Remember that Gospel Coalition piece about how Acts 29 survived the end of Mars Hill from 2017?
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/how-acts-29-survived-and-thrived-after-the-collapse-of-mars-hill/
...
The trouble with the wild west is, it’s wild.
“There was a kind of looseness that led to some real frustrations that needed to be fixed,” Chandler said. The focus had begun to slip; the “young bucks were more apt to gather around and argue about definitive atonement than they were to plant churches.”
Finances were also loose. Mars Hill didn’t ask for money, instead saying that planters could give when they could. But church planters aren’t raking in cash; given the option, they’ll spend their funding elsewhere. That left Mars Hill footing the bill and feeling frustrated.
And authority ran a little like a rubber band, loosening and tightening in seemingly random ways. “There was a lot of mistrust, even when I became president,” Chandler said. “There was a massive amount of skepticism about what was going to be true.”
Driscoll saw the weaknesses, and knew he wasn’t the person to fix them, Chandler said. Driscoll was also starting to attract more controversy, drawing regular fire over his impulsive language and attitude toward women, and apologizing again and again.
So in the spring of 2012, Driscoll met with Chandler and Acts 29 vice president Darrin Patrick. Patrick had his hands full with health concerns and his growing church, but Chandler was splitting lead pastor responsibilities with a team of two other men, and could add the responsibility. So Driscoll handed the network over to Chandler.
“I was anxious about taking it because I thought it would lead to conflict between Mark and I,” Chandler said. “But Mark was adamant that he was for me, that he was supportive of me, and that he would come behind me. And to his credit, he did that every step of the way.”
...
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is nothing less than a miracle that Acts 29 did not go down with Mars Hill,” said Acts 29 CEO Steve Timmis.
Driscoll was not only instrumental in “but also the personality of Acts 29,” Kwon said. So when Driscoll’s controversies started piling up, the board “publicly and internally tried to support and give [Driscoll] the benefit of the doubt,” they stated in 2014.
But “based on the totality of the circumstances, we are now asking you to please step down from ministry for an extended time and seek help,” they wrote. “Consequently, we also feel that we have no alternative but to remove you and Mars Hill from membership in Acts 29.”
The Acts 29 brotherhood was hurt and confused, some by Driscoll’s actions, some by the board’s rejection of him. So leaders opened up town hall meetings, telling the people to ask anything they wanted.
Ah, yes, we had a few things to say about that over at the following blog post
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/12/recent-gospel-coalition-piece-discusses.html
One of the most striking things about the Gospel Coalition piece about Acts 29 surviving and thriving after the collapse of Mars Hill was skimming over how Mark Driscoll wasn't even president for most of the 2007-2012 period of Acts 29 leadership. Who was? Well, back in November 2011 Ray Ortlund told the world exactly who was president of Acts 29, Scott Thomas. Despite the above-quoted article in which sources stated that Mark Driscoll's personality defined Acts 29, even within the context of The Gospel Coalition website itself we know perfectly well that Mark Driscoll may have defined Acts 29 by force of personality but neither was he necessarily officially president most of the time between 2007-2012.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/ray-ortlund/i-honor-scott-thomas/
I honor Scott Thomas
November 11, 2011 | Ray Ortlund
Scott is President of Acts 29 and my coach. There are many reasons to honor him. But for starters, here is one.
It is clear to me that the church planters in Acts 29 are not cannon fodder for someone else’s war. To Scott, every man matters. Scott works hard to make sure our network is healthy and sustainable. Church planting is costly. I personally think it is the hardest of all pastoral ministries. As Mark Driscoll has said, “The body count is high.” Fully aware of the price these young men are paying to spread the gospel, Scott works tirelessly to care for them. No one understands the burden he bears. But I have become somewhat aware of his sacrificial labors on behalf of the A29 planters. For this, and much more, I honor Scott.
I think of Acts 29 as the bikers of evangelicalism. Or better, a band of brothers. I honor all these magnificent young men, and their heroic wives, for giving their lives to advance the gospel in our time and beyond. It’s a privilege to be among them.
But in early 2012 ..
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/phoenix-preacher-matt-chandler-to-take.html
On February 6, 2012 Driscoll explained that Scott Thomas urged him to resume presidency of Acts29
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/dear-acts-29-members/
Dear Acts 29 Members,
This letter is intended to provide some clarity about where we are, and Lord willing, where we are going. I hope you find it encouraging, compelling, and unifying.
Under the leadership of Pastor Scott Thomas we just completed our most amazing year of God’s grace yet. In the US alone we are now over 400 churches! This is a wonderful gift of God. I want to sincerely and personally thank Pastor Scott for juggling so many duties so graciously.
...
With Pastor Scott’s encouragement and the board approval, this means I am resuming the presidency of Acts 29. I want to invest every resource and relationship at my disposal to serve our church planters. Consider this primarily the “Prophet” board. This board is not closed and other men may join it in years to come. This board will be meeting soon in California, long before our annual retreat, so that we have a clear battle plan for the next season of Acts 29.
Regarding Scott Thomas:
Scott Thomas is taking this transition as a chance to pursue other opportunities he has before him and will not be making the move to Dallas. Scott and I are on very good terms and had dinner just this past weekend, where he informed me of his deep love for you and the network but felt like God has released him from leading Acts 29. He is excited about what God has next for him.
As for Scott Thomas being president, with help from The Wayback Machine we established that he was at least listed president from the 2010 to 2011 period.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/chandler-on-mars-hill-a29-was-so-kind.html
Back when I was a journalism student my journalism professor said that often the most important stories are not the ones that 'everyone" is talking about but the ones that "nobody" is talking about for which there are enough leads to write a story. One of the non-stories in coverage of Mars Hill over the last decade was the abrupt disappearance of Scott Thomas from leadership at both Mars Hill and Acts 29 in a mere two or three month period in early 2012--for those who were at Mars Hill for any number of years it might raise questions about what has happened since, and such as can be documented for the time being. There were announcements, to be sure, but actual explanations were not so clear. Much like the 2005 leadership transition in which David Nicholas stopped getting mentioned as a founder of Acts 29 or a board member the disappearance of Scott Thomas is comparably under-explained. Something happened, obviously, because presidents or founders don't just vanish into the blue for no reason at all, but that the reasons for the change have not even been discussed in an article such as the one that appeared at The Gospel Coalition is just weird. In a way somewhat comparable to an absence of mention of Scott Thomas the TGC article also doesn't mention Darrin Patrick's removal from Acts 29 or why that happened.
Scott Thomas' role in the EIT and the trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry have been so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere there's not much need to do more than tag associations with the content. Joyful Exiles has a detailed timeline of documents and correspondence related to the Mars Hill trial of Paul Petry, for instance.
The memo associated with then executive elder Sutton Turner about the financial condition of Mars Hill in earlier 2012 might be the only document shedding any light on behind-the-scenes leadership issues within Mars Hill that might shed more light on what may have been going on. The Gospel Coalition article did indicate there was some resentment on the part of Mars Hill leadership as a whole that they were footing the bill for Acts 29 to function without necessarily seeing member churches kicking in to help fund organizational activity and overhead.
Now for those who don't already know, Scott Thomas was one of the men who signed a letter apologizing to Paul Petry and Bent Meyer for the trial/termination proceedings they were subjected to in 2007. About how that trial could be understood as having an educational role within what was becoming an increasingly authoritarian culture you can read stuff I've written elsewhere at this blog
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
Unfortunately that website is down. But with help from The Wayback Machine you can read the letter.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141107012719/http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry
which has also been preserved here
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/03/for-archival-purposes-letter-of.html
Scott Thomas' role in the EIT and the trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry have been so thoroughly documented here and elsewhere there's not much need to do more than tag associations with the content. Joyful Exiles has a detailed timeline of documents and correspondence related to the Mars Hill trial of Paul Petry, for instance.
The memo associated with then executive elder Sutton Turner about the financial condition of Mars Hill in earlier 2012 might be the only document shedding any light on behind-the-scenes leadership issues within Mars Hill that might shed more light on what may have been going on. The Gospel Coalition article did indicate there was some resentment on the part of Mars Hill leadership as a whole that they were footing the bill for Acts 29 to function without necessarily seeing member churches kicking in to help fund organizational activity and overhead.
While at one level I get how everyone would want to forget the past, "move on", and get back to business as usual I would persist in saying that the nature of business as usual was still how we got to the catastrophic meltdown of Mars Hill when, by dint of journalistic and blogging coverage, some things were uncovered that exposed the nature of what "business as usual" entailed. Recall that when the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability made a defense of the Result Source Contract gambit to secure a No.1 place on the NYT best seller list for Real Marriage the mea culpa was that it was not unethical or illegal but it was unwise. Blogging done by Warren Throckmorton later showed that not only Team Driscoll made use of RSI but that other Christian writers used it, too. Then after a year or so of controversy the hubbub died down and things were back to normal, whatever normal might be. But it was hard to shake an impression that it was easier for Mark Driscoll to go down for having been caught doing what other celebrity Christians seem to have been able to do before and since Mark Driscoll's own celebrity was at its peak. To that extent that Anglo-American evangelicalism attempts to treat the Driscoll case as an outlier or exception so as to not regard his rise and fall as potentially emblematic of the nature of the Christian media industries there may be no opportunity to learn any "lessons" about how "we" in evangelicalism got "there" back in 2014.
Showing posts with label a memo from 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a memo from 2012. Show all posts
Saturday, January 06, 2018
Sunday, May 10, 2015
revisiting Turner's recent account of Global in light of Mars Hill's history of fiscal cliffs and mass layoffs
We've discussed the conundrum of Sutton Turner having reported:
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
*Unfortunately, Mars Hill’s attorneys have requested that I not blog. I have removed some of the financial information as well as other non-financial information in response to their request.
When in the earlier statement they were:
http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on
For the past several weeks, I have been planning to discuss the lessons I have learned from events and mistakes at Mars Hill Church on my website. Earlier this week, I wrote three separate blogs regarding the ResultSource decision in 2011 at Mars Hill. Today, I planned to focus on Mars Hill Global. However, last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill’s former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week.
More recently, Turner seemed to indicate that attorneys in association with Mars Hill had recently invoked litigation. This comment quoted below does not seem to have referred to a reported pending suit against former MH legal officers, but against Turner individually.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/05/sutton-turner-talks-mars-hill-global-says-lawyers-asks-him-to-leave-out-financial-information/#comment-2011875134
Sutton Turner > Warren Throckmorton • 9 hours ago
The litigation threat was against me (personally), nothing outside. I honestly don't understand it. As I said before in my blog, if the church was still a church, I would not communicate about anything, however the church is dead and it is time to learn from my mistakes and my sin.
I wanted to publicly apologize to people that had been hurt by my sin and my mistakes, following my 1:1 meetings with people directly that I needed to reconcile with. I thought it was time to communicate the full story - in detail with $ - however "they" got wind (honestly, don't know how) of what I was doing and told me to stop, with a threat. If I get sued for doing what I have done, my wife and I are fine with it.
It would seem Turner has nothing to lose and everything to gain by sharing where the money was spent and when in terms of clearing the air. It's a shame that it took the process of the formal dissolution of the corporation to spur him to considering this option.
However, something that seems worth noting is that the lack of clarity about what Mars Hill Global did and didn't do came in during the Sutton Turner regime. Back when Munson was legal president, there didn't seem to be any lack of clarity about what Global did. Driscoll explained the 2009-era vision for Global in a sermon that did not get transcribed and that Wenatchee The Hatchet had to transcribe. It's worth revisiting to see what was being said on behalf of Global in those years.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
Whether or not it was former or current Mars Hill attorneys who have insisted that Turner not blog about Mars Hill has yet to be clarified but the statements made dealing with Mars Hill Global can be dealt with independent of questions as to which attorneys that were or weren't with Mars Hill got in some kind of touch with Turner.
Now we can get to the Turner era.
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
Just a few observations about the following:
...
Global Focus
The vision and activities connected to the Global Fund must focus on reaching the worldwide church. As a person sits in front of his computer in Qatar, London, Cape Town, or Sydney, he does not care about Mars Hill planting in Everett. As an international citizen, however, he cares greatly about global evangelism, global missions, global causes for Jesus, global church-planting, etc. Though the sentiment is rare among Americans, people abroad feel a sense [of] belonging kinship with the global community.
Flagship Projects
of the money that comes into the Global Fund, designate a fixed percentage internally for highly visible, marketable projects such as mission trips, orphan care, support for pastors, and missionaries in the third world, etc (ten to fifteen strategic operations in locations where Mars Hill wants to be long term). This percentage should be flexible (not a "tithe"), and not communicated to the public. Support for Mars Hill Global would be support for Mars Hill Church in general, but the difference and the draw would be that a portion of Global gifts would also benefit projects that spread the gospel and serve the needs of people around the world.
Even if unintentional the gap between the global/Africa emphasis in soliciting funds and the reality of local use created a problem. The problem was, basically, that some people felt that if Mars Hill was going to solicit money the solicitation ought to have accented the majority of activity and expenditure.
asf
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/01/mars-hill-global-fund-help-the-helpless-or-use-the-helpless/
...
The purpose statement in the November 2011 memo below is almost identical to another November 2011 memo I posted in early May of this year which signaled a change of focus for Mars Hill Global.
[WtH the other memo can be found here]
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
BENEFITS
The Global Fund could be beneficial in a number of ways, besides the obvious gain of increased funding:
* For a relatively low cost (e.g. $10k/month), supporting a few missionaries and benevolence projects would serve to deflect criticism, increase goodwill, and create opportunities to influence and learn from other ministries
* Many small churches who may consider joining Mars Hill hesitate because they do not believe we support "missions." While we need to continue to challenge the assumptions underlying a claim, the Global Fund would serve as a simple, easy way to deflate such criticism and help lead change in those congregations
* The ability to communicate and interact with supporters of Mars Hill Global provides an avenue for promoting events, recruiting leaders, and developing Mars Hill core groups in strategic cities
IMPLEMENTATION
* EE sets specific guidelines on what Global Fund will financially support
* Possible suggestions: Church Planting, Orphan Care, and Widow Care in Developing Countries
* Specific targets will easily allow MHC to say "no" to the flood of request that will come.
* Launch MH Global 3 weeks before Easter 2012
* Website
* Video
* Testimonies of Jesus working in developing countries
* Call to give
* Monthly updates from all global fund projects.
What Turner and the others may not yet fully appreciate is that what can seem controversial about Global is that whatever good it did and whatever funds it raised, the nature of the memo highlights the benefits of Global for the brand of Mars Hill more than those whose needs would be met by Mars Hill's financial resources and activity.
There's an obvious point that could be easy to miss in the memo. You might not have spotted it but it's the Easter 2012 part. The November 2011 memos published by Turner explore Global as a "sleeping giant" but why would Turner and company have been interested in that?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
In the spring of 2012 Turner sent a memo indicating that Mars Hill, at the risk of putting things to simply, was teetering on the brink of financial ruin, pursuing a series of projects at the same time that were not financially sustainable. The multiple campus launches and relaunches, the promotion of Real Marriage, these things were taxing the resources. Turner seemed convinced giving was not what it could have been. Whether the church should have been renting the city of Ephesus for a day didn't come up but it might have been part of the concern, maybe.
The point is, let's suggest that given that by the spring of 2012 the memo linked to above suggests a panic mode about the fiscal competence of the Martian culture. Global looked like an untapped resource, "a sleeping giant" that would be beneficial to the church. Now in the spring of 2012 there were mass layoffs and adjustments. In spite of that Driscoll would go on to declare that FY2012 had been the best year ever.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
http://marshill.com/media/jesus-loves-his-church/jesus-gave-us-communion#transcript
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5, 2012
... And in that same spirit, we like to notify the church of how things are going. That includes monthly updates for all of Mars Hill. In one sense, we’re one church, in another sense, we’re fourteen local churches scattered across four different states, and pregnant with five more churches, hopefully to be birthed in about a year. And what we like to do is give a global update for how Mars Hill is doing, and then also allow the lead pastors of each local church to give a local update for how things are going at that particular location.
Our fiscal year, our budget year, runs from July through June, so we just finished our fiscal year, and those who are administratively gifted and allow us to steward the resources that God has given us, have put together a final year-end report, and I’m really excited to share it with you.
Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been. [emphasis added[
In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
...
Just off the top of my head, I know that Pastor Sutton Turner, your executive pastor, is negotiating deals for Mars Hill Everett, as they’ve outgrown their kid’s space, Mars Hill Downtown, as they’re at five services having outgrown their facility as well, in negotiations for Mars Hill Orange County, also in negotiations for Mars Hill Federal Way, also hoping, trusting, praying that we’ll be able to open Mars Hill Tacoma, Mars Hill Renton, Mars Hill Kirkland/Bothell-ish, and so lots of real estate negotiations in play, in addition to others that I’m sure that I’ve forgotten. But, just be in prayer for that, that we would have the space to see more people come to church and come to Jesus.
Driscoll had landed a best-selling author status (thanks to Result Source) and had scored a million dollar home in Snohomish county. His star was higher than it had ever been and he could afford to issue pre-emptive character attacks on Justin Brierley and rear-guard defenses of shaking hands with T. D. Jakes. 2012 was probably a "best year ever" for Mark Driscoll. But what about Mars Hill as a whole? What about the Orange County eviction? What about the more rank and file staff?
The situation behind the scenes in 2012 looked a bit different. There's the "we're in a big mess" memo, and then there's Dave Bruskas' communication from May 25, 2012.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/
...
We Really Need Your HelpFrom Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:
As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.
First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]
...
Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals
...
Internally layoffs were happening in the first half of 2012 that Bruskas said could not and should not be appealed. The financial situation of Mars Hill was bad enough that potential lends would consider Mars Hill an unattractive candidate for future financing. In June 2012 Driscoll mentioned that Mars Hill had been operating on a financial model that wasn't good for its long-term future. You won't find that in the sermon if you go to download it at Mark Driscoll Ministries, because it's been cut out.
While Bruskas was internally urging laid off staff to not make appeals and Driscoll had bought a roughly million-dollar home in Snohomish county, and in June 2012 mentioned a tough "season" by August 2012 he was declaring in his sermons that 2012 had been the greatest year ever for Mars Hill.
Then ... by 2013 Driscoll was talking about how Mars Hill managed to avoid slipping over a fiscal cliff.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-mars-hill-managed-to-avoid-slipping.html
With Mars Hill at times seeming to be teetering on the edge of fiscal cliffs every other year, it's "possible" the leadership was so focused on finding some way to keep the corporation solvent it was not nearly as careful as it could have and should have been about the nature of what Mars Hill Global was. It's not necessary to propose all out intent to deceive if we connect all the dots, if Mars Hill was as fiscally incompetent as Sutton Turner's 2015 narrative indicates, a failure to grasp the gravity of the fiscal situation could fuel a subsequent lack of proper concern for how to convey what Global had become.
Or, of course, it is also possible to propose that the way Global was promoted was too slippery and evasive, too. These are not mutually exclusive explanations being proposed. Wenatchee leans more toward the sloppy incompetence theory as to what went wrong with Global. What does seem to be the case, given the evidence and narratives at hand, was that the controversial lack of clarity about Mars Hill Global didn't come up until the Turner era. Whatever Turner's general story of the fiscal incompetence of late Munson-era leadership on Mars Hill financials (and one can only wonder how long Munson's going to let that stand as the new public narrative about his era of leadership), it can be said in Munson's defense that there seemed to have been nothing at all about Mars Hill Global during his tenure that could become any basis for controversy.
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
*Unfortunately, Mars Hill’s attorneys have requested that I not blog. I have removed some of the financial information as well as other non-financial information in response to their request.
When in the earlier statement they were:
http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on
For the past several weeks, I have been planning to discuss the lessons I have learned from events and mistakes at Mars Hill Church on my website. Earlier this week, I wrote three separate blogs regarding the ResultSource decision in 2011 at Mars Hill. Today, I planned to focus on Mars Hill Global. However, last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill’s former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week.
More recently, Turner seemed to indicate that attorneys in association with Mars Hill had recently invoked litigation. This comment quoted below does not seem to have referred to a reported pending suit against former MH legal officers, but against Turner individually.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/05/sutton-turner-talks-mars-hill-global-says-lawyers-asks-him-to-leave-out-financial-information/#comment-2011875134
Sutton Turner > Warren Throckmorton • 9 hours ago
The litigation threat was against me (personally), nothing outside. I honestly don't understand it. As I said before in my blog, if the church was still a church, I would not communicate about anything, however the church is dead and it is time to learn from my mistakes and my sin.
I wanted to publicly apologize to people that had been hurt by my sin and my mistakes, following my 1:1 meetings with people directly that I needed to reconcile with. I thought it was time to communicate the full story - in detail with $ - however "they" got wind (honestly, don't know how) of what I was doing and told me to stop, with a threat. If I get sued for doing what I have done, my wife and I are fine with it.
It would seem Turner has nothing to lose and everything to gain by sharing where the money was spent and when in terms of clearing the air. It's a shame that it took the process of the formal dissolution of the corporation to spur him to considering this option.
However, something that seems worth noting is that the lack of clarity about what Mars Hill Global did and didn't do came in during the Sutton Turner regime. Back when Munson was legal president, there didn't seem to be any lack of clarity about what Global did. Driscoll explained the 2009-era vision for Global in a sermon that did not get transcribed and that Wenatchee The Hatchet had to transcribe. It's worth revisiting to see what was being said on behalf of Global in those years.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
Whether or not it was former or current Mars Hill attorneys who have insisted that Turner not blog about Mars Hill has yet to be clarified but the statements made dealing with Mars Hill Global can be dealt with independent of questions as to which attorneys that were or weren't with Mars Hill got in some kind of touch with Turner.
Now we can get to the Turner era.
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
Just a few observations about the following:
...
Global Focus
The vision and activities connected to the Global Fund must focus on reaching the worldwide church. As a person sits in front of his computer in Qatar, London, Cape Town, or Sydney, he does not care about Mars Hill planting in Everett. As an international citizen, however, he cares greatly about global evangelism, global missions, global causes for Jesus, global church-planting, etc. Though the sentiment is rare among Americans, people abroad feel a sense [of] belonging kinship with the global community.
Flagship Projects
of the money that comes into the Global Fund, designate a fixed percentage internally for highly visible, marketable projects such as mission trips, orphan care, support for pastors, and missionaries in the third world, etc (ten to fifteen strategic operations in locations where Mars Hill wants to be long term). This percentage should be flexible (not a "tithe"), and not communicated to the public. Support for Mars Hill Global would be support for Mars Hill Church in general, but the difference and the draw would be that a portion of Global gifts would also benefit projects that spread the gospel and serve the needs of people around the world.
Even if unintentional the gap between the global/Africa emphasis in soliciting funds and the reality of local use created a problem. The problem was, basically, that some people felt that if Mars Hill was going to solicit money the solicitation ought to have accented the majority of activity and expenditure.
asf
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/01/mars-hill-global-fund-help-the-helpless-or-use-the-helpless/
...
The purpose statement in the November 2011 memo below is almost identical to another November 2011 memo I posted in early May of this year which signaled a change of focus for Mars Hill Global.
[WtH the other memo can be found here]
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
BENEFITS
The Global Fund could be beneficial in a number of ways, besides the obvious gain of increased funding:
* For a relatively low cost (e.g. $10k/month), supporting a few missionaries and benevolence projects would serve to deflect criticism, increase goodwill, and create opportunities to influence and learn from other ministries
* Many small churches who may consider joining Mars Hill hesitate because they do not believe we support "missions." While we need to continue to challenge the assumptions underlying a claim, the Global Fund would serve as a simple, easy way to deflate such criticism and help lead change in those congregations
* The ability to communicate and interact with supporters of Mars Hill Global provides an avenue for promoting events, recruiting leaders, and developing Mars Hill core groups in strategic cities
IMPLEMENTATION
* EE sets specific guidelines on what Global Fund will financially support
* Possible suggestions: Church Planting, Orphan Care, and Widow Care in Developing Countries
* Specific targets will easily allow MHC to say "no" to the flood of request that will come.
* Launch MH Global 3 weeks before Easter 2012
* Website
* Video
* Testimonies of Jesus working in developing countries
* Call to give
* Monthly updates from all global fund projects.
What Turner and the others may not yet fully appreciate is that what can seem controversial about Global is that whatever good it did and whatever funds it raised, the nature of the memo highlights the benefits of Global for the brand of Mars Hill more than those whose needs would be met by Mars Hill's financial resources and activity.
There's an obvious point that could be easy to miss in the memo. You might not have spotted it but it's the Easter 2012 part. The November 2011 memos published by Turner explore Global as a "sleeping giant" but why would Turner and company have been interested in that?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
In the spring of 2012 Turner sent a memo indicating that Mars Hill, at the risk of putting things to simply, was teetering on the brink of financial ruin, pursuing a series of projects at the same time that were not financially sustainable. The multiple campus launches and relaunches, the promotion of Real Marriage, these things were taxing the resources. Turner seemed convinced giving was not what it could have been. Whether the church should have been renting the city of Ephesus for a day didn't come up but it might have been part of the concern, maybe.
The point is, let's suggest that given that by the spring of 2012 the memo linked to above suggests a panic mode about the fiscal competence of the Martian culture. Global looked like an untapped resource, "a sleeping giant" that would be beneficial to the church. Now in the spring of 2012 there were mass layoffs and adjustments. In spite of that Driscoll would go on to declare that FY2012 had been the best year ever.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
http://marshill.com/media/jesus-loves-his-church/jesus-gave-us-communion#transcript
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5, 2012
... And in that same spirit, we like to notify the church of how things are going. That includes monthly updates for all of Mars Hill. In one sense, we’re one church, in another sense, we’re fourteen local churches scattered across four different states, and pregnant with five more churches, hopefully to be birthed in about a year. And what we like to do is give a global update for how Mars Hill is doing, and then also allow the lead pastors of each local church to give a local update for how things are going at that particular location.
Our fiscal year, our budget year, runs from July through June, so we just finished our fiscal year, and those who are administratively gifted and allow us to steward the resources that God has given us, have put together a final year-end report, and I’m really excited to share it with you.
Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been. [emphasis added[
In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
...
Just off the top of my head, I know that Pastor Sutton Turner, your executive pastor, is negotiating deals for Mars Hill Everett, as they’ve outgrown their kid’s space, Mars Hill Downtown, as they’re at five services having outgrown their facility as well, in negotiations for Mars Hill Orange County, also in negotiations for Mars Hill Federal Way, also hoping, trusting, praying that we’ll be able to open Mars Hill Tacoma, Mars Hill Renton, Mars Hill Kirkland/Bothell-ish, and so lots of real estate negotiations in play, in addition to others that I’m sure that I’ve forgotten. But, just be in prayer for that, that we would have the space to see more people come to church and come to Jesus.
Driscoll had landed a best-selling author status (thanks to Result Source) and had scored a million dollar home in Snohomish county. His star was higher than it had ever been and he could afford to issue pre-emptive character attacks on Justin Brierley and rear-guard defenses of shaking hands with T. D. Jakes. 2012 was probably a "best year ever" for Mark Driscoll. But what about Mars Hill as a whole? What about the Orange County eviction? What about the more rank and file staff?
The situation behind the scenes in 2012 looked a bit different. There's the "we're in a big mess" memo, and then there's Dave Bruskas' communication from May 25, 2012.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/
...
We Really Need Your HelpFrom Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:
As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.
First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]
...
Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals
...
Internally layoffs were happening in the first half of 2012 that Bruskas said could not and should not be appealed. The financial situation of Mars Hill was bad enough that potential lends would consider Mars Hill an unattractive candidate for future financing. In June 2012 Driscoll mentioned that Mars Hill had been operating on a financial model that wasn't good for its long-term future. You won't find that in the sermon if you go to download it at Mark Driscoll Ministries, because it's been cut out.
While Bruskas was internally urging laid off staff to not make appeals and Driscoll had bought a roughly million-dollar home in Snohomish county, and in June 2012 mentioned a tough "season" by August 2012 he was declaring in his sermons that 2012 had been the greatest year ever for Mars Hill.
Then ... by 2013 Driscoll was talking about how Mars Hill managed to avoid slipping over a fiscal cliff.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-mars-hill-managed-to-avoid-slipping.html
With Mars Hill at times seeming to be teetering on the edge of fiscal cliffs every other year, it's "possible" the leadership was so focused on finding some way to keep the corporation solvent it was not nearly as careful as it could have and should have been about the nature of what Mars Hill Global was. It's not necessary to propose all out intent to deceive if we connect all the dots, if Mars Hill was as fiscally incompetent as Sutton Turner's 2015 narrative indicates, a failure to grasp the gravity of the fiscal situation could fuel a subsequent lack of proper concern for how to convey what Global had become.
Or, of course, it is also possible to propose that the way Global was promoted was too slippery and evasive, too. These are not mutually exclusive explanations being proposed. Wenatchee leans more toward the sloppy incompetence theory as to what went wrong with Global. What does seem to be the case, given the evidence and narratives at hand, was that the controversial lack of clarity about Mars Hill Global didn't come up until the Turner era. Whatever Turner's general story of the fiscal incompetence of late Munson-era leadership on Mars Hill financials (and one can only wonder how long Munson's going to let that stand as the new public narrative about his era of leadership), it can be said in Munson's defense that there seemed to have been nothing at all about Mars Hill Global during his tenure that could become any basis for controversy.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
the March 17, 2012 memo, "policies and procedures were non-existent", but what about the 2007-2010 tenure of Tim Beltz and the financical policies mentioned in the 2008 Generous series?
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
...
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
If you go back and look, the Church had no budget and the financial statements were a total joke this time last year. Financial reporting was 4 to 5 months late because the staff in finance was incompetent and the policies and procedures were non-existent. I am sorry, these are strong words, but it is true. ...
This memo seems to have been written by someone who may or may not have had memory of earlier explanations of financial systems from the pulpit. Wenatchee The Hatchet has kept some tabs on this kind of thing and we're about to indulge in some self-recycling for educational purposes. If there was truly a bunch of incompetent staff in finance and no set of policies and procedures then this opinion would need to be cross-checked against the short history of public assurance about financial solidity. Specifically, we need to go back to 2007-2008 when Tim Beltz was introduced as an executive elder and consider that Beltz handled financial operations up until later 2010. Why he stopped being an executive elder has never been explained and how he transitioned from that high role to being some kind of biblical living pastor has also never been explained.
Now on November 4, 2007 Mark Driscoll preached the sermon “The Rebel’s Guide to Joy in Humility”. In this sermon he referred to a couple of men who became pastors. One of them was James Noriega who had recently been promoted to the Board of Directors and placed in charge of alcohol and recovery group ministries. James Noriega and Bill Clem played important roles in getting the property that is now Mars Hill West Seattle to Mars Hill in 2006.
So the elders voted this Tim to be an Executive Elder and on the Board of Directors.
Now we get to the late 2008 Generous series
According to Tim Beltz' earlier accounts he was an executive pastor from October 2007 until November 2010, when he became Pastor of Operations. But it wasn't all that long before he ended up being a "biblical living pastor" of some sort, was it?
http://timbeltz.com/uploads/Short_Bio_Nov_2011.docx
In October 2007, Tim was ordained at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA and served as the executive pastor until November 2010 when he became pastor of operations. [emphasis added] As executive pastor, his responsibilities included overseeing the financial, HR, legal, technology and capital programs for the church. He transitioned off staff July 2011 and now serves as an unpaid elder at MHC West Seattle and as a member of the MHC Board of Elders. Tim is a faculty member at the MHC Re:Train program and regularly presents workshops at regional and national executive pastor seminars and conferences.
Tim has extensive executive experience in the non-profit, public and private sectors...7 years as a CEO and 8 years as a COO. From 2003-2007 he was the executive vice president and COO of CRISTA Ministries, a North Seattle-based Christian organization of nearly 2,000 employees and a $170M annual budget...the 2nd largest non-profit in the state. [emphasis added]
So while the March 17, 2012 memo indicated that there seemed to be no financial competence or controls or procedures it is actually not clear that there were no such things in place throughout the history of Mars Hill since 2007. Beltz was brought on as a consultant to streamline policies and procedures and ensure financial accountability of some kind.
Assuming that Beltz had helped architect accountability for money given to Mars Hill across the entire chain of command what happened between November 2010 and November 2011, the gap of time between Tim Beltz no longer being executive pastor and Sutton Turner being introduced as an executive pastor? The March 2012 memo seems to indicate the author was persuaded financial reporting was incoherent and that the financial situation was problematic at best and that there were no controls and no competence.
Assuming Turner's memo was right that Munson was basically checked out and the financial staff were incompetent and there were no policies in place ... could this be proven? After all, one opinion is still one opinion, even if of an executive elder. And Beltz was at that time still around to see how things had changed for better or worse since he had been added to the executive elder team back in 2007 and had transitioned off for reasons as yet unexplained.
It's possible there was "nothing" per the March 2012 memo but it seems to make more sense, knowing the history of Mars Hill and the public assurances of its leaders to the laity that financial stewardship was a concern, to suggest that there probably were previous policies and procedures and systems in place that had devolved earlier in the wake of some kind of change in the leadership culture.
Because if the fiscal scenario was as bad as the March 2012 made it seem then the corporation known as Mars Hill Church may have just deserved to die of its own fiscal incompetence and the culture of entitlement in its leadership.
It also means that if Mars Hill does not become 100% transparent about all its finances in the past as well as the present that there's no saving the corporation from a deserved financial death however robust the social and spiritual community associated with it may yet prove to be (or not to be).
...
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
If you go back and look, the Church had no budget and the financial statements were a total joke this time last year. Financial reporting was 4 to 5 months late because the staff in finance was incompetent and the policies and procedures were non-existent. I am sorry, these are strong words, but it is true. ...
This memo seems to have been written by someone who may or may not have had memory of earlier explanations of financial systems from the pulpit. Wenatchee The Hatchet has kept some tabs on this kind of thing and we're about to indulge in some self-recycling for educational purposes. If there was truly a bunch of incompetent staff in finance and no set of policies and procedures then this opinion would need to be cross-checked against the short history of public assurance about financial solidity. Specifically, we need to go back to 2007-2008 when Tim Beltz was introduced as an executive elder and consider that Beltz handled financial operations up until later 2010. Why he stopped being an executive elder has never been explained and how he transitioned from that high role to being some kind of biblical living pastor has also never been explained.
Now on November 4, 2007 Mark Driscoll preached the sermon “The Rebel’s Guide to Joy in Humility”. In this sermon he referred to a couple of men who became pastors. One of them was James Noriega who had recently been promoted to the Board of Directors and placed in charge of alcohol and recovery group ministries. James Noriega and Bill Clem played important roles in getting the property that is now Mars Hill West Seattle to Mars Hill in 2006.
In the sermon excerpt below Driscoll describes Tim and the Tim in question
Another man we appointed to that board is a man names Tim. I’ll tell you his story. He has an MBA in not-for-profit management. He has 20 or 30 years, I can’t remember, of not-for-profit manage experience. He’s run some very large, very significant ministries. He’s consulted for very large, very significant ministries. He nominated himself for eldership. Was a faithful member of this church. And he said, “You know, I think I can help. I think my management background will help organize Mars Hill.” We said, “Okay, well what’s your proposal?” He said, “I’ll work 50 hours a week for six months free of charge. I’ll quit my well paying job. I’ll shut down most of my consulting business. I’ll reduce my expenses, live off of my savings. I’ll nominate myself for eldership. I will work for free for six months, and I’ll come under Pastor Jamie, who’s young enough to be my son, and has none of the experience or education that I do so that I can humbly serve him so that Mars Hill can become a better church.”
God opposes the proud. Gives grace to the humble. The elders vote and say, “He should be an Executive Elder and on the Board of Directors.”
So the elders voted this Tim to be an Executive Elder and on the Board of Directors.
... Not all of these men are paid staff. Executive Elders – A sub-team of the Board of Directors who serve as the leadership team of Mars Hill. The Executive Elders are responsible for the day-to-day leadership, management, and oversight of Mars Hill. At present, the Executive Elders are: Jamie Munson, Mark Driscoll, Scott Thomas, Bubba Jennings, and Tim Beltz (read more about them here).
Now we get to the late 2008 Generous series
December 21, 2008
Part 4: Generous (Part 2B)
Pastor Driscoll: Along that line, what I wanted to do is bring out Pastor Jamie Munson (your lead pastor), Pastor Tim Beltz (your executive pastor), and I wanted them to describe to you kind of where we’re at, where we’re going, what we’re doing. A little bit of business, and then we’ll sing some Christmas songs.
Hey guys, you want to take it, buddy? Maybe introduce Tim. You guys all know who Jamie is, right? Lead pastor – was up last week? Yes? No? You guys know Jamie? Cool.
[Applause]
I don’t oversee the money. You don’t want me counting stuff, that’s for sure. I’m not a systems, policies, and procedures guy. These men have great skills, gifts, and abilities. And they run the administrative and stewardship load of Mars Hill. And so, rather than me making mistakes, I thought it’d just be best for them to let you know what’s going on.
Pastor Munson: Appreciate you guys making the hike in the snow. So, this is Pastor Tim Beltz. He’s the executive pastor of Mars Hill, a dear friend. He runs all of the operation side of what we do as a church. So, we’re a church, we’re about ministry, but we have to have budgets, we have to have buildings, we have to have staff, we have to have policies, procedures. Tim oversees all of that.
He has a lot of experience in nonprofit management. He was the chief operating officer at Crista Ministries, and the interim CEO up there for a number of years. He has an MBA. He’s overseen a $200 million budget in the nonprofit world. Lots of experience.
And so we brought him in about a year-and-a-half ago, to come on and oversee this area for us. He does a great job. I love working with him. A good man. So, I’m gonna turn it over to him to give you guys an inside look at some of the not-so-sexy part of Mars Hill, but the important part.
He keeps us out of jail. He does the good work, the hard work, to make sure we’re above reproach in a lot of those systems. So, I’ll let you kind of give us an overview of what does some of the financial accountability look like at Mars Hill?
Pastor Beltz: That’s a tough act to follow. Thank you. Just a couple of real quick points. We take this really seriously, the financial controls of the church. Our generosity as a – I’m a members of Mars Hill Church, obviously, and so it’s our generosity that really gives us an opportunity to be great stewards here at Mars Hill Church.
And so, just walking through this, the financial controls piece, it’s as simple as the two people that count the money and then deposit it. We have a chain of custody for that money, to make sure that there’s no opportunity for making errors or mistakes or having any problems.
It’s as complicated as having budget and expense reports that are reviewed at multiple levels of management. It’s also a system where Pastor Mark and Pastor Jamie, they don’t sign any checks. Their names aren’t on any of the accounts so that we can keep them above reproach, and that we can allow those who really enjoy doing those kind of things, and who are good at it, that we can.
…
Pastor Munson [from the same transcript]:
In addition, we’re gonna give $500,000.00 to our Shoreline campus, to help them find a permanent home. We launched that campus in January 2006, so this will be it’s third year. It really paved the way for the multisite movement of Mars Hill and allowed us to add other campuses. They were the guinea pigs in a lot of ways.
We’re gonna give them half-a-million dollars and then raise some more money to then be able to go find a permanent home for them. They’re meeting right now on the campus of Crista Ministries, King Schools, up in the North End. We’d like to get them a permanent home.
So, we wanted to bless them, get that fund started by giving them a half million.
http://timbeltz.com/uploads/Short_Bio_Nov_2011.docx
In October 2007, Tim was ordained at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, WA and served as the executive pastor until November 2010 when he became pastor of operations. [emphasis added] As executive pastor, his responsibilities included overseeing the financial, HR, legal, technology and capital programs for the church. He transitioned off staff July 2011 and now serves as an unpaid elder at MHC West Seattle and as a member of the MHC Board of Elders. Tim is a faculty member at the MHC Re:Train program and regularly presents workshops at regional and national executive pastor seminars and conferences.
Tim has extensive executive experience in the non-profit, public and private sectors...7 years as a CEO and 8 years as a COO. From 2003-2007 he was the executive vice president and COO of CRISTA Ministries, a North Seattle-based Christian organization of nearly 2,000 employees and a $170M annual budget...the 2nd largest non-profit in the state. [emphasis added]
So while the March 17, 2012 memo indicated that there seemed to be no financial competence or controls or procedures it is actually not clear that there were no such things in place throughout the history of Mars Hill since 2007. Beltz was brought on as a consultant to streamline policies and procedures and ensure financial accountability of some kind.
Assuming that Beltz had helped architect accountability for money given to Mars Hill across the entire chain of command what happened between November 2010 and November 2011, the gap of time between Tim Beltz no longer being executive pastor and Sutton Turner being introduced as an executive pastor? The March 2012 memo seems to indicate the author was persuaded financial reporting was incoherent and that the financial situation was problematic at best and that there were no controls and no competence.
Assuming Turner's memo was right that Munson was basically checked out and the financial staff were incompetent and there were no policies in place ... could this be proven? After all, one opinion is still one opinion, even if of an executive elder. And Beltz was at that time still around to see how things had changed for better or worse since he had been added to the executive elder team back in 2007 and had transitioned off for reasons as yet unexplained.
It's possible there was "nothing" per the March 2012 memo but it seems to make more sense, knowing the history of Mars Hill and the public assurances of its leaders to the laity that financial stewardship was a concern, to suggest that there probably were previous policies and procedures and systems in place that had devolved earlier in the wake of some kind of change in the leadership culture.
Because if the fiscal scenario was as bad as the March 2012 made it seem then the corporation known as Mars Hill Church may have just deserved to die of its own fiscal incompetence and the culture of entitlement in its leadership.
It also means that if Mars Hill does not become 100% transparent about all its finances in the past as well as the present that there's no saving the corporation from a deserved financial death however robust the social and spiritual community associated with it may yet prove to be (or not to be).
Thursday, September 18, 2014
another thought about the March 2012 memo--so people watching Mark sermons on a DVD later was fine but Film & Theology was "not sustainable" after being around more than a decade?
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
16. Having ministries like Film and Theology and Military Missions is not sustainable.
17. Doing anything other than weekly capture and next week playback is not sustainable.
18. Supporting Acts29 and spending $800,000 to $1.2M per year is not sustainable.
19. Doing anything that is not Making Disciples, Training Leaders and Planting Churches is not
sustainable.
Wasn't Military Missions basically a book distribution ministry? It had been around for a while, at least a few years.
Acts 29 was an entity that was co-founded by Mark Driscoll and the whole aim of the organization has been church-planting. Why Turner would have decided that supporting Acts 29 was not sustainable could have been fleshed out. Blunt yet cryptic references to a Scott not being good at checking spending wouldn't be clear enough.
Now about Film and Theology there are two points for consideration.
First, the ministry had been in place since pretty much the dawn of Mars Hill and had been run by James Harleman for an entire decade, basically. What about that was "not sustainable", especially in light of the reality that in late 2011 Sutton Turner signed the contract with Result Source Inc to buy a spot on the NYT best seller list for Real Marriage? Harleman came in on Fridays and brought DVDs he got on his dime to discuss at regular intervals and had been doing this since at least 2011 (Satoshi Kon's film Perfect Blue for those who want to know). And that gets to ...
Second, since the move to multi-site in 2007 and the drop of live-feed in 2009 Mars Hill had already gotten to a point where the vast majority of Mars Hill attenders aren't even watching Mark Driscoll preach live or in person. They're watching a DVD that's popped into a player that was produced a week or even two weeks before depending on production issues. When people at community groups talk about a Driscoll sermon they are most likely talking about something they saw on a DVD at least a week after the sermon was actually preached. Talking about something you watched on a DVD that was filmed earlier doesn't seem to be "unsustainable" for Film & Theology if it's also fundamentally the very nature of what most Mars Hill members would call "church" and "community group discussion".
Just something to consider. The 2012 memo presents itself as full of reasonable and concerned ideas but some of them suggest its author had no clue at all about how some of the material might come across to someone with ten years inside of Mars Hill culture. The stuff about entitlement on the part of the leadership didn't even go for the jugular and the stuff about Film & Theology not being sustainable seemed to reflect some ignorance of the foundational nature of the "church" experience at Mars Hill that had been in place since 2009. For a review of how and why pretty much all of Mars Hill became watching Mark's sermon on a DVD at least a week later go here.
16. Having ministries like Film and Theology and Military Missions is not sustainable.
17. Doing anything other than weekly capture and next week playback is not sustainable.
18. Supporting Acts29 and spending $800,000 to $1.2M per year is not sustainable.
19. Doing anything that is not Making Disciples, Training Leaders and Planting Churches is not
sustainable.
Wasn't Military Missions basically a book distribution ministry? It had been around for a while, at least a few years.
Acts 29 was an entity that was co-founded by Mark Driscoll and the whole aim of the organization has been church-planting. Why Turner would have decided that supporting Acts 29 was not sustainable could have been fleshed out. Blunt yet cryptic references to a Scott not being good at checking spending wouldn't be clear enough.
Now about Film and Theology there are two points for consideration.
First, the ministry had been in place since pretty much the dawn of Mars Hill and had been run by James Harleman for an entire decade, basically. What about that was "not sustainable", especially in light of the reality that in late 2011 Sutton Turner signed the contract with Result Source Inc to buy a spot on the NYT best seller list for Real Marriage? Harleman came in on Fridays and brought DVDs he got on his dime to discuss at regular intervals and had been doing this since at least 2011 (Satoshi Kon's film Perfect Blue for those who want to know). And that gets to ...
Second, since the move to multi-site in 2007 and the drop of live-feed in 2009 Mars Hill had already gotten to a point where the vast majority of Mars Hill attenders aren't even watching Mark Driscoll preach live or in person. They're watching a DVD that's popped into a player that was produced a week or even two weeks before depending on production issues. When people at community groups talk about a Driscoll sermon they are most likely talking about something they saw on a DVD at least a week after the sermon was actually preached. Talking about something you watched on a DVD that was filmed earlier doesn't seem to be "unsustainable" for Film & Theology if it's also fundamentally the very nature of what most Mars Hill members would call "church" and "community group discussion".
Just something to consider. The 2012 memo presents itself as full of reasonable and concerned ideas but some of them suggest its author had no clue at all about how some of the material might come across to someone with ten years inside of Mars Hill culture. The stuff about entitlement on the part of the leadership didn't even go for the jugular and the stuff about Film & Theology not being sustainable seemed to reflect some ignorance of the foundational nature of the "church" experience at Mars Hill that had been in place since 2009. For a review of how and why pretty much all of Mars Hill became watching Mark's sermon on a DVD at least a week later go here.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
and part 5 ... "The hole we are in today was set in course when we decided to plant 6 churches in 5 months on top of the Real Marriage campaign." An invitation to members to start a financial embargo on Mars Hill the corporation
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
Executive Elders
Current Financial Situation
Saturday, March 17, 2012
...
The hole we are in today was set in course when we decided to plant 6 churches in 5 months on top of the Real Marriage campaign. Too much work for an 8,000 in weekly attendance church to undertake when there was a culture within the church staff of poor stewardship and a church body that did not financially support the church.
What may be worth revisiting is some material sent along to Wenatchee The Hatchet regarding the leadership culture at Mars Hill circa 2011 through 2013. It was the opinion of at least one former staffer who was employed by Mars Hill that:
This is just the opinion of a single person and so there's plenty of room for other opinions and convictions but in light of the statement from the 2012 memo about how Mars Hill had a culture of entitlement it's possible that that sense of entitlement started from the top down, isn't it? It's at least something to consider.
And as Wenatchee The Hatchet and others have been documenting for some time, most of the scandals associated with Mars Hill Church in the last few years started at the executive level and worked their way down. Even in the case of Andrew Lamb the disciplinary precedents that led up to his case were made possible by by-laws changes in 2007 that permitted any two campus pastors to make any decision they deemed appropriate regarding member discipline with the member having neither the opportunity to appeal the disciplinary decision nor any assurance that the disciplinary action or any knowledge of a given case wouldn't be made public to local authorities or the local church.
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
Executive Elders
Current Financial Situation
Saturday, March 17, 2012
...
The hole we are in today was set in course when we decided to plant 6 churches in 5 months on top of the Real Marriage campaign. Too much work for an 8,000 in weekly attendance church to undertake when there was a culture within the church staff of poor stewardship and a church body that did not financially support the church.
What may be worth revisiting is some material sent along to Wenatchee The Hatchet regarding the leadership culture at Mars Hill circa 2011 through 2013. It was the opinion of at least one former staffer who was employed by Mars Hill that:
This is just the opinion of a single person and so there's plenty of room for other opinions and convictions but in light of the statement from the 2012 memo about how Mars Hill had a culture of entitlement it's possible that that sense of entitlement started from the top down, isn't it? It's at least something to consider.
And as Wenatchee The Hatchet and others have been documenting for some time, most of the scandals associated with Mars Hill Church in the last few years started at the executive level and worked their way down. Even in the case of Andrew Lamb the disciplinary precedents that led up to his case were made possible by by-laws changes in 2007 that permitted any two campus pastors to make any decision they deemed appropriate regarding member discipline with the member having neither the opportunity to appeal the disciplinary decision nor any assurance that the disciplinary action or any knowledge of a given case wouldn't be made public to local authorities or the local church.
Warren Throckmorton publishes March 2012 memo on Mars Hill in financial trouble: part 4 "What are SOME of the areas we should focus on?" projects declared unsustainable at or even before formal launch
The date of March 17, 2012 is important for an excerpted list
1. OC Church is not sustainable in its current form.
And since Mars Hill Orange County got evicted in May 2012, that turned out to be true. It does raise some questions about what the executive elders did and didn't know about the launch site and is sustainability not just on financial grounds but on city land-use grounds. Go here and here for some background as reported by Warren Throckmorton.
2. UWD is not sustainable in its current form.
That was two years ago, this last Sunday it was announced the campus was closing.
3. #of Blogs on Resurgence, MHC, and PastorMark.tv is not sustainable.
Why this presented a problem is slightly less easy to understand. It might be that, as the memo later explains, this sort of activity was not mission-critical and distracted from main goals. This was an interesting concern to express relatively soon after the launch of PastorMark.tv, which was a platform through which Driscoll at one point said he could broach social issues in a way that wasn't available to him before (the pulpit, the Midrash (versions 1 and 2, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all apparently notwithstanding ... .
4. Mars Hill Music is not sustainable as currently operating.
Now this one is particularly interesting because eventually ...
https://marshill.com/2012/05/02/were-starting-a-record-label-pastor-mark-interviews-jon-dunn
Did Mars Hill Music somehow become sustainable between March 17, 2012 and May 2, 2012? Since less than a year after May 2, 2012 the label turned out to be a partnership with BEC Recordings/Tooth & Nail it might be that Mars Hill Music was ultimately no more successful as its own thing than Tim Smith's project Re:Sound was.
So if Mars Hill Music was considered a bit precarious in March 2012 why did Driscoll go to the trouble to pump the idea in a film a couple of months later? What changed? Anything?
5. ReLit is not sustainable as currently operating.
Re:Lit was described thusly in a number of books published under its imprint circa 2011 ...
Resurgence Literature (Re:Lit) is a ministry of the Resurgence. At wwww.theResurgence.com you will find free theological resources in blog, audio, video, and print forms, alogn with information on forthcoming conferences, to help Christians contend for and contextualize Jesus' gospel. At www.ReLit.org you will also find the full lineup of Resrugence books for sale. The elders of Mars Hill Church have generously agreed to support Resurgence and the Acts 29 Church Planting Network in an effort to serve the entire church.
Resurgence became a for-profit publishing company. Whatever wasn't sustainable about Re:Lit might have been fixed.
6. Central Ministries are not sustainable (currently being disbanded to local church).
If Central had been working on God's Work, Our Witness and architecting launching about half ad ozen campus launches or relaunches and also putting everything in place for the Real Marriage multimedia campaign then, yeah, most of that probably wasn't sustainable, per the list statement.
7. Printing and Branding of sermon series as currently practiced is not sustainable. ($100,000
for banners, signage, popups per sermon)
One can only speculate as to what this was referring to, though a guess could be the sheer number of promotional materials that were out on the town plugging for Real Marriage as at least one possibility.
8. Producing movie sermons like God's Work Our Witness is not sustainable.
It was a fascinating if in some ways revisionist history of Mars Hill Church while it lasted. Yet if the film was an example of something that was not sustainable there's a triple irony afoot.
The first irony is that the film culminates in Driscoll chiding Mars Hill for how bad they were at giving.
The second irony was that the film was presented as part of a sermon series in the aftermath of Turner signing the Result Source Inc. contract and this takes fuller significance if you remember that during this period Mars Hill got itself embroiled in a snafu in which Stokes & Lawrence issued a cease-and-desist letter to a church over a trademark/logo concern. A subset of this second irony is that it would turn out that Real Marriage, in its first edition, would make use of ideas published by Dan Allender without giving Allender any credit. In spite of the fact that Grace Driscoll had publicly shared with the whole internet Allender was one of her favorite authors, no less, which made the omission of any credit to his ideas in the first edition all the more baffling.
The third irony is that in the film Mark Driscoll mentioned how he had a vision of starting a music label and a Bible college from the earliest period of Mars Hill even though in 2014 he would write a statement to members claiming that what Mars Hill has become is "not even close" to what he envisioned at the start of the church.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-history-of-mh-attempts-at-record_87.html
If Driscoll these days can't remember that he'd been saying for years that the vision to start a church/Christian movement that would yield a seminary and a music label from the start then that's of a piece with not remembering that there were in fact children at the dawn of Mars Hill, even if he claimed from the pulpit otherwise in late 2013.
So if it was proposed that God's Work, Our Witness was the sort of thing Mars Hill couldn't afford to keep doing, well, no argument from Wenatchee the Hatchet on that point, either. The question now would be what donations were reaped by the fundraising film in which Driscoll chastised the flock for their lack of faithful giving verses the amount of money it cost to make the film.
1. OC Church is not sustainable in its current form.
And since Mars Hill Orange County got evicted in May 2012, that turned out to be true. It does raise some questions about what the executive elders did and didn't know about the launch site and is sustainability not just on financial grounds but on city land-use grounds. Go here and here for some background as reported by Warren Throckmorton.
2. UWD is not sustainable in its current form.
That was two years ago, this last Sunday it was announced the campus was closing.
3. #of Blogs on Resurgence, MHC, and PastorMark.tv is not sustainable.
Why this presented a problem is slightly less easy to understand. It might be that, as the memo later explains, this sort of activity was not mission-critical and distracted from main goals. This was an interesting concern to express relatively soon after the launch of PastorMark.tv, which was a platform through which Driscoll at one point said he could broach social issues in a way that wasn't available to him before (the pulpit, the Midrash (versions 1 and 2, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all apparently notwithstanding ... .
4. Mars Hill Music is not sustainable as currently operating.
Now this one is particularly interesting because eventually ...
https://marshill.com/2012/05/02/were-starting-a-record-label-pastor-mark-interviews-jon-dunn
Did Mars Hill Music somehow become sustainable between March 17, 2012 and May 2, 2012? Since less than a year after May 2, 2012 the label turned out to be a partnership with BEC Recordings/Tooth & Nail it might be that Mars Hill Music was ultimately no more successful as its own thing than Tim Smith's project Re:Sound was.
So if Mars Hill Music was considered a bit precarious in March 2012 why did Driscoll go to the trouble to pump the idea in a film a couple of months later? What changed? Anything?
5. ReLit is not sustainable as currently operating.
Re:Lit was described thusly in a number of books published under its imprint circa 2011 ...
Resurgence Literature (Re:Lit) is a ministry of the Resurgence. At wwww.theResurgence.com you will find free theological resources in blog, audio, video, and print forms, alogn with information on forthcoming conferences, to help Christians contend for and contextualize Jesus' gospel. At www.ReLit.org you will also find the full lineup of Resrugence books for sale. The elders of Mars Hill Church have generously agreed to support Resurgence and the Acts 29 Church Planting Network in an effort to serve the entire church.
Resurgence became a for-profit publishing company. Whatever wasn't sustainable about Re:Lit might have been fixed.
6. Central Ministries are not sustainable (currently being disbanded to local church).
If Central had been working on God's Work, Our Witness and architecting launching about half ad ozen campus launches or relaunches and also putting everything in place for the Real Marriage multimedia campaign then, yeah, most of that probably wasn't sustainable, per the list statement.
7. Printing and Branding of sermon series as currently practiced is not sustainable. ($100,000
for banners, signage, popups per sermon)
One can only speculate as to what this was referring to, though a guess could be the sheer number of promotional materials that were out on the town plugging for Real Marriage as at least one possibility.
8. Producing movie sermons like God's Work Our Witness is not sustainable.
It was a fascinating if in some ways revisionist history of Mars Hill Church while it lasted. Yet if the film was an example of something that was not sustainable there's a triple irony afoot.
The first irony is that the film culminates in Driscoll chiding Mars Hill for how bad they were at giving.
The second irony was that the film was presented as part of a sermon series in the aftermath of Turner signing the Result Source Inc. contract and this takes fuller significance if you remember that during this period Mars Hill got itself embroiled in a snafu in which Stokes & Lawrence issued a cease-and-desist letter to a church over a trademark/logo concern. A subset of this second irony is that it would turn out that Real Marriage, in its first edition, would make use of ideas published by Dan Allender without giving Allender any credit. In spite of the fact that Grace Driscoll had publicly shared with the whole internet Allender was one of her favorite authors, no less, which made the omission of any credit to his ideas in the first edition all the more baffling.
The third irony is that in the film Mark Driscoll mentioned how he had a vision of starting a music label and a Bible college from the earliest period of Mars Hill even though in 2014 he would write a statement to members claiming that what Mars Hill has become is "not even close" to what he envisioned at the start of the church.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-history-of-mh-attempts-at-record_87.html
If Driscoll these days can't remember that he'd been saying for years that the vision to start a church/Christian movement that would yield a seminary and a music label from the start then that's of a piece with not remembering that there were in fact children at the dawn of Mars Hill, even if he claimed from the pulpit otherwise in late 2013.
So if it was proposed that God's Work, Our Witness was the sort of thing Mars Hill couldn't afford to keep doing, well, no argument from Wenatchee the Hatchet on that point, either. The question now would be what donations were reaped by the fundraising film in which Driscoll chastised the flock for their lack of faithful giving verses the amount of money it cost to make the film.
Warren Throckmorton publishes March 2012 memo on Mars Hill in financial trouble: part 3 "... Mars Hill has a culture of entitlement."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
Executive Elders
Current Financial Situation
Saturday, March 17, 2012
...
It is my belief that the reason we have such poor giving by our Church is the lack of stewardship in the Church staff. Churches with excellent stewardship see greater giving because people know that every dollar they give will go towards the mission of the Church. It is very clear this has not been the case at Mars Hill Church.
Secondly, Mars Hill has a culture of entitlement. This goes back to the beginning when church staff was poorly paid. When a staff is poorly paid, leaders feel convicted that they are not rewarding staff for their work. So the leaders then take the church credit card and give additional benefits to the underpaid staff. As this buying staff "presents" and "rewards" became the environment, people began to feel entitled to buy things on the church credit cards for others. This culture has grown and is the predominant culture within Mars Hill Church.
There's almost nothing, really, to add to that set of statements.
But Wenatchee The Hatchet shared with someone in Mars Hill leadership in later 2008 that he had a concern, the pastors and leaders at Mars Hill made quite a point of warning against consumerism on the part of the rank and file while in reality it seemed the biggest risk was a growing culture of consumerism on the part of the leadership toward the congregation, like the leaders would get this idea and the congregation was just supposed to pony up. Having bitterly discovered that the up-for-sale real estate that became Mars Hill corporate headquarters was bought without the elders having bothered to look carefully into zoning and land use issues before spending $1.5 million, Wenatchee got a nagging sense that the elders couldn't have gotten into that snafu without some overconfidence about how "Jesus will build His church" regardless of whether or not a certain thing was observably a good idea.
Churches (and other non-profits) that have a strong donor base "can" tend to have that because they can demonstrate the money goes to effective causes. At this stage Mars Hill leadership may not want to reveal where all the money has gone. If even among executive leadership there was some concern about a sense of entitlement on the part of the leadership culture that might retroactively cast light on the whole point of the film God's Work, Our Witness, which built up to Driscoll gently chiding the entirety of Mars Hill for sucking at giving. The March 2012 memo, by contrast, seems to imply that the entire film production process and finished project were "unsustainable" and that it was one of a variety of kinds of projects taken up by Mars Hill leadership that contributed to the financial mess.
And yet ... Turner signed the Result Source contract in October 2011. To this day no one on the Board of Advisors and Accountability has displayed any interest in stating who the "outside counsel" was that came up with that idea. Was that outside counsel given freely ... or was it paid advice? That, too, might be a question for regular members to ask.
Warren Throckmorton publishes March 2012 memo on Mars Hill in financial trouble: part 2 the memo as a possible prelude to some leadership changes in MH and A29?
As has been noted already the memo published by Warren Throckmorton, apparently from Sutton Turner regarding the bad financial situation Mars Hill was in in 2012 in the aftermath of Munson's resignation, was dated March 17, 2012.
About ten days after the date of this memo ... a big change-up in Acts 29 leadership got announced. It would have been under the radar for outsiders but this was roughly the period in which Scott Thomas vanished from both Acts 29 leadership and leadership at Mars Hill.
The content may be hard to find these days so, as is increasingly usual with purged or altered or outdated content dealing with the history of Mars Hill, Wenatchee The Hatchet ends up self-quoting materials preserved from Mars Hill past. This material was originally made available via Phoenix Preacher.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-announces-departure-from.html
From Pastor Matt Chandler
I am greatly humbled by the opportunity to serve our great God and King, as well as our movement, in the capacity of president of Acts 29. Our meeting in Seattle couldn’t have been more Spirit-empowered and unifying than it was, and I flew home excited and invigorated by the opportunities that are before us. There are few things that excite me like planting churches and seeing people come to know, love, and mature in Christ. So, this task allows me to serve in an area of my passion. I want to update you on what’s in our immediate future.
We are in the process of transitioning Acts 29 from Seattle to Dallas. At present that involves gathering all of the information we can on Acts 29’s budget, processes, setting up Acts 29 legally in Texas, etc.
Tyler Powell is relocating to Dallas and will continue to handle assessments and his other duties. Tyler and his family are excited about the move and the direction of the network. I personally can’t wait to get him to Dallas. He is a godly, hard-working, Spirit-led man, and I’m grateful he’s coming to DFW.
Scott Thomas is taking this transition as a chance to pursue other opportunities he has before him and will not be making the move to Dallas. Scott and I are on very good terms and had dinner just this past weekend, where he informed me of his deep love for you and the network but felt like God has released him from leading Acts 29. He is excited about what God has next for him. [emphasis added]
We are in the process of looking for a new executive director for A29 and plan on being meticulous, prayerful, and patient about getting the right guy. Once we’ve identified and hired the new director, we will finish out the national board and introduce the full team to the network.
I have asked all the network captains, as well as a few other men I love and respect in the network, to meet me in Dallas on May 14 and 15 to look closely at Acts 29 and pray about how we might get better at planting churches, coaching our pastors, communicating more effectively, etc. Please be praying for our time together.
We will report on any changes and our future hopes and plans at the pastors retreat in Newport in June. There is much to do between then and now, so I would deeply appreciate your continued prayers for not just the board and me but also for all involved.
Men, I really believe we have been positioned by God to be a part of a spectacular move of his Spirit in our day. It’s with great anticipation and holy fear that I step out to help lead us into what God would have for us. Please let me know how we can serve you.
Scott Thomas also made a statement of his own over at Acts 29, which has since been expunged but, again, Wenatchee The Hatchet kept the material around for reference.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-announces-departure-from.html
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-letter-from-scott-thomas/
I am thrilled that Acts 29 is moving to Dallas and will be led by my friend, Pastor Matt Chandler. I think it is good for the network that other leaders will add different perspectives, nuances, and emphases. It will only be a better network as healthy, reproducing churches will continue to plant churches for the glory of God.
I was honored to serve in Acts 29 as God allowed some amazing outcomes in spite of man’s feeble efforts. I never deserved the opportunity. I never deserved the love of so many planters. I never deserved the fruitfulness God enabled.
But I wasn’t planning to stay forever. I was anticipating a change for my ministry in the future, and the move to Dallas makes it a perfect time to allow new leadership to emerge. I am looking forward with great anticipation how God is going to shape the network and the planters to effectively pursue His mission with greater Spirit-empowerment and clearer gospel purposes.
[Updated March 28, 2012 at 3:30 pm]
I am deeply thankful for the generosity of Mars Hill Church, the unity of the Acts 29 Board, and for the friendship of Mark Driscoll. I am especially grateful for the hundreds of church planters in Acts 29 who I had the honor of pastoring and leading.
About ten days after the date of this memo ... a big change-up in Acts 29 leadership got announced. It would have been under the radar for outsiders but this was roughly the period in which Scott Thomas vanished from both Acts 29 leadership and leadership at Mars Hill.
The content may be hard to find these days so, as is increasingly usual with purged or altered or outdated content dealing with the history of Mars Hill, Wenatchee The Hatchet ends up self-quoting materials preserved from Mars Hill past. This material was originally made available via Phoenix Preacher.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-announces-departure-from.html
From Pastor Matt Chandler
I am greatly humbled by the opportunity to serve our great God and King, as well as our movement, in the capacity of president of Acts 29. Our meeting in Seattle couldn’t have been more Spirit-empowered and unifying than it was, and I flew home excited and invigorated by the opportunities that are before us. There are few things that excite me like planting churches and seeing people come to know, love, and mature in Christ. So, this task allows me to serve in an area of my passion. I want to update you on what’s in our immediate future.
We are in the process of transitioning Acts 29 from Seattle to Dallas. At present that involves gathering all of the information we can on Acts 29’s budget, processes, setting up Acts 29 legally in Texas, etc.
Tyler Powell is relocating to Dallas and will continue to handle assessments and his other duties. Tyler and his family are excited about the move and the direction of the network. I personally can’t wait to get him to Dallas. He is a godly, hard-working, Spirit-led man, and I’m grateful he’s coming to DFW.
Scott Thomas is taking this transition as a chance to pursue other opportunities he has before him and will not be making the move to Dallas. Scott and I are on very good terms and had dinner just this past weekend, where he informed me of his deep love for you and the network but felt like God has released him from leading Acts 29. He is excited about what God has next for him. [emphasis added]
We are in the process of looking for a new executive director for A29 and plan on being meticulous, prayerful, and patient about getting the right guy. Once we’ve identified and hired the new director, we will finish out the national board and introduce the full team to the network.
I have asked all the network captains, as well as a few other men I love and respect in the network, to meet me in Dallas on May 14 and 15 to look closely at Acts 29 and pray about how we might get better at planting churches, coaching our pastors, communicating more effectively, etc. Please be praying for our time together.
We will report on any changes and our future hopes and plans at the pastors retreat in Newport in June. There is much to do between then and now, so I would deeply appreciate your continued prayers for not just the board and me but also for all involved.
Men, I really believe we have been positioned by God to be a part of a spectacular move of his Spirit in our day. It’s with great anticipation and holy fear that I step out to help lead us into what God would have for us. Please let me know how we can serve you.
Scott Thomas also made a statement of his own over at Acts 29, which has since been expunged but, again, Wenatchee The Hatchet kept the material around for reference.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-announces-departure-from.html
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-letter-from-scott-thomas/
I am thrilled that Acts 29 is moving to Dallas and will be led by my friend, Pastor Matt Chandler. I think it is good for the network that other leaders will add different perspectives, nuances, and emphases. It will only be a better network as healthy, reproducing churches will continue to plant churches for the glory of God.
I was honored to serve in Acts 29 as God allowed some amazing outcomes in spite of man’s feeble efforts. I never deserved the opportunity. I never deserved the love of so many planters. I never deserved the fruitfulness God enabled.
But I wasn’t planning to stay forever. I was anticipating a change for my ministry in the future, and the move to Dallas makes it a perfect time to allow new leadership to emerge. I am looking forward with great anticipation how God is going to shape the network and the planters to effectively pursue His mission with greater Spirit-empowerment and clearer gospel purposes.
[Updated March 28, 2012 at 3:30 pm]
I am deeply thankful for the generosity of Mars Hill Church, the unity of the Acts 29 Board, and for the friendship of Mark Driscoll. I am especially grateful for the hundreds of church planters in Acts 29 who I had the honor of pastoring and leading.
Now an anonymous commenter noted some time ago that Wenatchee The Hatchet's observation that Scott Thomas vanished in the wake of the publication of Joyful Exiles was an erroneous one. Well, touche, if the memo Throckmorton has published somehow refers to a Scott with a last name of Thomas. The Scott being referred to could be someone else who was on staff as a pastor at the time, perhaps? In any event, that Mark Driscoll recommended Pastor Scott (Scott Thomas) replace Jamie Munson has already been documented by Wenatchee The Hatchet from Mars Hill online statements.
As noted here before, it took a while before Scott Thomas was no longer a member at Mars Hill in spite of having taken a formal ministerial role at The Journey
Having revisited that the March 2012 memo published by Throckmorton was about a week and a half before it was announced Scott Thomas was out of Acts 29 and quietly and unofficially out of Mars Hill in eldership, there are a few other things about the memo to consider..
At this point whatever transpired in 2012 (or 2007) if Scott Thomas is willing to state something for the record now might be a good time to clear up how he ended up out of leadership at both Mars Hill and Acts 29 on the one hand, and what was going on with the conciliatory process/trial in 2007 on the other. Anonymous commentary a while back indicated some kind of "rampage" undertaken by Sutton Turner without providing much by way of explanation. It increasingly seems that what needs to happen is for people who were there to start making statements on the record. In Scott Thomas' case if he doesn't take a risk in speaking up there could be some speculation as to whether the recently published memo was in some way referring to him.
At this point whatever transpired in 2012 (or 2007) if Scott Thomas is willing to state something for the record now might be a good time to clear up how he ended up out of leadership at both Mars Hill and Acts 29 on the one hand, and what was going on with the conciliatory process/trial in 2007 on the other. Anonymous commentary a while back indicated some kind of "rampage" undertaken by Sutton Turner without providing much by way of explanation. It increasingly seems that what needs to happen is for people who were there to start making statements on the record. In Scott Thomas' case if he doesn't take a risk in speaking up there could be some speculation as to whether the recently published memo was in some way referring to him.
Warren Throckmorton publishes March 2012 memo on Mars Hill in financial trouble: part 1 the general situation
Well, today's contribution from Throckmorton, if it's an authentic memo from Sutton Turner from March 2012 ... is pretty amazing.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
Unless we're exegeting Pauline epistles for telegraphed doctrinal themes we know the Christianese cold open can usually be ignored but Turner opens with a paragraph that, summarily, declares how bad things were in 2012.
The parts that are interesting enough to quote for the moment are ....
Executive Elders
Current Financial Situation
Saturday, March 17, 2012
...
After being at Mars Hill for 10 months and in my current role for 3 months, I now have a picture of a very broken and fundamentally financially unsustainable organization. I am sorry that I have not been able to really see the financial picture of the organization until just this week. So many distractions with A29, Real Marriage, GWOW, distractions with Churches, my Eldership, and a very incompetent staff when I arrived has kept me from not seeing the picture. But now I see the organization very clearly and we have some difficult decisions to make.
"GWOW" is most likely a shorthand for God's Work, Our Witness.
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
Let's revisit the resignation of Jamie Munson.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/where-are-they-now-update-jamie-munson.html
Since Mars Hill purged this content Wenatchee The Hatchet has to make do with previously published blog material that preserved some information.
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors
LEADERSHIP VISION FOR MARS HILL:
My proposal to the Board of Directors (BOD) is that Pastor Jamie Munson remain an elder at Mars Hill Church Ballard. Following a sabbatical through the end of the year to enjoy his family, rest up, and finish writing a book, he will rejoin us as an unpaid board member at the highest legal level of Mars Hill Church. In God’s providence, the same day that Pastor Jamie made this decision, one of our unpaid BOD members had to resign due to escalating demands at his place of employment. So, while this man will remain an elder at his local Mars Hill Church, it opened a seat on the BOD for an unpaid elder, which Pastor Jamie fills perfectly. We need many more unpaid elders and Pastor Jamie helps us to raise the profile of that service. The plan is simply that Pastor Jamie will remain an elder at Mars Hill indefinitely. He has clearly communicated his desire to stay at Mars Hill and serve as an elder and we welcome this. So, Pastor Jamie is still Pastor Jamie. Also, the door to employment is always open to Pastor Jamie. It has been clearly communicated to him by myself personally and by his performance review team collectively that should he ever change his mind, we would welcome him back on staff at Mars Hill Church. Our bylaws require that our Executive Elder (EE) team have at least three members. Pastor Dave Bruskas and I remain on the EE. Thankfully, Pastor Dave and his family recently moved to Seattle after leading Mars Hill Albuquerque. His leadership, wisdom, and experience come at just the right time and we praise God he is on the team. In God’s providence, the sermon he preached at Mars Hill Ballard will air this Sunday at all our other churches, helping you to get to know him better. To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king." Sutton is new to staff, but not to ministry. He is a former executive pastor of a large church. Educationally, he is a graduate of Texas A&M, the SMU Cox School of Business, and Harvard Business School. Professionally, he has recently served as the CEO of a company that has nearly 1,600 employees. Prior to that he served as the CEO of another company that under his leadership grew from 0 to 500 employees in the first year. He and his family moved to Seattle sensing a call to serve at Mars Hill, and we believe he is a gift from God to us for our future.
Let the record note that Scott Thomas vanished from the leadership scene of both Mars Hill and Acts 29 with a matter of months, but we'll get to that later. Driscoll stated back in 2011 that Munson was always above reproach. It'd be easier to go look that up if Mars Hill hadn't scrubbed that public statement, though. But what we can consult is occasional public statements from Munson such as:
http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/150820-4-reasons-to-expand-even-when-you-shouldn-t.html
2) The opposite of growth is death.
The living grow; the dying do not. A church need not add to its numbers in astronomical proportions, but if nobody is showing up, chances are nobody is meeting Jesus, which is the whole point. Also, spiritual growth is inextricably linked to numerical growth (though it’s not always an exponential relationship); if people are truly growing in their faith, they will give, they will serve, they will invite their friends, they will tell people about Jesus, they will live on mission—all of which leads to some level of numerical growth as God works through his people.
Munson may have been implementing what amounted to a "too big to fail" approach to church growth
So, let's get back to what Sutton Turner reportedly thought about the financial situation at Mars Hill as it was left to him in the wake of Munson's resignation. According to the memo, the financial situation was none too promising.
If you go back and look, the Church had no budget and the financial statements were a total joke this time last year. Financial reporting was 4 to 5 months late because the staff in finance was incompetent and the policies and procedures were non-existent. I am sorry, these are strong words, but it is true.
In June and July, we slammed together a budget and put in place a new software system so we could start getting some financial information. In September the financial information began to come, but since the organization in general had no policies around spending and credit cards use, it was garbage in and garbage out. In September we installed Concur (credit card management system) and new policies across the organization. Finally by December, Kerry arrived with two good accounting managers to really get things cranking. As we have discussed, the financials for January 2012 were difficult to read because of all of the year-end GWOW giving/expenses plus the launching of 4 churches on 1/15/2012 to make the picture very foggy.
Is it less foggy two years later? Because it would be a great demonstration of the stewardship of the leadership of Mars Hill Church to open up the books to rank and file members and explain where all that money went. Throw in how much it cost to rent Ephesus, too. After all, Driscoll couldn't help himself remarking "We even rented Ephesus for a day".
Yesterday I received February financials (within 15 days of the close of the month) and we are in a big mess. It is much worse that I could have ever imagined. Since September, we have basically planted or re-planted 6 churches (EVT, ABQ, OC, SAM, RNV, and PDX). Operationally and organizationally this is a huge task. In order to accomplish this massive task, the people and processes were set up to accomplish this task. So the organization was built to plant 6 churches, not sustain past that event. Then you put on top of these 6 churches launches a RM campaign and you basically have a company going to World War Ill. It is all hands on deck, spend whenever is
needed and let's win the War.
Wenatchee The Hatchet had made a point of sharing with leadership in 2008 that Mars Hill looked to be committed to a growth pattern that couldn't be sustained. Adding campuses would just be adding operational liabilities without cultivating the donor base to keep the newly opening campuses viable. The Lake City campus was eventually closed, so the recent closure announcements of Mars Hill are merely unique for quantity rather than quality of announcement.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
Unless we're exegeting Pauline epistles for telegraphed doctrinal themes we know the Christianese cold open can usually be ignored but Turner opens with a paragraph that, summarily, declares how bad things were in 2012.
The parts that are interesting enough to quote for the moment are ....
Executive Elders
Current Financial Situation
Saturday, March 17, 2012
...
After being at Mars Hill for 10 months and in my current role for 3 months, I now have a picture of a very broken and fundamentally financially unsustainable organization. I am sorry that I have not been able to really see the financial picture of the organization until just this week. So many distractions with A29, Real Marriage, GWOW, distractions with Churches, my Eldership, and a very incompetent staff when I arrived has kept me from not seeing the picture. But now I see the organization very clearly and we have some difficult decisions to make.
"GWOW" is most likely a shorthand for God's Work, Our Witness.
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
Let's revisit the resignation of Jamie Munson.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/where-are-they-now-update-jamie-munson.html
Since Mars Hill purged this content Wenatchee The Hatchet has to make do with previously published blog material that preserved some information.
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors
LEADERSHIP VISION FOR MARS HILL:
My proposal to the Board of Directors (BOD) is that Pastor Jamie Munson remain an elder at Mars Hill Church Ballard. Following a sabbatical through the end of the year to enjoy his family, rest up, and finish writing a book, he will rejoin us as an unpaid board member at the highest legal level of Mars Hill Church. In God’s providence, the same day that Pastor Jamie made this decision, one of our unpaid BOD members had to resign due to escalating demands at his place of employment. So, while this man will remain an elder at his local Mars Hill Church, it opened a seat on the BOD for an unpaid elder, which Pastor Jamie fills perfectly. We need many more unpaid elders and Pastor Jamie helps us to raise the profile of that service. The plan is simply that Pastor Jamie will remain an elder at Mars Hill indefinitely. He has clearly communicated his desire to stay at Mars Hill and serve as an elder and we welcome this. So, Pastor Jamie is still Pastor Jamie. Also, the door to employment is always open to Pastor Jamie. It has been clearly communicated to him by myself personally and by his performance review team collectively that should he ever change his mind, we would welcome him back on staff at Mars Hill Church. Our bylaws require that our Executive Elder (EE) team have at least three members. Pastor Dave Bruskas and I remain on the EE. Thankfully, Pastor Dave and his family recently moved to Seattle after leading Mars Hill Albuquerque. His leadership, wisdom, and experience come at just the right time and we praise God he is on the team. In God’s providence, the sermon he preached at Mars Hill Ballard will air this Sunday at all our other churches, helping you to get to know him better. To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king." Sutton is new to staff, but not to ministry. He is a former executive pastor of a large church. Educationally, he is a graduate of Texas A&M, the SMU Cox School of Business, and Harvard Business School. Professionally, he has recently served as the CEO of a company that has nearly 1,600 employees. Prior to that he served as the CEO of another company that under his leadership grew from 0 to 500 employees in the first year. He and his family moved to Seattle sensing a call to serve at Mars Hill, and we believe he is a gift from God to us for our future.
Let the record note that Scott Thomas vanished from the leadership scene of both Mars Hill and Acts 29 with a matter of months, but we'll get to that later. Driscoll stated back in 2011 that Munson was always above reproach. It'd be easier to go look that up if Mars Hill hadn't scrubbed that public statement, though. But what we can consult is occasional public statements from Munson such as:
http://www.churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/150820-4-reasons-to-expand-even-when-you-shouldn-t.html
2) The opposite of growth is death.
The living grow; the dying do not. A church need not add to its numbers in astronomical proportions, but if nobody is showing up, chances are nobody is meeting Jesus, which is the whole point. Also, spiritual growth is inextricably linked to numerical growth (though it’s not always an exponential relationship); if people are truly growing in their faith, they will give, they will serve, they will invite their friends, they will tell people about Jesus, they will live on mission—all of which leads to some level of numerical growth as God works through his people.
Munson may have been implementing what amounted to a "too big to fail" approach to church growth
So, let's get back to what Sutton Turner reportedly thought about the financial situation at Mars Hill as it was left to him in the wake of Munson's resignation. According to the memo, the financial situation was none too promising.
If you go back and look, the Church had no budget and the financial statements were a total joke this time last year. Financial reporting was 4 to 5 months late because the staff in finance was incompetent and the policies and procedures were non-existent. I am sorry, these are strong words, but it is true.
In June and July, we slammed together a budget and put in place a new software system so we could start getting some financial information. In September the financial information began to come, but since the organization in general had no policies around spending and credit cards use, it was garbage in and garbage out. In September we installed Concur (credit card management system) and new policies across the organization. Finally by December, Kerry arrived with two good accounting managers to really get things cranking. As we have discussed, the financials for January 2012 were difficult to read because of all of the year-end GWOW giving/expenses plus the launching of 4 churches on 1/15/2012 to make the picture very foggy.
Is it less foggy two years later? Because it would be a great demonstration of the stewardship of the leadership of Mars Hill Church to open up the books to rank and file members and explain where all that money went. Throw in how much it cost to rent Ephesus, too. After all, Driscoll couldn't help himself remarking "We even rented Ephesus for a day".
Yesterday I received February financials (within 15 days of the close of the month) and we are in a big mess. It is much worse that I could have ever imagined. Since September, we have basically planted or re-planted 6 churches (EVT, ABQ, OC, SAM, RNV, and PDX). Operationally and organizationally this is a huge task. In order to accomplish this massive task, the people and processes were set up to accomplish this task. So the organization was built to plant 6 churches, not sustain past that event. Then you put on top of these 6 churches launches a RM campaign and you basically have a company going to World War Ill. It is all hands on deck, spend whenever is
needed and let's win the War.
Wenatchee The Hatchet had made a point of sharing with leadership in 2008 that Mars Hill looked to be committed to a growth pattern that couldn't be sustained. Adding campuses would just be adding operational liabilities without cultivating the donor base to keep the newly opening campuses viable. The Lake City campus was eventually closed, so the recent closure announcements of Mars Hill are merely unique for quantity rather than quality of announcement.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)