I have long since abandoned this blog which was started as a cathartic exercise and a means to warn others away from a controlling, unhealthy church if not to exact some sort of revenge on the players involved. But I had to revisit it for a brief moment to share some insight I recently found.
Over the last ten years, I have certainly grown spiritually and had many ups and downs. Four years ago, this Pascha (Easter), our family was received and baptized into the Orthodox Church. Our children are almost all grown and are spreading their wings into adulthood. We have started successful businesses, become more politically active, become more active in our community, and wrested with covid and masks just like other Americans. We are learning that everyone is spiritually sick and in need of spiritual medicine. This is true of us, like everyone else.
Recently, in a classical education group, someone shared a podcast that spurred me to write another blog post. This podcast has really helped me see churches like Milestone within the historical landscape of the 20th-21st century American protestant church movement. After listening to the podcast, I had so much more empathy for both our younger selves and Milestone Church and its leadership. We are all players in historical and philosophical movements that we did not create nor even consciously choose to participate in. I highly encourage you to listen to the podcast, start to finish. You can find it here.
Many times while listening I was amazed at the similarities between Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church and Jeff Little and Milestone Church. The sense of real community, the reliance on a strong pastor as a draw and a glue, the treatment of women, the bravado, the call for men to be "real men," the narcissism, the lack of authority, these are all commonalities between these two churches and their pastors.
It was a deep sense of relief that came over me as I listened and I said, aloud, "Thank you, Lord, for delivering us from that situation." That attitude has been a long time coming. I truly feel lifted up out of the mess of American Protestantism that Milestone represents for me. I understand so many things now, philosophically and theologically.
While listening to the podcast, I found myself asking: Why, at Milestone, was there so little focus on humility and our own abject sinfulness, pastors or laity? Why was there no legitimate authority structure to protect both pastors and laity? I know the answers to these questions now. I have a totally different perspective on what it means to be led by a pastor who is compelled to ask the forgiveness of the people he serves every single week, multiple times. I understand now that authority needs to be legitimate and have a solid historical underpinning. I understand what it means to swim in the water of humility, where the root understanding of everyone in your church is that we are all in need of a hospital, that we are all horribly sick and need spiritual medicine, and that to judge your brother who is struggling says more about you than him.
As I listened, I found myself praying for Jeff Little, the Wilsons, and the other leadership figures in our situation. They, too, were caught in a wave and a response to what had come before and what was going on culturally in our society. The things that happened at Milestone were so eerily similar to what was happening hundreds of miles away in Seattle at the exact same time...it wasn't a coincidence. We are all marching through the parade of history, often not able to see the forces at work in our lives because we are so close in proximity to them.
My prayer for every person is that we would come to know Christ, His Church, and His salvation, that we would become worshippers in spirit and in truth. As we pray and work daily to develop virtue and to control our passions, as we wrangle with the most hard-to-tame beast, the one within us, may we all repent of the sins we have committed and the ways in which we have hurt others. We are all victims here, of a sort, and we need to pray for one another and to forgive one another and to heal.
