The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” ~ Matthew 7:1-3

 

If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. ~ Galatians 5:15

 

These words of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul from 2,000 years ago hit so hard right now. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a post-mortem on the fall and destruction of one of the most prolific churches in the 21^st century. This was a tough one to listen to but I’m grateful I finally listened to it. It took me three years to consider listening and I’m glad I waited, because the lessons here sank deep. Chaulk full of 25 episodes with interviews and helpful and prescriptive contemplations, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill explored the death of one of the most influential and successful churches in America. It is also a convicting examination into my own heart and mind: the intentions, compromises, misunderstandings, and impulses. These are lessons for doing better in every space I operate in, with very real and well-intentioned people who operate in ways that are great examples of the very good, very bad, and very ugly. After listening to this helpful investigation, I had to find out who else was talking about it and how others were feeling about it. Carey Nieuwhof had one of the best takeaways I found, writing from a leadership perspective. I value good leaders, and being a good leader, so Niewhof’s lessons are prescriptive to me:

 

Originally published by Carey Nieuwhof

 

“Like so many leaders in the church space, I listened to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast…To say it was hard to listen to is an understatement.

It took me a month or two to even decide whether I would listen to it or not.

For those who may not know, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a podcast produced by Christianity Today that chronicles the humble beginnings, explosive growth, and very public dissolution of Mars Hill, a megachurch that once had multiple campuses in Seattle, Washington (one of the most unchurched cities in the U.S.). 

Filled with interviews with former staff and church members, the focal point of the series is the leadership style of lead pastor Mark Driscoll.

Like many people I know, when I started listening, there were times when I shut an episode off, thinking I couldn’t go any further, only to resume it a day or a week later. The story is so painful for the multiple layers of hurt involved and yet crucial for what we can learn moving forward.

Eventually, I finished the series, but the ambivalence never really disappeared.

So, why this post?

Mainly because this is a leadership blog, and the patterns described around Mars Hill are not unique to Mars Hill. They’re not even unique to churches. 

The patterns can happen—and do happen—in varying degrees in many different churches and businesses.

While The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast isn’t a definitive account of what happened in Seattle (for example, despite attempts, former Mars Hill Lead Pastor Mark Driscoll didn’t agree to be interviewed for the show), it provided enough of a picture of the unhealthy happenings in churches and the dysfunctional happenings within leaders to convict me of my own sin (again).

For me, the most disturbing part of listening to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is that I saw some of myself in the story.

I recognized some of the same impulses in me.

There’s a shadow side of leadership, pride, and power lurking in most of us. Perhaps in all of us. At least, it definitely lurks in me.

And if you identify the unhealthy patterns in your own life, maybe you can catch it early enough to prevent it from harming others.

So, let me go first to say that everything I’m describing below is things I’ve had to wrestle down in my own heart and my own leadership. I hope and pray for progress and victory for all of us who lead, including the leaders and people who were part of Mars Hill.

Exposing the darkness in ourselves is one of the greatest ways to find more light.

Here are five reflections I’m processing after finishing the podcast.

There's a shadow side of leadership, pride, and power that lurks in most of us. Perhaps in all of us.

1. The Ends Actually Don’t Justify the Means

I’ve worked in a few places over the years: a law firm, at radio and tv stations, at a church, and for the last few years as an author, speaker, and a podcaster myself, running a small communications company.

You’d think it was easier to lead like the ends justified the means in a law firm or private company.

Nope.

It was easiest as a pastor.

For exactly the reasons described in the podcast, you end up saying things like:

• Well, more people are coming to faith than are leaving.
• I can’t be responsible for the consequences…that’s up to God.
• If it means more people come to faith, then let’s do it.

The church I led was not even close to the size of Mars Hill, nor did it have the influence of Mars Hill. But in the first decade of ministry, we became one of the fastest growing and one of the largest congregations in our denomination.

In the midst of all of that, some people got hurt. Often I moved fast and broke things. Sometimes I broke people.

Eventually, I realized that the ends don’t justify the means—that often different means produce much better ends.

I also realized that health and growth don’t have to compete with each other. You can have both. And if you can’t have both, choose health.

Listening to the podcast, I realized that what made those first few years of leadership so confusing was that great things were happening, and we were doing all of this ‘for God.’

In my heart of hearts, I believed that whatever we did that resulted in more people coming to Christ was a good thing.

Over time though, I realized that how you do what you do is just as (if not more) important as what you do.

In the church, more people is a good thing. But more love is even better.

As you have probably figured out, more love often leads to more people. But if it doesn’t, you’re still left with more love.

2. The Body Count Matters

I won’t go into the details outlined in the podcast, but one of the recurring themes was the body count at Mars Hill—the people who ‘fell off the bus’ or got pushed off the bus as it moved to new places and new heights.

For a season in my earlier years of ministry, we were growing quickly. But the underbelly of that season of growth was that we were simply growing faster than we were losing people.

It got so bad in some rapid growth years that I have a distinct memory of telling my team not to use pictures older than six months since there were too many people in the photo who had left.

I wince when I think about that now.

I don’t know why everyone who left ended up leaving (high growth and high churn seasons can be like that), and not everyone who left was mad or hurt—many tried it for a while and realized what we were doing wasn’t for them—but I do know that in all the churn, I started to form callouses around my heart.

When people leave or criticize you, it hurts.

The natural thing to do is to grow cynical, to stop listening to the disappointments and the complaints. And for a season, I did just that.

Had I let that go further, it’s likely I was only a few steps away from allowing the churn to be a badge of honor. Ugh.

Fortunately, I burned out after a few years of very rapid growth. I say ‘fortunately’ because, even though my burnout was the deepest pain I’ve ever gone through personally, I realize now that God was re-forming me in the midst of it.

I now think of my burnout as a divine intervention of sorts.

On the other side of burnout, I became much more sensitive to the pain and hurt I was causing, especially unintentionally. Often as leaders, we don’t mean to hurt people or even realize we’re doing it. Or we harden our hearts because we can’t stand the pain of people rejecting us.

I realized (and am still learning) how much of a mistake it is to close your heart to people or act like their leaving doesn’t matter. It does.

And while caring is hard, the ultimate damage of not caring is far greater.

Caring carries risk. So, leaders, please hear me. Your heart will get mangled, and you’ll be tempted to stop caring and trusting people altogether. Don’t.

So, you might ask, does opening your heart and caring about people stop people from leaving?

Nope. People still leave. Maybe not as many, but still, people leave. And it still hurts. (Toxic people are a different category, but most people aren’t toxic people. They just see things differently than you do).

People who disagree with you should be treated well and loved regardless of whether they are ‘with you’ or not. It’s not about you or me. It’s just not.

After I burned out and started to recover, we launched Connexus Church.

I look back on some of those launch photos a decade and a half later and smile. To my surprise and delight, most of the people who helped us launch are still with us.

And for those who left…well, if people were valuable to you when they came to your church, treat them as though they are just as valuable when they leave.

3. Charisma is a Double-Edged Sword

Culturally, we use the term ‘charismatic’ to describe leaders who have a magnetic pull to their personalities.

Leadership tends to attract and reward charismatic people. In the case of preachers, I imagine the concentration of charismatic leaders is even higher than in the marketplace as a whole.

Why? Many preachers are excellent communicators, and the ability to communicate is a significant factor in charisma.

So, what’s the challenge?

The good thing about being a charismatic leader is that people follow you. The bad side of being a charismatic leader is that people follow you.

As a charismatic leader, you have the potential to lead thousands of people to a much better future and the potential to lead thousands of people right off a cliff.

From the time I was young, people told me I had charisma. Honestly, I didn’t know what that meant at that point, but having led for decades now, I realize charisma is a double-edged sword.

The temptation to use your charisma to consolidate power and use it to your benefit is real. Another temptation is to form an inner circle of fans, sycophants, and enablers who won’t challenge you or pose a threat to your viewpoint.

I got to a point early in my leadership where I was so sensitive to criticism that I felt the impulse to create an inner circle like that.

Fortunately, prayer, counseling, and people who knew me and loved me enough to help me see the truth helped me realize that ultimately that’s a path that leads to death, not life.

This brings us back to the original meaning of ‘charisma’ for all of us who at some point have been called charismatic leaders.

Charisma is a Greek transliteration into English; it means both ‘gift’ or ‘favor’ and carries a sense of having a grace given to you by God.

In other words, to the extent you possess any, your charisma is a gift and a favor from God to be used and stewarded not for your glory but God’s.

Of all the character traits we can cultivate, humility might be the greatest when it comes to stewarding charisma. As I’ve learned, again and again, only humility can get you out of what pride got you into.

If you find yourself surfing off your own giftedness, humble yourself.

This takes quite a bit of intentionality. But I’ve learned you can get to humility through two paths:

1. Voluntarily
2. Involuntary

How does involuntary humility happen? Simple: When you’re humiliated by others or a situation.

Humiliation is simply involuntary humility. When you won’t humble yourself, others are happy to do it for you.

I’m trying to take the voluntary path moving forward. I don’t always get it right, but I’m trying.

4. Your Character Needs to Grow Faster Than Your Platform

As I listened to story after story during the podcast, I realized that the real issue is character. It was at Mars Hill and it is in all of our lives.

The challenge is that in an age of instant celebrity, your platform can grow faster than your character.

I think that’s one of the reasons so many megachurch pastors fail (here’s a post with some thoughts on why it keeps happening).

As we’ve seen too often in the church (so painfully), all the competency in the world can’t compensate for a lack of character.

Character is the great leveler. You may be smart, but if people don’t trust you, they won’t want to work with you. You may be the best preacher in your city, but if you treat others as less than, people will stop listening.

Lack of character kills careers, shatters families, ruins friendships, and destroys influence. And even if you never get fired or divorced over the compromises you make, your lack of character will limit the intimacy, joy, and depth you experience with God and with people.

Competency gets you in the room. Character keeps you in the room. As a result, it’s character—not competency—that determines your capacity.

Although I hear the argument all the time, I personally don’t believe there is anything inherently bad about a large church or organization.

But there is something inherently difficult in it. And to some extent, the larger something is, the harder it is.

Please know, this doesn’t mean leading a small church or venture is easy. I have led small churches. I get it. Few things in leadership are easy.

But I’ve also led some larger ministries and organizations, and the larger it is, the greater the pressure and the more there’s at stake.

I remember when our church grew past 300; my mind was blown. Now, it’s five times the size.

Or look at this blog or my podcast. Honestly, 100,000 readers or listeners was inconceivable a decade ago. Then millions showed up.

Nothing gets you ready for that.

It’s way too easy for your platform to outgrow your character. And that’s where all the danger lies.

Add to it one more fact: You and I are not naturally made to lead thousands or millions.

It doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means you’ll have to grow your character faster. Much faster.

5. Many Leaders Want to Be Celebrities—And The Internet is the Bullet Train

The podcast focused a lot on pride, narcissism, and the desire for celebrity.

It’s super easy to point the finger at a leader like Mark Driscoll, but that still leaves us with four fingers pointing back at ourselves.

And even if you don’t have a platform of your own, it’s easy to get a platform (a big one) by criticizing and destroying other people.

Before you deny that this applies to you, do a little gut check. Ask yourself, How good would you be with complete obscurity, with an irrelevance so deep nobody notices you or cares? 

Yep…very few of us are good with that. After all, God designed us to be social creatures and to live lives of meaning and purpose.

Interaction and making some kind of a difference are core to a meaningful life.

The challenge becomes, of course, that the internet is the bullet train to celebrity. Just ask any 12-year-old YouTuber.

There’s more than a little irony that The Rise and Fall of Mars Hills podcast criticized Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill for using the internet and social media to rapidly grow their ministry, while The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast itself was using exactly the same platforms as it became the most listened-to podcast in the Christian space.

And before you or I claim innocence or protest too loudly, well, you’re reading this blog post and perhaps you listen to my podcast or follow me on social and you’ll leave your comments online and…

You see?

Yeah.

It’s easy to criticize people with bigger platforms than yours, and in doing so let yourself off the hook.

A better approach is to dig deep and probe your own motives.

After listening to the podcast, I found myself asking questions like Why do I like the fact that my podcast gets downloaded so much, or how many people read my blog/buy my book/come to my talks?

There’s something ugly under that.

Alternatively, you can be so allergic (and self-righteous) about remaining obscure that your option becomes what…do nothing? Say nothing? Attempt nothing? That’s not faithfulness either.

Once again, humility and character are the keys here.

So what do you do?

Work twice as hard on your character as you do on your platform.

If we all did that, our posts would be more kind, our comments more grateful, our content more purely motivated.”

Source: https://careynieuwhof.com/some-reflections-on-the-rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/

The Cross and The Machine

             It’s become a new and enlightening practice of mine to hear and read about the lives and faith journey of others. Life is big and profound, especially when the Lord is summoning people into His kingdom through lavish means. Paul Kingsnorth is such a life and I learned about him on Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly. The episode is called “The Story of Someone Who Changed His Mind.” To me it’s a modern, refreshing and honest exegesis on Romans 1:23 and its examination of our modern, ultra-industrialized, so-called post-Christian era. Paul's transparency about his experience with the stuffiness and clash of the ancient ways of Christianity and modernity's opportunistic opulence leaves you saying, 'wow, I thought I was the only one struggling...well said.'

But Kingsnorth’s story is also a hopeful and living example of Romans 2:4 which reads, “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?” Kingsnorth’s testimony, which he mentions in the episode and published below, is a beautiful tapestry of man’s waywardness and God’s patience and kindness. Kingsnorth, a professional writer, meticulously captures the details of his life and faith journey leading him to faith in Christ and community in the church – somewhere he consciously never intended to be. Well, as the saying goes, if you ever want to make God laugh tell Him your plans:

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First published by the Paul Kingsnorth on June 2021 on https://www.firstthings.com

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“Europeans didn’t only disinherit Aztecs and Incas. Continuously, since the sixteenth century, we have been disinheriting ourselves.”
—John Moriarty

 

“There is no bloodless myth will hold.”
—Geoffrey Hill

 

"We must have been fifteen or sixteen when we discovered the church visitor’s book. It was an old church, maybe medieval, and I would pass it with my school friends on our way to the town center. I’m not sure what possessed us to go in; it might have been my idea. I’ve always loved old churches. For a long time, I would tell myself that I liked the sense of history or the architecture, which was true as far as it went. Like the narrator in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” I would venture into any church I found, standing “in awkward reverence . . . wondering what to look for,” drawn by some sense that this was “a serious house on serious earth.” ­Obviously, there was no God, but still: The silence of a small church in England had a quality that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

 

This visit was less serious. A fifteen-year-old boy with his schoolmates can’t be admitting an interest in rood lofts. I’d like to say it was someone else’s idea to write in the visitor’s book, where other people had inscribed things like “what a beautiful building” and “I feel a tremendous sense of peace here,” but a man should never lie about matters of the soul. It was I who took up the biro and scrawled, “I WILL DESTROY YOU AND ALL OF YOUR WORKS! HA HA HA!” then signed it “SATAN.” A few days later, we came back and did it again. “DIE, NAZARENE! VICTORY IS MINE!” I think we’d been watching the Omen films. We kept going for weeks, wondering when we’d be caught. We never were, but one day we came in to find that all of our entries had been tippexed out and the pen removed. The fun was over. We went to the video shop instead.

 

More than thirty years later, in the early spring of 2020, I was reading the autobiography of the Irish philosopher John Moriarty and following the news about some new virus that was apparently spreading in China. Moriarty’s book is called Nostos—homecoming—and like all his work, it is impossible to summarize because it is less a narrative than a myth. One of its threads, though, is how ­Moriarty gave up on the simple, unconvincing Christianity of his Irish rural youth and left for Canada to become an academic, only to become equally disillusioned with the empty-can rationalism that characterizes postmodern intellectual culture. Something was missing. Was it Ireland? Moriarty threw in his academic career and moved back to the mountains of Connacht. He had lost faith in science, in the mind alone of itself, in an age that had disinherited its people. But even at home, some part of the jigsaw was missing.

Seeking it, whatever it was, Moriarty crashed into a devastating personal crisis. One day, walking in the mountains, he suddenly had a mystical vision that broke his world apart. “In an instant,” he wrote, “I was ruined.” He seemed to see into a great abyss in which all of his stories were dust: “I had been let through not to a heaven but to a void that was starless and fatherless.” For years, he wrote, he had been engaged in “a genuine search for the truth, not merely a speakable truth, but a truth I would surrender to.” Now he realized, with a terrible inevitability, that there was only one story that could hold what he had seen, only “one prayer that was big enough.” He had, he wrote, been “shattered into seeing.” Whether he liked it or not, he had become a Christian.

A truth I would surrender to. I put the book down. I didn’t know quite why, but Moriarty’s story had shaken me. I realized that I had been searching for years for a truth like that. “How strange!” he had written. “Christianity making sense to me!” Somehow, the way he was telling the story—interweaving the Gospels with the Book of Job, the ­Mahabharata, the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the folk tales of ­Ireland, the poems of Wallace Stevens—was making sense to me too. What was going on?

“The story of Christianity,” wrote Moriarty, “is the story of humanity’s rebellion against God.” I had never thought of that ancient, tired religion in this way before, never had reason to, but as I did now I could feel something happening—some inner shift, some coming together of previously scattered parts designed to fit, though I had never known it, into a quiet, unbreakable whole.

A truth I would surrender to. What was this abyss inside me, this space that had been empty for years, that I had tried to fill with everything from sex to fame to politics to kenshō, and why was something chiming in it now like a distant Angelus across the western sea?

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me,
And that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

Something was happening to me, and I didn’t like it at all.

Urban England in the eighties was not, shall we say, a spiritually rich environment. My family never set foot in a church when I was growing up, which suited me fine. The nearest I came to serious religion was probably through my best friend, who was from a Pakistani family. He’d been on the hajj to Mecca and fasted for Ramadan and did all the other things that Muslims did, which I knew very little about. This was before Islam became a political lightning rod and everyone felt they had to develop strong opinions about it. All I knew was that my friend thought religion was real, which seemed quaint and very un-English. We in the modern world had long grown out of superstition.

Still, at least my friend’s religion seemed to pulse with some sort of living energy. The same could not be said of the Christianity which, when I was a child, was still at least nominally the national faith. I grew up singing hymns, listening to parables recited by teachers at morning assembly, and performing in Christmas nativity plays with a tea towel tied around my head. I knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart. Whether I liked it or not, I was taught as a child the outline of the Christian story—the story that had shaped my nation for more than a thousand years. I didn’t realize that my nation was surviving on spiritual credit, and that it was coming close to running out.

Back then, there were two distinct flavors of Christianity, both of which I tried to avoid. One was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this if you had to go to a wedding or a funeral, or when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a generation of kids more interested in their ZX Spectrums. The Victorian vicar would hand out morality lessons from a man who had lived two thousand years ago and whose core imagery might as well have been from Mars: wine presses, fishing boats, vineyards, masters and servants, virgins. The basic pitch seemed best summed up by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I’d rather have been reading than listening to a vicar: “One man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.”

The second flavor was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar was plugged into the spirit of the age. He knew that instead of bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist, we were watching The Young Ones and playing Manic Miner, and he was on our side. The trendy vicar had a clipped beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and gave awkward, vernacular sermons in which biblical stories were interspersed with references to EastEnders or Dallas or Michael Jackson songs. Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way otherworldly, as religion should be. If it was pop culture we wanted, and we did, we were better off sticking with the real thing, which was to say the thing without any Jesus in it.

So, I had no reason to take any notice of religion in general or Christianity in particular. My Muslim friend had a faith that was passed to him by his family and was clearly a central part of their worldview. Nothing similar was offered to me, and even if it were, it would have been undercut by the wider cultural narrative. The school may have had mandatory religious education classes, but the age taught another faith: Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It was the theft of our precious free will by authorities who wanted to control us by telling us fairy tales. It repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational edicts. It hated science, denied reason, burned witches and heretics by the million. Post-Enlightenment liberal societies had thrown off its shackles, and however hard both species of vicar tried to prevent it, religion was dying a much-needed death at the hands of progress and reason.

Et cetera.

Still, there was enough truth in this story to fuel the intellectual anger of the Dawkins-esque teenage atheist that I later became. People had walked away from the church by choice, after all, and not just because they all wanted to have premarital sex. The message seemed irrelevant. Across Europe, the exodus was happening. Corrupted, tired, suddenly powerless, Christianity was dying in the West. And why not? I hadn’t seen anything relevant in it. Where was the mystery? Where was the promised connection with God? Who was this God anyway? A man in the sky with a book of rules? It was long past time to move on.

I didn’t know back then that the Christian story is the story of our rebellion against God. I didn’t know that by taking part in that rebellion I had become part of the story, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know, either, why Christians see pride as the greatest sin. I only knew that I could argue a good case for the injustice of the world made by this “God,” and the silliness of miracles, resurrections, and virgin births. I knew I was cleverer than all the people who believed this sort of rubbish, and I was happy to tell them so.

I kept visiting empty churches. I just didn’t tell anyone.

Up on the mountains of England and Wales, I had my own visions. Walking and camping on the hills for weeks with my dad, I felt something settle within me that was more real than any theology. I might have been a teenage atheist, but my ­atheism amounted mainly to arguing with Christians. The religions of the book were obviously nonsense, but I knew there was something going on that humans couldn’t grasp. Trudging across moors, camping by mountain lakes as the June sun set, I could feel some deep, old power rolling through it all, welding it together, flowing from the land into me and back again. With Wordsworth, I was dragged under by “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought / And rolls through all things.” Nothing humans could build could come close to the intense wonder and mystery of the natural world; I still believe that to be self-evidently true. This was my religion. Animism, pantheism, call it what you will: This was my pagan grace.

 

Years of environmental activism followed. Working for NGOs, writing for magazines, chaining myself to things, marching, occupying: Whatever you did, you had to do something, for the state of the Earth was dire. Nobody with eyes to see can deny what humanity has done to the living tissue of the planet, though plenty still try. There were big, systemic reasons for it, I discovered: capitalism, ­industrialism, maybe civilization itself. Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.

Activism is a staging post on the road to realization. Dig in for long enough and you see that something like climate change or mass extinction is not a “problem” to be “solved” through politics or technology or science, but the manifestation of a deep spiritual malaise. Even an atheist could see that our attempts to play God would end in disaster. Wasn’t that a warning that echoed through the myths and stories of every culture on Earth?

Early Green thinkers, people like Leopold Kohr or E. F. Schumacher, who were themselves inspired by the likes of Gandhi and Tolstoy, had taught us that the ecological crisis was above all a crisis of limits, or lack of them. Modern economies thrive by encouraging ever-increasing consumption of harmful junk, and our hyper-liberal culture encourages us to satiate any and all of our appetites in our pursuit of happiness. If that pursuit turns out to make us unhappy instead—well, that’s probably just because some limits remain un-busted.

Following the rabbit hole down, I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every living culture in history, from the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.

Now I started to dimly see something I ought to have seen years before: that the great spiritual pathways, the teachings of the saints and gurus and mystics, and the vessels built to hold them—vessels we call “religions”—might have been there for a reason. They might even have been telling us something urgent about human nature, and what happens when our reach exceeds our grasp. G. K. Chesterton once declared, contra Marx, that it was irreligion that was the opium of the people. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world,” he explained, “they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.” Here we were.

I went searching, then, for the truth. But where to find it? Elders, saints, and mystics are notable these days for their absence. In their place we are offered a pick’n’mix spirituality, on sale in every market stall and pastel-shaded hippy web portal. A dreamcatcher, a Celtic cross, a book about tantra, a weekend drum workshop, and a pack of tarot cards with cats on them, and hey, presto: You’re ready for your personalized “spiritual” journey. On the other side, you will find no exhortation to sacrifice or denial of self, and certainly no battered and bleeding god-man calling you to pick up your cross and follow him. No, you will find instead the perfect manifestation of everything you wanted in the first place: the magnification of your will, not its dissolution. Expressive individualism disguised as epiphany, the reaching prayer of a culture that doesn’t know how lost it is.

I wanted something more serious, something with structure, rules, a tradition. It didn’t even occur to me to go and ask the vicars. I knew that Christianity, with its instructions to man to “dominate and subdue” the Earth, was part of the problem. And so, I looked east. On my fortieth birthday I treated myself to a weeklong Zen retreat in the Welsh mountains. The effect of seven days of disciplined meditation in a farmhouse with no electricity was astonishing. Something in me flipped open. For the next five or six years, I practiced Zazen and studied the teachings of the Buddha. It is clear enough why Buddhism is taking off in the West as Christianity declines: Its metaphysical claims seem convincing, its practices, when taught properly, yield results, and as a tradition it is even older than Christianity. It is, in short, a serious spiritual path, but with none of the cultural baggage of the church.

And yet. As the years went on, Zen was not enough. It was full of compassion, but it lacked love. It lacked something else too, and it took me a long time to admit to myself what it was: I wanted to worship. My teenage atheist self would have been horrified. Something was happening to me, slowly, steadily, that I didn’t understand but could clearly sense. I felt like I was being filed gently into a new shape.

Something was calling me. But what?

Obviously, it wasn’t Christ. I had read the New Testament a few times, and I mostly liked what I saw. Who couldn’t admire this man or see that, at root, he was teaching the truth? Still, he obviously didn’t die and return to life, this being impossible, and without that, the faith built around him was nonsense. I was a pagan, anyway. I found God in nature, so I needed a nature religion.

This was how I ended up a priest of the witch gods.

The short version of the story is that I joined my local Wiccan coven. Wicca is a relatively new occult tradition, founded in the 1950s by the eccentric Englishman Gerald Gardner, who claimed he had discovered the ancient remnant of a pre-Christian goddess cult. He was fibbing, but the practice he sewed together out of older, disparate parts is strangely ­cohesive, complete with secret initiatory rituals, a law book that can be copied only by hand by initiates, magical teachings, spell work, protective circles, and, at the heart of it all, the worship of two deities: the great goddess and the horned god. All initiated Wiccans are priests or priestesses of these gods; there are no laity. My coven used to do its rituals in the woods under the full moon. It was fun, and it made things happen. I discovered that magic is real. It works. Who it works for is another question.

At last I was home, where I belonged: in the woods, worshipping a nature goddess under the stars. I even got to wear a cloak. Everything seemed to have fallen into place. Until I started having dreams.

I had known, I suppose, that the abyss was still there inside me—that what I was doing in the woods, though affecting, was at some level still play-acting. Then, one night, I dreamed of ­Jesus. The dream was vivid, and when I woke up I wrote down what I had heard him say, and I drew what he had looked like. The crux of the matter was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that or want it to be true. But the image and the message reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me. My wife has a preternatural sensitivity that she always denies, and it wasn’t the first time she had done something like this. It shook me. A Christian? Me? What could be weirder?

After the dream, it began to make sense. Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. They were coming out of the woodwork: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests coming to me for help with their writing. I found myself having conversations with friends I’d never known were Christian, who suddenly seemed to want to talk about it. An African man contacted me on Facebook to tell me he had had a dream in which God had told him to convert me. “If you want to know God,” he told me, “you need to read the book He wrote. You know it already: It’s called nature.”

It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being . . . hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.

One evening, I was sitting in the kitchen of the house in which our coven had its temple. We were about to go in and conduct an important ritual. As we got up to leave, I felt violently ill. I was dizzy, I was sick, I was lightheaded. Everyone noticed and fussed over me as I sat down, my face pale. I had an overpowering feeling that I should not go into the temple. I felt I was being physically prevented from doing it. Someone had staged an intervention.

After that, there was no escape. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” How much later was it that I was finally pinned down? I don’t remember. I was at a concert at my son’s music school. We were in a hotel function room, full of children ready to play their instruments and proud parents ready to film them doing it. I was just walking to my chair when I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what was going on inside them and inside myself. I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was ­unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.

 

None of this is rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. There is no point in my arguing with myself about it: I gave up after a while. This is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the more Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism. In the end, though, I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone. Someone else inhabits me.

I am not a joiner, but I accepted, eventually, that I would need a church. I went looking, and I found one, as usual, in the last place I expected. This ­January, on the feast of Theophany, I was baptized in the freezing waters of the River Shannon, on a day of frost and sun, into the Romanian Orthodox Church. In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.

Out in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress—the triumph of the Nietzschean will—­dissolves the glue that once held us. Fires are set around the supporting pillars of the culture by those charged with guarding it, urged on by an ascendant faction determined to erase the past, abuse their ancestors, and dynamite their cultural ­inheritance, the better to build their earthly paradise on terra ­nullius. Massing against them are the new ­Defenders of the West, some calling for a return to the atomized liberalism that got us here in the first place, others defending a remnant Christendom that seems to have precious little to do with Christ and forgets Christopher Lasch’s warning that “God, not culture, is the only appropriate object of unconditional reverence and wonder.” Two profane visions going head-to-head, when what we are surely crying out for is the only thing that can heal us: a return to the sacred center around which any real culture is built.

Up on the mountain like Moriarty, in the ­Maumturk ranges in the autumn rain, I had my own vision, terrible and joyful and impossible. I saw that if we were to follow the teachings we were given at such great cost—the radical humility, the blessings upon the meek, the love of neighbor and enemy, the woe unto those who are rich, the last who will be first—above all, if we were to stumble toward the Creator with love and awe, then creation itself would not now be groaning under our weight. I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history, and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them. I saw that we had arrived here because we do not live them; because, as Auden had it:

We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

It turns out that both the stuffy vicars and the trendy vicars were onto something: The Cross holds the key to everything. The sacrifice is all the teaching. I am a new and green pupil. I can talk for hours, but ideas will become idols in the blink of an eye. I have to pick up my cross and start walking.

How can I feel I have arrived home in something that is in many ways so ­foreign to me? And yet beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas, the dark silhouettes of two nuns chant the antiphon. There is incense in the air. The icons glow in the half light. This could be a thousand years in the past or the future, for in here, there is no time. Home is beyond time, I think now. I can’t explain any of it, and it is best that I do not try.

I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.

In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over ­humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been ­offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home? 

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist, essayist, and poet living in Ireland.

Source: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine