This week a twitter friend suggested that I blog about something I had tweeted. So here I am.
There is a storm blowing in certain circles as the result of a podcast. In the world of evangelical churches (especially the US version of that world) the rise and fall of the mega-church known as Mars Hill, Seattle was a pretty big deal.
(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)
A Christianity Today magazine podcast is re-telling the story some years after the event. I guess the point of this particular journalistic project is a warning to others how not to build something that falls quite so spectacularly and suddenly as Mars Hill did.
Anyway, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you’re probably already listening to the podcast, or you can go and find it.
The reason for my interest is general: how do we spot warning signs of unhealthy churches and leaders; and how will we, who have responsibility for people in our churches, remain reflective and humble, ensuring that what we build is to serve God and his church, and not ourselves?
My interest is also personal.
I don’t often tweet. Twitter for me is a rich vein of interesting people and issues: I read other people’s thoughts and I re-tweet a bit. That’s my level. But this week I found myself compelled to reply to a thread, knowing that I am one of many who will go un-noticed but nevertheless felt the need to put a stake in the ground and say my piece. It was for my own benefit, and not especially interesting to others I imagine!
Episode 5 of the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is entitled The Things we Do to Women, and centres on a particular brand of Christian understanding of masculinity and femininity. I don’t want to go into the detail here (like I said you can listen for yourself), but what I found in listening to the podcast was a profound (and unexpected) sense of shame and what I can only describe as wincing embarrassment. As I heard the presentation of some of the things I had once believed about the biblical view of men and women, it was a shock: a shock that left me feeling deeply unsettled. And it wasn’t just this particular extreme interpretation of these views that troubled me. I do not and have never fully embraced the most extreme version of these views, but I recognised some things in my own experience which had the same roots.
I had bought into the conservative Christian view on marriage and gender as part of the package of the Christian tradition into which I was converted (non-conformist charismatic). I recall even recommending some of the teaching on the subject coming out of Mars Hill back in the day (I think around 2001/2?). With Mars Hill, like many people I was taken in by what looked like a successful church with a straight-talking preacher. There was a grit and power to the preaching and teaching, and while I’m sure some of it was good, I have a particular recollection of a series about marriage in the early 2000s...
What I now see as a hollowed-out, cookie-cutter view, a caricature of someone’s ideal of a western nuclear family was portrayed as the godly norm for all Christians. Sermons alluding to the detail of the preacher’s own sex life were crass and crude, and the reductionist framework for sex and marriage horrendous. It actually reminds me of some of the stories I have heard from women in my own circles: women who were told if they had aspirations for leadership, their highest hope in life was to marry a pastor. (Don’t even get me started on what this means for single people.)
I came to faith in my youth, and here I am at fifty still fully convinced of the gospel I believed. But along with that gospel I was taught that version of Biblical manhood and womanhood which found expression at Mars Hill, possibly not in so crass and reduced a way, but I was taught a version of it nonetheless. That men are to lead and women are to follow, in the home and in the church.
I’m not trying to write a treatise on what the Bible says about men and women. Lord knows enough people have written/are writing on this subject, and I’m reading many of them. What I want to do is to put my hand up and acknowledge that as a young person in the church I was taught a way of seeing the world which was portrayed as the Biblical way of understanding God’s design for men and women. It was done in such a way that I (and I don’t claim to speak for others) wasn’t equipped and certainly wasn’t encouraged to look at other traditions and other ways of seeing the world.
I have sisters and brothers in the faith who love God and serve Christ faithfully from within an egalitarian understanding of sex and gender. I know and love others who remain fully convinced of a complementarian view from the Scriptures. We can’t all be ‘right’ but we are all trying to work out what is right.
There is so much more to say on this subject and my intention here is not to fully unpack all that. It is merely to say I was mistaken about much. I probably still am! But if I recommended a Mars Hill series on marriage to you around twenty years ago, I’m sorry. I hope it didn’t do you too much harm, by God’s grace.
I am pleased to say that I’m married to a lovely man, and we’re trying to work out life together… as a team… with different strengths and skills… both fully convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news for everyone.
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