The eleventh book in my year-long Book-a-Week Challenge was Mark Driscoll’s Confessions of a Reformission Rev: Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church. In it, Driscoll walks the reader through the different stages of the life of Mars Hill, the church that he planted in Seattle, Washington, back in 1996.
As I read, it became clear to me why Mars Hill has grown so successfully: Driscoll is flat-out real. He shares it all, and does it in a way that is as refreshing as it is honest. From the mistake of holding an outdoor Bible study on a pier as people flashed and mooned his church to the frustration of being kicked out of the church they were renting with no way to tell his church where they’d be the next Sunday, you can’t help but laugh at the way God has helped the work continue and even thrive when so many things seemed to be against it.
There’s no doubt that people considering the call to church planting will benefit from reading this book, but there is plenty in it to chew on for people simply asking questions about how we can be more effective in pursuing the mission of Christ in our current churches. Driscoll writes with a plain, direct style and doesn’t shrink back from heavier issues of theology. That may have been the most refreshing aspect of the book for me, because it often seems that the world of emerging leaders is dominated by shallow books that simply capitalize on really good marketing and are more flash than meat. It was nice to read about Driscoll’s drive to go to Scripture to work out the details of things like how they handle preaching, how the church is organized, what type of doctrine they hold to, and other issues.
He also was the first person I’ve read that really gave a clear example of the distinctions between the emerging church movement and the emergent movement. Without doubt, this book will go in my toolbox to be referred to over and over again in my ministry. Of course, I’ll have to buy it first since I have to give back the borrowed copy I read.
