Mars Hill Church Cancels Its Huge Annual Conference: Mark Driscoll’s Trouble and the Dying Resurgence

Yesterday Mars Hill Church announced that it is canceling its huge annual conference, Resurgence 2014. The conference website has this announcement:

The Resurgence Conference has always been born out of our love of Jesus and the church, and the desire to support efforts to grow leaders to grow churches. Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel this year’s conference due to unforeseen changes to our speaker line-up and other challenges we believe would make it difficult to provide the quality of conference people have come to expect from Resurgence. Anyone who has already purchased a ticket will be receiving a prompt refund. Thank you for your support of Resurgence and the ministries of Mars Hill Church.

Seattle PI guesses that this is due to speakers like James MacDonald and Paul Tripp distancing themselves from Driscoll, and ultimately dropping out of Resurgence 14. Last year, Matt Chandler was a speaker. This year, he penned the letter removing Driscoll and Mars Hill from the Acts 29 network and asking Mark himself to step down from ministry.

Regardless, a week after that letter was released we are starting to see the fallout. LifeWay Stores has removed Mark’s books from the shelves and now speakers have pulled out of his conference. All that said, this doesn’t mean that Driscoll will step down or that Mars Hill will come to an end. But I still think this means that we have reached the end of an era in evangelicalism that has been virtually defined by Mark Driscoll and his friends.

I think it means the Resurgence is dying.