Tony Jones on Mark Driscoll: What came first, the thug or the theology?

Just a couple more thoughts.

1. Sarah’s post reminds me strongly of watching defenders of Clarence Thomas speak of him during his confirmation hearings. They were very calm, thoughtful, believable women who just honestly could not even conceive of him doing what he was being accused of doing. And yet he had done those things, as others (besides Anita Hill) who knew a different side of him were perfectly prepared to say under oath. Those defenders weren’t lying, but they also weren’t qualified to speak to those allegations.

2. There is a very large burden on people who call themselves pastors. They’re like teachers and parents, in the sense that what they say and do (or fail to say and do) is going to echo in their congregations forever. This site exists because so many people have been damaged by the behavior of men (nearly always men) who, when trusted with their spiritual well-being, gave it all the tender care of a blind ox.

3. There’s an EB White story/free verse poem called The Door, in which he names a series of things that once represented hope. It’s about despair. This language has stuck in my head for more than forty years:
“First they would teach you the prayers and the Psalms, and that would be the right door(the one with the circle) and the long sweet words with the holy sound, and that would be the one to jump at to get where the food was. Then one day you jumped and it didn’t give way, so that all you got was the bump on the nose, and the first bewilderment, the first young bewilderment.”

He’s naming the special terribleness of realizing that church — which ought to be a refuge — can also shut its doors against you. This thread isn’t resonating because TJ is such a bad guy or because people take pleasure in watching someone get called out for hypocrisy. It’s resonating because it hurts to trust that much in an institution only to find out that it (and the people in it) do not care what happens to you.

That’s the wrong we’re trying to right, and not just for Julie.

All, I accept the apologies that I have received to date, and I would hope for more, but I am not expecting any. I think the larger focus should be on the issue of how to dismantle a toxic culture that operates very similar to Mars Hill. I wish my story on no person! It was and is awful. I gave my honest and true account of all events. I am confident the ones at ground zero will spin and deny, and that is their choice. Coming clean is hard for people. For those on the discernment team, if you were a pawn that is very unfortunate and I would absolutely owe you an apology. I guess I will never fully know. I pray that the Holy Spirit would use my story to help others. Encourage others to speak up and call out when they experience injustice or if they are a bystander. Peace, Julie

Sarah, having me arrested in front of my kids to take a run at flipping custody is present day activity. I can email you the Ex Parte document where he says, “because their mother is arrested, I ask for immediate custody.” Thankfully a wise judge saw through it and denied it. Did you read that account above? I do appreciate your response. However, I am not sure how you would reconcile what others have witnessed and wrote about here. The smear campaign. That is your choice. Your voice and others are welcome but you are speaking at at JoPa event coming up so, I imagine that would be difficult to entirely separate. Thank you for sharing your view.

I am the Sarah Cunningham who commented very early on in the thread. I offered, at that time, my opinion that if you take Tony’s post about Driscoll in the context of all Tony has said about Pastor Mark, it’s very clear that Tony does not “reflect the refusal of the church to understand spiritual abuse” as David observed.

The full record, as I have read it, actually shows that Tony has actually written against Driscoll’s spiritual abuses so many times that one might actually conclude Tony is an example of how the church DOES SOMETIMES CONFRONT ABUSE. His relentless calling out of Driscoll’s abuses, in fact, is heavy-handed not understated in my opinion.

In this post (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2012/03/22/mark-driscolls-house-of-cards/), for example, Tony points out that the problems were NOT just theological, but that “Mark Driscoll has fired pastors and elders who had the gall to question his leadership” and “Petry expressed concern that Driscoll was having the by-laws rewritten to consolidate his power.”

In this one (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/03/06/how-mark-driscoll-gamed-the-publishing-game/), he drew attention to how “Mark Driscoll and his church hired a firm that used a thousand different credit cards and thousands of individual names — the names were supplied by the church — to drive Driscoll’s marriage book onto the bestseller lists.”

Here Tony criticized Driscoll for using his celebrity to start a Twitter campaign critiquing the President’s faith because it is different than Driscoll’s own. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/01/23/responding-to-mark-driscoll-with-the-bible/

While I don’t want to burden this post with too many more specific examples, there are PLENTY more criticisms in the 17 PAGES of posts Tony wrote criticizing Driscoll’s abuses at this link if you’d like to investigate. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/?s=mark+driscoll

Later my comments were referred to dismissively as if my opinion, based on having read all of Tony’s posts on Mark, was invalid JUST BECAUSE I happen to be a speaker at Christianity21.

I understand why that conclusion was drawn, but I would like to pause and offer some additional nuance into who I am.

My name is Sarah Cunningham. And I am a moderate EVANGELICAL. Although I consider one of my former pastor and some of my former church staff to have participated in emergent, I was not part of the Emergent movement myself. Prior to a year ago, I never attended an Emergent event and never used the label to describe myself, nor do I use it now. I have even declined the opportunity to be more involved in some progressive Christian events, because labels like Emergent and Progressive do not reflect my theological positions and do not always FIT with how I see or practice faith.

As a young Christian, I even asked my publisher NOT to brand my book with any Emergent markings because despite having respect for some of the attitudes within it, Emergent was not how I identified. This was so true that in this book, Dear Church: Letters From a Disillusioned Generation (Zondervan, 2006), I wrote phrases like these:

It can’t ever be a tag like “relevant” or “emergent” or even “seeker” or “purpose-driven.” Churches can’t pay an association fee or read a certain book in order to be listed on some online directory of “authentic churches.” Authenticity doesn’t work that way.——

I don’t always want to call myself a Christian…..The emergent church opts for “Christ-follower” which, I have to admit, is the best term I’ve got as well. (But darn it, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as “emergent” either.)——

In the book, I also quoted some of D.A. Carson’s criticisms of the emergent movement.

With this background, I’d like to give you the full disclosure on how I know Tony.

I first met Tony at the National Pastor’s Convention in either 2007 or 2008. Our interaction there was brief and uneventful. Not long after that, I began attending a yearly gathering of Christian leaders in Philadelphia where Tony was also in attendance. Despite being in different places on the Christian spectrum and having many theological differences, our friendship began there. Over the years, I have had the chance to work closely with Tony as well. I did contract work for a brand Tony also did work for. And I speak and have helped with organizing Christianity21—a conference Tony runs—because I hope to help create a place where people from diverse Christian camps—such as Tony (who came from the Congregational Church and now blogs for a progressive platform) and me (who grew up in the Southern Baptist tradition who identifies as a moderate) can come and share ideas and interact respectfully.

I want to be especially clear, then, when I emphasize that Tony and I do not see eye to eye theologically. I am more conservative than him and that has led to many discussions between us. We have spent hours in person and on the phone discussing our differences in our theology, and I have freely and frankly disagreed with him so many times we both have likely lost count. But suffice to say, I have called him more than once to push back on blog posts where I disagreed with his tone and/or content and each time, he has spent the time to fully hear me, has validated my voice, and sought to learn with me. In one case, we even spelled out our disagreements in a blog post. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/11/27/maybe-schism-was-the-wrong-word/

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the evangelical world I come from, it’s important for me to mention that many people from where I come from do NOT see Tony as someone who would advance my career as a moderate evangelical since he is such a provocative critic of many in my camp. In fact, if anything, some of the people at the conservative presses who published my books probably wish I DIDN’T interact with Tony because his theology is considered harmful and his reputation as a progressive is sometimes perceived as dangerous. So when I come to Tony’s defense, please understand that I do not do so in an effort to boost my career. In fact, I possibly defend him at the risk of raising eyebrows in my home tradition. But I do it in an effort to honor my genuine and meaningful friendship with him—to tell you the unexpected truth about how I came to dearly respect someone that many in my camps would vilify.

With that, because David has welcomed everyone’s voices in an attempt to discern truth, I’d like to offer a couple thoughts.

I certainly cannot speak to Tony and Julie’s marriage. I do not have any first hand information about this time in their lives, nor is my expertise in marital counseling. No one besides Tony and Julie know what happened there, and their accounts are very different.

While I cannot myself question Julie based on my knowledge, I think it is fair to at least point out that there is legal documentation and testimony to support that Julie’s side is not the only side of the story. That divorce, as we would all expect, is messy and dark, and ex-spouses rarely agree on how or why it got that way.

Being honest about my inability to speak to that, I WOULD like to leave you with my own experience. I have and still do work with people from across the Christian spectrum. I often serve in “middle ground”areas between progressives and conservatives and as a result, have experienced community—both highs and lows—with many tribes.

Although there have been times where Tony and I do not see eye to eye, I want you to know that no other man I have worked with from the right to the left has treated me better as a co-leader, habitually asking for and respecting my point of view, and insisting that I co-shape shared projects as an equal than Tony Jones. In fact, if at any point I ever default to language that implies Tony is my superior, he has halted the conversation and told me that he never wants me to talk that way; that I am an equal and co-creator in anything we do. This has always struck me as refreshing since unfortunately, I also know what it is like for people to treat me as if I am the support staff rather than an intelligent and educated leader. I can honestly say that although I’ve challenged Tony’s public tone or content, I have never had to once challenge how he spoke to me or how he treated me as a woman because, if anything, he was uniquely conscious of the need for him as a straight white man to sometimes defer to my skills and abilities.

Whether Tony was like this in the early Emergent days, or whether he has always interacted with women this way, I have no way to judge. It is incredibly difficult for me to imagine that some of the accusations made here could possibly, in any way be compatible with the Tony I know now. Since I never observed that Tony, I did not befriend him with the requirement that his past meet some list of criteria. I befriended him as he is now.

The Tony Jones of 2014? I would like you to know that I believe in what God is doing in his life today. I believe that he is healing from his divorce just as I hope Julie is, that I believe he has learned and grown from both his divorce and early leadership days, and that God continues to breathe redemptive love and strength and talent into Tony’s life. I believe he is happy. And I believe his best days are ahead of him.

I wanted to post earlier, but did not want to be a part of an online forum where emotions can sometimes run understandably high and don’t always bring out the most objective listeners in any of us. I did not want to take away from the goodness I believe my friend Tony has found in this stage of his life. And I did not want to add to comments that drug up what the courts and public officials have already judged on for years, at the possible expense of hurting Tony’s family more than all of them have already suffered.

Instead, I wrote David an email. I clearly stated that I knew it was David’s right to moderate how he wanted, and I noted that I believe it is fair to talk about silencing in church systems, but I asked him to consider the damage and misinformation that a free-for-all like this can have when it takes a huge left turn into picking apart people’s personal darkness from a far. I am not sure if David counted me among the attempted silencers he mentioned, but the harsh responses to those who defended Tony seemed to suggest this place was only safe for one kind of people: the people who are against Tony.

That made me feel like I might not be welcome here. But I want to try anyways.

I do believe that many of you are well-motived and are genuinely concerned with injustice as I am, and that this leaning toward helping victims may have led you to this discussion in order to promote the cause of good. I am praying you will show me that same generosity and grace to offer one more piece of the story from my point of view.

I appreciate all of you for taking the time to listen, even if your point of view is different than mine.

Yes, Kate. I am beginning to think that some of them got played and were pawns in a strategic plan. Especially since it was discovered in a canceled check that a lawyer was already retained when he made the group believe that he was doing everything in his power to save his marriage. I think now Brian McLaren, Brad Cecil and Mike King got played and used as pawns in the strategic plan. Mark too? It is very difficult to believe Danielle Shroyer (her pastor at Journey church) and the church where the dissertation was being written about, knew and observed nothing in those frequent trips to Dallas? If she had no idea, then I wish she should say so. I am not sure because only Brad is talking. I am very sorry for thinking they were all in on it….now I think maybe just 2 or 3? I think Mark was the pawn sent. It would be helpful if there was dialogue. I am quite confident Doug will not admit his role. I know HE won’t. Daniele did you know a lawyer was already retained? Did you know there were daily phone calls between the two starting May 2008? And, Danielle…did you tell Phyllis Tickle that I am crazy? An email says you did, so I would like to know if you did or not?