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Less than a year ago, Mark Driscoll, an evangelical pastor, was flying high. His hometown Seattle Seahawks were in the Super Bowl, and the brash pastor scored a big, faith-fueled interview with five of the team's top players, including quarterback Russell Wilson. But in a remarkably fast fall from grace, Driscoll resigned Tuesday as pastor of Mars Hill Church, a congregation he founded 18 years ago and turned into a force in the mostly secular Pacific Northwest. In a statement, Mars Hills' board of overseers said Driscoll hadn't committed any acts of "immorality, illegality or heresy" -- sins that have...

Victoria Osteen, wife of megachurch preacher and New York Times bestselling author Joel Osteen, is now facing withering criticism online for a viral video clip in which she is shown telling congregants at Lakewood Church that obedience, worship and church attendance is not for God but themselves. "I just want to encourage every one of us to realize when we obey God, we're not doing it for God—I mean, that's one way to look at it—we're doing it for ourselves, because God takes pleasure when we're happy," she said in the 36-second clip posted on YouTube, with her husband smiling...

Seattle megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll recently came to the defense of fellow Christian minister Joel Osteen, while admitting that his "Reformed brothers like to treat Pastor Joel like a pinata." In a recent interview with The Gospel Coalition, the Mars Hill Church pastor was asked to comment on a segment of his new book, Who Do You Think You Are?, that mentions "appreciated people" who "exchange grumbling for praying, competing for celebrating, bitterness for thankfulness, performing for serving, and boasting for encouraging." The interviewer, TGC's associate editor Matt Smethurst, asked Driscoll, "What's an 'appreciated person'? Isn't that what Joel Osteen...

To understand the current unrest at Mars Hill Church, you have to go back to 2007. In the autumn of that year, Mars Hill was an emerging evangelical powerhouse, attracting national attention for its combination of ultraconservative theology and rock ’n’ roll posturing. It had grown over the previous decade from a Bible group in pastor Mark Driscoll’s living room to a multi-campus institution drawing 4,000 attendees to services every week. Paul Petry, Mars Hill’s pastor of families and member care at the time, says that roughly 1,600 of those 4,000 people had joined the church as full-fledged members—they’d taken...

“Jesus is better than the Super Bowl,” says Seahawks Defensive Passing Game Coordinator Rocky Seto, and some Seahawks players are clearly in agreement. Before their playoff run a group of Seattle Seahawks players sat down with the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle for a videotaped discussion called, “Who is Jesus?” “It’s no question he gave us everything,” Seto says during the group interview. …

Mars Hill Pastor Mark Driscoll preached on the still popular and still controversial topic of emerging churches in his latest sermon. But it’s an issue he normally wouldn’t teach to his mainly twenty-something church crowd in Seattle. That’s because Mars Hill attendants don’t use the language “emerging church” as many Christian leaders label them. The issue of the emerging church, however, was raised when thousands of people, who regularly tune into Mars Hill sermons every week through the Internet, voted to make it the No. 2 most popular topic they wanted Driscoll to address in a sermon series titled “Religion...