Book Review: Confessions of a Reformision Rev.

One of the benefits of being a church planter/pastor of a tiny brand new church without a name is that I can read as much as I want to. I started this one in the bathtub last night after taking Sophie to see the Underdog movie and putting her to bed. I quit reading it this morning at the point in the story of Mars Hill Church where attendance reaches 1000 people. Since there are now about 20 people meeting for church in my living room and we're praying about how to grow to 150, I think I'll stop here. When God grows our church out of my living room, I think I'll pick it up again.

Mark Driscoll makes me laugh out loud. Read this book and enjoy some laughter that is good for the soul. A master of sarcastic one-liners, Driscoll is part preacher, part stand-up comic. Take the title of chapter 1, for instance: "Jesus, Our Offering was $137 and I Want to Use It to Buy Bullets." Thank God he's a biblical preacher who talks about Jesus a lot too.

If you love people who don't yet know Jesus, you should consider Mark Driscoll as a special gift to God's Church. He says this of himself: "Over the years, I have accepted the fact that I'm really not much of a pastor but rather am a missiologist studying the city who leads a church filled with missionaries who reach the city and with pastors who care for the converts." [51]

I find hope today in Mark Driscoll's example of leading a church through its infancy. He spent a lot of time meeting people one-on-one, telling the gospel story as often as he could and inviting people to repent and believe, calling men to be men and do great things for God, praying, training leaders and learning to preach. I don't know what else I should be doing right now besides all that.

Driscoll often makes people mad, and he often seems to like it that way. As my wife so helpfully reminds me, disagreement is OK as long as it doesn't degenerate into personal attacks. Here is one important issue in pastoral theology where I disagree with Driscoll. Who has the right to remove someone from the fellowship of a church? Driscoll recounts a few stories from the early days of Mars Hill Church when he kicked people out of his young church all by himself. Does the Bible give him the authority to do that? Yes, shepherds are to guard the flock against wolves. But the wolves he unilaterally kicks out on pages 76 and 77 were some of his fellow workers and co-leaders! In Matthew 18:15-20, Jesus has given us clear instruction on the process of kicking people out of the church. First you go to them one on one and give them opportunity to repent. Second you bring along one or two others and do the same thing. If they won't repent, then you tell the church and if they won't listen to the church speaking pleading words of repentance, then you all kick the stubbornly-unrepentent sinner out together. Have you ever seen the redemptive power of congregational corrective church discipline in action? I have and it's a beautiful thing. Church planters and church leaders and pastors need to learn from guys like Mark Dever here and thank God for the privilege of learning from Driscoll's mistakes. Driscoll's ecclessiology requires elder rule because of a missiological preference in creating a certain church culture. A biblical ecclessiology puts Jesus at the top of the org chart, ruling primarily through the scriptures. Next, the Bible puts a church on the org chart, a congregation of people who actually give evidence of being born again. In the New Testament, the church is called to recognize the gifting of men whom God calls to the office of elder/pastor by delegating leadership authority to these strong leaders. The scripture gives us more instruction about how to organize our churches than Driscoll admits.

Enough disagreement. There are so many great lessons for church planters and pastors in this book! Like this: "We learned that unchurched people tend to be the most traditional when it comes to church. For years, we had held services only on Sunday nights trying to be cool, different and therefore more attractive to unchurched people. But our first morning service took off in part because unchurched people thought that church was an event that happened in a church building on a Sunday morning." [132] I find a lot of hope in the fact that church planting isn't brain surgery. I also find hope in this comment from Driscoll on preaching: "Preaching is like driving a clutch, and the only way to figure it out is to keep grinding the gears and stalling until you figure it out." [133] My apologies in advance to the people who are coming to our new nameless church. It may be a bumpy ride for a while. But I think it will be an worthwhile adventure.

Once last priceless Driscoll-ism: "My answer to everything is pretty much the same: open the Bible and preach about the person of Jesus and his mission for the church." [86]

Amen, bro dude.