Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

This summer Christianity today released a podcast series entitled “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.” I encourage you to check it out. It’s as gripping as it is sobering. In it, Mike Cosper gives the history of the formation of Mars Hill Church. The podcast follows Mark Driscoll’s beginnings as a church planter in 1996 when he launched Mars Hill in Seattle to his quick rise to fame to the church’s ultimate collapse. The details are excruciating. It’s heartbreaking that such an influential community could have gone from leading such a huge cultural wave to closing its doors in a matter of years (Mars Hill ceased to exist in 2014).

Driscoll’s consolidation of power and elimination of personal or organizational checks was the reason for Mars Hill’s tragic demise. It’s easy to watch from the sidelines in judgment, but Mars Hill ought to be a warning to every leader. If you set Driscoll’s bombastic style and troublesome theology aside, there is an important lesson here for every leader: we must never cease to submit ourselves to one another.

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

It is also true that there are dangers in emotionalism: a spirituality that uses one’s emotions as the sole gauge of God’s presence or truth.

And yet.

There is a danger to the subtle stoicism that some corners of Christendom are drawn toward.[i] In this worldview, emotions are dangerous and hinder faith. This is false. Emotions are not our enemy. They’re a gift from God and purposed by him to be harnessed, not suppressed.

I’ve met with many who struggle to identify their emotions (men seem to be particularly vulnerable to this challenge). Faith sometimes only exacerbates the issue. We numb our feelings because we don’t like the feeling of pain. We numb our feelings because we think God might be disappointed in us if we felt disappointment with him. We shut down our emotions because we don’t want to be out of control.