William Wallace II
posted 01-06-2001 09:01 PM
I love to fight. It's good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified. Fighting is a lost art form. Fighting is cheaper than medication and more effective than counseling. Fighting always wins over compromise. Fighting is what passionate people do instead of killing. So log on, fight away. And if you are reading this and talking to yourself log on you coward and get in the ring.
Radical Reformission
ISBN 0-310-25659-3Mark DriscollZondervan
copyright 2004 by Mars Hill Church
page 14
... So I married Grace, began studying Scripture with the enthusiasm of a glutton at a buffet, and started preparing myself to become a pastor who does not go to jail for doing something stupid. To pay the bills, I edited the opinions section of the campus newspaper, writing inflammatory columns that led to debates, radio interviews, and even a few bomb threats--which was wonderful, because the only thing worse than dying is living a boring life.
There may never come a day when the co-founding elder of what was once Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll, may fully be able to appreciate the legacy he has made for himself. He can talk about the number of people that were baptized at Mars Hill Church and never have to stop to wonder how many of those people who were baptized then are even still Christians now. He can also talk about how many people got married, even though he preached himself that the first day of your marriage isn't what defines your marriage, the last day does. He can talk about the lives that were changed in abstract ways, about lives changed by Jesus ... but as I've written extensively over the years which Jesus are we talking about? The Jesus presented in the Bible or a Jesus reverse-engineered in Driscoll's preaching to correspond to Mark Driscoll's own ideas about manliness? A person with a life changed by that kind of Jesus may end up twice the son of hell he might have been before.
After Pussified Nation was made available for public consideration Driscoll made a point of saying he felt differently in 2014 than he did when he wrote as William Wallace II. In a 2006 he admitted he sinned and cussed a lot but that God drew a straight line with a crooked stick. But at no point has Mark Driscoll said that he thinks differently on social and gender issues now than he did in his 2000 provocation.
He can say that he no longer feels the way he did when he was writing as William Wallace II. He may one day even think differently than he did when he wrote as William Wallace II. Had a whole lot more of us seen William Wallace II to be who Mark Driscoll really was without a mask of public piety, there might have been no Mars Hill left after 2001, but too many of us who were there thought the show was for confrontation. People needed to have a sense of humor and recognize a character on a message board for what it was. Others of us (me) mistakenly believed that while the rants reflected who the guy really was at the time, he could get better and had submitted himself to older and wiser men who would be able to reel him in and spur him to dial things back. Obviously that hope proved to be profoundly mistaken and I hope to never stop regretting the small part I played in entertaining that overly permissive and optimistic hope.
The Mark Driscoll at The Trinity Church is the Mark Driscoll who wrote the passages quoted above about how he loved fighting and that he wrote editorials that even allegedly inspired a few bomb threats.
Why mention this?
Because the legacy of Mark Driscoll and how he led Mars Hill Church and the kind of leadership example he provided to his leadership culture can never be merely checklists of baptisms and wedding ceremonies and "lives changed". There are also the other things like those who saw how Mark Driscoll and others chose to live and, in response, chose to reject the Christian faith; or those marriages that were founded on a vision of married life inculcated by a Driscollian example that Real Marriage revealed may have been more of an act for the public than a lived reality; because the kind of man who could have proxies lament that other people cribbed his work may have taken a few shortcuts on footnotes himself. Because, in a phrase, in his post Mars Hill interviews Mark Driscoll has seemed a bit more eager to take credit for positives than to mention any particular negatives. Because it's possible for legacies to live on, but especially because it's possible for legacies to live on in ways that impact people I've met.
So, in case anyone actually forgot this, Cross and Crown was once Mars Hill Ballard. It wasn't going to escape my attention that some man was arrested recently for issuing threats to Cross and Crown Church. This was reported recently be Deborah Horne.
http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/man-arrested-ar-15-rifle-seized-after-threat-to-kill-all-at-seattle-church/648876204
and also at
http://q13fox.com/2017/11/16/man-arrested-ar-15-rifle-seized-after-he-allegedly-threatened-to-kill-you-all-at-seattle-church/
...
Goga's alleged messages were sent to pastors at the Cross and Crown Church. The pastors told police that Goga had not been in contact with any members of the church for about a 18 months, when, they said, he had previously threatened to burn the church down -- an incident that was not reported to police. The pastors told police Goga had become upset with them because they had recommended he seek medical help for past comments he had made.
http://komonews.com/news/local/man-arrested-after-threats-to-kill-you-all-to-university-district-church-ar-15-seized
...
Goga reportedly had previously attended the Cross and Crown Church and threatened to burn it down a year and a half ago, according to police. That threat reportedly came after church members told Goga to seek medical treatment.
According to police, he began sending emails to the church in October saying "people are going to get themselves killed now" and "time to engage the artillery and kill you all."
http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/11/16/25570901/spd-arrested-a-man-and-seized-an-ar-15-after-he-allegedly-threatened-a-church
Seattle police officers arrested a 25-year-old man in Snoqualmie on November 9 for allegedly sending a series of threatening emails to a University District church that he previously attended, according to the department's blotter. Police detectives seized an AR-15 rifle from the man's home in Covington after his arrest.
A police spokesperson identified the arrestee as Edeek Goga. King County prosecutors on Thursday charged Goga with felony harassment for the alleged threats. Jail records show that he was released on bail on November 14. Prosecutors had request bond of $100,000.
Goga allegedly began sending threatening emails to Cross and Crown Church in October, including a message saying "time to engage the artillery and kill you all.” Goga's messages followed a Facebook post 12 days earlier containing a photo of an AR-15 and the message "going on an adventure.” Church officials reportedly called the police, and officers made note of call.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/covington-man-charged-for-threatening-seattle-church/
On Tuesday, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office charged a 25-year-old Covington man with felony harassment for threatening violence against a Seattle church, according to charging documents. Seattle Police arrested Edeek Grigorovich Goga on Nov. 9 and placed him in King County Jail, but he was released on bail five days later, according to jail records.
On the evening of Oct. 26, Edeek Grigorovich Goga reportedly sent threatening emails to two pastors at the Cross and Crown Church in the University District, which he had previously attended. It was the first time Goga had contacted any of the church members since allegedly threatening to burn down the building a year and a half ago. The October emails to the pastors contained criticism of the church for recommending that Goga seek medical treatment: “Time to engage the artillery and kill you all,” they read, in part. Although the church hadn’t reported the previous arson threat, the pastors did alert SPD of the emails because they feared that Goga might act upon his threats.
...
Seattle Police Swat arrested Goga at his landscaping job in Snoqualmie on November 9, and detectives later confiscated an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle from his Covington home.
According to the charging documents, Goga told police that he was angry at the Cross and Crown Church for not helping him overcome his depression, but that they “should have known that he did not intend to carry through with his threat.”
Now for the review of the history of how Mars Hill Ballard became Cross and Crown. Cross and Crown has had a bit of a journey in terms of real estate, but it was formerly a church that opened up in the wake of the demise of Mars Hill, and was onceMars Hill Ballard.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/08/from-mars-hill-ballard-to-cross-and.html
Eventually Cross and Crown Church relocated after the sale of the former Ballard campus to Quest Church
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/02/throckmorton-reports-what-wth-has-heard.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/02/15/quest-church-to-occupy-old-mars-hill-ballard-building/
Cross and Crown Church relocated to what was once the Mars Hill University District campus, and purchased that real estate on March 10, 2016 according to the King County Assessor records.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/mars-hill-church-closes-sale-of-former.html
http://blue.kingcounty.com/Assessor/eRealProperty/Detail.aspx?ParcelNbr=6746700035
It's worth emphasizing that a big reason this matters is because back in the William Wallace II days Mark Driscoll's approach was to write incendiary, provocative stuff and then all of a sudden when people decided to escalate real-world aggression in response to Driscoll's on-line provocations his tune changed abruptly. We'll get to that tone-shift soon enough but first ...
One of the things Driscoll mentioned in his 2013 piece "The Hardest Part of Ministry" was the fear he had for the safety of his family, a thoroughly understandable and legitimate concern. Yet in all of that verbiage Driscoll avoided mentioning that he had a long history of deliberately incendiary public statements. The easiest example of how he decided to court controversy was with Pussified Nation but we have the quotation from his 2004 book establishing that he managed to, by his account, incite some bomb threats and that he loved that because the only thing worse than death would be a boring life right?
And then when potentially emotionally or mentally unstable (or simply very angry) people escalated responses to seeking physical confrontations Driscoll suddenly dropped the role-playing and talked about how crazy it was that people were taking things too seriously.
Coming from a man who would, ten years later, only be seen by the majority of Mars Hill Church members through the mediation of a screen and a week later than the date he would preach his sermons the irony of this 2001 polemic would be hard to overstate. The line between fantasy and reality can be pretty easily crossed when you go out of your way to not deal with people in person.
For a guy who claimed to be a pastor he should know there's a proverb about how like throwing around flaming arrows, firebrands and death is the one who deceives his neighbor and then says "I was joking."
Having recently finished reading Justin Dean's book PR Matters what jumps out about this recent headline is that the arrested person had an association with a church community that was once part of Mars Hill. As Justin Dean has gone out from his post-mars Hill work into publishing a book on how public relations is important for your church he's shared some stuff that suggests that we who have covered the history of Mars Hill have potentially seen just the tip of the iceberg of a large church culture with some stuff that hadn't been discussed while Mars Hill existed. We'll get to a specific example on the subject of men with guns who were church members precisely because Dean mentioned a case in his new book.
It's important to establish that prior to working on staff in communications at Mars Hill Justin Dean never worked in PR for a church previously and he has not been listed as on staff in a PR capacity since the end of Mars Hill at very many a place (i.e. any so far).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinjdean
Communications Director
Mars Hill Church
I oversaw all communications, content and editorial, social media, and public relations for one of the largest churches in America.
Founded in 1996 by Pastor Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill was one church with 15 locations in 5 states and ultimately closed its doors at the end of 2014. Visit marshill.com to learn more.
Founded in 1996 by Pastor Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill was one church with 15 locations in 5 states and ultimately closed its doors at the end of 2014. Visit marshill.com to learn more.
Prior to Mars Hill he worked at Ygnition Networks and since Mars Hill he has not listed being on staff at a single church.
That's a significant bit of history to know because when it turns out Dean's only ever been on staff in communications at a single church that was the former Mars Hill it's all but impossible to not notice something like the following.
PR Matters: A Survival Guide for Church Communicators
Justin Dean
copyright (c) 2017 by Justin J. Dean. Published by DOXA Media Group, LLC
ISBN 0692862676
ISBN-13: 978-0692862674
from Chapter Ten, Crisis Planning
page 177
We were in a bit of a crisis mode when we realized the shooter at a local Christian school was a member of our church. The media never linked the story to us, but we went into crisis mode just in case they did. It would have been devastating had the headlines turned to "Local Church Member Shoots Up School."
it's impossible to think of more than, really, just one shooting incident at any place that could be described as being a Christian school in the Seattle area. That would have been the 2014 shooting incident at Seattle Pacific University. You couldn't possibly just stroll into the Crawford Music Building these days to visit faculty and staff or practice some piano without getting security clearance to enter that building. You don't have to really guess how I know this, do you? I haven't exactly made being an SPU alumni all that secret even if I don't normally mention it here.
In order to fully appreciate this disclosure from Dean it may be helpful to know that his employer, Mars Hill Church, was already likely in crisis mode over the previous year for completely other reasons. The June 5, 2014 shooting incident at Seattle Pacific University happened just a few months after the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability issued a statement in the wake of WORLD magazine reporting that Mars Hill had contracted with Result Source to secure a #1 place on the NYT bestseller list for Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage.
https://world.wng.org/2014/03/mars_hill_board_stands_behind_driscoll
Driscoll was also embroiled in a controversy related to his books after a late 2013 on air conversation in which Janet Mefferd accused him of plagiarism. Just a month before that fateful November 2013 conversation Mars Hill had a public relations debacle in the form of the Good for Bellevue online campaign on behalf of Mars Hill getting the International Paper Building, which had turned out to have been purchased by Sound Transit at least a month earlier.
http://komonews.com/archive/mars-hill-church-god-wants-us-to-have-disputed-property
In the context of a cumulative dumpster fire of successive public relations nightmares, if it were also discovered that a man who shot and killed at a Christian school in the Puget Sound area turned out to be a church member a certain church might have died even earlier than it did.
http://www.king5.com/news/local/timeline-seattle-pacific-university-shooting/244056933
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/trial-begins-for-man-accused-of-deadly-shooting-rampage-at-seattle-pacific-university/
...
Ybarra has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Berliner described to jurors how Ybarra posed as a potential transfer student to scout the campus, twice visited a Lynnwood gun store to load up on birdshot and detailed in his journal his hatred for the world.
She said the state doesn’t contest that Ybarra “is mentally ill to some degree,” but noted he intentionally stopped therapy and medication to fuel his hate.
“Mentally ill is not legally insane,” she said. “We ask you to pay attention to the facts and the words the defendant used back then.”
It wasn’t until long after his arrest that Ybarra would claim he was suffering under a delusion that he was being commanded by God, she said. But in the shooting’s immediate aftermath, Ybarra told police detectives he was angry at what he perceived as disrespect from other people and felt “powerful” after committing the shootings, Berliner said.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/aaron-ybarra-sentenced-to-112-years-for-deadly-shooting-at-seattle-pacific-university/
Before Aaron Ybarra was sentenced to 112 years in prison, he named each of the victims — the freshman who was killed, the young woman who was critically wounded and the three students who managed to run away — of his June 2014 shooting at Seattle Pacific University.
“I’ve realized I’ve damaged more than just innocent people. I damaged the community and even the world. I’ve hurt a lot of people’s emotions. I wish I could take that away, but I can’t,” Ybarra, 29, said Friday. “I’m sorry to the world.”
The SPU shooting incident is literally the only shooting incident at a Christian school that comes to mind, and that was in 2014. If Justin Dean or others are aware of some other shooting at a Christian school that can get clarified later. And since it's been established by Dean's own history of his employment that he was on staff as communications leadership at Mars Hill Church and served in no staff capacity at a church be
.fore or since to date then "our church" seems like it could only have referred to an incident in which it was feared the press would discover that someone who shot people at a Christian school in the Puget Sound area was a member of ... Mars Hill Church.
Mark Driscoll can go on the road and talk about lives changed but if it turns out that part of the Mars Hill Church history is that a member of that church went to Seattle Pacific University, shot and killed someone, and ended up pleading not guilty by way of insanity then that's part of Mark "I see things" Driscoll's legacy, too. That, too, has to be considered part of the Mars Hill Church legacy if it turns out to be the case.
If it turns out to be the case then what good were those spiritual super-powers of discerning abuses after they allegedly happened (if they even happened) that Mark Driscoll shared in 2008, if it turned out Driscoll didn't even have sight clear enough to avoid a plagiarism controversy by putting the appropriate footnotes into his books in their first editions? If Driscoll had the discernment he has claimed to have how did he manage to get embroiled in a plagiarism controversy to begin with, let alone the Result Source controversy? Driscoll used to say headship means it's your responsibility as the man in charge even if it's not your fault. If he ever took that principle of headship seriously then would an incident like a school shooting perpetrated by a church member not count?
Most ironic of all, perhaps, is that had Justin Dean not mentioned working at a church where they feared the press would discover a guy who shot up a local Christian school was a church member, it's possible nobody would even be in a position to point out that the only church this could have been at was Mars Hill ,simply on the basis of the single church Justin Dean has established that he ever worked for.
It's good to hear that nobody at Cross and Crown Church was harmed. I'm not going to skip over the fact that I know people who are over there, even if I haven't seen them in a while. I'm grateful nobody got hurt.
POSTSCRIPT 11-21-2017
One of the things that is impossible to establish from Dean's anecdote is whether the person who shot up a Christian school was, in fact, verifiably a member of the church at the time of the incident. In the case of Mars Hill someone might attend for years and never technically be a member but be recognized within the Mars Hill community. Someone might be a member, allow membership to expire, and yet still attend for a time. Which is to say that Dean's use of "member" is vague even if we can establish from Dean's own accounting of his professional history that he was never working as communications staff for any church but Mars Hill Church.
Another point for consideration is that within the history of Mars Hill Church leadership have been known to say things in hyperbolic ways or to exaggerate slightly for rhetorical and contextual effect. Take, for instance, Mark Driscoll's 2006 sermon account of how Mars Hill Church acquired the West Seattle campus. Be patient, there's a reason for all this subsequent detail.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-mars-hill-acquired-west-seattle.html
http://marshill.com/media/1st-corinthians/spiritual-gifts-part-ii#transcript
Part 26: One Body, Many parts
1 Corinthians 12:12-26
Pastor Mark Driscoll
July 30, 2006
That is a $5 million gift. That is a $5 million gift, right? And I don’t know if you’ve been tracking the real estate market, people aren’t giving away a lotta real estate right now in Seattle and so we have – we’ve taken Pastor James and Pastor Bill on staff at Mars Hill. We have taken their members through the Gospel Class and they’re now members of Mars Hill. [emphasis added] They’ve been meeting as a core group over there. As we speak, there is $1.5 million of construction going on at the West Seattle campus, with the intention of opening in October in time for our ten year anniversary, and we want to expand over to West Seattle as well. We were thinking, “Well, we can borrow $8 million from the bank. We can spend $3 million and for $11 million, we can open up a 40,000 square foot location.” Well, we can now open more square feet for $1.5 million. So obviously, you take that opportunity.
The two cool aspects of this particular campus is one, is already zoned as a church, so we don’t need to fight use permits. We don’t have to bring it up to code. We can just walk in and use it immediately and it saves us, literally, a few years of permitting. Secondly, the lot that it is on is only zoned for 15,000 square feet of building and it already has 50,000 square feet, and because as grandfathered in, we could use it all. We could never build this building today as it exists. And the cool thing with this building, a very Godly church that loved the Bible – started this church, built it, their denomination went liberal, dropped the doctrine of the inerrancy or perfection of Scripture and this building went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was the test case for who owns the church building, the congregation or the denomination. The congregation lost and these people actually bought their own building back, because they refused to drop the authority of Scripture as their value. [emphasis added] And so, there were some Godly older saints who paid for this building twice. It then went into decline but there is still a core of these people, like in their 70s and 80s, that are now members of Mars Hill. Grandmas tithing, waiting for us all to show up and fill that thing up again, and they’re praying us in. It’s a really cool God story and what God has done is pretty amazing.
The first thing to address out the gate is the Supreme Court case. Was the property that was known as Doxa church involved in a case that went to the U. S. Supreme Court? Well, Driscoll doesn't provide any meaningful background as to when this case might have been heard even at a local level, let alone gone to the United States Supreme Court. He also doesn't mention whether the high court even agreed to hear the case.
...
Hillcrest Presbyterian Church vs the Presbytery of America.
Well, the thing about Hillcrest Presbyterian is that if you look it up now here's what you'll probably find first:
That's roughly a six minute drive from the property that is now Mars Hill West Seattle which is here:
7551 35th Avenue SW
Seattle, WA 98126
Okay, so if you look up Presbytery of America literally you won't find it. You will find this, however.
PCUSA, for the folks who aren't actually Presbyterian, would be considered by Driscoll in all likelihood to have been a denomination that sold out on the inerrancy of scripture..
Here's a reference to this case hitting the Supreme Court of Washington from October 9, 1973.
The case didn't actually get appealed to the United States Supreme Court until Apr 22, 1974 and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
If Justin Dean were put on the spot about whether or not Ybarra, who shot people at Seattle Pacific University in 2014, was ever a member or an attender of Mars Hill it's not clear that he could establish that that was the case. More to the point, in the literary context of Chapter Ten, where Dean was emphasizing how it is important for a church to have a crisis plan ready for potential crises in public relations, the whole point of the story is more of a "here's a for instance" that is used to bolster "why" from a case study.
The trouble is that if Dean was alluding to the Ybarra shooting incident then this suggests that things behind the scenes at Mars Hill were stranger and more chaotic than anyone had previously ventured to guess in public writing.
Since only Ybarra fits the profile of a man shooting a Christian school adjacent Mars Hill in the Puget Sound area in the last few years Dean's anecdote, apparently given for rhetorical effect, raises more questions than can probably be answered. It seems improbable that Dean intended the anecdote to inspire any public enquiry so it won't be a surprise if there are no answers.
If Ybarra were a member of Mars Hill there's no way to prove it but, on the other hand, had Justin Dean not made a point of claiming that there was a crisis at a church he worked for in which people feared the press would link a school shooter to the church, and went so far as to claim the shooter was a member, none of this would be up for consideration.
On the whole, Mars Hill's public reputation was at its peak in the early 2012 period up through a stadium Easter service. Even then there were controversies but the cumulative reputational controversies Mars Hill had to deal with were not really to do with hostile coverage from secular or liberal media; the most significant scandals involved issues of intellectual property and its integrity and enforcement; the nature of fundraising activity and financial allocations; and the nature of who had governmental power and how much as distinct from disclosures about said power and its use and all these from within explicitly Christian media, media that was very often neither particularly liberal nor remotely secular.
There's even an anecdote in Justin Dean's book where he seems to concede that how he handled a public PR campaign to get an already annexed building may have damaged the reputation of the church beyond repair.
Justin Dean
PR Matters, page 118
A reporter caught me off-guard and it threw a whole building campaign off the tracks. We might have been able to recover by doing another interview and explaining what happened. I certainly wanted to stay in the fight. Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to even clarify my position because the prevailing decision was to move on. We were already under a lot of pressure at the time, and frankly it marked the beginning of us giving up on the future of the church. ....
If this was a reference to the disastrous attempt on the part of Mars Hill Church to get the International Paper Building in Bellevue there was no chance of another attempt. Sound Transit (not without its critics around here) had already obtained the International Paper Building about a month before Mars Hill set up the "Good for Bellevue" website/campaign. The attempt to get that real estate was a lost cause before the website went up, from what's been reported on that incident in Puget Sound papers.
What is more, given the history of Mars Hill acquiring a large property without even having the zoning issues worked out (the former corporate headquarters purchased in 2005, for instance), Justin Dean came to a Mars Hill that had already had a history of boondoggle real estate investments, whose leadership was not necessarily very good at scoping out good properties or being fully informed about zoning and usage issues before dumping money into a project.
If a reporter caught Justin Dean off guard and that tanked an entire building project what does that say about his experience and skill in handling public relations?
It's remarkable, really, that Mars Hill went from peak influence in early 2012 to being a pile of organization cinders and rubble by the end of 2014. I've never shied from saying that one of the most significant catalysts for the death spiral of Mars Hill Church's public reputation was simply how Justin Dean opted to handle one reputational crisis after another. It's probably he handled things the way the people he worked for told him to handle things, perhaps, but the net result was the collapse of Mars Hill Church. If Justin Dean wants to sell a book about how good public relations can help your church his track record so far is that he worked at one church and during his time there it went from being one of the fastest growing churches in America to one of the most remarkable church implosions in recent memory. In a way, Dean's book was informative, but not about public relations methods. There's almost nothing in the book Dean published that you couldn't also hear from Mark Driscoll's own teaching about media exploitation. On the other hand, there are anecdotes about crises behind the scenes that suggest that contrary to Dean's possible optimism, Mars Hill may have been even more doomed to fail than anyone previously thought.
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