I felt I’d already said my peace about Mars Hill last year. But here I am again, talking about them.

Taken individually and at face value, the current problems with Mars Hill — the controversy over the fired pastors, the end of year money troubles, members airing their grievances on blogs — look like little bumps in the road that megachurches all go through. Taken together, though, you get the image of something that looks like a “bubble.” The church grew too fast. Things overheated. The leadership now trying desperately to rein things in, mainly through altering the power structure, while trying to maintain an unmaintainable level of growth.

You can see it coming, can’t you? The correction. All it takes is one major event — sexual impropriety, financial struggles, the books getting cooked, or just some moment of theological wackiness — and the bubble pops. We saw it with the televangelists in the 1980s. We saw it out at Overlake in the late 1990s.

Overlake is a good one to mention here because at their peak they had as many members as Mars Hill does now (6000). They were the fastest growing and most prosperous evangelical church in the entire region. They’re still around, but they are smaller (2000-3000 members) and are saddled with the debt of a building built for a much, much larger congregation.

And yet, here’s Mars Hill, in the midst of its biggest crisis of its young life, still having Mark Driscoll boom on about 10,000 members by the end of 2008. I’m not one to question the power of God here — if He wants a 10,000 member Mars Hill, there will be a 10,000 member Mars Hill. But the captain of a ship needs to worry about the rocks and shoals around him first and their next port-of-call later.

From this side of things, the side of people who haven’t darkened the door of that church, things aren’t going well for Mars Hill. Their own prayer letters suggest that. There’s an eerie radio silence coming out of the congregation right now, with rumors of members getting “disciplined” and/or “excommunicated” floating through the backwash. And in the announcement for the church’s “new” newsletter we’re informed that one of its goals is “aligning the people of Mars Hill with the vision of Mars Hill Church.” Is the membership somehow “out of alignment” with the “vision?” Don’t the people of Mars Hill have a say in the vision and whether they want to be “aligned” with it? That sort of language worries me.

Something’s happening there. Something that sounds vaguely cultish. Something that looks like a church bubble. I’d be thinking long and hard about whether Mars Hill is worth the investment right now.

Meanwhile, the people behind the Mars Hill blog have now resigned from the church. One paragraph stood out for me:

If the sin of arrogance and pride were sexual addiction or theft, it would not require any explanation before you [Mark Driscoll] were asked to step down. And yet because of our western culture, your pride is treated as praiseworthy rather than abhorrent to Jesus.

Mark, you must step down from Mars Hill and figure out where Jesus wants you. You have incredible gifts, but you are using them for your own selfish ambitions. Run from this temptation!

Why did it stand out for me? Well, remember that “must be the pastor’s wife’s fault” thing he wrote up last year? When I wrote it up, I pulled this graf out of that post:

Any pastor who is drifting toward serious sexual sin should have the courage, love for God, devotion to his family, and respect for his church to simply fall on his sword and resign before he goes down in flames. He must get the professional help he needs without fear of losing his position as a pastor. It is much better to be an honest Christian than a wicked pastor.

Methinks Pastor Mark might be blind to his own sin. Or, at least, he doesn’t regard it as such. Even more reason to fear that Mars Hill is turning into Mars Bubble.

Of course, what I say doesn’t matter. After all, as I’ve said before, they think my church, the home church of a certain newly elected member of the city council, is at the least defective, at the most apostate. (That last word, non-religious types, is one of those words you call Christians if you want to get socked in the mouth.)

That’s right, Dan Savage. Tim Burgess isn’t considered enough of a Christian by Mark Driscoll.