A friend described a pastor we all knew. "He's not made the move to medicine man. He still talks like a chief."
The pastor was widely known and deeply respected. He had retired a few years earlier, but he hadn't adapted well to his new role. With a wealth of experience to offer as an adviser, he still employed the language of the large-church office he once held.
The transition to medicine man is not easily made—especially these days, when what's cutting edge one decade is obsolete the next. We wrestle with the Paul-Timothy model of mentoring, because today, Paul has a lot to learn and Timothy has a lot to say.
We found a postmodern-day example.
The setting is an old church in an old Seattle neighborhood overlooking the Puget Sound. Under renovation, the gray clapboard building houses the offices of Mars Hill Fellowship, a ministry that draws hundreds of mostly Gen-Xers to its Sunday night services, one at a traditional church facility downtown and another two hours later at a ragged one-screen movie theater nearer the university.
Leadership editors Marshall Shelley and Eric Reed met there with Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll, 29, and David Nicholas, 69, pastor of Spanish River Presbyterian Church in Boca Raton, Florida, which he founded 33 years ago. Together they have formed the Acts 29 Network, a church planting ministry that trains and supports younger pastors (www.a29.org).
In their churches and church planting, both men are chiefs. In their personal relationship, Driscoll is apprentice and warrior; Nicholas is mentor and medicine man. He is also, at times, student.
Mark Driscoll: We're very different. East Coast, West Coast. Tall, short. I go back to the Reagan Administration.
David Nicholas: I go back to FDR (laughter). Our churches are very different. Spanish River is a large suburban church with a Christian school and a new performing arts theater. We draw lots of families. That's very different from what Mark's doing.
Driscoll: Our churches look different, our bands sound different, things are done differently. Besides our regular services, our church owns a venue that seats up to a thousand kids a week in three or four concerts. It's hard-core hip hop. We have metal detectors at the door. It's very frontline.
Nicholas: We have very little in common really—except Christ.
And yet you've forged a partner relationship and started a church planting enterprise together. How did that come about?
Nicholas: I met Mark through another church planter here in Seattle. He told me, "This is a great guy, but he could use some help from an experienced pastor." So I invited him to come down to Boca. He stayed four days. From that has grown our friendship and in the past two years our network for young church planters.
Driscoll: What holds us together is friendship. David is for me an anamchara.
The Celts described the anamchara as the person you journeyed through life with—not as the mentor or the apprentice, particularly—but the person you did community with. He might have more authority or experience, but he still would listen and believe that there was something beneficial in the life of even a novice.
The heart of the relationship is encountering Christ through that person and together figuring out what Christ has called us to.
How do you do this over such long distance?
Driscoll: We talk all the time. David is my pastor. He prays for me. He invests in me. He doesn't tell me what to do, but when he sees things in my character or theology that need to be challenged, he speaks to that very directly.
I desperately need that. I tend to be stubborn and aggressive. I need someone strong speaking into my life, saying, "Think about this." But it has to be predicated on friendship and love.
Nicholas: Mark is about forty years younger than me, and he's been a Christian only twelve years. I have experience. I have a good knowledge of Scripture and theology and a practical bent toward ministry, but I don't say, "Mark, don't do it that way." Frankly, his approach to ministry does not appeal to me at my age, but he's reaching his generation in ways that I'm not. I'm learning from that, and I respect him for what he's doing.
I wouldn't say I'm a great trainer. Mark and I, we just talk. He's always mentioning a book he's just read, so I'll order the book. That feeds my spirit. Mark is impacting me and growing me, too. I hope I never stop being a learner.
You're a better model than teacher?
Nicholas: Yes.
What are you modeling?
Nicholas: I've become much more evangelistic as I've gotten older. I have an urgency to preach and to share the gospel.
Driscoll: He gets that in at a Wendy's drive-thru: "What would you like?"
"I'd like you to get saved."
Nicholas: As Mark and I discuss all the time, the gospel is the hub around which everything revolves.
Driscoll: Every time I talk with David, it's "How are you doing? How is your family? Anybody come to Christ?"
And that's what he tells me—how he and his family are doing, and then who he shared the gospel with that week. There is something about that that's fun and contagious.
Nicholas: That's what I'm about. And I hammer these young guys with it. I figured out years ago that in church there are two tensions—outreach and nurture. And without outside effort, nurture always wins. Christians say, "What are you doing for me?"
So as pastor I have to push evangelism. I get the gospel in every week and my people say, "David is an evangelist." I don't know if I am or not, but I have a heart for the lost. And God keeps bringing me into contact with people I would never expect to meet who need to hear the gospel.
About a year-and-a-half ago a couple in Boca Raton was having a discussion. Rebecca had recently come to the Lord and was attending our church. She asked her husband, "Are you going to church with me tomorrow?"
He said no.
She asked again the next morning. "No," he said. "You go, and take Justin with you." So she went to get Justin, their seven-year-old son, dressed.
Rebecca returned to the bedroom. "Your son said he will not go to church because his father won't go."
The father, Nicko, replies, "I'm not having this." So he gets up, gets dressed, and demands the same of the boy.
They come into our church.
Nicko said as soon as the music started he started crying. He could not compose himself during the whole service. Well, somebody in our band recognized him as the drummer for a heavy metal band. And so our music leader went over to him and said, "Nicko? I'm Brian." They went out to lunch, and Brian shared the gospel with him.
I met Nicko, shared with him, and Nicko has come to know Christ.
I was preaching in the Chicago area last summer. Nicko's band was in concert there. Nicko had a driver bring him to the church where I was preaching on Sunday morning. The next night my wife and I went to hear him at the Aragon Ballroom with 4,500 screaming 20-something males. Just incredible. God brings us to people like that. I could go on and on about people who have come to Christ.
Do you have to learn a new language to reach a different generation?
Nicholas: The generational thing is driven greatly by music. Who comes to my church and who stays depends on two things: the personality of the pastor and the style of music.
Mark may disagree, but I think Generation-X has a culture all its own. Just as denominations are mostly homogeneous, Gen-X churches are mostly homogeneous. They have a mindset: this is the way to do church. They have candles. Sometimes they have lots of candles. Sometimes they have incense.
When I was at one of our Acts 29 churches in Houston a couple of weeks ago, the pastor let people go up and draw something, and then he put it up on an easel. It sat there while he preached.
Driscoll: In some services, people make pottery and paint. There's art surrounding the whole congregation. It's connecting image to experience.
Nicholas: I don't understand that. I'm asking myself, What is that a picture of?
But they love it, obviously.
Driscoll: I don't believe you demark a generation according to age.
It's a modern marketing technique to divide people by age and make assumptions based on that. It's an attempt to take complicated wholes and break them down into simple parts, but it's very superficial.
David has 20-year-olds at his suburban church in South Florida, and I have 20-year-olds in urban Seattle, but they think and value and experience life in substantively different ways. Age is not what determines values or lifestyle.
What does distinguish the difference between your churches?
Driscoll: Philosophical mindset and worldview. How we come to truth. How we come to faith. Our value system. The postmodern person values community more than the individual. Instead of concept, there's value for practice in the body. I don't view generation as the primary issue.
Do you think it's fair to say that younger people bring different expectations to their church experience?
Driscoll: Yes, there are different expectations, but the biggest factor is that our area is still pre-Christian. It's more like Acts 17, Paul at Mars Hill. Everybody is spiritual, but no one understands God. No one understands the gospel. And so when these people come to faith, they come out of Wicca, they come out of the tech scene, hard core music, homosexuality. They have no idea what church is or what a pastor is.
Is that a good thing?
Driscoll: That's a wonderful thing because I get to define for them the pastoral role. And it is not pastor as therapist. It is pastor as missionary.
Nicholas: Not merely nurturer.
Driscoll: Too often the pastoral function is performed by someone without a heart for lost people. Although we have some good prophets and some good priests, the church doesn't have a lot of missionaries—at least in the West. We tend to think of missions as an overseas adventure. There's missions right here.
The city I'm in is one of the least churched cities in the United States. It's highly pagan in its essence. We need missionaries who can plow some hard soil and plant some seeds here.
You approach your work as a missionary. Is that one of the changes in the pastor's role today?
Driscoll: Context determines the pastor's role. If you're in an area that has tremendous poverty and injustice, pastors may need to play a prophetic role. If your community is reeling from some trauma, then a shepherd is needed. I reject any concept of a universal approach to ministry.
The only way that we can talk about church in a pluralistic context is to talk about its mission, its goal and values, and its Savior. But practice? We can only talk about that locally.
That means the way I pastor is driven by the setting. If I were somewhere else, I would have to adapt my skills to fit that culture.
Aren't the effects of today's trends and the ministry situations they create for most pastors similar enough for us to identify some new ways we should do ministry?
Driscoll: No, I don't think so. Observing young pastors across the U.S., I see tremendous variation in the ways they do ministry.
Our temptation is always to take an approach and turn that into a system, and I think that's the death of what the Spirit of God is trying to do. God puts the right people in the right places and then hones their gifts in their context.
Nicholas: If you were in Boca Raton—
Driscoll: It would be completely different. Whether a pastor is in a rural context or urban, or modern or postmodern, mono-cultural or multi-cultural—those variables really define the pastoral role.
So what do we say to someone trying to understand what's happening in ministry right now?
Driscoll: In the church today, there is such a glaring need for someone to define how to reach Gen-X and how to do postmodern ministry. That's what everybody wants to hear. But as soon as I start talking about the gospel, Christology, and the pastor's missionary contextualization, they say, "No, no, no, just reduce it to something simple."
It can't be done. You need to open your Bible. You need to wrestle with God.
Mark, we saw you deliver that message in a dramatic way at a conference on Gen-X ministry. You were scheduled to preach at a dinner, but instead you prayed a prayer of repentance, for about 20 minutes. You sounded like an Old Testament prophet. What happened?
Driscoll: There were a thousand people there looking for answers, and what they were being told grieved me deeply. I felt like the speakers were selling their journey rather than encouraging other people to go on their own journey. They took descriptive situations and made them prescriptive.
Most of today's well-known postmodern ministry leaders didn't begin with some grand strategy. They began on their knees—with God, with the gospel—and God turned it into something glorious. But suddenly they were assuming that the things they had been through in starting a new ministry were normative for all people.
When I got up to speak, God gave me this weird revelation. I saw what was taught in all the breakout seminars. I hadn't been to any of them; I was leading my own. But God showed me what the speakers were saying that robbed God of his glory. I saw that people were believing those things. And I knew God wanted me to come as an intercessor.
So I started repenting. It just kept coming and coming, and it got to the place where I didn't know what to do. I've never had anything like that happen before.
And when I was done repenting of those things, I didn't feel like preaching, so I walked away. There was nothing intentional about it, or malicious. It was totally out of my control.
Some were there who really wanted to know how to minister to younger adults. Are there skills you'd suggest they hone?
Driscoll: It used to be that the big would eat the small. Now it's the fast eating the slow. Survival is more about speed. How quickly can you learn? How quickly can you adapt? If you're resistant to that, then you start to atrophy and die—whether as a person or as a congregation.
In a pluralistic context—where the world is morphing and moving in many directions—you can't talk about culture. It's not about Gen-X culture or postmodern culture. It's about cultures. Plural. Many cultures changing rapidly.
Churches need pastors who continually adapt to the local context. If there is a skill set needed for this time, it's adaptability.
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
