The Church Values of Mark Driscoll’s New Church Plant, The Trinity Church

by: Will Mancini

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It has been said that your greatest strengths reflect your greatest weaknesses.

Mark Driscoll grew a wildly successful church in Seattle–Mars Hill–with a strong following locally and nationally through his speaking, books and the Acts 29 church planting network.

A little over a year ago, Mars Hills closed down and the 12 sites of the large megachurch become autonomous. You can read the entire story but I’ll boil it down to one word: grit. It attracted people to pastor Mark; it led to the tragic failure of the church. In the end he was too harsh as a leader.

The year before things started unraveling, I was with Mark in the Catalyst Conference greenroom. My son, Jacob happened to be there with me. I wanted Jacob to get some advice from Mark as he started his journey to college. It was good advice but it was bold, blazing and borderline crass. I was glad Mark said what he said. It was appropriate to three men talking about manly stuff. It was edgy. Your greatest strengths reflect your greatest weaknesses.

I have always said that your success develops your confidence and your failures develop your convictions. As I read the guiding principles of Mark Driscoll’s new church, I couldn’t help but notice how his previous failures are informing his new church values system. Same grit, new love.

At Auxano we walk with churches to build our their top 4-6 values that we define as the shared convictions that guide the actions and reveal the strengths of the church. This is one side of the Vision Frame. Many times the deepest window to our values is our own failures. It reveals lines that we never want to cross again. Here are the top 10 reasons why you should state your church values.

What does this mean now for Mark Driscoll? As he pours the foundation for a fresh start, here are five questions that The Trinity Church will use in making decisions:

1. How is God glorified through this?
2. Does this contribute to church health?
3. Are lives being transformed?
4. Are people learning the Bible?
5. Are people in relationship?

In addition here are eleven phrases or statements that he aspires to embed into the culture of the church. I consider this to be an extended list of church values that he will be refining.

• ???? Pray first
• ???? The pedals on our bike are Bible teaching and relationships
• ❤️ Loving relationships are the mark of good theology
• ???? Fun is fundamental
• ???? Build people up, don’t beat people up
• ???? God is our Father and we are a family of multiple generations
• ???? Children are a blessing
• ???? We do things with excellence or we don’t do them at all
• ????‍????‍????‍???? The family that serves together grows closer
• ???? Nothing beats people meeting Jesus
• ???? Vision requires provision

Personally I am proud of Mark for stating the obvious and working to create a new culture:

Build people up, don’t beat people up

All through the website you see a new softness; a new attention to love and healthy relationships. Even the use of emoticons signals a shift (or maybe a lack of resources). When it boils all down, it looks like Trinity Church has one mission driving the big idea the new start: We open our Bibles to learn. We open our lives to love.

Who among us doesn’t need grace for life and room to learn from our mistakes? (Whether they be highly visible or not). My prayer is that God will richly bless the new vision of The Trinity Church.

By the way,  how are you doing stating your own core convictions and ministry values? What cultural lines have been crossed that need to be re-clarified with your leadership team?

Tags: Church Values, Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, The Trinity Church, Values, Will Mancini

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Do You Trust Your Pilot?

by: Mark Driscoll

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Can you remember a time when you were flying in a plane and it made a sudden turn that made you feel scared, helpless, and wondering if you could trust the pilots to get you to your destination safely? Do you remember feeling out of control, as someone else was in charge and your fate was in their hands?

Working for an organization, including a church or ministry, is kind of like a plane in flight. The senior leaders are up front getting data from private channels and have a perspective out the windshield that no one else has. Most people on the proverbial plane are going about their lives without considering the competency of the pilots’ leading, until there is a hard turn and they feel it.

A commercial pilot in our church explained these turns as “bank angles” where one wing stoops down. He said that the response of the passengers directly correlates to the degree of the turn. For example:

• 25–30 degrees: 1.1–1.2 g-force on the body, most people won’t feel a thing.
• 45 degrees: 1.5 g-force, people start to feel it.
• 60 degrees: 2-2.5 g-force, people really feel it and start to freak out.
• 70–80 degrees: Around 5 g-force, people start getting tunnel vision as the blood rushes out of their eyes.

Ideally, an organization makes as many 25–30 degree turns as possible. If so, there can be ongoing changes and course corrections without people freaking out and panicking, running through the proverbial cabin. But, sometimes a really hard turn simply has to be made. Those on the plane usually don’t understand why, because they neither have the data nor see the reality that’s confronting the pilots flying the plane. Those on the plane have five basic options on how they will respond when the organizational plane makes a hard-banked angle turn:

1. JUMP OUT OF THE PLANE

Stand up, freak out, make a scene, grab a parachute, and jump out of the plane with your résumé in hand hoping to land a job somewhere else. If you are really freaked out and negative, you can try and take as many passengers with you as possible, which is in your mind some kind of heroic act.

Read the rest of Mark’s post here.

Read more from Mark here.

Tags: Leadership Development, Mark Driscoll, Staff, Structure

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8 Principles for Churches that Want to Grow

by: Mark Driscoll

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When it comes to numbers, churches tend to err in one of two ways: they either discount them as unimportant or they put too much emphasis on them.

The reality is that numbers are important, and though they aren’t the only sign of a healthy church, they are an important measure.

For Mars Hill, numbers are a key measure of our health. For us, it’s all about the numbers, if by “numbers” you mean the number of people getting their sins forgiven, getting their lives changed by Jesus, and going to heaven instead of hell. We’d like that number to go up. We’re all for that.

When numbers are viewed from this perspective, they are a good thing to desire to see grow. This is why I commend pastors who desire to see the church they pastor grow for the right reasons.

In my conversations with pastors around the world, many have questions on church growth. So, I thought I’d share eight principles I’ve learned about church growth.

1. BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND AND KNOW HOW LARGE YOU WANT TO BE.

The following is a rough breakdown of reported (which may not be entirely accurate) church attendance. Admittedly, these numbers are a few years old, but, as a general rule, they do give you a rough idea of church-size barriers.

• Churches with 45 people or fewer = 100,000 churches or 25% of all churches
• Churches with 75 people or fewer = 200,000 churches or 50% of all churches
• Churches with 150 people or fewer = 300,000 churches or 75% of all churches
• Churches with 350 people or fewer = 380,000 churches or 95% of all churches
• Churches with 800 people or fewer = 392,000 churches or 98% of all churches
• Churches with 800 people or more = 8,000 churches or 2% of all churches
• Churches with 2,000 people or more = 870 churches or 0.22% of all churches
• Churches with 3,000 people or more = 425 churches or 0.11% of all churches

Lyle Schaller, considered one of the best church consultants in the world, states in his book, The Very Large Church, that the two most comfortable church sizes are under 45 people and under 150 people, likely making them two of the hardest thresholds to pass through, in addition to the 800 mark.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell states that 150 is also the maximum number of people someone can purposefully connect with, which explains why some people do not like bigger churches. It may also explain why John Wesley divided people into groups of about 150, the average hunter-gatherer village is about 150 people, most military units are under 200, and the Hutterites allow their communities to grow no larger than 150.

Understanding group dynamics like this is important in understanding that there are significant challenges that come with each phase of church size, and being aware of where you want your church to grow allows you to begin preparing for those growth phases more effectively.

Tags: Church Growth, Mark Driscoll, Structure, barriers

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