Too Much Driscoll?

My Saturday routine includes an iced green tea and guilty cinnamon roll pleasure at Starbucks every week.  Along with that, I open a copy of both Seattle dailies and peruse whatever religion news might be included.  This week I was pretty surprised by the Seattle Times and its Mars Hill-heavy content.

Mark Driscoll is one of the Times’ five religion columnists, and along with them he shares a column that replaces the long-running and popular Dale Turner writings.  What sets Mark apart is his evangelical passion about sharing the gospel — and his big-dollar ads that run adjacent to his column.  

This week’s column was a nearly-accurate discussion of crucifixion in the ancient world (can we call Cicero a Greek philosopher? OK, he taught Greek philosophy and spent lots of time visiting friends in Greece, but he was a Roman last I heard) that almost read like an AMA article from a few years back that described crucifixion in medical-detail depth.  On the bottom right of the page was a very large (and expensive) ad advertising Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church.

I guess I can’t think of another time in which a columnist’s writing was paired with an advertisement about his work, or that an advertiser was also given a free column to support his/her viewpoints.  I’d be interested to hear the Times’ rationale for its columnist’s dual-role, partly for ethics reasons and partly for theological reasons.

A Church Council board member shared a Salon.com (subscription only) article written about the Mars Hill Church, in which the church’s “Biblical” marriage gender roles are described.  I haven’t seen Driscoll describe these in a Times column, but if he did, I’d wonder how Seattle would respond.  Basically, women are to be in the home, raising children.  Men work outside the home and make the decisions.  Clear and simple.

I’d like to invite the Times to encourage Pastor Driscoll to share his views about women with its audience.  We deserve to know the whole truth, since we’re both reading his words sponsored by the Times and reading the Times sponsored by him.