The Church in Dark Times Quotes

“As Driscoll’s celebrity rose, things inside the church grew rotten. Driscoll was temperamental and unpredictable. Staff members and volunteers faced unreasonable demands on their time. Dissenters were cast out and crushed. Policy, official language, and quasi-theological jargon emerged to keep order. A leader would disappear from the community, and the church would be ​told to avoid them. “They’d gone negative,” leaders would say, with little to no more explanation. If you asked questions, you’d be told, “Trust your elders.” That was usually all it took. If you pushed too hard, you too might be perceived as “going negative” and, in the language of Stalinist Russia, become a nonperson. For most Mars Hill members, theologizing conflict and coded language was enough to keep dissent from growing too great. While it was a little more complex for staff and leaders, the church bureaucracy prevented them from bearing too much of the burden of spiritual abuse.”
― Mike Cosper, The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement

“The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Mars Hill Seattle was planted by a handful of people in 1996. By 2013, it had become one of the largest and fastest-growing churches in the country, with anywhere from twelve to fifteen thousand people gathering in more than a dozen locations across five states. Then, on December 31, 2014, the church closed its doors forever. Mars Hill’s pastor, Mark Driscoll, is a charismatic communicator with an eye for the cultural “moment,” and he tapped into the malaise of Gen Xers with a message of purpose, certainty, and identity. He surrounded himself with an extraordinary team of musicians, graphic designers, videographers, audio engineers, and entrepreneurs, all of whom saw making Mars Hill successful as a mission from God. When Mark’s charisma and sense of authority was combined with their ability to package, brand, and distribute him via emerging streams—social media, YouTube, podcasting—Mars Hill found an international audience.”
― Mike Cosper, The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement

“It takes a village to abuse a child.” ​Likewise, it takes a village to enable sexual and spiritual abuse of all kinds in our churches. Our institutional bureaucracies—which might be as small as a steering committee or as large as a Fortune 500 company—provide a structure to constrain the impact of abuse while rarely addressing the abuse itself. Each member of the institution plays their part like a worker on an assembly line; none of them realize they’re in a factory that produces victims.1”
― Mike Cosper, The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement