https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/10/mars-hill-rainier-valley-and-willie.html
You'll get a 404 error for this content if you try to follow the link but it was preserved in an earlier post here at Wenatchee The Hatchet. a donniehalbgewachs weebly entry indicated on January 27, 2013 that Willie Wilson was the new lead pastor for Mars Hill Rainier Valley.
http://donniehalbgewachs.weebly.com/1/post/2013/01/pastor-willie-mars-hill-church-seattle.html
January 27, 2013
Willie Wilson is the new lead pastor for Mars Hill Rainier Valley. Scripture is filled with "one another" statements such as: encourage one another, serve one another, love one another, and bear one another's burdens. That's what life in the church looks like. Pastor Willie has a passion and vision for building community in the name of Jesus. Find out more information on Mars Hill Rainier Valley.
In case you missed it, watch last month's Mars Hill Monthly and read about what Jesus did at our student camp.
What do you think about urban church planting?
that absence was first noted at Wenatchee The Hatchet in a comment
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/follow-up-on-follow-up-nathan-burke-is.html?showComment=1379933273461#c279481577807274760
Anonymous said...
In light of that comment, we took a look at the departure announcement.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-rainier-valley-willie.html
For those who didn't read it at the time, here's a WayBack capture of Wilson's departure, announced in a blog post published August 5, 2013:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130824135027/http://marshill.com/2013/08/05/running-the-race-with-duffel-bags
Running the race with duffel bags
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1–2
Imagine this: You’re about to run your first marathon. You’re at the starting line with hundreds of other people who will be running with you. You’re wearing a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, boots, and a parka. You’re also carrying a duffel bag, a briefcase, a suitcase, and a bag of groceries. You look ridiculous, but you don’t want to run this race without all the things that you find comfort in.
The gun bangs and you’re off! Hundreds of runners take off and you’re running alongside them. You’re off to a great, quick start. But 100 yards in, you’re already drained, tired, and ready to quit. The other runners are gone ahead of you. You’re now dragging your feet. You want to give up . . . because you’re carrying too much to continue.
The gun bangs and you’re off! Hundreds of runners take off and you’re running alongside them. You’re off to a great, quick start. But 100 yards in, you’re already drained, tired, and ready to quit. The other runners are gone ahead of you. You’re now dragging your feet. You want to give up . . . because you’re carrying too much to continue.
Suitcases stuffed with pride
A lot of times, we find ourselves in this very situation in our spiritual lives. We’ve started running the race of faith, but because of the load we’re carrying, we’re not running well. We’re shouldering unconfessed sin, secrets, and things we haven’t repented of but are holding on to. And it’s all weighing us down and holding us back. We’re carrying bags of guilt from past sin, backpacks filled with shame from sin that was committed against us, and suitcases stuffed with pride that keep from admitting that we’re tired and we need help. Jesus already carried our junk and nailed it to the cross, but for some reason, we choose to try and carry it anyway.
Are you tired of running your race? Are you tired of serving? Tired of loving people? Tired of giving of your time, talent, and treasure? It’s probably because you are carrying some things that you shouldn’t be carrying while running a race. In Hebrews 12:1, we’re instructed to “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” What are you carrying that you need to lay aside or cast off? When you’re not carrying a huge load, you’ll see that you have more stamina and endurance to run the race that has been set before you.
He’ll finish what he started
Verse 2 gives us our motivation for running the race in such a way to win the prize: “ . . . looking to Jesus . . . ”
This is a race of faith, and Jesus is both the founder and perfecter of it. This means that he is the starter and the finisher of it. He caused you to start this race by calling you to himself, saving you, and placing you in a loving family who will run alongside you, be there to help you up when you fall and when you hobble along all the way to the finish line. He will make sure you finish and he will make your faith perfect. Jesus is our example of how to run this race, because we see how he ran his race with endurance, enduring the cross. We were his prize, the “joy set before him.”
Run with all your might
Now as we run our race, he is our prize! He is the joy set before us!! At the finish line, we will see Jesus face to face. He will say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master” (Matt. 25:21, 23).
Brothers and sisters, run your race with endurance, keeping your eyes on the prize. You’re not running alone, but with tons of witnesses on the sidelines.
So run wholeheartedly, with all your might and all your strength, and when you finish the race, you will be able to speak the words of the Apostle Paul: “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.”
At the time there was no explanation as to why Wilson had departed, though the text of the announcement leaned hard on duffel bags and the metaphor of baggage that keeps you from running the race.
Mars Hill as a culture tended to reduce everything sinful, everything, to pride. I've written in the past about how I do think we can regard pride as a kind of stem cell for sin, that it can transform into any number of sins but that to treat those cells of sin as just being "pride" in some generic Mars Hill sense is damaging and dangerous. To belabor the metaphor, if stem cells become a liver that has liver poisoning you won't help if you just say the problem is with what happened to the stem cells, man. Treat the liver. Not everyone has sins that are realized by pride in the same way. Some people lie, some people still, some people commit adultery. Mileage varies.
By March 25, 2016 it looks like Wilson was willing to talk about how and why he was fired by Mars Hill. I'm not going to quote from the entire article, though it's short, but I will highlight a couple of things.
http://www.rapzilla.com/rz/features/13011-adultery-of-ex-mars-hill-pastor-sparks-50-track-lp-about-gospel
David Daniels
Created: 25 March 2016
...
Willie Will released 78 tracks over four albums from 2006-2009 — including Reflection through Beatmart Recordings, a subsidiary of Sony Records — but he said none of it was Christ-centered. His music started to change after a friend invited him to Mars Hill in 2009 to serve with its worship team. Mars Hill introduced him to reformed theology and pastors like Driscoll, John Piper and Paul Washer, who heavily influenced Willie Will and whose sermon snippets act as interludes on The GIFT. [WtH--no offense meant, but if folks want to go Reformed there are vastly better theologians to go with than Driscoll, Piper or Washer but I digress]
“I was not a theological dude at all,” Willie Will said. “I was listening to Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen — a lot of prosperity cats — so everything [Mars Hill] got me around, it’s really my first time hearing. But it’s blowing my mind as far as, I felt like I had been in church for so long, and I never heard of this stuff being preached. I had never heard so much about sin, the cross and the person and work of Jesus. You felt like, man, I’m kind of just now becoming a Christian.”
From this inspiration, Willie Will began to write the original version of The GIFT. He embraced what he learned so much that he also pursued pastoring, which Mars Hill paid for his schooling to do. However, he admitted that he failed to apply his book smarts to his life.“My theology was changing. My mind was being changed. But my heart had not yet been changed,” Willie Will said. “My heart was set on becoming a pastor, rather than being a follower of Jesus and being a Christian and knowing and living out what that means.”
...
In 2012, Willie Will became the lead pastor of Mars Hill’s Rainier Valley campus. The following year, his wife informed church elders that he had committed adultery. [emphases added]
“I know I hurt so many people,” said Willie Will, who shared that he and his wife's marriage is still recovering, “people who trusted me as their leader, as their pastor, as their shepherd. I know they feel betrayed ... I was so riddled with guilt and covered by sin to where I just wanted to run. I just wanted to hide because I was so embarrassed. I felt every negative emotion to the point to where I felt hopeless.”
...
“I may never pastor again,” Willie Will, who's now an Apple Store technician, said, “but I do have a passion for the Gospel to see people changed by it because I was changed by it, because of what God did in me. I’m one who can say, ‘Look, I know the depths of sin, and I know the intenseness and the magnitude of God’s love in the Gospel.’ That’s what I want others to experience with [The GIFT], to see the magnitude of God’s love.”
...
So, fairly self-explanatory as these things go. Frankly it's okay if men who were once pastors at Mars Hill do not pastor again. There are a handful of men who served in pastoral ministry at Mars Hill who are still pastors and have shown themselves to be men I regard as actually fit for ministry, but I have to confess that number is pretty small. I've mentioned one of those men at this blog enough times I probably don't need to explicitly name him.
But what I want to highlight about what is shared in this brief story is that we see a man who was, by his own account, steeped in more of a prosperity Gospel before being exposed to teaching at Mars Hill that was different. Now my friend Wendy Alsup and I have blogged about how inside the culture of Mars Hill there was a kind of secret prosperity Gospel but it was of a sort you couldn't have noticed from the formal preaching and teaching. But in a sense the nature of that prosperity teaching can be inferred from cases where men who come into what they regard as a real Christian faith do so after arriving at Mars Hill and then find themselves fast-tracked into leadership. For those unfamiliar with the history of Mars Hill 2009 was a pivotal year in educational terms, it was when Resurgence Training Center was announced and kicked off, back in the middle of 2009.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/mars-hill-church-to-open-school-39256/
http://theresurgence.com/2009/10/08/the-resurgence-training-center
Mars Hill Church has started a school to serve as the leadership development engine for our global vision. As of August, the inaugural year of The Resurgence Training Center (Re:Train) is well underway.
What is Re:Train?
The purpose of the school is to train missional leaders to lead churches to transform cultures for Jesus. Our goal as a church is to start 100 new campuses and 1,000 new churches (in partnership with Acts 29) by 2019. In order to achieve this vision, we need as many men—trained and equipped—to be pastors and leaders within the movement. Pastor Mark Driscoll began The Resurgence a few years ago as a website with lots of free theological resources for missional leaders and the broader church in general. Re:Train is a further extension of this idea, offering premier missional leadership training and education.
What sort of classes does Re:Train offer?
Currently, Re:Train students participate in a yearlong graduate program that culminates in a Master of Missional Leadership. Participants are divided into "cohorts" based on area of interest. Once a month, all 75 students spend a weekend under the teaching of a nationally recognized professor. These classes are taught by men including John Piper, Bruce Ware, Gregg Allison, Ed Stetzer, Sam Storms, and Mars Hill Church Pastors Mark Driscoll and Bill Clem [emphases added]. Lord willing, beginning in the Fall of 2010, Re:Train will also offer university-style courses to equip the Mars Hill Church body in theology, biblical studies, missions, counseling, worship, biblical living, and other areas.
Who can attend Re:Train?
Re:Train participants come from all around the US and Canada. International students are expected next year, and our current student body includes a lot of Mars Hill leaders and members; we hope that many more will step up from within our community. Are you a future campus pastor? A future church planter? A faithful member who will be sent out as part of a core group to help start a new work? If you're interested in attending Re:Train in order to better prepare, we'll soon begin accepting applications for next year's graduate program (info at retrain.org).
Despite the fanfare the Resurgence Training Center had at most a couple of academic years and then seemed to just disappear. Those people in the best position to explain how and why it failed may not be, and may never be, in a position to really explain what went on but when and if they are there's some chance they know who to get in touch with.
Mars Hill had a culture in which ambitious young men with lively Christian convictions felt called to be in leadership, and some not-so-young but still eager men who wanted to participate in what they regarded as a unique move of God.
One of the things that eventually came to light was that by the time Sutton Turner was looking at the books of Mars Hill financials in earlier 2012 he was concerned that the church was in a big mess.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
We'll probably never know where all the money raised by and for Mars Hill Church over it's roughly twenty year run went, altogether, but the feature about Willie Will suggests that one of the things that was purchased by Mars Hill Church could include the education of some of its pastors, although the Rapzilla article didn't seem to mention where Wills education was, but then I might have missed that detail.
The most striking quote from Willie Will/Willie Wilson from the Rapzilla article is his mention that he was so set on becoming a pastor he had not set his heart on being a follower of Christ and understanding what that meant. It seems tragic that he managed to receive a theological training while at Mars Hill paid for by Mars Hill and yet to go by what was publicly disclosed about the length of time he was formally a pastor at Mars Hill he was only a pastor for months before being removed.
The more and more stories that are shared about people who were in the leadership culture of Mars Hill the harder it is to ignore that some men were fast-tracked into some kind of pastoral role within the leadership culture of Mars Hill who were relatively new Christians, either altogether or new to what they would identify as a serious evangelical form of faith. Men who in a more traditional and tradition-minded Christian community would not be considered for pastoral service seemed able to get a green light within Mars Hill. Back in 2006 when James Noriega was added to the Mars Hill leadership roster as a pastor reports of his second marriage and four felonies were a matter of public record thanks to the reporting of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and yet these did not seem to be red flags to anyone in the culture of Mars Hill leadership in 2006 that perhaps Noriega, though a brother in Christ, should not have been installed in a pastoral capacity then, or perhaps ever. Informally it seems that Mars Hill culture prized entrepreneurial drive first and theological education second and character ... well ... consider Driscoll himself and what his own Board of Advisors and Accountability had to say about him.
But if Willie Will/Willie Wilson is working a standard day job and working on repairing his marriage rather than being a Mars Hill pastor or the Mars Hill kind of pastor, God bless him. Of the many men who have come and gone through the ranks of Mars Hill pastorship there have been a handful I don't doubt have the heart of a shepherd. I've been cumulatively proposing that Mars Hill Church as a corporate culture may be best described as a church culture in which elder qualification was viewed in terms of entrepreneurial drive and media savvy more than doctrinal fidelity or character. Men were given roles for which they were not yet ready or possibly for which they would never be ready.
One of the warnings Paul gave Timothy was that men appointed to being bishops should not be recent converts or they would be vulnerable to pride, becoming conceited and fall to condemnation incurred by the devil. I have had doubts that Mars Hill leadership considered the real gravity of such a warning, give a recent convert of a man the responsibility and role of an overseer too quickly and to too recent a believer the man may become as conceited as a demon. I've had enough people tell me I've got a cold-blooded arrogant streak that the last thing I'd ever want to be is a pastor. I've never wanted to be a pastor anyway.
So over the years Mark Driscoll has claimed he started too soon and too young, that he wished he could go back and do things differently. Nobody familiar with the bulk of what he wrote and said in the 1990s and early 00s would get the impression he thought he started too young and too soon. What's more, as stories about pastors who rose and fell within the mercurial Mars Hill system suggest, not only did Driscoll not seem to take seriously the implications of starting too soon for himself, there was a culture of leadership within Mars Hill that seemed able to reward those who leapt into the quest for a leadership role. If a man like Willie Wills can look at himself and conclude he may never be fit to be a minister of the Gospel again after his sins that man may have more spiritual insight and appreciation of who he is in Christ than a guy more like Mark Driscoll.
I wasn't planning to write about this or about Mars Hill this weekend but stuff sometimes comes up. The actual catalyst for writing about Mars Hill again was something else involving a recent arrest.