About Mars Hill
In the Midwest where I grew up, it was assumed you went to church. Indiana was flooded with cultural Christianity. But in my hometown, anyone with a propensity for wearing vintage t-shirts and collecting zines experienced a certain cultural estrangement. We all wanted to get out.
While in Indiana, I heard about a church in Seattle called Grace where musicians I liked attended from time to time. And that was all it took to solidify the plan: I would move to Seattle, where I could be a cool, creative Christian. Seattle was the only place I could live. A city where my 90s-born interest in college rock, poetry and coffee culture could coalesce with my Christian faith.
You can read more about my and Drew’s story here and listen to us talk about it here in a podcast our friend Dan produced. But it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Seattle did not warmly welcome our young idealism when we arrived with friends to try living in intentional community. Shortly after landing in the city in 2004, I learned that if you go to church you’re an oddity, and it’s probably not by accident.
I spent a decade in Seattle not talking about being a Christian, because I didn’t know how. John Mark Comer and Mark Sayers explore the dynamic we experienced throughout the excellent This Cultural Moment podcast: We thought we were going to plant a community and start a house church in Seattle. But quickly, instead of assimilating the city, it assimilated us. We had no sea legs.
The Alt Weekly Effect
Mark Driscoll launched Mars Hill as a house church with a couple of friends in Seattle in 1996, when he was a 25-year-old kid. It was five years after Nirvana’s Nevermind was released, when everybody in the world was wearing flannel and talking about grunge. A new podcast from Christianity Today covers what happened to Mars Hill, and it’s why the topic is top of mind for me and a lot of folks in my circles right now. If you don’t know the story, listen.
By the time I landed in Seattle in 2004 and started attending Grace, Mars Hill was well established. At its peak, the church bloated across five states. More than 15,000 people attended 15 satellite churches. Around that time, local journalists began to frequently report on businesses affiliated with Mars Hill.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, there was a charged sense in the city that Evangelicals were hiding in the audience at concerts and pulling espresso shots behind cafe counters, waiting to convert you. They were somehow “other” and not authentic Seattleites, and the good work Christians did creatively or otherwise was suspect since they were all means to a proselytizing end.
I read an article in the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger in the mid-2000s written by an art museum employee. I’ve tried to find it online and can’t. The author meets a co-worker who, like her, wore cool sneakers and vintage clothes. The two formed a friendship, but eventually the author learned that her new friend was a Christian.
Here, she had uncovered a sheep in wolf’s clothes. Essentially, the author goes on to argue that post-religious folks should be on high alert: Christians are adopting our shared aesthetics, wearing the 2005 equivalent of Everlane and Warby Parkers, when really they’re part of an oppressive, old-school religion.
It took me longer to understand where the stereotype was coming from. That the common denominator was Mars Hill. In the 2000s, almost every protestant Christian in Seattle was linked to Mars Hill. Whether we knew it or not. It cast a large shadow over the city.
I wrote for alt weeklies and various local publications in the 2010s, mostly reporting on the restaurant and coffee industries, so in some way I’m talking about this dynamic as an insider and outsider. But it was clear to me from early on that Christians were made into a caricature, a straw man. There was so much juicy material to uncover, and reporters filed pieces on the Mars Hill beat with regularity.
Features popped up uncovering Mars Hill-affiliated businesses. In 2015, while the church imploded, this buzzy expose quoting the freshly agnostic Dave Bazan ran about The Paradox, the Mars Hill-linked music venue that hosted plenty of secular bands.
A Soft Place to Land
After Driscoll resigned in fall of 2014, the church—reeling from abusive leadership and the blow of Driscoll’s unexpected departure—quickly came apart. Some members stayed at satellite churches which rebranded, some left Church completely, and many others began to flood local congregations, including the church I’d attended since 2004. We’re a soft place to land, I always joke. It’s easy to remain fairly anonymous in the pews if that’s comfortable, and there’s liturgy, lament, and a folksy melancholy to the music.
A couple dozen families passed through in those years. Most have since departed. Some have left the Church, or moved from Seattle, or started new churches. But a common thread whenever I talk with anyone who spent time at Mars Hill is how it was traumatizing—and more than five years later, for many it still is.
That’s why this CT podcast is so charged. For a lot of friends, it’s personal. I realize it is for me, too.
I did not believe Mars Hill had any real connection to my own life. I knew about Driscoll’s crass sermons about sex and the weird messages that women should be making a lot of babies and men making money to support them. That was the running criticism I’d hear repeatedly, before anything came out about temper and toxicity in leadership and plagiarism. But in those days, I did want to be cool, missional, and a Christian. That’s why Mars Hill was a part of the movement that impacted many of us whether we attended or not.
I thought I’d listen to the Christianity Today podcast as an observer, as someone Mars Hill-adjacent who has always felt a thread of pride that I never attended. But this story is bigger than Mars Hill, and Seattle. It’s about coming up in the missional and emergent church years. Moving to a place to do intentional community when Shane Claiborne started talking about it. Being part of a wave in the church I didn’t recognize until later. Church in bars? You were there for it. Matrix red pill/blue pill sermon analogies? You were hooked.
The fact that some of us have never experienced abusive leadership from a pastor, myself included, is a complete gift. The aftermath of that era, and particularly Mars Hill’s fall, is consequential culturally. And for a lot of people I love, personally.
There is Room
Someone tweeted this week that we should remember what a good thing Mars Hill was for this city and for the church—how many people came to the Lord as a result of Mars Hill. If that is true, and that is your experience, I want to bless it. Let’s bless every good and true thing God brought to pass at Mars Hill in spite of its brokenness.
If you attended Mars Hill and stayed in Church after everything happened—in a new church or a house church or pressed into some community—bless you. For modeling belonging in the midst of pain.
But if you went to Mars Hill or another church like it, if you heard toxic messages about what it means to be a man, or a woman, and are still wading through what that time was and where God was in it, bless you. If the hurt is fresher than you’d hoped or can admit, bless you. Bless you if you’ve left the Church or tried but couldn’t keep going. There is community in Jesus if you are ready, whenever you are ready.
And if you’ve left Church but not left Jesus, I want to bless you to press further into the good and true story that the last will be first.
This happened. Mars Hill was a real church, and Mark Driscoll was its real pastor, and many people were undone. It’s sad and embarrassing and tragic and weird. And if you want to talk about it, we’re listening.
Your Story
The central question of the podcast season and first episode: Who killed Mars Hill? The answer, the podcast’s producer Mike Cosper posits, is a spoke with a lot of wheels: Mark, and leadership cloistering him, bloggers blogging, the internet that magnified his voice when that hadn’t really happened to a pastor before—and all of us for being capitalists who prop up stars in the church because that’s what we do in America.
These are such rich and big questions. To think through the fame of pastors. The megachurch pastor. The celebrity pastor. The number one. Our hero. Our champion. Propelling a regular old pastor into the stratosphere of brand. What did we think was going to happen? And more relevantly, where do we go from here?
Personally, I’m less interested in why we create celebrity pastors again and again. Kristin Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr are doing important historical work unpacking toxic masculinity and the stifling of the role of women in the church in the name of power. Katelyn Beaty and others are writing about celebrity and Church.
My interest in this question is very much focused on individual stories and the cultural impact of Mars Hill’s collapse on those of us who make up the Church.
I was a guest on a podcast last month. One of the hosts moved to Seattle to work at Mars Hill towards the end of the church’s life. He talked about a similar pattern of toxicity whispered about on blogs and Twitter regarding Trinity Church, which Driscoll launched in Scottsdale in 2016. His experience of loss, even felt on the tail end, was heavy. And there is palpable concern that the stage is being set for a repeat performance at Driscoll’s new church.
I met a friend for coffee recently who told me her story of leaving Mars Hill. We talked about how fresh the wounds still are, five years later. I texted with another friend who isn’t able to listen to old recordings of Driscoll’s voice.
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When you’re surrounded by a big, successful community that quickly erodes, how could bigger questions not follow? Questions like, God, where are you?
This never should have happened. A mature leader would have set up a church with risk in mind, under prudence and accountability. A wise pastor would have known personal failure and flaming ego would damage the flock.
But in the Mars Hill story, we see the aftermath of betting it all—full speed ahead—on growth linked to one person with full power and no contingencies. And we’re still walking through what happens after the collapse. For many, it leads to a crisis of faith. The Mars Hill story is lamentable, shameful, and a call for Christians to continue to stand beside all those who were wronged.
If you attended Mars Hill and want to share your story, you’re invited to comment on Instagram. Because when we better understand our experiences, we can better move forward in community.