“The Ethos of Mark Driscoll: A Summary of an Undergraduate Thesis”

by Benjamin Sherick | Xchanges 11.2

Conducting Qualitative Interviews

For this project, I wanted to not only speculate on issues of audience response, but also demonstrate the effect that Driscoll’s intrinsic ethos had on persuasion. Therefore, this project also involved qualitative, semi-structured interviews designed to add supplemental data that would support or question the findings of the rhetorical analysis.

Since it was impossible to interview actual members of the MHC congregation due to the significant distance between Calgary and Seattle, I had to simulate an audience for the purpose of the interviews. Driscoll shares a religious ideology with a significant portion of his congregation. A simulated audience needed to share the same ideology. Therefore, I recruited Protestant, evangelical, North American practicing Christians through purposive sampling. Participants needed to be professing Protestant evangelical Christians belonging to churches with similar theological views to MHC, preferably in their twenties to simulate Driscoll’s university-district audience.

Once participants were selected, the pool was divided into two experimental groups. Group 1 participants were asked to listen to one sermon and interviewed about its effect afterwards. Group 2 was asked to read a New York Times article and a blog post from Matthew Paul Turner about Mark Driscoll before listening to the sermon, in order to understand how knowledge of reputation affected reception. Both groups were shown the full video recording of the sermon.

Profiles of Interview Participants

All participants were in their twenties. All participant names are pseudonyms assigned based on gender.

Group 1 (no pre-briefing on Driscoll’s reputation):

• Courtney: 24-26 year old female. Low to moderate knowledge of Driscoll.
• Emily: 24-26 year old female. Low to moderate knowledge. Had never listened to Driscoll’s preaching.
• Kyle: 27-29 year old male. No prior knowledge about Mark Driscoll.

Group 2 (read NYT article and Turner blog post beforehand):

• Scott: 24-26 year old male. Highest level of knowledge; had actually attended Mars Hill Church and seen Driscoll preach in person.
• Rudy: 27-29 year old male. High knowledge about Driscoll.
• Liz: 24-26 year old female. Low to moderate knowledge of Driscoll.

The interview data is limited in its reliability and generalizability due to the small sample size. However, it does offer some interesting insights that could inform future research.