E43 "Reflections of the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill E9"

Episode 9 “The Bobby Knight Problem”

Pastor Ted Haggard from the Documentary "Jesus Camp" got caught doing meth with a male prostitute. 

Why pastors have sexual moral failings? Mark said it was because pastors' wives let themselves go and weren't willing to have open  and exciting sex with their husbands. 

Do the ends justify the means? Is it better to lose or to hold onto our morals and ethics? Bobby Knight normalized abusive behavior. Building fear keeps people from coming against you. James McDonald lost his job for domineering and bullying just as Bobby Knight did. 

The modern expectation of what we are getting from a church… for the church to be big enough to deliver on our evangelical expectations of “church”, the people who believe that they can deliver on those expectations and can endure what it takes to grow an organization  to that point are often the most unhealthy people.

If Bobby Knight will throw a chair across a basketball court with everyone watching and it being taped, what would he do behind closed doors? And if Mark Driscoll is willing to say wild stuff during a sermon on a Sunday morning, what do you think he’s like behind closed doors when not everyone gets to hear what he has to say?

The Latin word for media just means the middle and that’s what media is; it’s the thing that stands in the middle that everything gets interpreted through, like a lens, and there’s not a major church in America today that doesn’t mediate and show a certain version of itself and is it really good at that. A lot of people say the hardest person to hire for a mega church is the media person. Churches are firing youth staff so they can hire more media people. What does that say about a church? They know the dangers of people not really knowing you and what social media can do to people but at the end of the day they still upload their sermon every Sunday and push send.

How has our mediated way of connecting and communicating with people added to the culture of isolation that we are part of?

Everyone wants to be princess Diana and everyone wants to be Mother Theresa. Anyone can be Mother Teresa but not everyone can be Diana and marry a prince, but the reason we won’t be the next Mother Theresa is because we don’t want the suffering and humiliation that comes along with affecting peoples lives through the Jesus way because that way and path involves suffering.

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