World Magazine: Result Source contracted with Mars Hill get Real Marriage on NYT bestseller

http://www.worldmag.com/2014/03/unreal_sales_for_driscoll_s_real_marriage/page1
http://www.worldmag.com/2014/03/unreal_sales_for_driscoll_s_real_marriage/page2

World Magazine has gotten ahold of a contract between Mars Hill Church and Result Source to ensure that Real Marriage would get on the New York Times bestseller list.  Smith writes about the contract being between a Mat Miller and John Sutton Turner. 

So in addition to there having been some controversy in the last four months about the degree to which Mark Driscoll plagiarized the work of others, and included egregious factual errors in a number of his books over the last five years, it also transpires that his NYT bestseller seems to have been bought into a place on the NYT bestseller list.

Buying a spot at the top is hardly unheard of and there are those who are pointing out that since it isn't really strictly illegal what is the story here?  Well, how many evangelicals who would make the case that because it isn't illegal there are no ethical qualms to be had about it would turn around immediately and apply the same rationale to abortion? Anyone?  Surely there will be someone but the point is that when the venue of the this breaking news is World Magazine we could expect a slightly different response.  And surely we don't have to actually bring out the observation that something being legal does not necessarily confer upon the thing the status of being unimpeachable on the matter of ethics. 


So, for sake of review, let's recap some of what has been observed about Real Marriage.  We've compared chapter 7 of Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll to chapter 9 of Dan Allender's The Wounded Heart.

We have also considered the chronological puzzle of Grace Driscoll talking about how when she shared her story of abuse (which Mark Driscoll has placed somewhere in 2006) there were few resources available for sex abuse victims. There are several puzzles involved in this. 

1. In Real Marriage Grace Driscoll described the resources for sex abuse victims as being inadequate even though the men in charge of ministry to abuse victims were apparently recruited by Mark Driscoll himself and the leadership appointments Mark Driscoll made that included giving Bent Meyer charge of counseling and recovery groups had to have predated April 2006 when Confessions of a Reformission Rev was published.

2. Grace Driscoll went on in the bestseller to commend books written and published by MH staff under the Re:Lit banner that weren't published until 2011, half a decade after she shared her story with Mark about a specific case of abuse.  What on earth was happening between first sharing a story of abuse and the five years later when books by Mike Wilkerson and by Justin & Lindsey Holcomb got published?

3. It turns out, in fact, that at the 2006 mens' training camp booklet Mark Driscoll was commending Dan Allender's work on the subject of sexual abuse in a teaching event. And since it's beyond all possible doubt Allender's work had a formative  influence on the Driscoll's approach to counseling victims of sexual abuse what, precisely, was supposed to be not gospel-centered or wrongly-focused on behavioral change in Allender's work?  On pages 130-131 of Mark Driscoll's Confessions of a Reformission Rev he wrote about assuming the identity of William Wallace II and rebuking men for being immoral and cowardly and on page 131 in particular he wrote that the ultimate result was,

"The life change was unreal. We had guys getting saved en masse. We had gay guys going straight. We had guys tossing out porn, getting jobs, tithing, taking wives, buying homes, making babies, and repenting of the sins of their fathers. We had guys who had divorced their wives remarrying them. We had men adopting children so they would have a Christian father. ... "

What about that litany of life change that was unreal couldn't be described as behavior change? Everything about Driscoll taking on the pseudonym William Wallace II and the way he proudly describes the results, whether in Confessions of a Reformission Rev or the fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness, highlights the glory of how because he yelled at young immature guys they shaped up and flew right, doesn't it? Good luck actually finding anything published under the pseudonym William Wallace II from the old unmoderated Midrash, though.

So, this gets back to Grace Driscoll's statement that in 2006 there weren't many options and those that existed were ... not gospel-centered or were wrongly focused on behavioral change? 

And, again, we're back to the reality that by Mark Driscoll's own account, Allender's work was known of and commended as far back as 2006, and that Grace Driscoll listed Dan Allender as a favorite author as far back as 2000.  An amended acknowledgment section in Real Marriage mentions Allender.  It would seem, now, it is officially impossible for authors to have lifted concepts and wording so thoroughly from an author whose works were available and commended in the church in 2006 to have, against all odds, been not gospel centered or wrongly focused on behavioral change.  If it was somehow lacking, according to the Driscollian narrative in chapter 7 of Real Marriage, why rely on that work so extensively?

There's also the curious matter of how strikingly similar Mark Driscoll's woke-up-and-threw-up narrative in chapter one of Real Marriage resembles a narrative in chapter five of Confessions of a Reformission Rev.  In one case there's a nightmare that inspired Mark Driscoll to wake up, throw up, and stay up on a couch all night because of a terrible sin committed against and yet also apparently by a person that Driscoll said he wouldn't name.  This nightmare is described as having happened a couple of years after Ashley was born.  But in the narrative in Real Marriage, a nightmare Mark Driscoll had about Grace cheating on him so shook him that he woke up, threw up, and stayed up on a couch all night hoping the nightmare wasn't true before Ashley was born.  Now it's certainly possible for someone to have multiple nightmares over multiple years that inspire emesis but there is ... how to put this delicately, a synoptic question that seems to come up with these two narratives. 
In the 2006 account Mark Driscoll said unequivocally the nightmare about the unnamed person was a satanic, accusatory nightmare.  In the 2012 account the dream happens before Ashley's birth and is regarded as some kind of revelation. It's not a given, after all, what the source of the revelation was but a book sold through a Christian publisher to Christian readers might lead one to infer a divine origin.  If you'd like to read through the two nightmare accounts go over here.

One of the crucial things to observe about the book, now that it's been out for a couple of years, is that it opens with the story of the Driscoll marriage.  This is the opening gambit, the basis from which all subsequent instruction is informed and the leverage from which a reader is invited to take that instruction seriously.  We can survey the doubts even complementarians had about Real Marriage in substance some other time.  What we're reviewing here is that the narrative itself in Real Marriage, in light of what has been publicly available in other writings by Mark Driscoll, is not entirely certain. Did Mark have two vomit-dream incidents or one?  If Grace Driscoll claimed there weren't resources that were properly gospel-centered or able to avoid a wrong focus on behavior change why was Mark Driscoll boasting about behavior change in a 2006 book? 

For that matter, again, the matter of Dan Allender--wouldn't use of his phrases suggest appreciation of his work?  Now that Grace experienced some kind of abuse often enough to not recognize it as abuse is not in dispute at all.  But as we've noted here before, chapter 7 of Real Marriage actually tells us a whole lot more about the birth of the Mars Hill Re:Lit imprint than about what actually ever happened to Grace Driscoll.   And in a way that's fine. Grace Driscoll should not feel obliged to explain what happened to her no matter how many times her husband says she was raped, but it's unfortunate that the chapter with her name attached to it featured uncredited use of Dan Allender's ideas when it came out in 2012, and it's also unfortunate that it seemed to focus a lot of attention on promoting books from the Re:Lit banner that were published just a year earlier.

So there's all that even if there weren't any news about Mars Hill Church having a contract with Result Source to get the book on to the NYT bestseller list.

What is interesting is to observe how the members of On Mission LLC went from being Mark Driscoll to two LLCs in the wake of controversy about whether or not Mark Driscoll plagiarized the works of others.  The change in the LLC is documented over here. That there's an On Mission LLC at all to which royalties from Driscoll books goes at all would seem to be a change of heart from what Driscoll was saying from the pulpit in 2009 about how he didn't have a side company. Between On Mission LLC and Resurgence Publishing it would seem there's at least two for profit companies on the side these days, wouldn't it? Since Driscoll was describing himself as president of The Resurgence back in 2008 how far back was it a for profit company?  If Driscoll was regaling members about how he didn't have a side company in 2009 and yet has On Mission LLC now what changed?  Informally people theorize that John Sutton Turner has had some kind of role.  Who's John Sutton Turner?  Such as it is, a rambling tour through his professional history is available.

So, there's a broad overview of the various issues that emerged about Real Marriage since it was published in 2012 as some background for the recent statement by Warren Cole Smith at World Magazine about the Result Source agreement with Mars Hill Church.  We'll get to a stroll down memory lane on whether complementarians were even all in agreement about the substance and quality of Mark and Grace Driscoll's book later.