Mars Hill Church, Seattle

Since I'm staying in Bellevue, Seattle, for two weeks, it was almost inevitable that I would go and check out Mars Hill Church (Bellevue Campus).

I approached with some trepidation. If you read Mark Driscoll's books, the church was founded with some of Seattle's most far-out people. Mark is a fan of Mixed Martial Arts, and the Bellevue campus has its own MMA club. It's the first church I've ever attended that had a group of burly guys with shaved heads hanging around outside, wearing T-shirts marked "security" (and no, that was not some kind of joke). Driscoll's theology is more-or-less at one with St. Ebbe's, which also scares me. (Though in the case of Ebbe's, it's more the preponderance of privately-educated members of the congregation that re-awakens in me undergraduate feelings of inadequacy. You have to be English to understand that.)

But of course, the welcome was warm, and the whole experience distinctly un-threatening. In fact, if you leave aside the fact that the sermon was shown via high-definition one-way video link to one of Mars Hill's campuses (all the campuses get the same live sermon), it could have been any Evangelical church, anywhere. Perhaps it was more middle-class than some. I certainly felt the need to remove my baseball cap... I didn't see anyone with big tattoos...

The "worship" was a perfunctory two songs. The sermon, an hour. Followed by a loosely-structured communion. I'll write more about sermonizing by video tomorrow: it raises interesting questions.

The sermon was the first of a new series on prayer. If you leave aside the Driscollisms (I was disappointed. The Cussing Pastor is evidently a thing of the past), it was completely straight down the line standard teaching on prayer. That in itself raised lots of questions for me ("you don't have to argue/struggle with God"? What about Jacob. Or Moses, come to that.), but we'll leave those on one side. I learned that Driscoll prays for parking spaces. And had his prayers on that subject answered as recently as this week.

Will I go again? Yes, maybe. Next Sunday is free right now. Would I join, if I lived here? I think it unlikely: the membership programme sounds kind-of scary. I think I would ask the wrong sort of questions.


EDIT: I did go back on the following Sunday. Previously, I'd had to dash out right after communion. In fact the band does an extended set through/after communion: this is the church's main "worship time". That's quite attractive - and unusual in a reformed-minded fellowship (to go out with communion and worship on your mind, not the sermon).