Mark Driscoll, An Innocent Moment and a Shattered ‘Cult:’ A Book Review of Vince Manuele’s ‘Kiss and Tell’

It’s been almost 13 years since I confronted now-disqualified Pastor Mark Driscoll about his plagiarized book on my radio show and watched as the dominos of his celebrity-pastor con game began to fall, one by one. 

I last wrote about him in 2014, in a fit of frustration that this scandal-riddled charlatan was somehow still at the helm of Mars Hill Church, even after everything that I and others had revealed about him (he left Mars Hill soon thereafter to launch The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ). 

I said in that article that I was done, and I have been done ever since. I can only take so much, after all. But I’ve decided to come briefly out of self-imposed Driscoll hibernation after reading Vince Manuele’s new book, “Kiss and Tell: The Innocent Moment that Shattered Mark Driscoll’s Cult.”

Manuele is a former junior intern and worship-team member at The Trinity Church whose family was ejected from the congregation and then – reportedly and mind-bogglingly – surveilled after they left. What heinous transgression did Manuele commit to deserve such draconian action, you may ask? As he recounts, the then-15-year-old was discovered to have kissed Mark Driscoll’s then-17-year-old daughter, Alexie, with whom he had struck up a friendship and innocent teen romance. 

“Kiss and Tell” tells the whole story behind that forbidden kiss, but it also reveals a lot more about Driscoll and the latest church he’s managed to sucker. 

Among the shocking and appalling claims that Manuele makes in the book:

• As a junior intern at the church, Manuele was paid $200 a month, but not via paycheck or direct deposit. The money, he writes, was “loaded onto a prepaid Visa card you could buy at Walmart.” 

• Every junior intern earned $200 a month, he says, but “the Driscoll kids were paid $500 a month.” That apparently included Alexie, the Head Junior Intern, who was just one of several Driscoll family members commanding various leadership roles at Trinity. 

• Teenage interns were required to sign non-disclosure agreements, in which they agreed to keep “all information obtained, discussed, witnessed or learned … strictly confidential” and to not discuss “certain information shared by The Church … with parents, guardians, or any outside parties, regardless of age or familial relationship, unless specifically approved in writing by Church leadership.” They also weren’t allowed to “speak or write negatively about The Church, its leadership, or its affiliates in any public or private context.”

• The first time Manuele met Mark Driscoll, he says, he asked the pastor how to control his temptations and “follow the Lord more” as a 15-year-old boy. Driscoll told the young man that he needed to get a girlfriend and that “God created men to be sexual creatures.” 

• Once Manuele and Alexie began to grow close, Driscoll started exerting control over the couple, telling Manuele that “there is no dating” and insisting that Manuele had to sit in the back seat of the car if Alexie was the driver. “If you two spend time together,” Manuele quotes Driscoll as saying, “it will be when (Driscoll’s wife) Grace and I coordinate it, and I will be watching to see how you grow as a man.” Alexie, Manuele writes, told him that Driscoll “did not allow her to talk to boys” and that she “always” referred to her father as “Mark.”

• Driscoll’s church office -- outfitted with “one-way glass” to look out over an outdoor youth-ministry area -- was “the largest room on campus, aside from the main sanctuary,” showing members “the control he had over the church.”

• At Driscoll’s behest, Trinity’s security guards threw out an African-American homeless man who entered a church service, stepped onstage and asked for prayer. The video recording of the service “was gone” by the end of the day, Manuele says. An angry Driscoll called out and “cut down” multiple security members afterward, and “the firings started,” he writes.

• As Manuele tells it, security maintained tight control whenever the same homeless man resurfaced near the church, commanding him to leave the property, refusing his requests for water and even using “slurs since the man was black.”

• When Driscoll’s son, Gideon, was asked “if it was true that his dad believed women were ‘penis homes,’” -- one of Driscoll’s many infamous epithets -- “Gideon didn’t flinch. He laughed and said, ‘They are.’ Like it was obvious … I asked what his mom thought about that. He shrugged and said, ‘She knows that’s what they are, too.’”

• Driscoll, by Manuele’s account, continues to use profanity in his new “pastoral” role (with some staffers following suit), including smutty vulgarities, and also told men at the Wednesday-night “Real Men” service that they need to “man up and stop being a p***y.”

• When church leadership found out that Manuele and Alexie had kissed, he says a campus pastor confronted him with crude language, then telling the teenager, “You failed Pastor Mark. You failed God.” When Manuele asked if he could speak to Driscoll, he writes that the campus pastor said: “There’s a reason Pastor Mark isn’t here. He would most likely bash your face in.”

• Manuele says he was asked to leave the church after that, and his brother followed him. The campus pastor then called the boys’ father, who was waiting outside in the car, to tell him not to come to church that night, either. He followed it up by saying that “security channels” had been messaged to remove both father and son from the campus “immediately.” Then the shunning from former friends began, Manuele writes, “the lies started,” and his contact with Alexie ceased. Driscoll, he also claims, “hired a surveillance team … watching us. Tracking us. Following us.”

There’s a lot more in the book, of course, but none of the jaw-dropping stories surprise me. This is just deja vu all over again. 

It also reminds me of the time that I spoke to a TV reporter who wanted my reaction to the news that Driscoll was just about to launch The Trinity Church. I can’t recall my exact words, but I said something like: “Everything anyone needs to know about Mark Driscoll’s many scandals and very well-documented downfall is readily available through a simple Google search. That’s why I think that anyone who’d go to his new church at this point -- and I hate to say it -- deserves to be ripped off. You were extensively warned!”

I meant it at the time, but I’d amend that statement now. From my unique vantage point then, I couldn’t imagine how any Christian could not have heard the truth about Mark Driscoll. The news seemed to be everywhere at the time. But the truth is that not everybody Googles their pastor before attending a church -- or even follows the news very closely. Some people also are very trusting and/or naive. And when I offered that quote, I certainly didn’t have in mind any high-school kids who might end up at Trinity, teenagers who just wanted to learn more about God and to serve Him in a church. 

I kept thinking about that as I read “Kiss and Tell.” It’s one thing for Driscoll to have deceived and offended and sinned against his Mars Hill congregation, elders, pastors and staffers -- and the oblivious readers of his plagiarized books. It’s quite another matter for the target of ire to be a young man whose only “misconduct” was to have normal affection for a girl and want to date like any normal young couple, without some control-freak fallen pastor trying to control their every move. But then again, we’re talking about Mark Driscoll, folks. The guy who, thus far, has been bridled by nobody, stopped by nobody, brought to repentance by nobody.

After reading Manuele’s stirring book, I just hope and pray that he, like so many others who have been wronged on Mark Driscoll’s watch, will remember a few important things.

First, Driscoll was not in that pulpit because God called him, but because he willfully disobeyed God and His Word (see 1 Tim. 3:1-7) in order to keep his celebrity church grift going. Second, the same God whose name Driscoll has invoked as he’s deceived and abused so many people through the years knows the whole truth about what this man has done and, in due time, will deal with him justly. 

And finally, I hope he will remember the words of Psalm 25 and keep fellowship with the God who still loves him and his family and will never forsake them. “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust … Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.”