My Community Break-Up Story

Life in Community, Part 2 of 3

Today’s post is the 2nd in a 3-part series on my life in community. If you need to catch up and read the first one, you can find it here. This is a pretty raw post, because after attending a funeral on Friday, I scrapped what I’d already written for today and barfed this out instead.

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Hi, it’s me. Today feels like a bummer, so I’m going to skip the small talk and jump right into what’s on my mind. Bryan and I went to a memorial service on Friday for someone we knew a long time ago. It’s been maybe 15 or 20 years since we were last in community with him, so the occasion reunited hundreds of people we hadn’t seen in a good long while. It was beautiful and complicated. There was a lot to mourn that evening besides the soul we were there to remember.

You may or may not have heard the saga of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, depending on your proximity to Evangelicalism now or in the early 2000s. If this hasn’t been on your radar and you’re curious, just google “Mark Driscoll” or “Mars Hill Church Seattle” and you can get caught up to speed. It's an epic story that people have written books about, big newspapers have reported on, and podcasters have chronicled. The tl;dr is that a young man named Mark Driscoll started a church in Seattle over two decades ago. It grew fast, and so did his ego. Manipulation and abuse happened, the church imploded in 2014, and Mark came out of it unscathed. He started a new church a couple years later in Phoenix, where he leads with a Righteous Gemstones kinda vibe.

I found Mars Hill Fellowship, as it was called back then, in the late 90s. I was in my 20’s and had just come back from living in New York for a couple of years. I’d also just ended a serious but codependent relationship with my boyfriend after realizing I couldn’t “fix” his addiction. Up to this point my entire church experience had been pretty formal, with “church clothes” and rules about dancing and Rated R movies and drinking. I could listen to this music but not that music, watch these shows but not those, hang out with these people but hold those people at arm’s length (unless I was “witnessing” to them!). The compartmentalization never made sense to me, even as a teenager. 

Mars Hill was different. 

People wore jeans to church. They had tattoos and face piercings. They played in well known local bands. Their worship songs were filled with doubt and angst. Art was appreciated - good art, not White Jesus art. Mark called men to grow up, get a job, and settle down to raise a family. As someone who had just ended a self destructive relationship that was going nowhere good, this new community felt like a safe, trusted space. They would look out for me. We would look out for each other. My whole life I had seen Christians as shiny happy people who lived in their very exclusive Jesus Club, but here was a community of dented and rusty Believers who loved Jesus in a way that made sense to me. The lines were blurrier, there was just music, not Christian music. There were just friends, not Christian friends. This, a stark contrast from the Christian community I had New York that scoffed at my participation in an adult softball league with *gasp* nonChristians. 

Over the years, outsiders have expressed judgement and strong opinions about the kind of person who falls for a guy like Mark, like we’re stupid or gullible. I get it. It’s easy to see us as a monolith, to overlook our backstories, to hear the sound bites and cringe at how obviously deranged he was. I get how easy it is to believe you would never fall for something, or someone, like that. But the thing is, we didn’t just hear the sound bites – we lived the full transcript in all its complexity. And it was definitely not cut and dried, not at first.

There was a time before it all went sideways when Mark was like a big brother to me, and I ended up working as his assistant. This would never be tolerated in his world now, but I used to hang out in his office and give him rides in my car and generally have a normal relationship with someone who was like a brother. Sometimes your brother is a dick and says stupid shit, but he’s your brother so you hip check his ego and move on. You don’t automatically jump to thinking your brother might be an egotistical misogynist. That thought comes years later when you manage to line up a pattern and realize this whole time you’ve been a frog sitting in a pot of water that has slowly arrived at its boiling point. 

In the early days, Mars Hill Fellowship was all about living in and loving the culture around us, not separating into our own subculture like the churches I had experienced before. The tagline we lived and breathed was "Meaning | Beauty | Truth | Community."  Eventually Mark dropped the tagline and curiously changed the name from Mars Hill Fellowship to Mars Hill Church, effectively changing its identity from a community to an institution. He reversed course, moved to the hard right of the Evangelical bubble, and became what he used to mock. This divided the community inside Mars Hill. To some, Mark could do no wrong. To others, me included, Mark had detoured far far away from the community we had originally signed on to build. 

Header image from the old website (special thanks to Ben Vandermeer).

I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of the downward spiral, but if you’ve seen division and broken relationships among friends and family with differing political views dating back to the 2016 election campaign cycle, then you understand the conflict, rhetoric, and loss of community we experienced in the years leading up to Mars Hill’s official implosion in 2014. Suddenly the Zugs were blacklisted. Friends broke up with us, and we never spoke again. Text threads went silent, ending on several unanswered messages from me pleading for a coffee date to talk things through. The entire community was divided. Bryan and I had to explain to our elementary school aged kids that we wouldn't see their friends anymore, or that the cool couple who took them ice skating wouldn’t be back. I think the biggest mind fuck during that time was the number of people who hissed at me, “I LOVE my pastor! I LOVE this church!” as if I didn’t. As if I couldn’t love my pastor AND hold him accountable for his behavior, as brothers and sisters do.

When interviewed by Mike Cosper for a podcast he produced called The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill Church, I started reminiscing about the community Mark built in the early days, but I stopped myself mid sentence. “Actually, Mark didn’t do that,” I corrected myself. “We did that. We as a community built the community culture at Mars Hill.” That was us. It was never Mark’s thing. Now that I look back on it, Mark was a recluse. He dropped in to preach, then went home to eat wings and watch MMA. Someone later pointed out that Mark alone held life and death power over our community in the form of a legal structure. He didn’t participate in it, but he had the power to topple the structure holding it together. It’s like if someone pulled the plug on Facebook or Twitter and all the connections you had there were suddenly gone, only it happened to us in real life. 

I realize this is an uncomfortably long post about a church community, and you may or may not be into church. But most of us can relate to broken friendships, families, or communities. Some relationships eventually get repaired, but some don’t. Sometimes we get invited to a wedding or a funeral, and suddenly we’re hyper aware of our feelings around who else might be there. I chose to attend that funeral last week, but I know people who didn’t. No shade to any of us in that regard, we all heal differently. 

This post feels like a mess and I don't really know how to end it. So here is where I’ll leave you today, reflecting on a memorial service for a man, but also for a community lost. I know it’s kind of a bummer to end here, but it's like the scene from Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, and we’re all thinking, “How the hell did we get to Cloud City in the first place??” Mars Hill Church was a Cloud City chapter of our lives that ended badly, but it’s not the end of the story. 

Part 3 is coming next week. Despite the heartbreak we experienced, Bryan and I still can’t quit community. Next week I’ll share what I think really matters when building strong, healthy communities. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Until then,

Jen

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News + Notes

One of the best books I’ve read on reconciling communities is I Never Thought of it That Way, by Monica Guzman. This is her personal story, but also a super practical guide for how to break through surface rhetoric and get to the heart of someone else’s perspective. If you’re experiencing conflict in your family or community and need a guide for how to navigate those relationships with love and curiosity, read this book. I highly recommend it.

From the publisher:

Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity. 

In this timely, personal guide, Mónica, the chief storyteller for the national cross-partisan depolarization organization Braver Angels, takes you to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt—broken conversations among confounded people. She shows you how to overcome the fear and certainty that surround us to finally do what only seems impossible: understand and even learn from people in your life whose whole worldview is different from or even opposed to yours. 

In these pages, you’ll learn: 

• How to ask what you really want to know (even if you’re afraid to)

• How to grow smarter from even the most tense interactions, online or off

• How to cross boundaries and find common ground—with anyone

Whether you’re left, right, center, or not a fan of labels: If you’re ready to fight back against the confusion, heartbreak, and madness of our dangerously divided times—in your own life, at least—Mónica’s got the tools and fresh, surprising insights to prove that seeing where people are coming from isn’t just possible. It’s easier than you think.