Mark Driscoll: Scandal, Forgiveness, and the War for Young Men's Souls | Ep. 55

Pastor Mark Driscoll—founder of the once-influential Mars Hill Church in Seattle, who resigned amid scandal in 2014 and now leads the fast-growing Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona—joins Jeremy for a two-hour conversation that doesn't blink.

They start with the crisis: Gen Z men drowning in porn, gambling, and video games, a church that's been "over-mothered and under-fathered" since the men came home from World War II, and a seeker-sensitive movement that made Sunday morning safe for everyone except the men who needed it most. From there the conversation goes everywhere—the politics of the pulpit, why Gen Z is drawn to liturgy and structure instead of comfort, the Exodus story as a blueprint for what happens when believers exit the public square, and Driscoll's own account of the Mars Hill collapse: the hacking, the extortion, the fake confession sent to his entire mailing list, and the eighteen years of his own sermons he had to buy back at auction.

The back half is about forgiveness—not as a feeling, but as a decision, using the story of Joseph as the frame: "The deeper the forgiving, the greater the anointing." Jeremy pushes Driscoll on the difference between forgiving someone and trusting them again, and Driscoll closes with his answer to the question he says he asks every pastor who comes on the show: what is the gospel?