on ten painful lessons from the early days of Mars Hill, lesson 1-"create a team" offers a fuzzy account of how lacking in a team and support Driscoll was in the early years of MHF.

http://pastormark.tv/2011/12/06/10-painful-lessons-from-the-early-days-of-mars-hill-church
Pastor Mark Driscoll
December 6, 2011

This week, we launched our new sermon series at Mars Hill Church, “God’s Work, Our Witness,” which is a kind of documentary-meets-reality-TV-show-meets-sermon experience that looks back over the history of the church and reflects on the amazing work God has done over the last 15 years.
On Sunday, we showed the hour-long documentary, shot and edited by our amazing creative guys, which shared the story of God’s faithfulness in the early days of Mars Hill. In the coming weeks for this series, we’ll show videos of sermons preached at various Mars Hill churches on four defining values of our church: gospel-centered theology, complementarian relationships, Spirit-filled lives, and missional churches.

Driscoll went on to list the bits of his list

1. Create a team.

For the first five or six years of Mars Hill, I was the only paid pastor on staff and carried much of the ministry burden. I was doing all the premarital counseling and most of the pastoral work as the only pastor on staff. This went on for years due to pitiful giving and a ton of very rough new converts all the way until we had grown to about 800 people a Sunday. At one point I literally had over a few thousand people come in and out of my home for Bible studies, internships, counseling, and more. My phone rang off the hook, my email inbox overflowed, my energy levels and health took a nose dive, and I started becoming bitter and angry instead of loving and joyful. It got to the point where either something had to change or I was going to go ballistic and do something I really regretted.

Through much prayer and study of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit impressed upon me that I’d done a poor job of raising up leaders along with me to help care for his church. I was carrying the burden myself and was not doing a good job because it was too much. I needed to transition from caring for all the people to ensuring they were all cared for by raising up elders, deacons, and church members. This spurred me to make some dramatic changes to increase membership and train leaders.

It is documentable that within the first six years of the founding of Mars Hill there was a lot of activity but there aren't many details in the Pastor Mark TV account from 2011.  There's more detail in the film God's Work, Our Witness from minute 48-51.  Circa 1999 the church lost its offices, the Driscolls had people living in their house (more on this later), Mark and Grace's friendship began to wane.  Exactly what was happening would be hard to sum up. 

However, thanks to a book Driscoll published in 2006 we can get some idea of how far back Mark Driscoll had a team helping him found Mars Hill Church and how soon and for what reasons he began to wish to handle all the preaching and teaching.

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

CHAPTER TWO, 45-75 PEOPLE
page 69-70
... Lief was running a construction company, and Mike was running a campus ministry at the University of Washington, so I was the only person focusing full-time on the church.  I really wanted to just take the pulpit and figure out how to preach by doing it every week, but I also wanted to respect these older, more seasoned, and very godly men. [emphasis added] In time, they sat me down and said that they believed in me, wanted to cover my back, and wanted me to take the pulpit and lead the church.

... To some degree I had been wrongly allowing Mike and Lief to shoulder the burden because I feared failure and hoped to share the blame if things went poorly. [emphasis added]
So it would appear that there was some kind of team, even if the other two co-founding pastors of Mars Hill Church were older men who had full-time employment and activity.  Driscoll was by his own account chronically underemployed in this period and wasn't making enough money to feel that his wife could stop working so they could start a family.

CHAPTER FOUR 150-350 PEOPLE
page 98
The church still was not paying me, so I was living off of outside support from another church. I was not making enough money to pull my wife out of work and start our family. So I started traveling a lot to speak at various conferences, hoping to help serve other Christian leaders and supplement my income.

page 101-102
During this season my wife, Grace, also started to experience a lot of serious medical problems. her job was very stressful, and between her long hours at the office and long hours at the church, her body started breaking down. I felt tremendousy convicted that I had sinned against my wife and had violated the spirit of 1 Timothy 5:8, which says that if a man does not provide for his family he has denied his faith and has acted in a manner worse than an unbeliever. I repented to Grace for my sin of not making enough money and having her shoulder any of the financial burden for our family.  We did not yet have elders installed in the church but did have an advisory council in place, and I asked them for a small monthly stipend to help us make ends meet, and I supplemented our income with outside support and an occasional speaking engagement. [emphasis added]

Shortly thereafter, Grace gave birth to our first child, my sweetie-pie Ashley. Up to this point Grace had continuously poured endless hours into the church. She taught a women's Bible study, mentored many young women, oversaw hospitality on Sundays, coordinated meals for new moms recovering from birth, and organized all of the bridal and baby showers. Grace's dad had planted a church before she was born and has remained there for more than forty years. Her heart for ministry and willingness to serve was amazing. But as our church grew, I felt I was losing my wife because we were both putting so many hours into the church that we were not connecting as a couple like we should have. I found myself getting bitter against her because she would spend her time caring for our child and caring for our church but was somewhat negligent of me.

I explained to Grace that her primary ministry was to me, our child, and the management of our home and that I needed her to pull back from the church work to focus on what mattered most.  She resisted a bit at first, but no one took care of me but her.  And the best thing she could do for the church was to make sure that we had a good marriage and godly children as an example fo other people in the church to follow.  It was the first time that I remember actually admitting my need for help to anyone.  It was tough. But I feared that if we did not put our marriage and children above the demands of the church, we would end up with the ukewarm, distant marriage that so many pastors have because they treat their churches as mistresses that they are more passionate about than their brides. 
...

Although I was frustrated with both my wife and church, I had to own the fact that they were both under my leadership and that I had obviously done a poor job of organizing things to function effectively.  And since we did not yet have elders formally in place there was no one to stop me from implementing dumb ideas like the 9:00p.m. church service. [emphasis added] So I decided to come to firmer convictions on church government and structure so that I could establish the founding framework for what our church leadership would look like.

So in Driscoll's earlier account he explained that there were co-founding pastors but no elders formally in place who could play a role in stopping him from implementing stupid ideas. 


CHAPTER FIVE, 350-1,000 PEOPLE
page 119
[this season began in early 1999]
I had worked myself to near burnout and was still the only paid pastor on staff although there was  enough work for ten people. [emphasis added]

This was 1999.  It's also not quite done yet.  Read on.

page 120
A friend in the church kindly allowed me to move into a large home he owned on a lease-to-own deal because I was too broke to qualify for anything but an outhouse. The seventy-year-old house had over three thousand square feet, seven bedrooms on three floors, and needed a ton of work because it had been neglected for many years as a rental home for college students. Grace and I and our daughter Ashley, three male renters who helped cover the mortgage, my study, and the church office all moved into the home. [emphasis added] This put me on the job, literally, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as the boundary between home and church was erased.

We ran the church out of my house for nearly two years, including leadership meetings and Bible studies for various groups on almost every night of the week. It was not uncommon to have over seventy people a week in our home. Grace got sucked right back into the church mess. She was a great host to our guests. But I started growing bitter toward her because I was again feeling neglected.

I began working seven days a week, trying to save the church from imminent death. I had decided to go for broke and accepted that I would either save the church and provide for my family or probably die of a heart attack. I lived on caffeine and adrenaline for the better part of two years, ate terribly ,and put on nearly forty pounds.  [emphasis added]
There a couple of things to note.  By his own account Mark Driscoll couldn't afford to get the house he ended up getting that became Mars Hill Church by default when Mars Hill had no choice but to vacate the Laurelhurst location (if memory serves).  It's worth noting that there were three male renters who helped cover the mortgage.

During the 2000-2003 period of Mars Hill history leaders began to talk about how guys should get married and get houses.  For those who recall lending practices in this period, what may have happened during this time was that young married couples who didn't strictly speaking have the credit history or assets to have obtained home loans were able to do so because of peculiarities to housing lending practice at the time.  To offset the lack of resources they had at their disposal, a young married couple in a nascent church plant might rent out as many spare rooms to single people as they felt they could safely do.  These renting tenants might collectively pay enough rent to cover the cost of the mortgage.  This was occasionally referred to as "living in community" and as a positive thing.  Married people got to have houses earlier than they otherwise might and single people got to have a place to stay with people they already knew or trusted.  By having it within a nascent church community it seemed pretty win-win to a lot of people at the time.

But the lack of financial resources to ensure that Grace didn't have to work at all and could focus on being a homemaker would have to have gotten to Mark over those years.  And hosting the church in a home eliminated any distinction between "life together" and life together. 

A family counselor might suggest this desperate financial/real estate scenario for Mars Hill as a social system or hybridized family might potentially lead to what's called an undifferentiated ego mass. 
And, not entirely surprisingly, Mark Driscoll's health took a nosedive in this period.  What Mark Driscoll presented in the documentary/fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness as a continuous decade of depression and frustration may have been more of a cyclical pattern that persisted over ten years rather than being one steady stream.

And it was not necessarily because there was no team as such but there was not necessarily a team that was invested, by Mark Driscoll's own account, with the formal authority and capacity to shoot down his dumber ideas whenever he decided to implement them.

For as much as Driscoll has referenced his burn-out it's worth revisiting that by his own account he actually wanted to have complete ownership of the pulpit from practically the dawn of Mars Hill Fellowship but felt it would be disrespectful to Gunn and Moi to just act on that or say that plainly.  Eventually Gunn and Moi, by Driscoll's account, basically gave Mark Driscoll what he wanted, uninterrupted access to the pulpit.  That Driscoll would go on at one stage to preach five to seven services on a single Sunday week after week might have become grist for Driscollian narratives of frustration and burn-out but it's worth remembering that by Mark Driscoll's own testimony in his published work doing all the preaching was what he actually wanted.

He could have delegated a lot more of the preaching to other leaders within Mars Hill Church at a variety of times.  It's not necessarily that there was no team in place, it's that the team Driscoll had recruited, by Driscoll's own account, basically let him do what he wanted even when he had stupid ideas and was doing things in a way that was detrimental to his health and that this was going on as far back as 1998-1999.