a history of Mars Hill Fellowship by way of articles of incorporation and annual reports 1995-2007

One of the things the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has reminded me of is how few people from the earliest stages of Mars Hill history have said anything on record.  A reason for this absence may partly be because people from Antioch Bible Church and Spanish River Church such as Ken Hutcherson and David Nicholas died years ago.  Conspicuous by their absence from the podcast are the three co-founding leaders of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll, Mike Gunn and Lief Moi.

But ... now that in the wake of the dissolution of the corporation formerly known as Mars Hill Church the original articles of incorporation and annual reports have been made available through the State of Washington and so, absent more comments (or any) from people from the earlier years as of the eve of October 2021 it may be as well to document a history of Mars Hill through filed documents.   Thus ...

The articles of incorporation

Does it seem as though no one has ever mentioned a Cedric Bryant once in any published history of Mars Hill Church?  Yet Bryant was listed as part of the founding board of directors.  Has Cedric Bryant spoken about his role in the launch of Mars Hill?  That was sufficiently before my time that 1) I didn't even know he had a role in the founding of Mars Hill and 2) whatever role it was it was not mentioned within a mere few years as I'd never heard of Cedric Bryant that I can recall during the years I was part of Mars Hill from roughly later 1999 through early 2008.

Now there's the first annual report in 1997 after the 1996 launch of Mars Hill and it shows there's no sign of Bryant.

Mark Driscoll, Mike Gunn, Eric Brown, Michael Corwin, Chris Knutzen, and Kirk Schlemlein, these names I recognize but for Corwin. Bryant has vanished. Perhaps his was a get-things-started role but it was still a bit of a surprise to me that someone could be a director on the articles of incorporation who didn't show up in the first annual report and was subsequently never, to the best of my knowledge, mentioned much in Mars Hill history.  As for the rest of these named people, who has managed to talked to Knutzen or Schlemlein or Brown or Corwin, let alone Driscoll, Gunn and Moi about the earliest years of Mars Hill for the record?  Driscoll has, of course, said and written a lot and we can get to different versions of his origin stories some time later.

There seem to be two annual reports filed in 1999. 

Then we get to the transitional period of 2000-2003

That report will be the last mention of Janet Sawyer in the history of Mars Hill via annual reports. As we've seen Brad Currah's name has disappeared.  By 2002 Munson and Smith will appear

Things stabilized for a time from 2004-2006

Then we get to 2007

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