Reconstructing My Faith: Postmodernity, Bullies, and Uncle Carl

Well, you knew we'd eventually get to Mark Driscoll if we started talking about deconstructing and reconstructing my faith, right?[insert heavy sigh here]PostmodernityIn the spring of 1997, I attended the GenX church planting conference at Mount Hermon (a Christian retreat center in California). One of the speakers there was Mark Driscoll, who spoke passionately about the collapse of modernity, the rise of post-modernity, and how both of those would likely affect the way leaders taught & led their church communities. At the time, I reacted pretty positively to Mark's "in your face" style of speaking. (For more personal context on my experience at the conference, you can see my post from 2006 entitled 9 Years Ago.)What I didn't internalize back in 1997 was that Mark Driscoll had only been leading a church for a year or so. Mars Hill Church (Seattle) was growing rapidly, but he was relatively new to church leadership. His forcefulness, his charisma, his passion, and his humor masked his…