I Dreamed A Dream

I like to inform my readers of the various issues exploding in the Evangelical Christian world. You may remember last year I wrote about Rob Bell, of The Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and his book I’m Really Cool and Wear Hip Glasses. Ha, Ha, just a little blogosphere humor. His book was titled Love Wins and it seemed to state, although not very directly, that everybody goes to heaven, because when you get down to it, the Lord is just a big o’ softy.

To update you regarding Bell, he has loaded up the church van and moved to Beverly with its swimming pools and movie stars. He has hooked up with the executive producer of Lost and created a new television drama called, “Stronger”. It is about the spiritual journey of a musician named Tom Stronger. I am not making this up.

The latest book to set an explosion off in the Evangelical world is Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll of The Mars Hill Church (another Mars Hill Church?) in Seattle, Washington. Whereas Bell was a kind of hipster poet of the Young Evangelicals, Driscoll is a bull looking for a china shop.

Driscoll first came to our attention in the too cool for Sunday School book Blue Like Jazz, where he was anointed as “The Cussing Preacher”. He really didn’t cuss that badly. It has been described as more PG-13 instead of R. Still, Driscoll has a reputation of being rather blunt and Real Marriage is extra frank and “authentic” to a ridiculous degree. Particularly in a chapter of the book titled “Can We _____”. Let’s just say Brother Mark is not very clinical in his discussion about the physics of sex (that sounds like a good name for a band) and leave it at that.

Driscoll presents some real Too Much Information moments from his marriage . Driscoll enjoyed “catin’ around” as my mother would say, before he became a Christian. Mrs. Driscoll also had a fall from Grace, so to speak, before she rededicated her life back to the Lord. This leads to this strange passage, that has made the rounds on the internet:


“One night, as we approached the birth of our first child, Ashley, and the launch of our church, I had a dream in which I saw some things that shook me to my core. I saw in painful detail Grace sinning sexually during a senior trip she took after high school when we had just started dating. It was so clear it was like watching a film—something I cannot really explain but the kind of revelation I sometimes receive. I awoke, threw up, and spent the rest of the night sitting on our couch, praying, hoping it was untrue, and waiting for her to wake up so I could ask her. I asked her if it was true, fearing the answer. Yes, she confessed, it was. Grace started weeping and trying to apologize for lying to me, but I honestly don’t remember the details of the conversation, as I was shell-shocked. Had I known about this sin, I would not have married her.”


I cannot imagine any husband saying, “Sweetie, I had this dream where you were doing the Birmingham Bump with that guy from school you used to like, yeah, the one with the zits on the side of his face that looked like Idaho. Is that true?” Every wife I know, including my own, would punch her husband in the eyeball before she ran upstairs to go on the computer to look for a good D-I-V-O-R-C-E lawyer to email to see if you can get out of a marriage due to sudden insanity.

I once shared a dream with my wife. I was at East Cobb Junior High School. I had a date to an eighth grade basketball game. My date was Jane Seymour. My wife asked me if Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was “nekkid”? No, I explained, she wore a yellow sweater. Lori wept, from laughter, because she didn’t know I had this thing for Jane Seymour. I thought I had mentioned it. I know I mentioned Lynda Carter, but that’s another dream.

I know Driscoll has a ministry to people who have been raised in a super sex soaked society and his heart may be in the right place. I wish he would take a page from Charlie Rich and keep some things behind closed doors.