While I have some appreciation for blogging that Julie Roys has been doing (and certainly appreciate the work Warren Throckmorton has done); and while I encourage those involved with Dear Driscoll to keep sharing what they believe they must share; I do have some concerns about those who are undertaking what is colloquially known as watchdog blogging, specifically about what gets posted and how that content is presented.
There are good reasons to doubt that the latest cycle of watchdog blogging is likely to be anywhere near as effective in chronicling things connected to Mark Driscoll and The Trinity Church as watchdog blogging may have been during the demise of Mars Hill. There are three simple reasons for this and those reasons can be articulated in the form of questions a blogger must be able to answer before hitting "publish".
1. What is your hook, your news peg, that establishes that what you're posting is news?
What's the news peg, or hook, that ensures that what is being discussed in a blog post actually constitutes news? What are the questions of Who, What, Where, When, Why and How? You can have answers to all of these questions yet still have the resultant post fall short of being news. For instance, Julie Roys has taked with people who have started a website but the news peg is the website going up, not necessarily the content published at the website. For Driscoll supporters the mere appearance of a website that discloses content critical of Mark Driscoll cannot count as "news". By contrast, when Real Faith aka Mark Driscoll Ministries tells supporters they have purchased studio space that will allow them to generate more content that is news. There is a clear demarcation of who did what where, why they did it, and how they expect that to impact their supporters.
2. Is what you are reporting presented as hard news or soft news?
The contrast between the materials presented at watchdog sites or online discernment ministries and what Real Faith and Team Driscoll have done can be explained as the contrast between soft news and hard news. Hard news is a timely, concrete report of something that is expected to impact a lot of people right away that the reporter believes should be highlighted in close temporal proximity to the reported event. At the risk of leaning on my own work in the past, Wenatchee The Hatchet published information about the resignation of Mars Hill campus pastor Bill Clem the day it was announced on The City. Thousands of people were impacted by that resignation and it was reported in so timely a manner that eventually I got word that Mars Hill leaders were concerned as to how it was Wenatchee The Hatchet was getting so many leaks of staff resignations from announcements posted on The City. Clem's resignation constituted hard news because the basic facts were reported and given Clem's longstanding connection to the Ballard campus, his resignation stood to not only have impact on the Ballard campus but was the kind of thing people within Mars Hill would want to know about across the entire campus network. For those who don't recall, one of the laments raised by staff in the late Mars Hill was that they were finding out about major staff resignations or possible terminations via watchdog blogs rather than within the information infrastructure of Mars Hill Church itself.
By contrast, soft news tends to take the form of a personality profile and personal narrative. At the risk of using a very specific example, anything Matthew Paul Turner wrote about Mars Hill was by definition soft news, personal narrative rather than more concrete reportage and this was not a matter of what documents he was given but of the style of presentation. Telling a story about Andrew as an example of church discipline was going to be an outlier for being reported in contrast to never-reported disciplinary cases, but Turner was given documents that established that the discipline was a reportable, documentable process. It was also not that difficult to reverse-engineer from the sea of social media materials that Andrew Lamb had been involved with Kaitlyn Noriega who was the step-daughter of James Noriega at the Ballard campus. Turner's attempts to keep the parties anonymous was an abject failure. Since no engagement announcement between Lamb and Noriega ever appeared it's also not a given that Turner had really done due diligence by all of his sources. What if Lamb never formally proposed to Noriega? If not then Turner simply presumed something without backing it up, something that has tended to happen in progressive attempts to cover Mars Hill style churches, unfortunately.
If you want a higher impact post you need to make sure you're reporting actual news and leaning toward a hard news format rather than a soft news format. What this means is that merely reporting that Mark Driscoll acts like Mark Driscoll isn't enough. There's no news peg for Mark acting like Mark. Absent any presentation in traditional or mainstream media you have to keep in mind that unless you can document things there is no news peg and that sharing personal narratives are always going to be read as soft news in terms of journalistic conventions. Everything Matthew Paul Turner wrote about Andrew or "Amy" was necessarily soft news. When Driscoll has news he presents it in hard news style. That's something his critics should be willing and able to learn from him. He did get a degree in communications, after all, so even if he's not demonstrably competent to talk about prophetic literature and may even possibly live in fear of ever having to preach 1 Kings 13 (and anyone who isn't scared to preach that text shouldn't be preaching) he has, at least, shown that he knows how to communicate hard news in a hard news format.
The problem is that Mark Driscoll (probably with some help from Grace Driscoll, who studied public relations) and maybe from some people at A Larry Ross, has mastered the soft news personal narrative format. If you want to imagine that Mark Driscoll got taken down by bloggers don't waste your time fantasizing about how lone bloggers took Driscoll down by just blogging. Go back and trawl through the blogs and media outlets that did cover the late Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll and you will discover that Driscoll's reputation was waylaid by hard news rather than soft news, which gets me to the third issue.
3. Have you written a real inverted pyramid story that frontloads everything the reader should know into paragraph 1, or are you relying on a narrative to build emotional momentum?
One of the crucial differences between what often shows up in watchdog blog posts and actual journalistic coverage is that the watchdog blogs favor personal narrative over the inverted pyramid format for a story. There are some harsh but necessary ways to put this, too many bloggers try to replicate the gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson without realizing that amidst all the self-referential writing and personal opinion Thompson was still writing news.
There's a harsh but probably necessary way to reformulate this third question. If your headline ends in a question mark and the article provides the answer then you're most likely engaging in yellow journalism. That's what it used to be called in earlier eras and maybe now it will get called activist journalism but if your headline is a rhetorical question "Is Mark Driscoll evil?" you've been working in yellow journalism. In yellow journalism openly partisan writing against injustice that doubles as agitation propaganda has a long history in the United States and not necessarily a glorious one. Among bloggers such an approach kills your credibility before you've gained it because when megachurch pastors and higher-tier leaders engage the press they tend to engage the institutional press and not would-be citizen journalists.
That's not always the case. I can testify that Sutton Turner and Justin Dean have commented at Wenatchee The Hatchet and I let them. I also even made a point to not tell them they were liars or whatever has often been said about them. It's not my job to tell people that and I hope it never is. It wouldn't be my job to say stuff like that even if I were a member of the institutional press. The obligations of journalism are to report what the facts are and, even if I grant my biases and share them up front, to report what the facts are even if they aren't what I might like.
But I can also tell you that nobody from within Mars Hill leadership responded when I blogged about Driscoll's mishandling of biblical texts or sloppiness about theological concepts. They really began to get responsive when I received and published leaks about staff resignations; provided analyses of trajectories in donor activity in relationship to the fiscal health of campuses; and began to document bizarre statements Driscoll made from the pulpit that were later purged from the Mars Hill media library and protected by robots.txt lines of code from being dug up by The Wayback Machine. In other words, soft news was not the kind of blogging or journalistic coverage that made any trouble for Driscoll and Mars Hill, hard news was what compelled boards and public relations people to feel like they had to issue public statements. Passive aggressive riffs from the pulpit aren't the same thing.
Not incidentally, you should issue corrections and retractions as swiftly and thoroughly as possible. Do your research and never rely on sweeping generalizations that can be disproven because that guts your credibility. If you repeat the idiotic canard that Mark Driscoll said anything about Gayle Haggard you're not worth listening to, full stop. You're not speaking truth to power, you're repeating a comprehensively debunked bit of nonsense promulgated by Dan Savage at The Stranger that progressives have decided must have been said by Mark Driscoll because of their prejudices. I can assure you that Mark Driscoll has made himself look and sound terrible enough by being quoted accurately and in context without inventing things for him that he never said.
It's not that people can't or shouldn't share their stories, it's that steering people emotionally by telling stories is something that Mark (and arguably also Grace) Driscoll have mastered over the last few decades. Don't expect to "win" by trying to beat them at their level of discourse. Besides all of that, too much of what I've seen in watchdog blogging buries the lede so far down the body of the post there's no news by dint of any actual news being buried paragraphs into the post. Post what the actual news in paragraph 1 and if you can't then maybe you have no actual news. It's a hard question to answer because it can often mean that something you initially thought was news isn't even remotely news at all but it is the first question you have to ask. There's value to the ol inverted pyramid style of writing, it forces you to figure out whether what you're writing about is even newsworthy. Too many watchdog bloggers and online discernment ministry bloggers don't write with that kind of question in mind.
I know that there are readers who will be concerned that how Mars Hill leaders treated women is never going to be considered news compared to intellectual property controversies or real estate acquisitions and associated leadership changes. I can make a brief case for how and why it's important to stick with the hard news approach by way of a former Mars Hill pastor.
When Mars Hill picked up the West Seattle campus and picked up James Noriega as part of that deal, a man who was on his second marriage, a new convert and someone who had four felonies to his name, that wasn't news at the time it happened but it became newsworthy when I brought those issues up because the hard news peg was how and why the elders who voted Noriega into Mars Hill eldership didn't spot that about Noriega and, even more important, why Mark Driscoll ever even said from the pulpit that the West Seattle campus was real estate he'd wanted to launch Mars Hill at for ten years. The news was that it sure looked as though Mark Driscoll allowed someone to be added on to the Mars Hill elder team who was under any normal understanding of biblical texts unfit for pastoral ministry but who did not just so happen to be sitting on a piece of real estate Driscoll admitted he'd coveted for Mars Hill for ten years.
This all meant nothing to Mars Hill outsiders but to insiders it was, I believe, significant news, because it revealed that Mark Driscoll seemed to value real estate acquisition more highly than a man's fitness for ministry. Noriega was also part of the co-founding of Redemption Groups and said for the record one of the goals was to formulate ministries that ensured Mars Hill Church would never need to rely on any outside resources to help church members. That neither James Noriega nor Mike Wilkerson could exactly produce evidence of their qualifications to design what became Redemption Groups has not gotten a ton of attention and perhaps the Christianity Today podcast series can get to that. Until such time as people who went through Redemption Groups or Grace Groups go on record with what they went through, raising questions about the background and qualifications of the leaders who co-founded Redemption Groups can be asked by dint of the simple fact that materials were published. It's advisable to let the soft news personality profiles and features have some foundation in a hard news report of what materials were being promoted and distributed by Mars Hill.
For instance, while sharing personal accounts of people who have been ostracized from The Trinity Church is of interest, Win Your War was published in 2019. Spirit-Filled Jesus is years old now. Did Pray Like Jesus even chart? It's something I have not seen anyone even ask. If Mark Driscoll is priming his oldest daughter to be part of a family franchise then it matters whether or not Pray Like Jesus has even charted.
That no Driscoll book ever written arguably even needed to be written in the first place is its own separate topic, but my point is that while sharing personal stories is important contextualizing them where possible in connection to hard news should be considered. If Mark and Grace Driscoll published a self-help book on spiritual warfare for couples with children and they talk about how their family has continually been under spiritual attack that's a claim that is, at one level, hard to dispute, but at another level anyone with a modicum of biblical literacy can point out that in the Hebrew Bible spirits of strife and calamity were only ever dispatched by Yahweh to punish wicked and self-serving rulers, so can Mark and Grace Driscoll seriously engage a question as to whether the spiritual attacks they have claimed to continue to be under are because of "intense season of ministry" or because they have not publicly faced up to their legacy as leaders or figureheads within what used to be Mars Hill Church?
Why, for instance, does the scant bibliography in Win Your War feature a book by John Eckhardt that has chapters on self-deliverance? Why don't Mark and Grace Driscoll mention John Livingstone Nevius' treatise on demon possession that dates from 1895 and has been considered the touchstone work on demon possession and allied themes in the Anglo-American evangelical scenes since it was published? Have the Driscolls even read Nevius' treatise? It's actually not a very difficult read even if the Chinese names are wildly antiquated in terms of spellings. The Driscolls pass off their tale as not knowing what to do with spiritual attacks their family experienced because Mark was getting his master's degree at a conservative Baptist seminary. Well, if he's going to mention that can he prove he ever studied biblical languages? Can we see his transcript? Does he know the first thing about biblical Hebrew?
Does Mark Driscoll really think that no evangelical or fundamentalists have broached the topic of spiritual warfare as though Merrill Unger's landmark dissertation on that topic was done in the 1940s? Is he going to pretend that Hendrik Berkhof's treatise on the powers and principalities in the Pauline literature wasn't published in the mid-20th century and became an influence on Karl Barth despite Barth ripping on the proposal at first? Does Driscoll have anything to say about G. B. Caird's take on powers and principalities in Pauline literature from the 1950s? Apparently not, rather, Driscoll has just acted and written as though "nobody talks about this" when, in fact, Merrill Unger complained about a glut of popular level spiritual warfare manuals in the 1970s that he regarded as having sub-par scholarship. I am fairly confident at this point Driscoll didn't bother to read Robert Ewusie Moses' Practices of Power, which is one of the better books I've read on Pauline literature about spiritual warfare in my life. Driscoll name-checks Michael Heiser but not Graham Twelftree, without whose work Heiser's work would be a bit poorer and whose Jesus the Exorcist is considered a landmark in the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. Why mention all this?
Because in the hands of Mark and Grace Driscoll spiritual warfare comes across as a wagon-circling conspiracy theory that sells you on the idea that Satan and demons are out to ruin your family and how if you get their book they can tell you how to fight in the realm you don't see to experience victory in the realm you do. Christian witness does not necessarily lead to material prosperity. There's a tension in spiritual warfare self-help manuals across the last century that can't quite resolve whether the demonization or demonic attacks on Christian leaders is a result of their sin or a reaction to "intense seasons of ministry". The odds that Mark Driscoll has read Mark Crooks' essay on "the occult personality" is probably close to zero but the legacy of someone like the woman who used the pen name Rebecca Brown M. D. may be a warning to people selling pop level spiritual warfare books, that those authors sometimes turn out to be liars, frauds and maybe even actual lunatics. There is possibly no topic for which a Driscoll book would be more needless and superfluous than spiritual warfare for anyone who has studied the primary and secondary literature on that topic ... unless we're adding the topic of prayer.
But none of these things are the kinds of things that will come up if your approach to blogging about Mark Driscoll is confined to personal stories. Those are important and I'm not trying to diminish those, but I am sharing, after at least ten years of blogging about the life and times of the late Mars Hill and about Mark Driscoll as a self-selected public figure, that personal narratives are often a very small part of coverage and that they are, no matter how riveting, never a substitute for actual news. As yet the accounts of personal stories from people who have been part of The Trinity Church has gotten up to the edge of being hard news but is not quite there yet. Perhaps as more people share what has happened to them at both Mars Hill and The Trinity Church that can change.
Without some hard news elements to newer coverage, however, new blogs and new attempts to highlight what is going on behind the scenes at The Trinity Church may have the paradoxical effect of inspiring today's Driscoll loyalists to double down in their loyalty rather than reconsider their devotion.
POSTSCRIPT 8-9-2021
For those curious as to why I haven't included the Christianity Today podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill as having no news peg I hope the answer for that is obvious, a history doesn't need a news peg. Thus, whatever its strengths or weaknesses the CT podcast series is an entirely different genre from blogs both by way of being published at a company in the institutional press and by being a history rather than either hard or soft news. I will try to get around to writing thoughts on episode six later.
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