» Pastor Provocateur
Love him or hate him, Mark Driscoll is helping people meet Jesus in one of America's least-churched cities.

Great story over at CT about Pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle's Mars Hill Church (or, as I tend to think of it ... the non-Rob Bell Mars Hill Church). Driscoll's got his detractors as well as his diehards. I lean somewhat toward the latter. Haven't worked his messages into my rotation at home. But when I do catch up with one, it's always as engaging as it is instructive. The excerpt below might illuminate why that is ...

"I'm playing hurt right now," Driscoll confesses to prospective church planters at a March meeting of Acts 29, his network of 170 churches around the world. "I wore out my adrenal glands at the end of last year, just living off adrenaline too much. My sleep has been really jacked up for some months."

Those glands must have a little something left in the tank, because Driscoll warms up when he recounts the history of Mars Hill.

"My first core group was single indie and punk rockers committed to anarchy," he says. "Needless to say, they didn't naturally organize themselves or give generously. If I would have said, 'Everybody tithe,' it would have been in cigarettes."

Read the rest. Driscoll is a gold mine. If you're needing a little visualization here, Mark does a decent riff on being a cheerful giver here on YouTube.