Pastor as frat boy jock

By Lee Russ

Monday, December 04, 2006 at 11:48 AM

How do you know when your pastor is too immature for his job?  How about when he sounds exactly like a frat boy jock taking to his college buddies.

Mars Hill pastor responds to uproar over blog posts on women
Driscoll 'sad and sorry' some took issue

P-I STAFF

A protest in Ballard Sunday against an Evangelical pastor's rhetoric about women was called off after a local citizens group said the pastor agreed to tone it down, if not abandon his philosophy.

Pastor Mark Driscoll, who founded Mars Hill Church, issued a statement on his Web site saying he hasn't changed his philosophy about women's roles, but he was "sad and sorry to hear that various things I have said over the years have been received very personally by some people who felt personally attacked."

Driscoll made the statement after meeting Thursday with his critics to negotiate a truce of sorts.

The group had organized a protest at the church's Ballard site to call wider public attention to Driscoll.

Protest organizer Paul Chapman, who also founded a group called People Against Fundamentalism, said he and others in his camp considered some of Driscoll's rhetoric "demeaning and pejorative" against women.

"I found it degrading and completely against what's taught in the Bible" -- that people should love and respect all others, said Amelia Pitts, one of a group of about 20 who showed up for the scheduled protest Sunday before it was canceled.

In particular, Chapman and his supporters mentioned earlier entries from Driscoll's blog, one of which suggested to some that the wife of evangelical leader Ted Haggard was partly to blame for his contacts with a gay prostitute.

"A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him, either," Driscoll wrote.

In another blog entry, Driscoll reinforced the concept of a Holy Trinity - "Father, Son and Spirit. But some chicks and some chickified dudes with limp wrists and minors in 'women's studies' are not happy because two persons of the trinity have a dude-ish ring."

In another entry, Driscoll expounded on the recent appointment of a woman as an Episcopalian bishop, saying that "if Christian males do not man up soon, the Episcopalians may vote a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God's men."

Former divinity student Lindell Alderman said others who called for the protest were concerned that Driscoll's influence had spread to a congregation of several thousand and to a popular podcast.

I love that "he hasn't changed his philosophy about women's roles..."  Do frat boy jocks really have a "philosophy?" (You want stereotypes?  OK; take a look at his picture at the P-I link--think he just might have been a college jock?) Or just a bunch of shallow stereotypes that serve their ego by showing how superior they are to some other group?  But I guess it was too much too hope that he would simply acknowledge that "he hasn't changed his shallow stereotypes about women's roles..."

And what does it say about the members of this guy's congregation?