her life, Mr. Driscoll seems more interested in focusing on other people. One of the main reasons my parents moved from North Dakota to Seattle was to get away from some family members when I was a very young boy. Driscoll fails to acknowledge that running away rarely stops the cycle of abuse.
How did his family deal with it? Was Driscoll's father among the men who were abusive? As one member put it: "Crickets. Parsing out the things that Driscoll says can quickly lead a person down the rabbit hole, where everything is upside-down, backwards or distorted. In a portion of the book about the dangers of consuming pornography, Driscoll again brings up Ted Bundy, providing an excerpt of Bundy's last interview as a cautionary tale against consuming pornography.
Driscoll presents Bundy's account of blaming his serial murders solely on his addiction to porn as credible, and does not reveal important context about Bundy's true exposure to family abuse. According to Bundy's defense lawyer, his mother was living in a home for unmarried pregnant women when she gave birth to him, and that family members speculated that Bundy's grandfather, who was highly abusive to Bundy's grandmother, could also be his father. It would be perverse understatement to say that Driscoll and other elders at Mars Hill seem ill-equipped to counsel people who have been sexually abused.
The church seems to equate being abused with doling it out. Jesus makes us clean," reads a church Facebook post on the matter. Blogger Matthew Paul Turner has posted another disturbing account by another exile of Mars Hill, a woman who under the psuedonym "Amy" describes what it was like to get marital advice from Driscoll. That was something Mark preached about a lot — the nagging wife.
Later, Driscoll told her and her husband that she was beset by sex demons. His fierce glare seemed to look past her as he screamed his questions at her face.
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