As to at least one
possible claim that Noriega was terminated there’s one embedded within this
thread at Mars Hill Refuge
If Noriega was fired in
September 2011 this would go a long way to explain why Patrick Kyle’s anonymous
friend on staff at Mars Hill could legitimately say that Andrew’s story was at
best incomplete and most likely deliberately misleading. I, however, read Matthew Paul Turner’s
account of the story and theorized that ambiguities and oversights were
probably done on purpose not necessarily to deliberately mislead but to protect
some measure of anonymity for the other parties involved in the “confluence of
situations” harmed by Andrew’s actions.
Mars Hill stated that it
was not going to discuss details out of a concern to protect the privacy of
people involved. They did suspend all of
the campus blogs and blog archives. Mars Hill also scrubbed away all references
to the spouses or offspring of pastors and staff throughout Mars Hill. That’s a significant effort to preserve the
privacy of the Noriega family. But the
trouble was that the Mars Hill culture of profligate use of social media and of
writing extensively about one’s story of redemption and grace for the world to
read meant that all of the efforts of Mars Hill to preserve the privacy of the
Noriega family were ultimately for nothing.
The Noriegas had blogged and tweeted enough information to establish
that there was a boy named Andrew dating the daughter.
The connection between
Andrew and the Noriega family was a time-consuming project but ultimately not a
particularly difficult one. As I wrote
at the beginning of this investigation Mars Hill as a culture prizes two
things--social media savvy and stories of redemption and life transformation.
Mars Hill members and leaders in particular seem unable to resist sharing
stories of redemption and change. Some might call this a sanctified, Christian
variation of the bootstrap myth. If Noriega was fired the firing was done in a
way that was strictly in-house. Unlike
Andrew’s disciplinary case there was probably no unclear communication and if
Noriega was fired things were kept low profile.
How James Noriega went
from being referenced by Driscoll in sermons in 2006 and 2007 to co-leading
Redemption Groups in 2009 to vanishing out of eldership in late 2011 is not a
story I see any need to expand upon much more than I have elsewhere in this
blog. I have documented Noriega’s affection for Puritans, Ed Welch, and views
of human nature that antedate psychology as we know it. I have also documented Pastor
Mike Wilkerson’s observation that one of the incentives for developing
Redemption Group content was to ensure recovery groups had a theology that
matched what was taught from the pulpit.
In other words, there’s
little reason to doubt that Redemption Group content was tailored, in part, to not contradict the theology of Mark
Driscoll regarding habitual sin, addiction, and so on. Wilkerson and Noriega were able to put
together content that met with Driscoll’s approval. Driscoll asked Wilkerson to write the
Redemption Group book. Noriega’s role was in pioneering the mixed small groups
that became the prototype for Redemption Groups. Then in late 2011 Noriega was fired … or
maybe resigned under pressure. The blog
entries of James Noriega’s wife imply that her husband was fired rather than
resigned and that the MH PR statements in February 2012 were, in her
estimation, untruthful about important things.
Now it’s important to
stress at this point that the Mars Hill public response has been to say the
staff who were let go were let go over things that had nothing to do with
Andrew’s case. It is possible that if
James Noriega was fired and Andrew was engaged to his stepdaughter/daughter
that the firing had nothing to do with Andrew’s disciplinary case. Noriega was, by December 18, 2011, not even a
pastor at Mars Hill. So in that respect
Andrew’s story conveyed through Matthew Paul Turner “can” be considered
inaccurate or misleading. Andrew was
engaged to a pastor’s daughter but by the time his discipline case was
escalated and he’d withdrawn from Mars Hill his prospective father-in-law had
not actually been a pastor at Mars Hill in any capacity for a few months. But to say that James Noriega was a person
with no connection to the disciplinary case of Andrew Lamb is wildly
inaccurate, to put things nicely. And if
Noriega’s termination was actually connected in some way to how he dealt with
Andrew then saying otherwise would be a lie.
