I recently spent some time listening to Dustin Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming. I like his music, and the new album is good. The first song I heard, though, reminded me of the rumors that he has walked away from orthodox Christianity:
When I left town, I was swept up
The heart of sedona
With the visions of a man from Galilee
Along the way, I lost my bearings
I got swallowed up by sins of certainty
The words to this song triggered a desire to research the truth. Kensure was an impactful Christian musician who wrote the worship album of the year not to many years ago. I wondered, therefore, why he walked away (if indeed he did).
I learned that Kensrue was a former worship leader for Mars Hill, the failed church that rose to the heights of evangelical influence with many campuses, only to collapse with the failings of it erstwhile leader, Mark Driscoll.
Listening to the song, Heart of Sedona, off his new album, Desert Dreaming, gave me pause. The words seem to confirm the rumor, and the story seems all too familiar lately.
His music is as good as ever, but it comes with the melancholy of what used to be. Or maybe it never was. It’s hard to know how to process the deconstruction of someone’s else’s faith.
Given the back story (involvement in a failed church movement), I suspected his “deconstruction” (and many other artists who seem to have followed a similar path) may be symptomatic of some malady that has infected America Evangelical Christianity.
My entre into Kensrue’s story begin with the article, It’s Not Enough: Dustin Kensrue’s Turning Away, which is where I learned that Kensrue was intimately involved in the toxic environment of the Mars Hill church movement led by Driscoll, a controversial and polarizing personality.
I had heard of the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill Church, but I did not jump on the curiosity bandwagon when people associated with Christianity Today produced the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I only heard about it, and I had listened to a discussion of the podcast on another podcast, so I felt I needed to hear it firsthand to gain some perspective.
The podcast describes the talent and bravado of Mark Driscoll, who was also polarizing and toxic and seemingly proud of it. Driscoll was staunchly reformed in his theology with a cultish personality and a flair for the dramatic. He attracted people on the edges of faith in the notoriously countercultural Seattle area. I summarized some of my thoughts on what I learned in Keeping It Real for the Church: Talent in Tension with Character)
I have also gone back, now, through the tweets highlighted in the article I noted above, and I have poured over Dustin Kensrue’s Twitter (X) feed to gain further insight. These things give me additional food for thought in considering the “deconstruction” of Dustin Kensrue as it relates to the American Evangelical Church.
Though I have spent considerable time researching these things, my thoughts remain preliminary and exploratory. I am not certain that I have gained sufficient perspective to be clear or certain of any conclusions, but it seems to confirm my sense that the story is symptomatic of a problem with the American Evangelical Church.
In fact, the original article I found may also be symptomatic of the same issues with the American Evangelical Church and of current American culture, itself, affected as it is by social media. I apologize for the length of this article, but I am afraid I do not do much more than scratch the surface.
Continue reading “Diving for Pearls in the stories of Dustin Kensrue and Mark Driscoll”
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