Why Did Mars Hill Crash and Burn?

On Embracing a Cultivation Mindset, Not an Acceleration Mindset

For most of my adult life, people have been talking about Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll. Remarkably, Mars Hill does not even exist anymore, sadly, but we’re still discussing it. There’s no parallel here that comes to mind; Driscoll’s ability to command a conversation was and is unmatched in my lifetime.

Parsing the fall of Mars Hill allows people to tee off on Driscoll, on toxic masculinity, and related subjects. I have no interest in piling on in these ways. I saw much promise and good in the early years of Driscoll’s ministry, MHC, Acts 29, and such endeavors. But it did not endure—at least Mars Hill did not. Here is just one reason why: Mars Hill and related churches emphasized acceleration, not cultivation. Among other trends, pastors 10-20 years ago got enamored with business culture. The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere who have so shaped our world today (and who have in different cases become veritable technocrats who rule us without checks or balances) drew the attention and admiration of many, including a generation of church planters.

There was much zeal in this generation, and no small amount of good works were established through the neo-Reformed resurgence. I myself refuse uncomplicated, one-sided breakdowns of this movement; history is rarely so neat and clean as our revisionist histories would have it. As a side-note, I deplore the cottage industry of ecclesial criticism, in which people perpetually diagnose and snipe at the failures of others. Accountability is a must, but constantly harping on what other people are getting wrong in theology or ministry is not only tiresome in spades and a terrible bore, it is a very bad trajectory for the soul.

But there is a necessary place, carefully mapped, for learning from sin and failure. In recent years, a good number of churches and organizations chose of their own volition to engage the work of discipleship in local congregations as an exercise in entrepreneurship, not shepherding. Pride was at root—pride to ignore biblical polity and ecclesiology; pride to get a church built so you could have a platform and end up doing what you wanted to do, leaving the messy work of caring for the sheep behind you.

Even as we tender this critique, we must take care not to miss the log in our own eye. You can pop Orville Redenbacher, sit in the bleachers, and heckle the man-boys of a previous generation who got it all wrong, sure. We can all pontificate about what pastors do wrong; it’s practically a spiritual gift for some of us. But do you and I see our own tendency to choose acceleration, not cultivation? What about our own less-public high-velocity approach to relationships, to the grinding work of childraising and home discipleship, to the elements of our vocation we frankly do not want to do, to the degree program we’ve entered but now are bored with, to the God-appointed life that is much slower and duller than we would prefer? Has not pragmatism, selfishness, an instant-gratification culture, a results-driven society, a thirst for perpetual entertainment and excitement influenced us, too?

If this were Baptist youth camp and the preacher said “Raise your hand if you feel conviction here, and keep it raised,” a great many hands would be in the air. It’s not just a pack of the Driscoll-influenced preacher-boys of a generation ago who went too fast (a good number of whom began sound works, endured, and have glorified God in ministry for years now). It’s us too. We embrace a pride-driven acceleration mindset in certain forms. It may not be in the type-A alpha-male way. It may be much quieter; it may even be hidden. It may be yearning for a sped-up life over a slower one. It may be pining for an unendingly meaningful career instead of the only intermittently meaningful one we have. It may be simply wanting things to be fixed, to resolve, to not be annoying, to not go wrong, for the world to finally go right-side up. Is that too much to ask, we say to ourselves under our breath?

Surely we do well to take dominion as Christians (Genesis 1:26-28). This is a crucial part of the good life. Working hard, even very hard; pushing through challenges; not giving up; bringing hay into the barn while we can; seizing the moment when it arrives, the iron steaming hot. All this is good, and needful besides. Nor is it wrong to pray regularly about the challenges of our life, bringing both the great and small to the altar. Such petitions are in many cases well-founded and even righteous (2 Corinthians 12:1-6). But we must not miss this truth: in our own way, we are all tempted to choose an acceleration mindset, not a cultivation mindset.

Let’s think this through for just a minute. As Christians, we're not trying to run past our family; we're trying to cultivate it. We're not trying to get the kids out the door as soon as we can, to hand them off to someone else because we have an agenda to complete; we're trying to cultivate them as disciples. We're not trying to frame up a church plant or restoration at lightning speed so we can build a platform and become a ministry success; we're trying to cultivate the flock, care for the members, train them in the truth, minister grace to them, lead them by the Word.

Similarly, we're not trying to create institutions and vocations out of thin air; we're taking our time as we cultivate what God has entrusted to us. We're not trying to be entertained in a non-stop way, living an exciting life that never stops whirring, like a child who never leaves an arcade; we're trying to cultivate a God-centered existence, one that is often going to be anonymous, unexciting, and even on the surface "unfulfilling" as understood by modern people.

The language of cultivation is agricultural and natural. It’s in many cases outdoorsy. This is part of why some of us don’t incline toward it today. In some cases, we have very little to nurture in the natural world relative to previous generations. Their very life depended on cultivation; they had to learn skills to coax the natural order to life, and flowering, and fruition. They weren’t always doing so out of golden-glow husbandry lifted straight out of a lyrical Wendell Berry passage; they were doing so in many cases ruggedly, of necessity, and this was no Instagram-ready experience. It was hard, in some cases terribly hard (and still is for a good number of folk who live off the land.) It was not for show; it was to survive.

Their work can nonetheless inform our own. Perhaps a metaphor, an image, can help us here. Your life is not a table full of frozen TV dinners to microwave, one right after the other, and then you get to do what you want. It is not a mere task-list to charge through. Your life is a forest, even better still, a garden-forest. You are the one called by God—as a vocation—to steward it. (Was this not Adam’s original summons in Eden?) You will have tasks to do each day, and some of them must be done speedily and promptly. That may even constitute your vocation: quick-hitting action. If so, there’s no problem here, no spiritual static. Whatever work God gives, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and without guilt (Col. 3:23).

But don’t miss the point: we’re sketching here a mentality, a way of being. The long-term rearing of the garden-forest will only flourish if you commit to it. It will only reach full flowering if you invest in it. And that will not take days, or weeks, or months. It will take decades. If you invest in your own God-given forest-garden (we all have one, it is the very Christian life itself), then you may well have something beautiful to look back on in your twilight season. It is not of you, of course; it will all be of God. But God made Adam to steward creation and provide for his family, and God made Eve to work with him to build a home, and to bring children into this world (see Genesis 2).

In the end, if the Father blesses and allows, you will have a garden-forest to behold. You will not have torn through your days on earth like a NASCAR driver on a bender. You will have approached your existence like a master-cultivator, a steward, a dominion-taker who puts on gloves each mornings, clips some vines, pulls some nasty weeds, plants a few new bulbs, brings in some apples in a bucket, and sings softly to yourself as you work. Your vocation may be pastor or homemaker or lawyer or truck-driver (and it could well change over time, too). Whatever the case, you are not a bolt of lightning. You are a cultivator.

In the end, on the last day, you will enter a garden-city. It will not be your own. It will be one prepared for you over ages, and planned before time itself, by our great God (see Revelation 22). There you will live and worship and enjoy the New Jerusalem, the whole earth tended with perfect patience and made gloriously new by a divine forest-planter, a heavenly garden-maker.

There your joy will be full.