Results tagged “marshill”

The internet is indeed alluring and the source of many pleasures, and locals just can't keep their hands off her. This morning, we learn that Washington state legislators are ga-ga for Facebook (late pass! but welcome) and that Mars Hill Church has given worshippers the go-ahead to tweet during services (...ugh). Careful, guys: the world wide web is a cruel mistress. Forgive the Napoleon Dynamite reference, it was unavoidable.

Walking down Broadway, we smiled at the thought of these boots as evidence of some Raptured soul, but then wondered if, really, a pair of boots here and there is all we might see anyway. Odds seem pretty good.

Did any of our readers catch Mars Hill Church's feature on Nightline last night? ABC ran their three page 'summary' of the feature online yesterday with the beautiful headline, "Pastor Dude's Mega-Church Draws Crowds." (It's almost as good as the New York Times' Driscoll headline, "Who Would Jesus Smack Down?") We're wondering when the program will be online so we can catch the visuals. West Seattle Blog tweeted overnight that their site received a "miniblitz" of folks who had, presumably, seen the program and were googling for more info about Driscoll and homosexuality--a subject which didn't figure prominently in ABC's write-up. We love us some generous national media attention, don't we, Mars Hill?

Zondervan, "a world leader in Christian communications," says it's just bought Mars Hill's social-networking, community-building software The City (we prefer "Christbook"), which was the brainchild of ex-Amazonian Zack Hubert. Now Zondervan will roll the software out to online churched-up types all over, hoping to recreate the Mars Hill experience: "Mars Hill launched The City earlier this year to create a dynamic, engaging interactive online community for its more than 7,000 members. Within two months of launch more than 85% of the church's members had signed up and more than 75% visit the site every single day." That daily Bible reading plan must be a doozy.

-- "The texture of Seattle: Seattle feels, looks, tastes like the cinematic 1980s."

Tuesday, December 12

--"Who's at the door, honey?" "The Sonics!" "Uh, tell them I gave at the office."

The protest of the Mars Hill mega-church that we've been talking about for the past few weeks didn't go down as planned this weekend. It was called off at the last minute after Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll agreed to sit down with some of the organizers and discuss his egregious remarks towards women. Here is a recounting of that meeting and here is Driscoll's response to the protest. Below is an exchange we had with protest organizer Paul Chapman.

Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll is blowing up. His recent blog post on Ted Haggard, the meth smoking, gay prostitute hiring Colorado pastor displayed all of Mark's trademark bravado and bluster and unfortunately it probably made him as many new friends as new enemies and his apology for that post in no way apologizes for anything. And why should he? It's a very orchestrated campaign that presupposes, fosters and needs opposition.

Ok, our little shout-out to the organizers of the Mars Hill direct action earlier today worked, and we're sorry to be so pushy about it, but we're glad it worked. We should have done that days ago.

We wanted to get behind the direct action against Mars Hill because we too believe that Mark Driscoll is a woman-hating weirdo and it annoys us that he has such a huge congregation that seems to consider itself so punk rock. We kind of doubt that that they're particularly ill-informed on the issue of their pastor's attitudes towards women (uh, doesn't he speak directly to them every week?), but there's a chance that there are some hipsters in that crowd that legitimately don't know what's going on (always a safe assumption of hipsters) and if we can help get some people together to raise awareness of the brand of Christianity that's being practiced at Mars Hill, great.

A website entitled "People Against Fundamentalism" is setting up a direct action against the Seattle megachurch Mars Hill for December 3rd at 11am outside their Ballard campus to protest the preachings of Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll. There is a certain...passion to the website's descriptions of Mark and his attitudes towards women, as you can see here:

--A truly fantastic feature by Greg Bishop of the Seattle Times about three UW football players who quit the team in 1970, claiming racial discrimination. They kept a pact never to reveal the source of the discrimination until now.

-Outdoor advertising leviathan Clear Channel got a contract to wrap some Seattle community transit buses in their advertising.

Mars Hill is killing the Paradox not by closing it, but by taking over its operation. The Ballard church opened an all-ages music venue named the Paradox as a youth ministry/outreach type of thing in 1999, but after a lot of complaining about concert-goers being baited with cool bands only to get switched to Mars Hill's conservative religious agenda the megachurch loosed the reins on the Paradox and today it runs with no involvement from the church whatsoever, aside from the space it rents.

Last week when Salon came to town to check in on the Ballard megachurch Mars Hill there was a lot of commenting here and elsewhere, both condemning the church and inviting non-believers to attend a service. The proprietress at the local Electrolicious blog took them up on it and went to Mars Hill this Sunday, and today Seattlest sits down with the resulting post for a chat.

Yesterday we did a post on Mars Hill and their big article on Salon.com and we definitively established that they're a cult in the comments. So that's settled. Today we've got to mention them again because the Mars Hill blog announced overnight that they'll be up and running in West Seattle on October 1st, but it won't be at their new facility out there because it won't be ready in time. For the time being they'll be holding services at Chief Sealth High School. West Seattle Blog wonders if anyone will care about this comingling of church and state.

Why is it that all the of the really seductive ideas that are flowing out of Seattle right now and gaining currency around the country come from groups that we barely acknowledge the existence of, much less revere as city institutions? First, intelligent design has its fifteen minutes in the sun, and now Mars Hill is taking over the planet, at least according to Salon this week.

Megachurches excite us in the way a NASCAR race excites us. We don't get it, but we want to get it, or, at least, witness it. The image we've gotten of megachurches recently intrigues. A vast mall with Tulalip Casino style parking set off the highway. Inside, the bolo ties of the faithful dip into sausage gravy and the shopping errands saved up throughout the week serve as an excuse to make the rounds. There's some kind of dance routine in the lobby where scantily-clad daughters worship in their synchronized way while proud fathers tuck their shirts deeper into their jeans. Eventually everyone files into something like an auditorium and someone charismatic with impeccable hair walks energetically around the stage for forty five minutes.