By 2014, Mars Hill Church in Seattle had grown to 15,000 members across 15 locations. Mark Driscoll, the church’s co-founding pastor, was one of the most influential evangelical voices in America. Then it all collapsed.
The charges against Driscoll didn’t involve heresy. No one alleged immorality or financial fraud, though financial irregularities eventually surfaced. When Mars Hill’s own board of overseers accepted Driscoll’s resignation, they described a man “guilty of arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner.”
A former elder filed formal charges describing Driscoll as “domineering, verbally violent, arrogant, and quick-tempered.” Two pastors who dissented from Driscoll’s consolidation of power were fired for “displaying an unhealthy distrust in senior leadership.”
It was a catastrophic failure of character dressed up as visionary leadership. And it keeps happening.
Every generation produces its version of the holy tyrant. The names change but not the pattern. Even the titles can vary: senior pastor, ruling elder, or influential layman with the loudest voice in the room. What they share is a widening circle of personal authority and the slow accumulation of wreckage that follows them: broken relationships, silenced dissent, fleeing members, shattered congregations.
This pattern should not surprise us. Augustine identified this impulse 16 centuries ago and gave it a name: the libido dominandi — the lust to dominate.
In “The City of God” (14:28), Augustine drew the defining contrast between two cities, two loves, two images of self. The earthly city is built on love of self and contempt for God. The heavenly city, on the other hand, is built on love of God and contempt for self. In the earthly city, men are ruled by libido dominandi. In the heavenly city, by the love of serving.
Augustine added a twist that every church leader should read slowly: the proud are made subject to their own desire. The lust to dominate becomes the lust that dominates. The man who sets out to control others ends up enslaved to the need.
Where does this lust come from? How do people entrusted with authority in the church end up bullying the people they were called to serve?
Jonathan Edwards defined pride as a man “having too high a thought of himself” – something imperceptible to someone so afflicted. That interior miscalibration is where the libido dominandi germinates. Before the tyrant fires anyone, rewrites the bylaws, or silences the first dissenter, he has already concluded in the unexamined recesses of his own heart that his judgment is superior to other people’s.
The lust to dominate rarely begins with naked ambition; it usually begins with real competence. The leader who can preach, cast vision, manage a budget, or simply outwork everyone in the room comes to a reasonable-sounding conclusion: I know what I’m doing. These people don’t. My judgment is better than theirs. I need to take charge of the situation.
This conclusion may even be true in some cases, but pride always demands more. I’m smarter than they are. I see what they can’t see. I have a better grasp of the mission, theology, and the future of this church. And because I know better, my authority to direct them is righteous. And opposing me obstructs God’s work.
Scripture tells a different story:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3–4).
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring… Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil” (James 4:13–16).
The hubris described by James is one of control, specifically over the future. But James warns us that the future rests solely in God’s divine providence; to think otherwise is evil boasting.
The man convinced he alone knows God’s plan for his congregation has started down the road that James describes. His plans feel like faith, but they’re born of pride.
What makes libido dominandi so insidious in church settings is that it can wear the face of sacrifice.
The domineering pastor is often genuinely hardworking, passionate about the mission, and willing to absorb personal cost in service of the vision. He may honestly believe that the people resisting him are spiritually immature, self-interested, or deceived, and that the loving thing is to override them. (It’s not always the pastor. Sometimes, the pastor is the victim.)
This sincere motivation is what makes the lust to dominate so difficult to see from the inside, and so devastating when it finally becomes visible from the outside.
Augustine, and later Edwards, saw this too. The lust to dominate masquerades as care. He is not controlling them for his benefit; he is controlling them for theirs. He is the only one who understands the stakes. The only one willing to do what needs to be done.
It is important to follow how this plays out, and name it plainly.
When someone finally objects, or just declines to submit to an unreasonable demand, the domineering leader rarely responds with self-examination. He goes on the attack, and the person raising concerns becomes the problem. The dissenting elder is divisive. The pastor who won’t go along is insubordinate. Resistance to control gets relabeled as rebellion against God’s appointed authority. Questioning the leader becomes questioning God. Protecting oneself becomes pride. Principled objection is contumacy.
Psychologists call this gaslighting — after the 1938 stage play (and 1944 film) in which a psychopathic husband systematically works to make his wife doubt her own perceptions. The victim ends up defending herself against charges that are actually descriptions of her abuser. In church settings, it is particularly insidious because the gaslighting comes packaged in terms of spiritual authority.
Gaslighting is a predictable feature of any organization where authority is concentrated, decisions are made behind closed doors, and accountability flows in only one direction.
Which brings us to transparency — not as a corporate virtue, but as an ecclesiastical one.
Bullying thrives in secrecy. Decisions handed down without explanation, personnel actions taken without congregational knowledge, finances managed without scrutiny — these are not marks of strong, confident leadership. They are the fruits of libido dominandi growing unchecked. When leaders diffuse power, normalize transparency, and are genuinely accountable to one another and to the congregation, domination becomes much harder to sustain.
Conducting business in the open, welcoming hard questions, and being open to correction — these are wise practices, not weak ones. They reflect a doctrine of human nature that Reformed Christians have long embraced.
Calvin, writing in the “Institutes,” put it plainly: “If we concede unreservedly to men all the power which they think proper to assume, it is easy to see how soon it will degenerate into a tyranny which is altogether alien from the Church of Christ.” (4.8.1)
The power of church office, Calvin argued, belongs to the office, not the person. The authority they exercise is not theirs; it is Christ’s, mediated through his Word. Any officer who demands submission to his personal authority rather than to Scripture has stepped outside his commission entirely. Paul himself disclaimed dominion over the faith of the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 1:24). If the apostle renounced that authority, Calvin asks, who would dare claim it?
Peter called elders to shepherd the flock “eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.” (1 Peter 5:2–3). Peter knew the temptation to domineer was real so he named it directly. He never assumed godly men would be immune to it.
There is a governance principle here that PCA churches in particular should prioritize.
The Presbyterian model exists, in part, precisely because no individual can be trusted with unchecked authority. The session, presbytery, General Assembly — these structures are not bureaucratic inconveniences. They are safeguards built the doctrine of total depravity. We confess that the heart is deceitful above all things. And that truth does not just apply to those outside the church.
When a congregation or a session allows those structures to erode, the machinery for correction is gone before anyone realizes it was needed.
Mars Hill began with a vision of Jesus as “senior pastor” and elders serving with “one vote each.” That’s not what it became.
The antidote for the lust to dominate is not better leadership training, stronger bylaws, or formal codes of conduct. The cure is the virtue that Augustine, Calvin, Edwards, and the entire tradition of Christian ethics would name first: humility.
Not performative humility wherein the leader prefaces every decision with “I’m just a sinner saved by grace,” and then punishes anyone who disagrees with him. Real humility actually changes how a man thinks, wields power, and responds when he’s challenged.
The domineering leader and the humble servant are not distinguished by their competence, vision, or gifts. They are distinguished by what they believe about themselves. One believes his judgment is the most reliable thing in the room. The other admits it might not be.
Christians can disagree sharply over polity, governance, and management style. Those debates have their place. But no one can honestly claim to have attained perfect humility. No theologically informed Christian disputes that pride is sinful or that humility is a virtue. Whatever else divides us, this is ground we all can share — and ground the church desperately needs to move toward.
Edwards saw pride as “the main door by which the Devil comes into the hearts of those that are zealous for the advancement of religion,” but pointed clearly to our surest defense: “nothing sets a person so much out of the Devil’s reach as humility.” With the humble man, Satan’s most effective lies – “You are smarter than them; you are better than them; you should be in charge” – gain no traction.
Better governance fixes governance. Clearer bylaws fix processes. Removing one domineering leader creates an opening for the next. Humility, cultivated seriously across a congregation, fixes marriages, heals divisions, softens theological and political tribalism, leads to better thinking, and makes the church the kind of community a watching world might actually want to join.
Augustine’s two cities are not hypothetical. They are the competing realms chosen by every leader, elder, session, and every one of us. The earthly city runs on the lust to dominate. The heavenly city runs on the love of serving.
Which city are you choosing today?
Steven J. Willing is a neuroradiologist, a member of Briarwood Presbyterian Church, and the author of “Superbia: The Perils of Pride, The Power of Humility.”