The most blunt headline account of what happened that I saw was at The Wartburg Watch.
James MacDonald Has Been Deposed and It Took a Recording Played by Mancow to Send the Elders Over the Edge
http://thewartburgwatch.com/2019/02/13/james-macdonald-has-been-deposed-and-it-took-a-recording-played-by-mancow-to-send-the-elders-over-the-edge/https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2019/02/14/what-now-for-harvest-bible-chapel-and-james-macdonald/
Something I've been thinking about is that a radio broadcast by a radio personality seems to have been the catalyst for the elders of Harvest Bible Chapel removing MacDonald. As these things go it would seem we're talking about one mass media figure publishing material that catalyzed the removal of another media figure. It might be too soon or too dubious to suggest that members of a spiritual community can bring issues to light about problems in a leader or leadership culture without facing retribution across the board. It's hard to suggest such a thing not just because things are still playing out but also because, and I think this part is crucial, we're talking about elders removing someone at MacDonald's level with someone with a radio program made a point of publishing material. In mass media and broadcast media terms this is still an intra-media caste situation.
Justin Dean once tweeted about:
https://twitter.com/
Had that dream again where the bloggers won and our church closed down.
12:35 AM - 28 Jul 2015
The tweet is gone by now, but it once existed. The bloggers didn't "win" because Mars Hill Church shut down. Maybe thousands of people were leaving Mars Hill because of what was published and discussed at blogs, but it would be a stretch to say that "the bloggers" could be said to have "won" and that by Mars Hill Church closing down. I admit for some time I prayed that either the culture of Mars Hill would truly reform or that, if its leaders wouldn't reform, it would die a miserable death. If Justin Dean would be willing to grant that believers who prayed such prayers had their prayers answered then, okay, that might be one thing we could agree about, that God answered the prayers of those Christians who prayed that if Mars Hill leaders wouldn't repent and reform their culture that God would providentially destroy that empire. I'm not holding my breath about that if you hadn't guessed that by now.
But these kinds of moments with Harvest Bible Chapel do invite a question as to what level of public status a person has to have before the things they disclose become game-changers for governance boards inside of churches of any size.
Does Harvest Bible Chapel have a crisis plan along the lines prescribed by Justin Dean in PR Matters? We won't find out directly, in all likelihood.
Are all the HBC suits actually dropped? Not just the suit involving bloggers, what about the other one with a lending institution? At this point having active suits may be the prerogative of an entity to keep pursuing but amidst a leadership change other questions haven't gone away. There are other issues pertinent to HBC that don't just go away even if MacDonald does.
Whether or not HBC makes it remains to be seen. Mars Hill dissolved but even in his promotional discussions of his book, Dean seems to have indicated a good number of the churches that were once Mars Hill campuses are doing fine. Not Portland, obviously, which got absorbed into Door of Hope without so much as a single indication I've been able to see that Tim Smith is in any capacity on staff. That's mysterious ... but in the history of Mars Hill guys suddenly vanishing from online sites without any explanation is basically normal.
Where ever MacDonald lands next he probably won't land at a place that has congregational polity.
This is still the guy who at one point published that Congregational Government is From Satan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110612112311/http://jamesmacdonald.com:80/blog/?p=7552
and claimed that critics of his criticism were satanic
https://web.archive.org/web/20110616020203/http://jamesmacdonald.com:80/blog/?p=7592
Although I personally attend a Presbyterian church I would never say congregational polity is from the devil. There can be very healthy and unhealthy ways for just about any sort of ecclesiology paradigm to function, whether congregational, presbyterian, episcopal or so on.
It's been reported the suit against the bloggers said to be associated with The Elephant's Debt and aso against Julie Roys has been dropped and the report has been it was dropped because a court stated that discovery was going to be what discovery normally is, as best I understand it, where lawyers can ask for a variety of documents as part of litigation. While HBC was at liberty to drop its suit rather than deal with the realities of discovery this raises a question as to how and why anyone at HBC wouldn't have thought about those issues before filing a suit to begin with. If it seems esoteric and pedantic, it is, but it's relevant because in the history of this blog I got a certified letter from a leader who was at Mars Hill asking to meet with him to talk about my blogging, despite the fact that publicly Mark and Mars Hill were pretty dismissive of bloggers having any relevance at all. Back in 2012 or so I had some folks who had left MH or were leaving ask what could it hurt to meet with leaders at Mars Hill if they wanted to talk? I had an admittedly cryptic response, from the end of Judges 8 through Judges 9.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/06/interesting-story-about-self-appointed.html
But even in the case of Mars Hill, the bloggers didn't "win". It wasn't until the mainstream and independent press picked up that something was going on and began to investigate more fully that crises developed from which mars Hill did not manage to recover. Blogs played a role in keeping material available for public consideration but Mars Hill did not die because of a hostile secular liberal press corps having it out for Pastor Mark. If that was all that was necessary Mars Hill would have crumbled in 1998 under the coerage of Mother Jones. Clearly that didn't happen.
It has seemed that by opting for litgation HBC took a path that suggests from here in Puget Sound, that some people thought it was better to double down on a defense-by-offense approach. That ... seems to have boomeranged on HBC. The Mancow broadcast, which I haven't taken the tie to hear yet and might postpone until later, is still, when all is said and done a radio broadcast. This is media figure vs media figure in the most important ways. It may make the difference between a Mancow broadcast that leads an elder board to remove a pastor on the one hand and a storm of prolonged press coverage and social media controversies that culminate in a board putting a pastor on some kind of leave during which he designs to resign rather than start complying with the restoration plan he said he agreed to submit to. At the risk of putting this in terms that even I feel are a bit too stark and jaded, the difference between a Mars Hill resignation and an HBC removal seems to have had something to do with the prestige level of the media format in which audio with incriminating statements tied to a by-now-former pastor at a church has been disclosed.
Mark Driscoll's fortunes as a public figure and preacher took a substantial hit when he was confronted on air by Janet Mefferd who, in her own way, could be thought of as a sort of Reformed radio personality. The parallels are perhaps cosmetic but it would seem "possible" to say in both cases it took radio figures bringing material to light for things to change in the case of what used to be Mars Hill and for the current Harvest Bible Chapel.
That should not give anyone who could otherwise think of themselves as rank and file tithing members of a church, or even on staff members of a church leadership culture, the impression that it will go in a remotely similar way of they attempt to use social media or mass media to confront what they regard as problems in the life of a local church. I realize that maybe Justin Dean felt, at one point, and possibly no longer at that, that "the bloggers won" but anyone who carefully combs through the history of Mars Hill's long history of public relations crises and disasters would be hard pressed to say that "bloggers" were the reason the former Mars Hill shuttered its doors.
We'll get to find out how Harvest Bible Chapel weathers the current circumstances and wehther it makes it without its founding personality. The former Mars Hill campuses are, for the most part, still active and stable as best as I have been able to keep some track of them. The future of Harvest Bible Chapel is going to be a topic best left to other people much closer to the situation and people. But it does seem worth noting that, as Wartburg Watch led in their headline, it took a radio broadcast to change things at HBC with respect to MacDonald.
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