Now that everyone has stopped talking about Mike Cosper’s podcast series on the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church, published by Christianity Today, I thought it was high time to wade in. Leave it to 9Marks for a Pony Express delivery of hot takes.
Cosper’s podcast reminds me of Blue Like Jazz. Like Don Miller’s iconic 2003 book, it’s well-crafted and cool. More than that, both products caught the cultural winds at just the right moment, accelerating their popularity. A sailboat might be well-made, but it still needs wind. And Cosper and Miller found fortuitous weather conditions.
Blue Like Jazz caught the postmodern, anti-consumeristic, and anti-megachurch gales that the Gen-X kids who grew up in 1980s and 90s youth-groups felt around the turn of the millennium. He embodied their vibe and expressed their misgivings better than anyone. Cosper has caught recent gusts of growing existential angst over complementarianism and Calvinism, abuse and authority, engendered by everything from the #MeToo movement to anti-Trump exasperation. Driscoll’s message and leadership style, after all, are the Platonic ideal of what today’s climate can’t stand. No one else thought to do this in a dramatized podcast form, but now that Cosper’s done it,
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