Religion What He Said
posted by on December 17 at 14:02 PM
Dylan W. at Metroblogging Seattle on Mars Hill:
Taken individually and at face value, the current problems with Mars Hill—the controversy over the fired pastors, the end of year money troubles, members airing their grievances on blogs—look like little bumps in the road that megachurches all go through. Taken together, though, you get the image of something that looks like a “bubble.” The church grew too fast. Things overheated. The leadership now trying desperately to rein things in, mainly through altering the power structure, while trying to maintain an unmaintainable level of growth.You can see it coming, can’t you? The correction. All it takes is one major event—sexual impropriety, financial struggles, the books getting cooked, or just some moment of theological wackiness—and the bubble pops. We saw it with the televangelists in the 1980s. We saw it out at Overlake in the late 1990s.
Overlake is a good one to mention here because at their peak they had as many members as Mars Hill does now (6000). They were the fastest growing and most prosperous evangelical church in the entire region. They’re still around, but they are smaller (2000-3000 members) and are saddled with the debt of a building built for a much, much larger congregation.
I’m voting for sexual impropriety, just ‘cuz they’re way more fun than financial scandals—and it was a sexual impropriety that humbled Overlake (a gay one at that), so it would be a nice parallel. And Mars Hill, Overlake, is kinda obsessed with the gay thing and Mark Driscoll’s macho posturing has officially reached she-doth-protest-too-much-methinks proportions.
But, uh, Dylan? You wrap up your otherwise excellent post about Mars Hill with this weird dig at… me:
Of course, what I say doesn’t matter. After all, as I’ve said before, [Mars Hill thinks] my church, the home church of a certain newly elected member of the city council, is at the least defective, at the most apostate…. That’s right, Dan Savage. Tim Burgess isn’t considered enough of a Christian by Mark Driscoll.
So the take away message here is… it’s okay for Dylan W. to have a low opinion of Mark Driscoll’s church, but it’s not okay for me to have a low opinion of Dylan W.’s church. In fact, Driscoll’s low opinion of Dylan’s church proves that… um… what exactly does that prove, Dylan?
Look, Dylan darlin’, I could give a shit that Driscoll doesn’t consider your church legit—I was raised Catholic and we invented that your-church-ain’t-legit game. Your church doesn’t rise in my estimation because an arguably more heinous collection of religious hucksters thinks you’re going to hell. Please.
Wrap your head around this: I’m flexible enough to have a low opinion of Driscoll’s church and your church, Dylan. I think you’re all fools.
Did you see that financial statement recently on Slog? Mars Hill is vacuuming up $130K to $150K A WEEK from its members. That could be considered over $6.7 million in gross sales annually even on the low end, and they don't even produce a quantifiable product. That's far better than even a casino, which has greater overhead.
Their wing-nut theology may be repulsive, but you can't fault their business model. It's only foolish if you're the one paying into it, 'cause someone--maybe a few key people--must be making out like bandits.
Playing the "I was born Catholic" card! Snap!
Pyramid scheme.
A pox on all their houses.
@3 - A TAX FREE pyramid scheme, no less.
One thing I always cherished from my Catholic school upbringing was the: "All Catholics are christians, but not all christians are Catholics." They start us on superiority complexes early they do.
i think dylan just wants to point out that the reasons you don't like mars hill might not be the same reasons you dislike bethany. but he just wants his readers to know that bethany is no mars hill.
and it is a somewhat valid point. i mean, if all religious people are fools -- even the socially religious -- then a bethany fool is like a catholic fool is like a mars hill fool.
but if there are varying degrees of foolishness. maybe, say, one fool who believes something to themselves and harms no one and maybe does some good, verses maybe say, an other fool who subjects others to beliefs via political means.
Thanks for your opinion, dick.
Dan, I dig at your every chance I get. You should know that. It's because I'm obsessed with you. I mean, why else would I have planted that GPS tracking device in your spleen?
But the point I was trying to make was that you were loaded for bear against Burgess, but he's small fry compared to Driscoll. It's like saying you hate on all things Chicago, then beating up some whiny rich kid from Hinsdale because YOU HATE CHICAGO. If Burgess is the Hinsdale kid, then Driscoll is Wicker Park, or Wacker Towers, or Soldier fkn Field.
You smacked around Burgess because he once was anti-gay and once worked for the onerous and evil CWA, but Driscoll is that right now and more. He's turning into a cult of personality with a growing international following.
Seems like you should be picking him apart with at least the same gusto.
@6 - In other words, some types of foolishness are more annoying/harmful than others? Yeah, I can see that, especially considering how many local churches manage to fly under the radar, whereas Mars Hill has to be IN-YOUR-FACE pushing its misogynistic money-grubbing ways. You don't have to agree with or like any of them, but if they keep it to themselves it's much easier to maintain a passive disdain.
I believe all church leaders should be kept barefoot and pregnant.
Overlake now has the boring old financial scandals as well as the new, improved "straight"-pastor-caught-in-men's-room scandals.
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=overlake13m&date=20071213&query=overlake
We write about Drisoll all the time. And Hutcherson. And we only looked into Burgess' past--a.k.a. his *record*--when he decided to run for office. Casting an eye on the political work he did for a political group, the CWfA, was very much legit, and they're the ones that mixed politics and religion together to begin with.
@9 i can't tell if you are being condescending or not, but christians like obama are much less annoying than christians like fred phelps, yes.
if you want to call both fools, okay, but at least realize there is a vast difference in thier foolishness even by your standards...
of course, DW, can make his point here far better than i ever could.
and @7... was that to me? huh? okay... nice.
what ever happened with moorehead? did he ever admit to it? i know the elders eventually sided against him (sort of).
No, that was to Dan "I think you're all fools" Savage.
Oh, I totally agree that you should have looked at the CWfA work, and everything else they did work for. That's due diligence. That's why we have a Fifth Estate.
But I really felt like here's this guy, he's totally been involved with hardcore conservative stuff, he's been anti-gay before, but now he's repenting of all of this, and all you could do was just dump on him. Granted, he was running for public office, and politicians lie like dogs. But it seemed like you outright refused to give him the benefit of the doubt, or were even willing to say, "OK, but we're watching you -- Feit and Barnett will be riding your ass the next four years."
What comes to mind is Robert Byrd's history with the Klan. No matter how many times he's willing to say he regrets being part of it, there's the GOP machine, waving the bloody hood.
At some point, are *you* willing to forgive people? I mean, what's in it for anti-gay Christians to turn back from that when you're just going to be waiting with a baseball bat to beat them up for what they were?
For those who don't remember or didn't get a chance to see the comment from last week:
@11
Wow. I now want to be a megachurch usher!
I tend to think every person has a certain level of superstition. Everyone has certain things they believe that cannot be supported by hard evidence. I mean, look at quantum mechanics.
Hell, Richard Dawkins is singing Christmas carols and calls himself a "cultural Christian."
@14: Moorehead protested his innocence for a while, then there was this whole new stack of allegations. OCC bought out his contract and cut him loose in 1999. I have no idea where he is now.
dw...comparing how the Stranger treats a candidate for public office with how they treat a general pastor of a local church is not a fair comparison.
Methinks you are just protesting because you feel inadequate in the Stranger crowd because of your religion, and that sounds like a personal problem. :-)
No, I feel inadequate in the Stranger crowd because Fnarf waves that 12-inch dick of his around all the time.
dw @ 16,
Uh, perhaps you missed the fact that the Strangler hated Tim Burgess so much that they endorsed the fuckah for city council and he won and stuff.
http://new.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=419111
P.S. Just replace "God" and "Jesus" with "Zeus" and/or "Poseidon" and you can see how eye-rolling crazy the religion talk sounds to sane people.
Not sure if anything read this, but there is an interesting article in last week's New Yorker (may be 2 weeks old) about a megachurch in MA. It provides an interesting view on the history of megachurches. Might be worth checking out if you haven't seen it. If nothing else, it is clear that megachurches are serious business and have changed, and are changing the face of american religious activities.
yes, religion talk is insane.
like this october 31, 1994, interview hillary clinton had with newsweek:
"Do you believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?" "Yes."
"The atoning death of Jesus?" "Yes."
"The Resurrection of Christ?" "Yes."
or from it takes a village:
We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied, and argued with God. Each night, we knelt by our beds to pray before we went to sleep... ...God was always present to us, a much-esteemed, much-addressed member of the family.
Dylan... don't you think our endorsement was, in a sense, our way of "forgiving" Burgess? I believe, actually, that he's come around. I also believe that his evolution on gay issues and women's health issues was suspiciously rapid and we were right to grill him on this stuff.
Do you know how toxic CWfA is? Do you realize what the mailings that Burgess worked on for CWfA said about me, my family, and other gays and lesbians? Probably not. But it wasn't stuff that any gay or lesbian person could easily be expected to shrug off. "Oh, gee... here's a mailer from this Tim Burgess. He's for gay marriage now -- all is forgiven!"
But we endorsed Burgess in the end -- after hammering away at him. And I probably could've prevented that, had I wanted to. Not that a denial of our endorsement would have kept Burgess from winning. Della was awful, Burgess won by a landslide. Still, Dylan, you're revealing yourself to be just another crazy-ass American Christian with a persecution complex if you think the Stranger nailed Tim Burgess to a cross over this. We gave him an entirely appropriate amount of grief -- grief that couldn't come close to the grief his work for CWfA caused gays and lesbians all over the country. And then we endorsed the motherfucker. Sheesh.
Well Dan, when you tell the story like that, it sounds reasonable enough in retrospect.
At the time, I seem to remember, what you mostly accomplished was to legitimize and give a platform to some fundie anti-Christians. In a sense that was worth while: it is enlightening to see that extremist anti-Christians are not any smarter than extremist Christians. Seems like once you slide into uncompromising fanaticism, your IQ drops fast.
There is a tinge of hubris in the idea that this little paper is in position to offer forgiveness Burgess or anybody else for their transgressions. If he is guilty of causing such grievous harm to gay people across America, it seems all the less likely that an alt weekly should decide when he is forgiven.
Isn't it enough to merely say the Stranger editorial board weighed the pros and cons and, holding their nose, and made a choice among the options at hand?
i think the stranger was hard on tim, but in the end, pretty fair.
"Hard on Tim" ?!?!?!?
"In the end" ?!?!?!?
Oh, @28, you're just being naughty.
Dan accuses me of having a persecution complex. Somewhere in Canada, Alanis Morrisette is smiling.
I was surprised you endorsed Tim. I was expecting a "no endorsement" in that race, given that Della was the worst council member we've had in a long time.
And of course I know all about the CWfA. I grew up in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, just as much a Catholic kid as you were. I went to school in Colorado and had a lot of friends from the Springs. Promise Keepers. Crusaders. Amendment 2. Married a recovering fundamentalist.
Heck, the one and only time we've met? 1996 King County Republican Convention. Also known as the day I decided I wasn't a Republican anymore.
So, yeah, I know all about Beverley LaHaye and her fear-spewing machine. And also, her husband's tortuously ponderous Left Behind series. And honestly, I apologize that the Christian church continues to turn out this crap. Some of us are trying. We really are. But we're just not loud enough. And, well, people like the loud and cartoonish. It sells ads and helps raise money for causes conservative and liberal. The nice, polite Christians who just want to live and let live? They just don't make good television.
If you really did elide Burgess' past in your endorsement out of grace, then I apologize. Let's hope he can do a better job than Della. Unfortunately, that's an awfully low standard to start from.
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