Mars Hill Church, comparing the FY2012 figures to the Fy2013 figures

For those who haven't already seen the FY2012 report go over here.

For those who haven't seen the FY2013 report, well, you may be sort of out of luck if you want to see it with your own eyes.
[UPDATE 1-12-2014, thanks to commenter Winston we've been directed to a page that presents the report for FY2013. It looks a bit different than the version WtH saw earlier but this appears to be mainly in color and other elements of layout rather than in statistics]

http://marshill.com/annual-report-2013
http://marshill.com/files/2013/12/18/MHC_Annual_Report_2013_o_web.pdf

Let's just start with some basics.  Anyone who's read citations from the Fy2012 report may remember this number:

(go ahead click on this puppy to see how big it really is)

As in the stated number of the average weekly attendance at Mars Hill Church. 

Each dot represented one person and the blue dots represented newcomers, 2,796 in all.

Then there were the following figures for baptisms, total members, and kids each week.

Now in a pdf made available at some website affiliated with Mars Hill Church back in December 2013 a report was made available that features these numbers for FY2013.

(that 12,329 number isn't quite so big in real life, either, on the report)

Check out the average weekly attendance listed in what appears to be a FY2013 MHC annual report, that's 12,329 average.  While 1,337 members were added the grand total number of members of Mars HIll Church only increased by a total of a net total of 60 members between FY2012 and FY2013.  Curious.  If your organization has a net gain of formal members of a mere sixty after getting more than 1,200 newbies that's obviously not very awesome net growth.

Let's consider the giving trends as they break out by campus.  For FY2012 we got this:

The FY2012 web page was made not as a pdf but as a mass of constituent parts, which makes it hard to download the whole thing as a simple unified pdf-style whole but makes it hugely easy to consult constituent parts to compare the report to something else such as the corresponding data from the FY2013 report which says  ...

A little footnote here on the percentages before we proceed, check out the Fy2012 pie chart:

Compared to FY2012's listing the percentage of people who gave $0 went from 23.9% to 35.1%.  Interesting.  [WtH at 11:53pm---comparing this percentage of 0 donors to previous annual reports it also looks like possibly the highest ratio of non-givers at MHC in the last five fiscal years]

The number of people who gave between $1-$499 went from 42.9% to 29.5%.  It looks like they're losing the bottom of the pyramid in terms of lowest-level donors but that Mars Hill Church is gaining in the mid-tier and major donor categories.  But no organization can rely entirely on the top-tier for long.  You have to mobilize your base-level, low-end donors.  It's not safe to assume that some kind of Pareto principle means you can effectively ignore your base.  Let's not forgot if the numbers presented in the MHC FY2013 report hold up a whopping 64.6 percent of donors to Mars Hill in FY2013 either gave nothing at all or gave no more than $1-$499 for the fiscal year. Since the report doesn't quite clarify if this is a reference to cumulative giving (which it has been in reports past) or averages there's possible wiggle room for additional information.  Anyway, enough commentary on the aggregates.  Some campus shifts in giving are worth looking at.

Now here is where the numbers get interesting as a manifestation of shifts.  Certain shifts are so obvious they almost don't seem to be worth mentioning.  Let's mention them anyway.  Obviously moving live preaching from Mars Hill Ballard to Mars Hill Bellevue could explain a significant drop in the giving patterns at Ballard and this would be likely even if Bill Clem hadn't resigned from being a pastor at Mars Hill Church at the start of 2013.  Ballard, all told, looks like it had a nearly 2 million dollar drop in total giving per fiscal year to the general giving fund.  The actual difference is $1,972,010.00.  

Ballard wasn't the only campus to experience a drop in cumulative giving to the general fund.  Mars Hill Downtown's giving from FY2012 to FY2013 dropped by $94,687.00, and that could be explicable, perhaps, by the departure of not only the lead pastor Tim Gaydos but also of Tim Beltz and Will Little.  While A. J. Hamilton was the interim lead pastor for a time he became the lead pastor at Downtown until he was recently replaced as lead pastor by someone else Wenatchee's never heard of before.  

The Shoreline campus seemed to experience a drop from FY2012 to FY2013 that looks about like $5,462, a relatively negligible drop as things go.  But it's important to bear in mind that when Driscoll did his financial updates on Mars Hill around May and June 2012 Shoreline was running the biggest systemic deficit.  Even a small drop in giving could be a huge problem for a campus if it has continued to run the largest systemic deficit in the entire organization on a campus-by-campus basis.

More significant as a formal drop are the $87,911 drop at Mars Hill University District, and the $31,037 drop at Mars Hill West Seattle took place between FY2012 and FY2013.  These sort of look like campuses where transitions of employment may have happened but that in itself couldn't explain anything.  Willie Wilson vanished from leadership at Rainier Valley and giving has gone up.  

Less easily spotted would be changes in which average giving declined.  For instance, Mars Hill Federal Way experienced a drop in average giving per donor but a pending church plant or two might possibly explain that. Bubba Jennings is still slated to plant Mars Hill Tacoma, right? That could explain everything right there. Even though giving in total has gone up the average might have gone down because of where the resources are going.  After all general giving fund wouldn't be the same as restricted giving or giving to expansion projects.

It's no surprise the biggest spike in growth has been Mars Hill Bellevue.  Where Mark is the money will obviously follow.  Plus anyone with any length of experience in observing fundraising in the Puget Sound area can tell you that if you want the bigger money you have to turn your attention to Bellevue and the east side anyway.  

Now for those who aren't completely bored already here's a compilation of figures from the FY2013 report that was available last month and the still available Financial Disclosure agreement on FY2012 that you may still be able to find.  Along the way some numbers from FY2011 have been consulted.

ABBREVIATED BALANCE SHEET RESULTS
	2011	2012	2013
ASSETS
cash & cash equivalents	$   5,165,170.00	$   3,369,472.00	$   5,341,040.00
accounts receivable	$                       -	$         30,302.00	$      192,323.00
inventory and other current assets	$       81,041.00	$      203,685.00	$      515,751.00
lease deposits and other assets	$      118,011.00	$      136,718.00	$      180,269.00
property and equipment	$ 27,099,676.00	$ 28,650,133.00	$ 28,663,705.00
deferred loan costs, net	$      41,642.00	$         37,273.00	$         34,531.00
LIABILITIES
current liabilities	$   3,070,910.00	$   1,931,392.00	$   2,097,035.00
long-term liabilities	$ 13,121,525.00	$ 13,285,248.00	$ 12,146,688.00
total liabilities	$ 16,192,435.00	$ 15,216,640.00	$ 14,243,723.00
NET ASSETS
unrestricted	$ 16,387,843.00	$ 17,364,950.00	$ 19,959,873.00
temporarily restricted	$      126,946.00	$      118,993.00	$      724,023.00
total net assets	$ 16,514,789.00	$ 17,483,943.00	$ 20,683,896.00

There are more things that could be written but for now these numbers will suffice.  Wenatchee The Hatchet has covered Mars Hill adapting to numeric decline in the past. If we compare the 13,173 to the 12,329 a cumulative drop in average attendance of 844 isn't even really all that bad.  Sure, the net growth of 60 members despite adding 1,337 members doesn't seem encouraging but as noted recently, Sutton Turner happily informed Mars Hill that giving is very high and above and beyond what was asked for.  While certain campuses had losses in numbers and revenue that was going to happen with the resignations that happened in 2013 and with live preaching moving to Bellevue.  As it stands Mars Hill would not have bothered looking for a Capital Development Manager if they didn't feel confident about giving.  Whether or not the capital campaign projects being planned for 2014 on out are smarter ideas than the capital campaign project of 2004-2005 is open for some debate once we find out what those things are.

So even though the Fy2013 report was given and then taken away in terms of internet accessiblity Wenatchee The Hatchet did get ahold of it, or so it seems.  And the numbers are interesting.  Driscoll shared in the summer of 2012 that Mars Hill had hit a rough season financially.  In early 2013 he shared how Mars Hill avoided its own fiscal cliff and how Mars Hill was not a wealthy church.  But this does not keep nearly every fiscal year from seeming to be the best year ever when it comes time for annual reports, which have seemed to come later and later after the end of each fiscal year and most recently seems to have taken shape in the form of a report you probably can't even find and download any longer.  Well, maybe there's going to be a FY2013 financial dislosure statement that will be available some time in 2014.  We'll see.  

UPDATE 1-12-2014
Thanks (again) to Winston for pointing out where the FY2013 report is available.  Wenatchee's not going to claim to have the best eyes around. :)

Get ready for Jesus' bold little brother

Now, granted, depending on what your view of Mary's virginity was before and after the birth of Jesus the sermon series might be titled "Jesus bold older brother" since it's not unheard of in Christian traditions that Joseph was an older man with children from an earlier marriage.  Not that we're going to follow that rabbit trail here.

Seeing as the Malachi series about living for a legacy has wrapped up, there's a new series on the way. And there's a study guide you can buy at The Resurgence store now over here:

http://store.theresurgence.com/collections/books/products/james-study-guide

It's possible that when Mark Driscoll announced he was taking on editorial tasks at The Resurgence he could have been referring to editing this above-mentioned study guide to make sure all the citations and attributions are correct.  You can go pre-order the book now or maybe opt to buy a copy at one of the church locations.  This might be a sold-only version rather than a study guide being given away like the old one from the 1 & 2 Peter series initially was until it started getting sold to recoup printing expenses. 

The end of the Malachi series may be a suitable time to consider the tagline for the sermons, living for a legacy.  For the Esther series the tagline was God's perfect plan being worked out through imperfect people.  These taglines strongly suggest a guiding hand of marketing. :)  In 2012 featuring Esther in a sermon series and emphasizing the perfection of God's work in imperfect people could become a meta-theme, a meta-narrative in which an ostensibly expository sermon series became a set of topical riffs from Driscoll that ultimately played the role of building a massive narrative about the history of Mars Hill Church.  It wouldn't have been the first time Mark Driscoll did that with narrative literature or Old Testament literature.  Observe the Nehemiah series, if you dare. 

Malachi's appended motif of living for a legacy would ostensibly be all about Jesus and for Jesus' fame but functionally which legacy is a person being invited to live for?  Mars Hill Church, of course.  And by extension a lasting legacy seems to be an interest Mark Driscoll has had for a while now. But precisely what it entails at the level of lived lives or ubi numbers and associated entities may remain to be seen.

Sutton Turner bids farewell to 2013 and hello to 2014.

A new year and a new announcement comes along:

Mars Hill | New Discussion Topic

Welcome 2014!

From Pastor Sutton Turner: Mars Hill Family, Happy New Year! What a year 2013 was! It was great—and more importantly, our God was great (Psalm 147:5)! He was—and will continue to be—faithful, trustworthy, and generous to us. He is the reason that Mars Hill exists. His name and renown are the desire of our hearts (Isa. 26:8). Five Official Church Plant Launches We have much to look forward to and prepare for in 2014—a year we are praying to be our most evangelistic year ever. This Sunday, we will officially launch five new church plants into their new homes. They have been working tirelessly to make these homes ready for this important day, when they open their doors wide to people in the community, who will see the gospel of grace in the person of Christ clearly for the first time—or maybe the 501st time—and repent, be saved, and be baptized.   [picture not particularly necessary]   Easter 2014 Christmas Eve was an incredible night. We were able to celebrate Jesus’ birthday with over 9,549 people at our live services. And 5,226 people watched online from Tuesday through Friday of that week. We are now looking forward to Easter 2014, an amazing day of celebration and victory! It will be a day when believers can remember their Savior and non-believers can meet their Savior. Both are important; both are necessary. Mars Hill, we are praying for 25,000 people to attend our live services, and 50,000 to watch online. It’s all about Jesus—he’s alive, he saves, and people need to hear that. Jesus Festival In August, we have the Jesus Festival—an outdoor event in Seattle that will boldly proclaim the name of Jesus and clearly announce the good news of grace. We are praying for a work of the Spirit that would lead many, many people to Jesus that day. Mars Hill Schools We also have Mars Hill Schools launching in the fall, as we host Corban University and Western Theological Seminary at Mars Hill Bellevue. We want to see many students of God’s Word become fully trained and equipped for the work of the ministry—no matter what that looks like for their individual calling. We are truly honored to be part of such a significant endeavor in people’s lives. He Provides We are praying for Jesus to do so much more than we can ask, or even think or imagine in 2014 (Eph. 3:20). It’s because of faithful and generous family members that all these things are possible. Through his people, Jesus provides all that we need in order to accomplish all that he has for us. In the final weeks of 2013, we were asking God to provide $2 million above and beyond our normal tithes and offerings in order to accomplish these exciting endeavors in 2014. Guess what, Mars Hill? HE DID IT! We received $2,991,852 above our budget by December 31! In addition, during December and January, $300,000 was given to the Endowment Fund for Church Planting, which will help us plant more churches in 2014 and, Lord willing, for generations to come. Thank You Thank you, Jesus. And thank you so much for partnering with us as we seek to fulfill the mission of Jesus at Mars Hill Church. You are an invaluable part of what he does here. He is doing innumerable things among our Mars Hill family members and in our cities. We praise and honor him for all that he does through and for us, but . . . Jesus himself is our inexpressible gift (2 Cor. 9:15). Thank you, Mars Hill, for making it all about him. Here’s a full report of what Jesus did at Mars Hill Church in 2013.  Because of him, Pastor Sutton Executive Elder & Executive Pastor

View this topic on The City »

Interesting that Sutton Turner completely conflates the generosity of Mars Hill members and attenders with God Himself coming through.  Interesting conflation there and not particularly surprising as in the last four to five years there's been sort of a surreal trend in which Mars Hill leadership progressively conflates what God wants with whatever the MH elders have decided would be good for Mars Hill.  Meanwhile, who's got an update on the Sound Transit real estate Mars Hill's wanted to own?

Anyway, per Sutton Turner's missive, the full report is a link to this page

http://marshill.com/2013/12/27/goodbye-2013-hello-2014-mars-hill-year-end-update

But this falls considerably short of a FY2013 report.  Just compare that "full report" on FY2013 to this page for the FY2012 report. The FY2013 was available for a while but good luck finding it.  It's like the page got moved or dropped.  And no, this doesn't count, as it's a more detailed break-out of the material mentioned in the FY2012 report page.

More importantly, the "full report" was presented before the above-quoted passage Turner wrote in which he stated that Mars Hill received $2,991,852 above budget by December 31, 2013.  That information simply wasn't available on December 27, 2013 when the most recently mentioned link above hit the internet. 

Since Wenatchee The Hatchet has a copy sitting around of the Fy2013 report some observations about the Fy2011-Fy2013 will show up.  Perhaps in the meantime an updated FY2013 from MHC will be available. 

David Zahl at m-bird writes at some length about young men and their anxiety

http://www.mbird.com/2014/01/underachieving-boys-and-the-masks-men-wear/

There's a lot of material in the link above and just a few citations will suffice, I hope, to get you to go read the whole thing.

In unguarded moments, the young men I work with acknowledge their disengagement, and more than that, they articulate a confusion and even ambivalence about what it means to be a man.

The anxiety about the disengagement of young men is a thing discussed in a variety of settings.  Along the way David links to a recent guest piece I did on Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy. David and I probably agree that a way to address the problems of men and women would very likely not reside in defining the entirety of the dynamics between sexes in terms of class warfare.  It's hard to take the wound up rhetoric of feminists or the mens' rights movements all that seriously but that young men seem to lack ambition may itself not explain what men are exactly reacting to.

If young men are disengaged then what would engage them?  Why do they, as some put it, so eagerly embrace video games and porn, both of which can be described as vicarious iterations of conquests that are not real and do not matter?  Well, perhaps we are in a new kind of age of anxiety in which men are, well, perhaps it's too ridiculous to say men are on strike or that they are opting out because there's no incentive for them to succeed, though some elements of that may be true.

Having written at some length on the matter before I'm going to re-suggest that the crisis is one that includes the realization of men in various stages of life that they are disposable.  We live in a post-industrial economy and an information economy.  There's a sense in which your information, the stuff ABOUT you, may be worth more money in this economy than your own flesh and blood, let alone your labor.  In a culture in which the individual and individual choice may be prized as virtually no other in human history the choices of the individual can be simultaneously stultifyingly varied while also being almost inconceivably inconsequential at even a regional, let alone global scale.  Ergo, male disposability.

Men and women do not want to feel disposable even if they may rationally know that it is likely.  Any group or person who assures you that you are not only not alone but that you are not disposable is therefore capable of exercising almost unimaginable influence over you.  Rather than say that this or that movement hands out "kool-aid" that people then drink, which at this point seems too lazy and juvenile and ahistorical to understand what the appeal of a cult might reall be, let's play with the idea that cults move faster to assure potential participants that "you matter" and are better at concealing how fundamentally false this assurance is in contrast to the rest of the world, which largely and often successfully conveys that you are not that important and we won't really miss you that much if you're gone. 

D. G. Hart rhetorically asks who made Doug Wilson a general in the culture war

http://oldlife.org/2014/01/made-doug-wilson-judge-general/

Well, if the call to resurgence goes well perhaps the rising tide will lift all ships? 

Phoenix Preacher, contra Vision Casting

http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=15660

The whole thing is a worthwhile read but there's a particular quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that comes up:

He who loves this dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

It sounds like Bonhoeffer but I didn't catch which work it was when I read the post.  I'm still working through Schlatter's not-for-laity commentary on Romans and looking to crack open some Spurgeon on the Psalms. 

But the quote attributed to Bonhoeffer sticks with me because it's often seemed as though somebody who says he's a nobody likes to talk about how much he loves his community and over the last fourteen years or so it's seemed that, as time goes by, he really loves his idea of that Christian community significantly more than the actual community itself.  You cast your vision and if people don't climb on board you move on, right?  And despite having name-dropped Bonhoeffer as a favorite over the years ...

Throckmorton continues: comparing Real Marriage to Rid of My Disgrace, and Religion Saves

Mark and Grace Driscoll’s Real Marriage Compared to Justin and Lindsey Holcomb’s Rid of My Disgrace

Writing Recycling: A New Wrinkle in the Mark Driscoll Plagiarism Controversy?

Self-plagiarism may sound weird but it can happen if you recycle material for one publisher that is technically copyrighted and published by another publisher.  Depending on which publisher you work with and what kind of contract you have the matter is about license of use or restrictions on use of material in derivative work.  As long as you don't jump from publisher to publisher this might not even happen all that often.

But, you see, Driscoll jumped from Zondervan to Crossway to Thomas Nelson and that introduces a new potential variable which Throckmorton seems to be digging into. 

Now there can be debates and discussions about licensing and derivative work some other time.  As Throckmorton notes in comments there are settings where it's fine.  And it can depend on the era and applicable laws of the land.  Haydn's London symphonies employ a number of ideas that appeared in some of his later string quartets but which were developed in entirely different ways.  Self-quotation was commonplace in Shostakovich works, to move into a later century.  Of course perhaps the publishing stnadards in a totalitarian state might be different ... .

Anyway, new stuff from Throckmorton, whose work on this front of Driscollian publication seems swift and robust enough that our concerns can turn to other directions.

POSTSCRIPT:

Throckmorton also refers to this new piece by Becky Garrison.

a Mars Hill Church that's more than a century old (in Iowa) and an old catchphrase from Denver Moore ...

Who on the west coast could have guessed there's an old Mars Hill Church in Iowa? 

http://jodybresch.com/mars_hill_church_ottumwa.html

http://jodybresch.com/briefhistory.htm

Fascinating.  And let's not forget that just as the name Mars Hill Church is hardly new neither is the catchphrase Driscoll's become so fond of using.  Seeing as Denver Moore's dead he's not going to mind.

http://www.worldmag.com/2012/04/denver_moore_has_worked_his_way_home

In his email to friends, Hall shared that, despite all the attention and praise he received at these events, Moore wanted to be introduced in a certain simple way. 
 
"Tell 'em I'm a nobody that is tryin' to tell everybody about somebody that can save anybody," Moore told Hall.

From the name to the catchphrase it has a certain familiar ring to it.  Of course in Driscoll's variation that somebody isn't described as someone that can save anybody.  Chalk that one up to his being a Calvinist who affirms limited atonement, maybe?

In any case, as Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 put it (the old NIV):

9 What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.
¹⁰ Is there anything of which one can say,
    “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
    it was here before our time.
¹¹ No one remembers the former generations,
    and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
    by those who follow them.

Yep. 




http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/google19a88bb69f86e358.html

Warren Throckmorton: Kindle edition of Real Marriage adds Dan Allender to acknowledgments

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/01/08/kindle-edition-of-mark-driscolls-real-marriage-adds-dan-allender-to-acknowledgments/

It took a couple of years after the release of the book but it looks like, at least in the Kindle edition, Real Marriage finally features an acknowledgment of Dan Allender's work and influence. As Throckmorton noted by way of Garrison's update earlier, NavPress got involved in a private discussion with Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church. Of course it's a shame that Allender's work was never credited to begin with, and even more a shame that no editors at Thomas Nelson spotted any possibility that Allender's work might have been referenced.  And, in a larger sense, it's a shame the entirety of the Christian publishing and reviewing apparatus in the entirety of the north American continent didn't catch any of this stuff the year the book came out, let alone before publication. But we can let others take up the task of writing about how the Mark Driscoll attribution problem can be seen as symptomatic of problems in the entirety of contemporary North American Christian publishing. 

If NavPress has ushered in an era in which Allender's work is finally (again) acknowledged by the Driscolls that's another small step in a positive direction.

We've got numbers to crunch from a few fiscal year reports and that can become the basis for a post maybe later in the week.

a linkathon with a theme or two

Bill Cosby used to have this cartoon in which he'd mention he'd be coming at you with music and fun and if you weren't careful you might learn something before you're done.  And so one of the themes is allusively introduced but won't be talked about for a bit.  We'll just jump straight through to the other.

HT Jim West: Fred Clark writes about John Howard Yoder's abuse of women

Teddy Roosevelt as advocate of eugenics.

Over at The New Criterion (no surprise) there's some discussion about the seediness that has burgeoned behind the mythology of Kennedys and Camelot and the potency of the mythology itself.

Alastair Roberts has linked this little piece about the dark side of emotional intelligence. 

Warren Throckmorton has a post up called Dreamweaver: The Visions of Mark Driscoll.  Some of the research documented here at Wenatchee The Hatchet is alluded to and Throckmorton mentions two variants of a single story as related by Mark Driscoll about an Asian man from Canada. Who that was would be interesting to learn.  Perhaps the man can comment at Throckmorton's blog or clarify who he is.  After all, if it's all legit and checks out the confirmation it would be for Driscoll's claims of supernatural abilities would be, well, restricted to a single case that might be explicable by intuitive cold reading ... ?

It looks like the Mozart effect is not so effective after all. I'd rather kids listened to Haydn than Mozart, personally, but that's a matter of personal taste.

In other reading, David Dobbs wrote a piece about the problem of the meme of the selfish gene. The essay is fairly readable for a lay level and opens with a fascinating introduction that discusses how the difference between a grasshopper and a locust is not so much in the genetic difference between the two (as in there isn't one in sheer genes) but in genetic expression in the genome (if memory serves, correct if mistaken).  Dobbs lays out a case that the role of the individual gene is overplayed in relation to genomics and that to say that how an organism comes across is in the DNA can be overstated.  Gene expression can change things.

Seeing as Wenatchee The Hatchet is a blog that's written by a moderately conservative evangelical Protestant ... let's play a game here.  Here and there are bloggers and writers who have attempted to boil down this or that pattern irreducibly to a set of dogmas and ideals.  It's particularly popular among some quarters to declare that Calvinism is an austere and unforgiving tradition or to say that "Calvinism fails the love test."  In other settings some have said that certain abusive tendencies are indicative of the DNA of the founding, the DNA, if you will, being the basic theological core of a particular movement or school of thought or church.

Well ... this may be risky and simplistic.  It's not like I haven't said for years that you can't reduce potential problems in Mark Driscoll's approach to Calvinism because he wasn't even always a Calvinist, particularly early on.  It's also not necessarily possible to reduce his problems to charismatic ideals or practices because if you were to set foot in a Mars Hill Church service you'd probably never hear anyone speak in tongues or have some word of the sort you'd almost inevitably hear in a Pentecostal or charismatic setting.  Yet Driscoll has talked about dreams and interpreting dreams and seeing sexual molestations in real time even though, somehow, he's claimed to not talk about this stuff.  We'll have to assume that was a rhetorical flourish to say he doesn't USUALLY talk about such things as he did in the spiritual warfare lecture from 2008 that Throckmorton's recently begun to discuss. 

Well, let's pretend for a moment that Calvinists and Reformed traditions just yield nasty ol' people who hate and aren't neighborly.  Well, uh, what about Fred Rogers?  You know, that Presbyterian TV show host of that childrens' program?  What if there's an application of the limitations of the DNA/gene meme that works out at multiple levels.  Gene expression may be something we must also account for, so to speak, in less directly hard-science domains.  There can be prejudices for and against ideas and streams of human thought and activity that are based on conceptions of a thing that are too simplistic.

Which leads inevitably (at least at Wenatchee The Hatchet) to ...

Shinichrio Watanabe (creator of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo) is tackling another show

If you're a long-time reader of this blog then you'll know how much has been written here and there about cartoons.  Maybe you saw a post about the show Eureka Seven as an anime exploring child abuse through the set-up of the action/adventure genre.  Or maybe you saw that essay on different communal grounds for individual identity in the film Ratatouille.  Or in some other setting maybe you read about Toy Story as a trilogy of heroic repentance, or maybe you even read all of Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire.  Or not.  Point is, that animated narrative can be treated as seriously as an art form as live action is anything but controversial here at Wenatchee The Hatchet.  There are more essays about Justice League to eventually be written.  The Wind Rises will be seen by Wenatchee The Hatchet.  In the last month or so Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally been seen in its entirety. There's a fascinating episode of South Park about a hobbit that would be worth a blog post all by itself and a few links to some intriguing reading from 2013 that never took shape in the form of a post.

There's more that could be written but it's not a sure thing it will be written.  This is just to give you some idea of a small fraction of the reading that's been going on in the last month.

The Mars Hill opening for Capital Development Manager has been filled, which means a capital campaign is probably on the way

For those who may not have spotted the news back in later 2013, Mars Hill had a few job openings and one of them was for a Capital Development Director, discussed some at this post linked to just below:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-has-few-job-openings.html

Well, it would appear the job has been filled, according to this.

It's simply a matter of what the Mars Hill Church capital campaign(s) will entail and how soon it will get announced, it seems.  Who it is, well, might have to be a guess.

The Real Estate Finance Manager job seems to be taken care of

A while back at Wenatchee The Hatchet we noted there were some job openings over at this post.

There's also a Real Estate Finance Manager job opening.
... As a church, our ability to generate capital is one of our greatest bottlenecks in planting churches. The Real Estate Finance Manager will lead the charge in planning and executing the financial tools needed to support the movement of the Holy Spirit in our church. This is an incredibly unique opportunity, and as such it will require an incredibly unique disciple to carry this out. ...

The role of the Real Estate Finance Manager is to manage and administrate the investment tools, drive investor relations, and continue to develop our ability to meet the increasing financial demands of church growth. This position reports directly to the Property & Development Director [WtH:  apparently that's currently Caleb Walters] and will work closely with both the Development Team and the Finance Department.


At the time of the posting the position was held by Caleb Walters and apparently it is ... still held by Caleb Walters.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/calebwalters

Director of Property & Development

Mars Hill Church

Nonprofit; 51-200 employees; Religious Institutions industry

February 2012 – Present (1 year 9 months) Seattle, WA

The Property & Development team handles all of the real estate, construction, maintenance, insurance & legal logistics for Mars Hill.

Mars Hill Church is one church with 14 locations, across 4 states, and serving over 12,000 people every week.

Or at least the Real Estate Finance Manager job became the Director of Property & Development job, perhaps.  In any event, the usual kinda cheeky notice that a url is dead for the above link appears:

...

Jesus' Tomb is Empty

AND SO IS THIS URL

One of those statements is great news. The other is not as exciting. This empty URL is called a 404, and it simply means that the URL in your browser's address bar doesn't point to anything on our website. This can happen for a number of reasons. Something may have been moved, or a link may have been copied or typed erroneously.
All hope is not lost, you can try using the search box above to find what you're looking for.
If you want to understand why Jesus' empty tomb is great news, check out Resurrection: God Saves.