This video is now five years old. Pastor Norm Funk asks John Piper about Mark Driscoll and the implosion of Mars Hill Church and those who are tempted to give up on the church after a pastoral failure.
I think it’s worth listening to again, especially when the public failures seem to multiply in our day.
Piper makes five main points:
- We are not in a unique situation: historically, and today, we are letting Jesus down regularly.
- From a biblical perspective, God has historically been willing to use people to speak gospel truths who have motives and attitudes that are defective.
- Don’t throw out the baby of truth with the bathwater of sin. To walk away from Jesus because Jesus’s representatives are failures is to make an absurd choice. It would mean walking away from the one hope of your life.
- God must be the kind of general over his army that willingly accepts tactical defeats for strategic victories.
- If you say you love Jesus but you are giving up on the church, you are not following Jesus.