Three notoriously bad pastors are joining forces to teach on leadership.
Perry Noble, who called church members who want to go deep in the Word of God, “jackasses” (link) and Stephen Furtick, who says that telling his church members what his salary is would be biblically wrong (link) will be joined by more-or-less fired (run off, forced out?) and disgraced former pastor, Mark Driscoll.
The topic of the conference will be church leadership. Also, this is not The Onion. This is not satire. Pulpit & Pen doesn’t have the creative juices to make up fiction this unbelievable.
NewSpring Church (yes, the one that played ‘Highway to Hell’ for Sunday worship), pastored by Perry Noble (whose preaching of the Ten Commandments was so unbelievably bad got the church a warning letter from its own denomination), is hosting The Most Excellent Way conference.
Along with NewSpring’s Family Ministries Pastor, Brad Cooper, the infamous three men will also be speaking with financial guru Dave Ramsey and Lysa TerKeurst (for an explanation of the deep doctrinal problems with TerKeurst and her Proverbs 31 Ministries, click here).
What’s most ironic is the phrasing found at the conference website. The conference is to teach…how to leave a legacy by the impact of your leadership.
Let’s just put a pin in Noble and Furtick for now and come back in a few decades when they actually have a legacy, which I suspect will be a malodorous fetor of spiritual death for their followers en masse. But let’s narrow in on Driscoll’s legacy here, because he actually has one.
Although Driscoll’s website says he’s “a Jesus-following, mission-leading, church-serving, people-loving, Bible-preaching pastor,” the thing is, he’s not a pastor. He’s not a pastor because he resigned his pastorate in disgrace, with protesters outside the church and an exodus of staff related to issues (including, but not limited to)…
- Abusive behavior toward members
- Abusive behavior toward staff
- Misappropriating church funds to game the New York Times BestSellers’ list
- Plagiarism
Reasons not given for Driscoll’s ouster (he claims God told him to quit, audibly) include his creepy porno-visions and other weird stuff, but I digress.
Driscoll’s legacy includes the church (which he claims God told him to start, audibly) splintering, dismantling and being dumped into the dustbin of history.
Driscoll’s legacy includes untold numbers deeply spiritually hurt from his abuse.
Driscoll’s legacy includes his forever being self-branded as the guy behind the wheel of the Mars’ Hill bus, running over its own people on its way to nothingness.
Even Driscoll’s longtime friends and defender, John Piper, called it all a “colossal satanic victory.” So please, yeah. Definitely. Bring him in to teach us all about leadership, along with Noble and Furtick and and the mystichick from Proverbs 31 Ministries.
Do you know what the sad thing is? The sad thing is they’ll flock in to hear him by the thousands.
For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. – Matthew 23:15
