Sounds like a Manson Cult plus Jesus plus Internet = Paypal & Profits
A writer for the Christian blog ConversantLife.com called Driscoll, with his stocky frame, six o’clock shadow, and torn jeans, ‘the original cussing hipster pastor.’ It’s Driscoll’s snarky straight talk about everything from oral sex to yoga to God’s eternal wrath that has ignited passion in the hearts of his millennial disciples. After Driscoll and his wife, Grace, founded the church in 1996 in their Seattle home, it grew at a rate of about 60 percent a year—all the more notable when you consider that Seattle is one of the most left-leaning cities in a state that, according to a 2004 Gallup poll, ranked as the third least religious in the nation after Oregon and Idaho (Washington dropped to eighth in 2012). Mars Hill now has more than 5,000 members, with campuses in Portland, Orange County, and Albuquerque. In the late 1990s, Driscoll founded Acts 29, a ‘church planting’ network that trains men who wish to open churches; this led to the creation of the Resurgence, an online training resource with links to sermons, blog posts, music, and forums—essentially, a Mars Hill starter kit. Affiliates of the church are now spread out all over the world, with disciples everywhere in between.
That men lead the movement is key according to Driscoll, who ties myriad modern spiritual and societal problems back to the failure of female leadership. Driscoll traces his theory all the way to Genesis—in a 2004 sermon, he said Eve’s eating of the fruit of knowledge was ‘the first exercising of a woman’s role in leadership in the home and in the church in the history of the world. It does not go well. It has not gone well since.’ What’s more, Driscoll describes Satan’s encouragement of Eve as ‘the first invitation to an independent feminism…the first postmodern hermeneutic.’ For Driscoll, then, feminism and postmodernism are not only demonic, they are inherently linked; two revelations in the bite that led to the fall of man.
[Mars Hill] seemed to play right into my fear of becoming an adult woman,” wrote Kaelee Bates, a founder of the blog Mars Hill Refuge, in an e-mail. “It appeared to me as an easy way out. I didn’t have to finish school or try to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I could stay home, clean, have babies, and ignore all of [the] things I was struggling with.”
Church or Cult?
The Control-Freaky Ways of Mars Hill Church
In the midst of this, Lance had begun a long-distance relationship with a young woman in Colorado. Lance says that his pastor instructed him to end the relationship, even though their relationship was not yet physical and nothing improper had happened. Lance balked, but his pastor insisted: “I’m the authority over you,” the pastor said, according to Lance. “You agreed when you became a member that I am your authority, and you have to obey us.” Lance was torn—on one hand, he had signed that membership contract.
On the other hand, this was ridiculous.
In a final, tense meeting, Lance got fed up with the leadership’s harping about submission and authority. “How is this not a Jim Jones theology?” Lance remembers asking. “We don’t even think you were a Christian to begin with,” the pastor retorted, according to Lance, and left the room. The church told him to move out and, if he wouldn’t submit to church demands, to cut off any communication with members of Mars Hill.
Lance quit the church.
( In 2006, Mars Hill claimed $31,110,000 in assets. (According to a church-generated report—since it’s a church, Mars Hill is not required to publicly disclose its tax returns.)