Licentiousness

In Confessions of a Reformission Rev: Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church (2006) Mark Driscoll wrote, ‘Our church was still nearly all college students and singles, with a few young married couples and families with small children mixed in. I assumed the students and singles were all pretty horny, so I went out on a limb and preached through the Song of Solomon in the fall. I printed up a nice lengthy introduction to the book, with a lot of information about sex and marriage… Each week, I extolled the virtues of marriage, foreplay, oral sex, sacred stripping and sex outdoors, just as the book teaches, because all Scripture is indeed profitable. I was frank but not crass and did not back away from any of the tough issues regarding sex and pleasure. This helped us a lot because apparently a pastor using words like “penis” and “oral sex” is unusual; and before you could say “aluminum pole in the bedroom”, attendance began to climb steadily to more than two hundred people a week.’ (pp94, 96) Driscoll’s fame has been achieved largely through his explicit sexual messages from the pulpit, based on his interpretation of the Song of Solomon, which he handles as a sex manual for married couples.

Driscoll writes about the occasional R-rated movie at church: ‘Pastor James continues to lead our monthly film and theology class, at which attendance rises to more than two hundred people depending on the film.  He continues to show an occasional unedited R-rated movie to train our people to think critically about the themes preached through film, which is the new cultural form of preaching.’  (Confessions, p.157)

Cathy Mickel in her memorandum to church leaders says that some of the information and material advocated by Mark Driscoll is so tawdry and immoral that she does not feel comfortable in providing details. She writes: ‘Therefore, I am providing the two links below, which contain Mark Driscoll’s sexual advice to Christian couples. With the permission of Dr. Judith Reisman, I am also including her professional response to these sites. Her expertise and knowledge in this area makes Mark Driscoll’s recommendations all the more disturbing: ‘Well, this is, at best, tragic. I don’t know if it is worse to think that these are phony church sites put out by pornographers or that they are real church sites put out by pornified churches. Words cannot describe the ignorance, arrogance and flagrant homoeroticism of these sites.’ JA Reisman, PhD”

(http://blog.marshillchurch.org/2008/11/30/question-21-can-i-perform-anal-sex-on-my-wife/ and http://blog.marshillchurch.org/2008/11/30/question-22-can-we-use-sex-toys/)

Mark Driscoll has fun answering sexually explicit questions

Screen print from Mars Hill website:

But foolish and unlearned questions avoid (2 Timothy 2.23)

Driscoll explains the above warning:

“Pastor Mark here from Mars Hill Church in Seattle. We are putting forth a lot of content, and we’ve broken it down into two categories – offensive and really offensive. This content would fall into the really offensive category, the reason being it’s not the typical kind of thing that is said in a church. To be fair, we’re in the least churched city in America, and the services tend to include a lot of non-Christians and new Christians, our evening services don’t have childcare or families at all, and so we allow people to ask questions by a text message. Sometimes I’ll teach things that are very intense and you wouldn’t normally hear in a home school or a world church with ladies who have head coverings and guys who churn their own butter. Nonetheless, the content is, I think, great fun. You, however, may want to view it before letting your children do so. and if you are a minor you should get your parents permission because this is rated MH-17.

What you’re about to experience is usual, and it’s an experiment that we’ve undertaken regarding text messaging. Here’s how it works—during the course of a live service, while I’m preaching, we allow those who are in attendance to text in a question they would like me to answer on the topic or text that I’m preaching. Those them are filtered and screened, sent directly to me on the stage and without any notification or preparation, live on the spot, from my gut, for better or worse, I answer the question – honest, real, live, raw content made up on the spot. And so this is one example of what that looks like.”

Encouraging provocative and foolish questions in the church is in direct opposition to the teaching of Scripture. ‘But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes’ (2 Timothy 2.23). Driscoll not only encourages foolish questions, he takes great delight in answering them, from his gut, for better or worse. This is another example of ungodly conduct in the church. See Is Mark Driscoll a false teacher?

Remember, what Mark Driscoll likes about the ‘gospel’ of the emerging church is that it allows freedom. The above format allows Driscoll the freedom to discuss the most sexually explicit issues, which he does with great relish. Under the pretext of answering questions about sex, Driscoll leads his listeners into the lusts of the flesh.

“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality” (Galatians 5.19).

You can learn more about Mark Driscoll’s ministry in the book, The New Calvinists (2014), published by The Wakeman Trust and Belmont House Publishing.