What Do We Do After 'The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill' Podcast?
Like many of you, I’ve been devouring episodes of the “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” podcast from Christianity Today. But, with the end of the podcast now here, what is next?
Well, I’ve already set out some preliminary Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill after listening to the first few episodes and I think they still hold true now that the series has finished.
To be honest, I found the last two episodes actually riveting, vexing, alarming, perplexing, how it all unraveled, and what was exposed. Oh boy, I mean everyone in ministry should listen to this stuff.
But what next? What will Mike Cosper do next? What should we listen to next? What or who needs to be exposed next?
Well, I’m sure Mike Cosper has his own plans for the new year, even if it is seeing a therapist.
But as I think about this, I have to ask, whether my craving for more is really good or even healthy. Are we now addicted to church celebrity failure porn, munching on popcorn as we learn the sordid details of how the mighty have fallen from grace and roll our eyes at the debris around them? Or, is this really cathartic, and a salutary warning about what happens when power, platforms, consumerism, and church converge at an unholy intersection? To be honest, probably a bit of both!
So what should the next big church expose be about?
Maybe we need a series about Bill Hybels and Willow Creek, Ravi Zacharias and RZIM, or … what?
Or maybe we need a break from the negativity, and something a bit better for our morale, and for our souls. Perhaps a good news story, a story of grace and Christ-like character, triumph in the face of adversity. It would be nice to listen to something that makes me cheery rather than confused, angry, and a little depressed.
I don’t know the answer, like many of you I’m taking stock of what happened at Mars Hill, why it happened, how it happened, and what that means for me as a Christian leader.
I don’t know what the next big thing is gonna be, all I know is this, Jesus is still Lord of his church, his bride, and that bride needs to take a good look at herself right now in certain parts of the global church.
One temptation to all his exposure of toxicities in churches will be to tell stories of good churches, and we will end up valorizing them and the next thing we will be creating more celebrity pastors and celebrity churches. Which at least in part got us into this trouble. We resisted telling good stories of living pastors and churches in A Church called Tov for that very reason. I know you are not suggesting this one bit and are instead saying we’ve had enough of the exposure (I mostly agree) but we have a hero problem in evangelicalism and it needs to be dealt a death blow, and perhaps these exposures will accomplish that.
Not a podcast, but Winn Collier’s bio of Eugene Peterson “A Burning In My Bones” has been a nice antidote to all of the dismay of Mars Hill and the like.
I’m sure plenty of people are aware of it. But wanted to share as a way of pointing towards something a bit more life giving, especially for anyone in ministry.