some thoughts on what some call watchblogging

Earlier this year Wenatchee The Hatchet wrote a guest piece for Internet Monk. The very recently linked article in Slate on how most people don't read all of or all the way through articles on-line reminded me of how it seemed a lot of people read about a lot to do with a certain gigachurch. 

The more years go by the more Wenatchee The Hatchet has pondered the possibility that WTH was trained in writing in an era before the internet was available for civilian and commercial use.  If you grow up in a setting in which you voluntarily read the unabridged Moby Dick and love Dostoevsky you're not dealing with a type of reading that fits the internet we have now, at least in some ways.

Reading reactions to the guest piece impressed upon me that people felt the writing was of poor quality.  It was in the sense that a first draft went up without expected rewrites.  So it went.  But other comments involved either a belief that a certain public figure who blogs about how lame bloggers are had to be behind everything.  Driscoll ultimately had to be the big guy behind Andrew Lamb's situation ven though when Lamb's situation became a headline Driscoll was selling Real Marriage (more on the book later in some other posts).  Driscoll was preparing to shake hands and make friends with T. D. Jakes.  Driscoll was touring to promote his book and taking pre-emptive strike action toward Justin Brierley.  Yet for some reason people who already didn't like Driscoll insisted that Driscoll had to somehow know about Andrew Lamb's situation and somehow be directly involved in it.  Anyone who thought that was not in a position to have read Joyful Exiles (which, of course, didn't go up until months after Lamb's story made headlines).

But it appeared that even those who read Joyful Exiles didn't exactly read Joyful Exiles.  Piecing together the role Scott Thomas played as head of the EIT is clear enough if you know what you're looking at but not everyone knew what they were looking at.  Not long after the site went up correspondence was added in which Thomas stated that "a conciliatory process" had been completed and stated this days before, as head of the EIT, Scott Thomas would affirm that Munson's charges against Meyer and Petry were legit.  So what conciliatory process was that?  Hmm ... .

But you'd have to search far and wide to find any other blogs, let alone any journalistic coverage, that even discussed the roles of Scott Thomas or Jamie Munson in the controversial firings of 2007 at Mars Hill Church.  Munson's got his own domain and a book on authority out now, so maybe he'll be happy to field questions about those topics.  Yes, there's mention of Moleskins for those who are curious about whether he'll fit the New Calvinist demographics.  :)

But a majority of readers who click on a link in any way discussing Mars Hill want the topic to be Driscoll, not executive elders who were involved in firings six years ago or more.  They want things to be about Mark, even though Mark is in a sense just a brand, an icon who has his own domain name.  That Andrew Lamb got put through some kind of bureaucratic disciplinary meat-grinder didn't make Lamb a completely innocent person anymore than it made Kaitlyn Noriega a completely innocent person.  It took two to tango but for those against Mars Hill none of that mattered, and for those for Mars Hill none of that mattered, either.

Unsurprisingly comments asking Wenatchee The Hatchet to bottom-line things confirmed precisely the problem the guest post was written to address.  The for and against teams were (and still are) so eager to just get to the point they don't care whether or not there are other things to consider.  It didn't matter what the confluence of situations was because everyone had their minds made up.

It's not practical to find out how many people who wanted to know if Andrew's story checked out actually bothered to read the more than 15,000 words in "A Confluence of Situations" to find out whether the story checked out.  In the age of the internet readers want you to bottom-line it and research it for them so they simply don't have to.  There may not have been much traffic for A Context for A Call for Reconcilaition, either.  Dostoevsky once wrote that a young man will gladly die for a cause he cares about but ask him to devote five years of his incendiary youth to a cause and you'll find how swiftly his ardor cools!  So it is with readers and bloggers who think they have thoroughly investigated a matter.  No, you probably haven't, I'm afraid.  At least on the subject of a certain megachurch that Driscoll now calls a gigachurch Wenatchee The Hatchet can at least hope to provide some example of how to improve on what is written here. 

But you see, dear reader, the goal here is not precisely partisan.  The goal is not exactly to "win".  There's a difference between advocacy journalism and educational blogging.  It is Wenatchee's biased opinion that the majority of the very best people in the history of Mars Hill Church have come and gone.  There are still wonderful people inside the church but the church is in tens of thousands now and most of those people wouldn't know the name Brad Currah if their life depended on it.  They probably don't even know who Mike Gunn and Lief Moi are.  They also probably don't care.  Wenatchee cares, quite a bit, obviously, and one of the aims of this blog (besides pontificating later this year about why Wenzaslaus Matiegka's guitar sonatas are better than Sor's) is to find a way to share the stories of people who stepped off the bus, got thrown off the bus, or got thrown under the bus while the bus turns out to be some kind of triple-changer that turns into an airplane.  If that means that in some sense Mars Hill shifting from bus to plane makes the place seem like a Decepticon triple-changer you could do worse than Astrotrain. 

And bloggers who have set Mars Hill in their sights could do better about not fixating on Driscoll.  There's a little bit of history on how Mars Hill has acquired its current real estate, for instance. There are questions that can be asked about how a convicted felon on his second marriage and a relatively new Christian faith got fast-tracked into leadership in Mars Hill as quickly as he did and how and why he got vanished from leadership as swiftly.  But defenders of Mars Hill were eager to say "We're not perfect, just better than Andrew" and detractors only cared about Andrew largely, it seems, as a suitable icon for a prejudice against Mars HIll, a thing that could only play into the hands of a leadership culture that already found it easy to present itself as embattled over problems that were in several cases self-fulfilling prophecies or self-inflicted dramas.  If there had been an appeals process in place by which Andrew Lamb could have made a case that his discipline seemed retaliatory given that he was having sex with a pastor's kid maybe none of that situation would have made headlines at all.  Had Mars Hill not posted things to The City due to "unclear communication" Andrew wouldn't have known what was going on for a while. 

In fact one of the things that may be worth emphasizing in light of, say, the NSA headlines we're seeing lately, is that we must remember what a startling amount of information we often dump on to the internet.  Mars Hill leaders had blogged and tweeted so much that, as "A Confluence of Situations" established in exhaustive detail, the privacy of parties involved was dead in the water before Andrew Lamb was even beginning to get put through the disciplinary machinery.  If Bill Watterson is as much as a net-luddite as we may speculate he is then he's got nothing to worry about.  But for bloggers and for Mars Hill folks who tweet and blog about stories of redemption about how they didn't quite get expelled because a father-figure stepped up for them after they'd lied about having sex to bolster their school rep, well, even dead links can tell stories.  Andrew's girlfriend and Andrew himself were not exactly making shrewd decisions along the way and it's not to the credit of partisans to transform either of them into icons of virtue or vice.  Their young people with hormones and emotions they didn't have complete grips on and they said and did things together and to each other that, one surmises, they regret by now.

Wenatchee The Hatchet has gotten unhappy comments from fans and detractors of Mars Hill alike over the years.  In Driscollian parlance that would mean that if Wenatchee The Hatchet has ticked off the people who love Mars Hill and hate Mars Hill then, well, Wenatchee The Hatchet is doing a good job.  Those are the sorts of rhetorical flourishes through which Driscoll can constantly position himself as the center around which everyone else he doesn't consider important becomes a left and right that can be dismissed.  Well, maybe it is so for Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

Let's play with an idea, that a substantial critique of Mars Hill as a culture is not likely to emerge from the theological left or right of where ever Driscoll's fidgeting near.  Anyone he deems to the doctrinal left doesn't really love Jesus or believe the Bible is true and is therefore at best an unwitting instrument in the hands of Satan.  Anyone he deems to the doctrinal right is a legalist who doesn't know how to have fun and no one is in the center except whomever is "friend" material for the time being.  It wasn't long after Don Carson politely indicated that maybe Driscoll was an ignorant troll on British evangelicalism that Driscoll decided to leave. Driscoll has made much about how it's vital to support in public and criticize in private ... at least where he's concerned.  When it's Driscoll himself speaking of others he can say whatever he wants to or about Justin Brierley (go look it up) and he can cheerfully saying that picking on people is his love language (buried amid much other discussion about four points that Chris Rosebrough has discussed here).

To date Mars Hill fans have not really addressed the content at Joyful Exiles in any fashion.  Driscoll has not directly referred to it in any way that Wenatchee is aware of, though there's this.  When any form of criticism can be subsumed into attacks from the Devil Driscoll defines the in team as essentially who is for him and for him in a way that doesn't involve public criticism in any fashion, and he gets to share jokes about people as his love language. 

But the thing here, for those few of you who may have read this far (see the Slate reference above), Wenatchee The Hatchet does not see Mars Hill as some kind of enemy.  Wenatchee The Hatchet can admittedly make a distinction between Mars Hill the people (many of whom are lovely and are friends to Wenatchee The Hatchet whom Wenatchee would help in any practical way possible) and Mars Hill the principality (let the reader understand).  Wenatchee The Hatchet has Mars Hill members as not only friends but also neighbors and Wenatchee The Hatchet has been given work by people who call Mars Hill home.  It's not a hugely difficult task to find out who Wenatchee The Hatchet is, though the odds of being stonewalled by Wenatchee in a unilateral request for contact are very, very high!  Either you know you're in the loop by now already or you can guess that Wenatchee's not going to be hugely responsive.  Don't take it personally. 

What that means is that when Jesus teaches about what it means to love your neighbor in the parable of the Good Samaritan that means that Mars Hill people are your neighbors, especially if you should somehow hate them.  Wenatchee doesn't and so it's all the more true that loving your neighbor as yourself means not being merely a cantankerous troll even when many at Mars Hill might be so themselves.  It also means not simply assuming any old horror story about Mars Hill has to have been told by someone who's an innocent little lamb.  Some of the people who left Mars Hill were treated terribly and ostracized for standing on principle.  Some of the people who left Mars Hill were straight-up egotistical assholes who probably to this day think they were victims when they remorselessly threw their weight around to belittle people they disliked.  Some people voluntarily didn't renew when 2007 rolled along and were dismayed at the lack of fiscally sound policy in real estate expansion.  Surely by now you can guess where on this spectrum Wenatchee The Hatchet is.  Those 40-some posts on real estate didn't just appear out of nowhere.

But this is the internet and on the internet people don't want there to be ambivalence.  People don't want there to be some reality in which Mars Hill members would give Wenatchee The Hatchet a job, for instance, or in which Wenatchee The Hatchet would accept such work.  People don't want to imagine that there are plenty of people at Mars Hill Church who voted for Obama (Wenatchee knows some of them and promises not to name names). 

So for those who come to this blog wanting to read about Mars Hill, okay, that's clearly the most popular line of enquiry that leads people to this blog.  A decade inside the institution and meeting all the founding elders has given Wenatchee an unusual opportunity to share history that seems to just not quite make it into the official narrative lately.  But this is not to say that Wenatchee has any mad skillz that some other person couldn't bring to a situation.  The goal here is, as said before, not necessarily to change your mind (which is probably already made up by the time you got here) but to educate you.  There's a lot of history that isn't exactly swept under the rug but that is hidden in plain sight, that isn't attended to because nobody's thinking to look for it or at it.  That's where this blog can sometimes, perhaps, be of help to people.  There's very little here that doesn't rely on primary sources.  You don't need to contact me personally, dear reader, because the stuff Wenatchee knows is stuff made available through sources that are linked to and quoted sufficiently that you can make use of that primary source material as you see fit. 

None of this means Wenatchee The Hatchet is absolved from loving Mars Hill people as neighbors, seeing as Jesus' teaching properly understood makes that clear.  It also doesn't mean there's any obligation to avoid presenting some frankly ugly history about a place that Wenatchee used to attend, either.  But what you won't necessarily find here is a tone of moral outrage that has characterized a lot of writing about the subjects at hand.  It's not that Wenatchee the Hatchet hasn't felt outrage.  Waited at least a month for the blood to stop boiling before writing this series. Driscoll managed to subtextually transform Esther into a not-so-good-girl who was used for God's perfect plan--which, of course, couldn't be interpreted at a meta level as Mars Hill being embattled in a godless setting and doing their best despite critics, right? Mark keeps joking that he doesn't write the mail he just delivers it.  If that were so then it looks like he appends a few sticky notes on to the envelop that ostensibly got mailed to you from someone else. 

It's easy to blog about what Jesus was supposedly really on about but if you forget that even these Mars HIll people are neighbors to love if you take Jesus' ethical teaching seriously (not that all of you do, of course) then you're no better than you think they are.  You may even be worse.  There are not necessarily good guys and bad guys without blemish in the real world but the real world is not necessarily what the blogosphere wants.