Product Description

An inside snapshot view of the innovative Seattle church called Mars Hill and its Acts 29 network, providing--with a touch of sarcasm and humor--both principles and practices shared from the people actually doing missional church ministry with people often untouched by today’s traditional and contemporary churches.

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• Amazon Sales Rank: #145229 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

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• ISBN13: 9780310270164
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From the Back Cover
This is the story of the birth and growth of Seattle’s innovative Mars Hill Church, one of America’s fastest growing churches located in one of America’s toughest mission fields. It’s also the story of the growth of a pastor, the mistakes he’s made along the way, and God’s grace and work in spite of those mistakes.



Mark Driscoll’s emerging, missional church took a rocky road from its start in a hot, upstairs youth room with gold shag carpet to its current weekly attendance of thousands. With engaging humor, humility, and candor, Driscoll shares the failures, frustrations, and just plain messiness of trying to build a church that is faithful to the gospel of Christ in a highly post-Christian culture. In the telling, he’s not afraid to skewer some sacred cows of traditional, contemporary, and emerging churches.



Each chapter discusses not only the hard lessons learned but also the principles and practices that worked and that can inform your church’s ministry, no matter its present size. The book includes discussion questions and appendix resources.



“After reading a book like this, you can never go back to being an inwardly focused church without a mission. Even if you disagree with Mark about some of the things he says, you cannot help but be convicted to the inner core about what it means to have a heart for those who don’t know Jesus.”—Dan Kimball, author,The Emerging Church



“… will make you laugh, cry, and get mad … school you, shape you, and mold you into the right kind of priorities to lead the church in today’s messy world.”—Robert Webber, Northern Seminary

About the Author
Mark Driscoll is one of the 50 most influential pastors in America, and the founder of Mars Hill Church in Seattle (www.marshillchurch.org), the Paradox Theater, and the Acts 29 Network which has planted scores of churches. Mark is the author of The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out. He speaks extensively around the country, has lectured at a number of seminaries, and has had wide media exposure ranging from NPR’s All Things Considered to the 700 Club, and from Leadership journal to Mother Jones magazine. He’s a staff religion writer for the Seattle Times. Along with his wife and children, Mark lives in Seattle.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Confessions of a Reformission Rev.
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Driscoll
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Driscoll, Mark.
Confessions of a reformission rev. : hard lessons from an emerging missional
church / Mark Driscoll.
p. cm. — (The leadership network innovation series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10: 0-310-27016-2
1. Driscoll, Mark, 1970 – 2. Evangelists — United States — Biography.
3. Mars Hill Church (Seattle, Wash.) — History. I. Title. II. Series.
BV3785.D75A3 2006
280'.4 — dc22
2005032306
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible:
New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International
Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to
you. These websites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the
part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for their content for the life of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without
the prior permission of the publisher.
Photography by Thomas James Hurst
Interior design by Beth Shagene
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We want to hear from you. Please send your comments about this
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I was not a Christian when
I came to the church.
Today I am a pastor.
God saved me while I was
living with my lesbian mom
and my dad was in
prison for murder.
I am a founding pastor.
Jesus, Our Offering Was
$137 and I Want to Use
It to Buy Bullets
The upstairs room at the fundamentalist church was so hot that
everyone was sweating like Mike Tyson in a spelling bee.1 During
one service,
a pregnant lady simply passed out and fell off her chair.
This would not have been so traumatic if I were trying to plant
one of those shake-and-bake, holy-roller churches where I smacked
people
on the nugget in Jesus’ name so they could lie on the floor
and twitch like a freshly caught trout on a dock and call it the work
of the Holy Ghost.
It was the first half of 1996 and I was twenty-five years of age
chronologically, six years of age spiritually, and trying to gather
enough people
to launch Mars Hill Church in the city of Seattle.
About ten to twenty people
a week were showing up for our Sunday
service,
which had outgrown the living room of my rental home
and was now being held in one of those epically awful youth rooms,
complete with golden shag carpet on the floor and Christian
rock
posters on the wall for the poor kids forced to ride the short bus of
Christian
culture. Our weekly service
would start sometime around
6:00 p.m., whenever the college students and indie rockers would
show up, because it was apparently very difficult to get up by the
crack of dinner. Fortunately, the room was free, which was nearly
more than we could afford.
I had spent the previous two years as the college ministry intern
plankton at the bottom of the food chain at a multiracial mega0
church and had used the youth room to run a college group in Seattle.
College ministry soon started to feel like hanging out with an
ex-girlfriend, so I hit the eject button because life-stage ministry
was a vocational dead end.
What my college students needed was to mentor high school
students and hang out with singles who had phased from college
into the work world and married couples
who had learned what kind
of person to be and to marry to make a family work. What they
did not need was to hang out with the same immature yahoos they
spent all of their time playing “pull my finger” with anyway and
going to a free event that was like day care for twenty-one-year-old
hormonally enraged porn addicts and video-game aficionados trying
to stretch junior high into the retirement years.
So I decided to start a church, for three reasons. First, I hated
going to church and wanted one I liked, so I thought I would just
start my own. Second, God had spoken to me in one of those weird
charismatic moments and told me to start a church. Third, I am
scared of God and try to do what he says.
My wife, Grace, and I did not yet have any children, were both
working jobs to make ends meet, and spent all our free time changing
diapers on our baby church in its infancy phase.2 Our church
was a dysfunctional small group of Christian
college kids and
chain-smoking indie rockers who all shared the clueless look of a
wide-eyed basset hound that just heard a high-pitched whistle.
Infancy is the season of dreaming and envisioning the future, gathering
people,
raising money, and making plans. The ministry at this stage exists
only in the mind of the leader, who seeks to effectively communicate the
vision and compel people
to help make it a reality. In the infancy phase,
the church and the leader are one and the same because the leader is
essentially the only person holding the church together and doing most
of the work.
In retrospect, our church services
were, quite frankly, painful.
My preaching was like a combination of boring systematic theology
and uninspiring motivational talk from a cranky junior high gym
teacher. Our rotating cast of worship leader tryouts ranged from
screaming punk rockers — to this day, I have no idea why they were
so dramatically depressed — to the kind of happy-clappy Christian
praise musicians that you would expect to find playing on a karaoke
machine at a Christian
homeschool co-op reunion for kids whose
moms made their clothes. Our sound system included speakers from
a home stereo that were muddy and faint, except when pumping out
feedback, of course, since we could not afford real speakers. We
used a moody overhead projector for worship that another church
had thrown out because it only worked when it felt like it. If I were
Hindu, I would guess that the projector was a junior high kid or a
union laborer in a former life.
In my imagination, however, I saw an entirely different church,
one that did not have a beat-up old couch or a foosball table in the
sanctuary. I envisioned a large church that hosted concerts for non-
Christian
bands and fans on a phat sound system, embraced the
arts, trained young men to be godly husbands and fathers, planted
other churches, and led people
to work with Jesus Christ as missionaries
to our city.
Sadly, that church only existed in my mind, and the hard part
was figuring out how to get my vision into the minds of other
people
so that together we could build the church God had put in
my imagination.

Customer Reviews

Raw, Funny, and real
Raw.
We clicked because I drive a 1978 Chevy truck that gets single digits to the gallon and has a bacon air freshener and no functioning speedometer and because I fashion myself as the seld-appointed leader of a heterosexual male backlash in our overly chickified city filled with guys drinking herbal teal and rocking out to Mariah Carey in their lemon yellow Volkswagon Cabriolets while wearing fuchsia sweater vests that perfectly match their open-toed shoes. (p. 147)

Funny.
Scrambling for ideas, I agreed to cance a Sunday church service to let some of our long-haired public radio types take us outside to do a joint art project they had proposed....As a truck-driving jock who watches a lot of Ultimate Fighting, I can honestly say it was the gayest thing I have ever been a part of. (p. 71)

Real.
Emotionally, ministry proved to be more exhausting than I could have fathomed. Because I deeply loved my people and carried their burdens, the pains of our people's lives began to take a deep toll on me. Many nights were spent in prayer for people instead of sleeping, and even on what were supposed to be days off, my mind was consumed with the painful hardships and sinful rebellions of our people. (p. 68)

Mark Driscoll's latest book, Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church, is a fantastic look at life in ministry. I have a great deal of love and respect for Andy Stanley and Rick Warren, but their stories don't match my stories in ministry. Mark's story of the growth of his church is a wonderful and real look at a man on a mission, with strong theological convictions, and who loves Christ's church and the city of Seattle.

It is raw. He is blatanly honest. But if many could get away with it in ministry, we would do the same thing. He is a passionate man who doesn't have time to say things in flowery words. His story is real. It is an honest look at the hard life of ministry, and the pain and anguish we go through as ministers. And all the while, it's a picture of one sold out to Christ and his mission.

He is theologically conservative. He spends time unashamedly distancing himself from a hermeneutic that is liberal and relative. He believes the book, studies theology, and is passionate about teaching that.

Each of the chapters chronicle a period of time in the growth of Mars Hill. It is encouraging to see the struggles and the faith. It is encouraging to face many similar situations and see how others handled it.

I truly think this is a must read for all church planters and for those of us in ministry it should be highly considered. Few pastors are able to be real and transparent enough to let others see their pain and hardache and fears. Mark is a real man. And his story is compelling.

a needed second way in the Emerging chuch
I have read a thousand or two pages of "how to do church" books. I pastor at a church of about 900, and so it's par for the course. Most of them bore me these days. This one I read in three sittings.

There will be considerable criticism of this book. Mark didn't say what he was supposed to. He is pretty clear about what he thinks of Brian McLaren, the public pope of the Emergent church; and it isn't complimentary. He recommends both pragmatic evangelicals like Hybels and Warren and yet he affirms the work of their firm critics like Mark Dever and D.A Carson's work in his footnotes (a both-and I both agree with and am impressed with). He thinks masculinity should have content beyond plumbing, and even dares to refer to Grudem and Piper's book on the subject. That alone can get you stripped and beaten in some very loving evangelical circles.

He also says church people can be immature idiots and life sucking dead weight; like the Leech's two daughters that constantly cry, "give, give!" form Proverbs 30.

I was horrified.
I completely agree.

There will no doubt be many coming up with clever little shots at Driscoll and making pithy condescending remarks about the book. Mark has really opened himself up to that. I suspect he could care less, and I really appreciated that about his style.

No doubt many will find his style arrogant. It will be decried by the equally arrogant under the pretense of humility and nuances spiritual maturity. Many will be convinced. But it should be noted that Mark claims to have been arrogant and to be arrogant. He only claims that that doesn't necessarily make him wrong about what he is saying in this book, and about that he is right. Introspective indecisive hand wringing doesn't work as a dominant disposition when you're leading a church of more than a thousand people in the kind of context he is in. I know from experience. Nor does it particularly work in life unless you are interested in simply criticizing the position of others.

In terms of content, Mark has written his own leadership manifesto about making the hard choices, knowing your mission, learning from others, daring to be serious about the Bible's content in preaching and leadership decisions, allowing for messes, and focusing on spiritual growth if you want organizational growth.

Concerning his bits about the Emerging Church, perhaps his greatest bit was in a footnote. In that note that sprawls from pg. 203-205 he overviews looking into postmodernism as an epistemology, cultural phenomenon, the fruit of modern linguistic theory and post-structuralism, etc. He talks about reading in primary and secondary sources and finally concludes he's going to go ahead and stick with most of what Jesus was saying.

If you think that's simplistic, it's likely that either you're not in the subculture, are considerably more arrogant than Mark is, haven't read the literature or you don't have ears to hear (ie. have lost the will to find a culturally potent expression of Christian orthodoxy).

I have been in many social situations with Gen-X pastors or ministry folks who spoke with such arrogance in criticism of people who "just didn't get post modernism". I was sad because many of them knew more about postmodernism than the gospel

The greatest benefit of what this book is adding to is that there are now two clearly different options for those of us looking to the emerging church conversation for new ways to do church in the increasingly post-Christian West. Those of us that do not think Brian can get us where we want to go want another option. This is a much better one.

Mark Driscoll and Dan Kimball are needed to secure that second voice. And this book was needed to give some steam to that conversation. Mark Driscoll has done the church a service.

P.S.- I have no tattoos, I do wear pants, I do not carry a handgun, I am a Christian, and I'm a pastor in a mainline denominational church that is 98 years old. I'm only 29 though.

A friendly kick in the pants
Mark Driscoll is a pastor who finds himself at the center of controversy in Christian and non-Christian circles. His most recent book Confessions is "the story of the birth and growth of Seattle's innovative Mars Hill Church, one of America's toughest mission fields. It is also the story of the growth of a pastor, the mistakes he's made along the way, and God's grace and work in spite of these mistakes."

Why the Controversy? Driscoll doesn't fit in any category neatly. Tim Challies writes, "I am not the only one confused by Driscoll who is varyingly described as emerging, missional, Reformed, sarcastic and vulgar (all of which are true of him)." At times it looks like Driscoll goes out of his way to offend everyone. On the other hand, Driscoll is refreshingly candid and bold. I love it, but it seems to be too much for some.

The story of many "successful" churches have been tidied before going to print. Not here. Driscoll says, "I have made so many mistakes as a pastor that I should be pumping gas for a living instead of preaching the gospel." He begins with "Ten Curious Questions" designed to help clarify the church's identity, gospel, mission, size, and priorities. For instance, he asks which gospel we will proclaim: "a gospel of forgiveness, fulfillment, or freedom?" "Do you have the guts to shoot your dogs?" (He advises: "Dogs are idiotic ideas, stinky styles, stupid systems, failed facilities, terrible technologies, loser leaders, and pathetic people...Be sure to make it count and shoot them only once so that they don't come back and bite you." Now you know why he's controversial.)

For the rest of the book, Driscoll tells the story of Mars Hill from its start to the present and even his hopes for the future.

Takeaways and Memorable Quotes

"Attractional churches need to transform their people from being consumers in the church to being missionaries outside of the church." (p.27)

"The more I read the Bible, the more deeply the Holy Spirit convicted me that I had grievously erred by trying to figure out how to do church successfully by reading a lot of books, visiting a lot of churches, and copying whatever was working. Instead, I needed to first wrestle with Jesus like Jacob wrestled with Jesus and then discover what Jesus' mission was for Seattle and repent of everything else..." (p.44)

Developing biblical leadership to define, direct, and defend the mission is key (p.48). This requires toughness. "Sadly, the weakest men are often drawn to ministry simply because it is an indoor job that does not require heavy lifting." (p.54)

"I had to focus all of my time and energy on growing Mars Hill as a missional church for Seattle. Therefore I had to stop doing all other ministry work that was not accomplishing this objective." (p.52)

"I decided not to back off from a long-winded, old-school Bible preacher that focused on Jesus. My people needed to hear from God's Word and not from each other in collective ignorance like some dumb chat room...There is enough power in the preaching of God's Word alone to build a church from nothing" (pp.77-78)

"I have learned that sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is to create strategic chaos that forces people to pull together and focus on an urgent need, thereby subtly getting rid of all their other missions and complaints in a subversive way." (pp.82-83)

"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." (p.86)

"We were deciding if Mars Hill Church was to be defined by the size of its mission to reach the lost or by the number of people we could gather at one time in one room." (p.94)

In congregational ecclesiology, "The staff and the pastor are essentially seen as employees of the congregation, to be fired if they do not meet the expectations of their employer, the congregation. As I studied the Bible, I found more warrant for a church led by unicorns than by majority vote." (p.103)

"Over the years, I've just accepted that if I do not quickly open the back door when God is trying to run people out of our church, I am working against God by keeping sick people in my church so they can infect others. Indeed, the church is a body, and one of the most important parts is the colon. Like the human body, any church body without a colon is designed for sickness that leads to death." (p.131)

"We learned that unchurched people tend to be the most traditional when it comes to church." (p.132)

"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." (p.133)

"Slowly, the church will begin a cycle of decline unless it intentionally reinvents itself missionally to continue to grow by taking risks in an effort to reach lost people for Jesus." (p.141)

"The goal of the management phase is not to get the church organized and under control. Rather, the management phase is needed to eliminate the inefficiencies and barriers that are keeping the church from focusing back on the creative phase and creating a whole new set of problems to manage." (p.142)

Bottom Line - This book isn't for everyone. I enjoyed it, and saw it as a friendly and encouraging kick in the pants. If the above quotes appeal to you, then Confessions is a book that will help you in your ministry.