David Vanderveen

Thanks for making a criticism of our skin color, social status and education. It's unclear how that effects our work. Good churches in rich, middle income and poor communities with people from every color and educational background are great places to seek referrals for qualified pro bono counseling and support.

One of our favorite marriage counselors does not accept payment for services.

Going to licensed counselors really doesn't seem any different than going to licensed medical doctors--there are no guarantees and some are bad at what they were trained to do. So what? Find someone that is highly recommended and has the equivalent of a board certification. Find someone who can help you if you need help. it's unclear to me how going to a person that is not trained would give you better service than someone who is trained and certified. There are plenty of good Christians trained and certified in service professions--seek them out.

I'll go back to Capon: "...it seems to me that when pastoral advice is given by an ordained person, it ought to be given primarily on the basis of what he or she was ordained to do--namely, witness to the Good News of God in Christ--and not on the basis of any other competence (or incompetence) the pastor in question may possess."

There seems to be a significant amount of confusion about the revulsion that Sarah and I had about the ideas in Real Marriage. We do find the ideas repulsive and highly unusual in a healthy, Christian community. We do not know the Driscolls or have opinions about them personally. I'll share a lengthy excerpt from Robert Capon to illustrate our opinion about why the book makes us both so uncomfortable as spouses and as parents. This is from Chapter 2 of THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST:

In spite of the fact that people have an inveterate hankering to put the church in loco parentis--and in spite of the fact that the church, more often than not, has gleefully thrown itself into the role of being everybody's Mommy and Daddy--the whole exercise is a terrible idea. This insidious, parental image of the church doesn't conform to what even a halfway decent parent actually does. Only rotten fathers and mothers ride roughshod over their children's freedom to make mistakes. Only the worst parents ever suggest that there are unforgivable acts that will, unless avoided by the children, be the death of parental love. Only the most dreadful grown-ups use fear to control the young. That there are a good number of such disreputable types (and that all of us, to some degree, are equally disreputable) should not blind us to the fact that the concept of God as an angry, unforgiving parent--and of his church as a domineering grown-up issuing threats to willful kids--is bad news, not Gospel. Such concepts inculcate fear: fear of God, and then fear of our own freedom. They lead not to liberty of the children of God, to the freedom with which Christ has set us free, but to a servile mentality that kills courage and breeds resentment. Still, much of the church, clergy and laity alike, goes blithely on perpetuating its parental image. And then we have the nerve to wonder why so many people hate themselves for being sheep, and hate the church of making them such.

To us, the ideas in Real Marriage do not represent the Gospel, the Good News as we understand it. We found no Christian liberty there.

Interestingly, a friend sent me this link to the style of management at Driscoll's church--it seems to line up with Capon's criticism of a natural tendency towards bad parenting in churches:

http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/mark-driscolls-church-di...

If you want a church and church leaders that dictate your life's decisions to you, good luck. We don't have much to discuss.

Neither Mrs. Vanderveen or I know Mark Driscoll or his wife. We don't have personal opinions about them and our review was not a personal attack. We prefer other models of discipleship, like Capon's and Bonhoeffer's, that do not rely on a leader to spoonfeed specific answers to their followers. The spoonfeeding specifics issue is very problematic on a variety of levels. It seems to us that discipleship ought to be more about helping people learn to think for themselves, not have to come back to the leader for every answer.

This book and this style of management is not breaking any new ground as far as I can tell. Leadership idolatry has been around for a long time. Jim Collins has done some great in-depth research on alternatives to leadership cults that I happen to agree with and strongly recommend.

I guess my point was missed. I am have been a professional editor, not a professional surfer. How is it that a professional editor isn't qualified to edit?

We are enthusiastically awaiting the Driscoll brain surgery book.

Obama would be a great speechwriter for a President or a moderately decent community organizer (if you're looking for a Democratic organizer that can address Nation of Islam followers--give me the natty dressed African with good articulation). He has none--absolutely none--experience managing anything or being responsible for the health and welfare of an enterprise. Being a cog in a wheel and being actually responsible for a machine successfully over years is what we should be voting for as a President. If you haven't managed profit and loss or an enterprise, how would we expect that anyone would be successful in their maiden voyage as President of the United States.

Carter or Obama are two of the best-intended failures in the history of US Presidents. Ultimately, a President is graded on his execution, not his intentions.