I first began to hear about Mark Driscoll’s Christian sex series in September. Mr. Driscoll, 37, is the founder/pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, one of the nation’s most unchurched metropolises. The church, which went from 1,200 to 6,000 people in four years, boasts about 7,000 congregants at several campuses around town.
I’ve never met the man, but I have attended his church, which I found a tad too Gen X for me, plus the music was unsingable and the people were unfriendly. But Mr. Driscoll does have a way of taking the culture by the horns, as he did with his “Peasant Princess” series that ended Nov. 30. He’s kind of like Bruce Springsteen with a clerical collar (although Mr. Driscoll wears jeans, not clerical shirts); a blue-collar, working-class kind of guy who preaches it raw.
The “peasant princess” is the female character in the biblical book of the Song of Songs, the Old Testament’s erotic description of the love between a man and a woman. Mr. Driscoll calls it a “Christian marital pyrotechnics manual.”
So in September, the Seattle pastor began preaching, accompanied by his wife, Grace, about sex. Posts on his pastor’s blog went R-rated, especially in November, when the Driscolls were dishing out advice on everything from masturbation to sex toys. The response had to be biblical, thus replies like these to a question on why God gives young men strong sexual desires:
“To motivate them toward growing up and honorably taking a wife,” Mr. Driscoll wrote. “Nearly every man wants to have sex. The issue is which woman he will have sex with. If he grows up, leaves home, walks with God, pursues his career and then marries his bride to enjoy her biblically, then his love for her was part of God’s motivation to turn a boy into a man by making him take manly responsibility.”
I listened in on a few of his sermons at www.marshill church.org, then stumbled into an ongoing debate on how culturally relevant one should be to attract the lost. Mr. Driscoll, a theological conservative, has his enemies. Words like “vulgar”and “profane” fill the evangelical blogosphere about his ministry.
Bible teacher John MacArthur, writer of a now-famous Dec. 11, 2006, column, “Grunge Christianity,” termed the Seattle preacher’s vocabulary and subject matter as “tasteless, indecent, crude, and utterly inappropriate for a minister of Christ.”
Being that evangelicals rarely trash each other by name, these kind of mudfights are quite entertaining. Blogs that dissect Mr. Driscoll’s theology easily attract hundreds of posts, 99 percent of them written by men.
Many of Mr. Driscoll’s detractors have problems with some quasi-sexually explicit passages in his 2006 book, “Confessions of a Reformission Rev” and his sensational way of spreading the Gospel. But everything I’ve listened to from Mars Hill is pretty tame. So the pastor talks about oral sex? So did evangelical authors Tim and Beverly LaHaye in their 1976 best-seller “The Act of Marriage.”
What was different about this series is how people in church were able to text message their queries to the pastor live after the sermon.
“A lot of non-Christians come to the church and they have some very interesting questions,” Mr. Driscoll told Seattle’s KOMO-TV Channel 4 News this summer. “If they can’t ask their pastor, I don’t know who they are going to ask.”
• Julia Duin’s Stairway to Heaven column runs Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail Julia Duin.
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