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February 20 - Controversial Megachurch Pastor Mark Driscoll Finds a New FlockArticle: Unbiblical Christianity
There’s a new church coming to Phoenix, Arizona. According to its website, the pastor, Mark Driscoll, is a “Jesus-following, mission-leading, church-serving, people-loving, Bible-preaching pastor...grateful to be a nobody trying to tell everybody about Somebody.”
Though there’s no mention of it on The Trinity Church’s shiny new website, Driscoll built and presided over Seattle’s controversial Mars Hill Church, and he is one of the most famous and disruptive figures in the history of the evangelical mega-church movement.
But as Driscoll’s star rose, he was dogged by allegations from church members and pastors as well as from outsiders—of bullying and spiritual abuse, misogyny and homophobia, plagiarism, and misuse of church funds, just to name a few. In 2014, after being asked to submit to a reconciliation plan proposed by the church board he organized, Driscoll quit.
So, as prospective parishioners might be wondering, just what did Driscoll do? The first and easiest thing to digest, because the media so readily reported the juiciest bits, is the large groups of people whom Mark Driscoll has offended. Usually the aims of his ire were women or gay men. Sometimes, he hit both at once, like the time he suggested Ted Haggard's wife “letting herself go” might have had something to do with the rival evangelical pastor’s proclivity for male prostitutes and crystal meth.
The largest repository for his most offensive remarks comes from early 2001 in his church’s members-only forum, where he posted under the Braveheart pseudonym “William Wallace II.” In one particular thread, Driscoll rants (in part) that: We live in a “pussified nation” where men are “raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers,” homeosexuals are “Damn freaks,” and women, (unpoetically described as “homes” for a man’s penis), “will be ignored,” because Driscoll “[does] not answer to women.”
In 2003, former congregant Jennifer Roach had a disagreement with Mark over whether men and women could be friends. In response, Driscoll posted a letter to the forum addressed to her husband that read, “You better shut your wife up, or I’ll shut her up for you.” What surprised Roach, she said, even more than her pastor’s anger, were the “mini-Marks”—young men who took it further. “I got direct emails telling me I was an adulterer and a whore,” Roach told The Daily Beast. “One said that I was just trying to ‘take down a good man.’”
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