If there's something Wenatchee The Hatchet has discovered first-hand chronicling the life and times of the former Mars Hill Church it is how astonishingly variable, mercurial and pervasive link-rot is. When people presume to say, "People have no excuse not knowing what Mark Driscoll is like because they can look things up on the internet" the answer to that is, "Really? Can you? " Show me. From 2013 even through to the final months of Mars Hill Church massive information purges and robots.txt ensured that piles of stuff I documented could abruptly vanish from the internet the week after I quoted something Mark Driscoll said and then robots.txt ensured that not even The Wayback Machine could be used to go look up versions of it. If you read the rest of this post you'll even get to see there's a tag dedicated to robots.txt situations. But let's proceed to the article Alan Jacobs links to, okay?
Thursday, July 08, 2021
Julie Roys has part 2 of her discussion "Inside the Driscoll Cult", so far I haven't read much of anything that doesn't fit MHC circa 2007 to 2014.
I don't have especially detailed comments at the moment as I've just given the transcript a preliminary first read. But I can say this ...
Part 3 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast has gone up, this part includes a story of a woman who was declared a heretic for suggesting Driscoll surround himself with older, more mature men who would stand toe to toe with him
The story of Karen Schaeffer, former assistant to Mark Driscoll, is the stand-out story from the recent podcast. Her account of suggesting at a dinner that Driscoll surround himself with older, wiser men who could go toe to toe with him and that he'd be surrounded with fewer yes-men is also an account of how, not long after she said these things, she was summoned to meet with Mark Driscoll ad Jamie Munson and then dismissed from her job, and told she was a heretic.
Tuesday, July 06, 2021
Julie Roys has part 1 of a conversation with Chad Freese and Benjamin Eneas regarding The Trinity Church
This is part 1. Part 2 apparently drops in a few days.
https://julieroys.com/podcast/inside-the-driscoll-cult/
https://julieroys.com/podcast/inside-the-driscoll-cult/
Part 2 is apparently going to drop in a few days. For now a link suffices.
Monday, July 05, 2021
some thoughts on recent podcasts discussing the history of Mars Hill
The title of the first episode “Who Killed Mars Hill Church?” is evocative but at a formal level a bit unmysterious. It can be easy to describe the demise of Mars Hill as seemingly happening overnight but even in post Mars Hill Church interviews Mark Driscoll eventually alluded to years-long battles behind the scenes related to governance. It was as though a set of topics he had previously declined to acknowledge as relevant suddenly became relevant after his resignation catalyzed the collapse of the church he co-founded.
But Mars Hill’s demise was incrementally picking up steam since the peak of Driscoll’s celebrity with the No. 1 spot on the New York Time bestseller list Real Marriage. In that book Driscolls wrote of how their marriage was fraught behind the scenes.
http://download.marshill.se/files/2004/02/08/20040208_1-timothy-3-1-7_sd_audio.mp3
Part 6:1 Timothy 3:1-7
Preached February 08, 2004
... I love my wife. I've been totally
faithful to her. I'm a one-woman man. I met her at 17. I married her at 21.
I've been chasing her ever since. I'm quicker than she is, so I'm happily
married. You know, things are good. I just am. I love my wife. I adore my
wife. I enjoy my wife, you know? ...
Well, whatever Driscoll was implying there in the
sermon excerpt above may need to be reconsidered in light of the new book. Real
Marriage suggests that maybe this marriage was not always so happy.
Real Marriage: the truth about sex,
friendship and life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0
page 26
We didn't know
how to talk through these extremely hard issues without hurting each other even
more, so we didn't talk about them at all. I just got more bitter, and Grace
just felt more condemned and broken, like a failure. Occasionally we'd meet a
Christian pastor or counselor who was supposed to be an expert in these areas,
but we never spoke with them in much detail, because in time we found out they
either had marriages as bad as ours our they had been committing adultery and
were disqualified for ministry. We felt very alone and stuck.
Yet even the claim “We felt very alone and stuck” had to be weighed against all the men whose names Mark Driscoll had cited over the years. If Mark and Grace Driscoll really had no one they trusted to talk to about their marriage problems where was David Nicholas? Where was Mike Gunn? Where was Lief Moi? Where, for that matter, was Gib Martin, Grace’s father? The idea that Mark and Grace Driscoll were somehow completely alone and had “nobody” they felt they could talk to didn’t seem to be due to there actually being no one they could talk to. What about Greg Kappas? The problem that Real Marriage presented to those of us who had been at Mars Hill since the late 1990s was that one of a few possibilities seemed probable: either the Mark Driscoll of 2004 was lying when he talked about how happily married he was; the Mark Driscoll of Real Marriage was retroactively misrepresenting how unhappy they were (something I admit I wondered about when I realized that the vomit-inducing nightmare of Real Marriage seemed to overlap remarkably with a nightmare recounted in Confessions of a Reformission Rev) Mark Driscoll claimed in an interview with Christianity Today, no less, that both he and Grace were virgins when they met and began sleeping together, in open contradiction to the claim they made in Real Marriage that neither of them were virgins when they began dating.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/januaryweb-only/mark-driscoll-sex-marriage.html
Interview by Katelyn Beaty and Marlena Graves/ January 5, 2012
...
Is there tension in teaching sexual purity before marriage while
encouraging frequent and wonderful sex within marriage?
M: No, and for us, we sinned, quite frankly. We were
virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend.
Then Grace came back to Christ, and I came to Christ in college, so we had to
stop sinning sexually. I'd say if we both could go back and rewrite history and
change one thing, that would probably be the thing we would change. [emphasis
added] But we did repent and met with our pastor. And then we did get
married, between our junior and senior years of college
Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)
Page 7
Neither Grace nor I was a virgin when we met, and before long we
were dating and sleeping together, which continued even after she went off to
college while I was finishing high school. [emphasis added]
page 9-10
To be honest, fornicating was fun. I liked fornicating. To stop fornicating
was not fun. But eventually Grace and I stopped fornicating, got engaged, and
were married between our junior and senior years of college.
I assumed that once we were married we would simply pick up where we left
off sexually and make up for last time. After all, we were committed Christians
with a relationship done God's way. But God's way was a total
bummer. My previously free and fun girlfriend was suddenly my frigid
and fearful wife. She did not undress in front of me, required the lights to be
off on the rare occasions we were intimate, checked out during sex, and
experienced a lot of physical discomfort because she was tense. [emphasis
added]
...
Before long I was bitter against God and Grace. It seemed to me as if they
had conspired to trap me. I had always been the "good guy" who turned
down women for sex. In my twisted logic, since I had only slept with a
couple of women I was in relationships with, I had been holy enough, and God
owed me. I felt God had conned me by telling me to marry Grace, and
allowed Grace to rule over me since she was controlling our sex life. [emphasis
added] I loved Grace, but in the bedroom I did not enjoy her and
wondered how many years I could white-knuckle fidelity. ... We desperately
needed help but didn't know where to turn. Bitterness and condemnation
worsened.
To put it bluntly, by 2012 people who actually paid attention to what Mark and Grace Driscoll were saying as they promoted their new book began to discover they were lying. The long-term erosion of trust in Mark and Grace Driscoll may have seemed like an explosive overnight sensation but it wasn’t. Real Marriage is symbolically a focal point for the erosion of trust in the credibility of Mark and Grace Driscoll in a lot of ways, whether in terms of the ResultSource contract, the citation problems, or the basic narrative claims in promotional interviews and the book itself about how virginal Mark and Grace both were when they met. Behind the scenes former members heard that there were some significant efforts undertaken to ensure that William Wallace II writings would never be released to the public. That, too, is now water under the bridge. No one approached me about that topic and when I got the materials I published them. Driscoll felt obliged to issue an apology for those materials in 2014 but he didn’t issue an apology for them in his 2006 book Confessions of a Reformission Rev.
That people change their stories doesn’t
necessarily make them liars. By his own
account Mark Driscoll claimed to have been running on three hours of sleep a
night.
I write this blog while flying somewhere over the United
States late on a Thursday night heading home from a conference in the great
nation of Texas. I have blogged very little thus far in 2007 as I have been
playing hurt in terms of my health. I have been pushing it for ten years since
Mars Hill Church opened up, and the end of last year was a particularly rough
patch. I was looking forward to a few weeks off after Christmas to catch up on
sleep. Sadly, what happened is that I would be very tired and go to bed at a
decent hour only to wake up a few hours later, unable to return to sleep. I was
not stressed out or thinking, but it seemed something was physically wrong.
Even sleeping pills were of little to no help and by the end of the holidays I
was exhausted, having slept an average of perhaps three hours a night. A
naturopath said I had overextended myself and worn out my adrenal glands (which
regulate my sympathetic nervous system). The result of basically a decade of
perpetual stress and a final taxing season was that I was exhausted all day—I
literally had blurred vision and would fall asleep quickly only to wake up a
few hours later, unable to sleep again. So, I have been conserving energy for
my family and church, but some Sundays are brutal. I find myself nodding off on
the side of the stage before one of the four services I preach live.
So perhaps Mark Driscoll pushed himself
so far and so hard his sleep deprivation impaired his judgment? But what about late 2006 was a particularly
rough patch? You would have thought that
acquiring practically free real estate in the form of the West Seattle campus
via Bill Clem and James Noriega made things easier. It is true, as elders would later attest,
that the plans for a second campus evaporated in the face of the realities of
zoning laws but Driscoll didn’t allude to that.
He just wrote that he was playing while hurt. By later 2007 he claimed he solved a lot of
problems by sharing power.
Yet to go by the governance battle of
the 2007 period the perceived solution was not to distribute power (as Mark
Driscoll claimed was done) but to consolidate power.
Over the years Mark Driscoll has shared
how rough his family has it because he just preaches the Bible (as he reads
it). That
Mark Driscoll’s antics as William Wallace II may have played a role in people
seeking to aggressively confront him is something he has avoided directly
dealing with over the years.
In
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll said he wrote as William Wallace II and that the life change of
the men was “unreal”. Driscoll
claimed:
This season was messy and I sinned and
cussed a lot., but God somehow drew a straight line with my crooked Philistine
stick. I had a good mission, but some of my tactics were born out of
anger and burnout, and I did a lot of harm and damage while attracting a lot of
attention.
He cussed and sinned a lot but God
somehow drew a straight line with Mark Driscoll’s crooked Philistine stick. We can return to that topic some other time.
For now it’s sufficient to point out that a younger and brasher Mark Driscoll
was able to admit he was young, brash, and confrontational but he believed God
used his dubious methods to obtain measurably positive results.
But more recently it can sound from
newer reports that Mark Driscoll and company have adopted some more
conspiratorial takes on their lots in life. It was a point of discussion
between Warren Throckmorton, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas just last year as
to what Mark Driscoll was actually claiming when he said God reportedly told
him “A trap has been set.” It took a
while eto get to that point, but there was a fair amount of material discussed
as to what the 2014 investigation of Mark Driscoll entailed and what
intra-leadership board tensions were in play:
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/10/2020-interviews-on-late-mars-hill-part.html
…
The
history of the late Mars Hill Church turns out to hinge on a feud between two
boards:
Sutton
Turner:
Dave
nor I … I think, Dave, you might have been in one of those meetings, but I had
already
resigned.
So I was not a part of those, but I have all of the transcripts from those
meetings. So it documents basically out those … pretty much their three main charges.
I said them earlier in the podcast, but it’s quick tempered, including harsh
speech, arrogant, and the third one is domineering in his leadership of elders
and staff. So that’s the findings that these investigating elders have and that
they are bringing those charges to the Board of Overseers, which does not
include Dave nor I in that, or Mark. So those are those outside four board
members (Board of Overseers).
Sutton
Turner:
Then
I think actually, Dave, you might have been a part of one of those phone calls,
but you can address that. That’s kind of where we track everything, and I think
we can hit into the differences of those two groups and what ends up happening
because this all unravels very quickly in the first two weeks of October. If
we’ll remember, when Mark took his sabbatical, he was supposed to be out until
October the 14th, I think, but it was right around there. Let’s just throw out
the second weekend in October of 2014. So that’s what was trying to be wrapped
up during that time period and that was kind of like the drop dead date for the
investigating, for the findings to come out, and for there to be something
going forward.
Sutton
Turner:
Of
course, during this whole time, the churches, the people are leaving in droves,
especially
after
Acts 29. That’s really where you see the great exodus from the Mars Hill
churches.
Warren
Throckmorton: Yeah.
Dave
Bruskas:
Yeah,
let me speak to the meeting I was a part of. I probably not should speak to
meetings I wasn’t privy to. That would be dangerous. So I would have met,
Warren, with … let’s just call them, as Sutton has used the language already,
the Overseers. Those were the ones who … those are the outside board members
that were making the final decision regarding … they were rendering the verdict
of the investigation. Then the elders who had done all the investigative work.
Dave
Bruskas:
So
I met with them, I believe it was Monday, October 13th. The reason that date is
significant is the Overseers had met previously to that, the weekend prior to
that Monday. They had met with Mark and Grace, communicated to them the
findings of the investigation and gave them both some restorative plan, a
restorative plan of what changes were going to have to happen and needed to
happen for Mark to be leading the church moving forward. So I was part of the
meeting where the Overseers communicated to the elders, the investigative
group, here’s what we’ve communicated to Mark and Grace. [emphasis added]
The
weekend prior to Monday, October 13, 2014 would match the weekend before
Driscoll’s resignation and match up with what Driscoll recounted to Brian
Houston. Driscoll’s account was that the board laid out the
investigation results and proposed a restoration plan that Mark Driscoll said he
agreed to. Bruskas’ conversation with Throckmorton then moves on to
pointing out that what the Board of Overseers presented was not the plan the
Board of Elders recommended:
Dave
Bruskas:
There
was some agreement in that meeting, and the two things that were really … even
looking back over the notes from that meeting, two things that I think are
important particularly for members of Mars Hill to hear, the two points that
were just evident were both bodies expressed deep love and concern for Mars
Hill Church. That was clearly a point of agreement. Both groups expressed a
deep love and appreciation for Mark and really wanted good for Mark, wanted
Mark … Both groups wanted him to thrive long-term in ministry.
Dave
Bruskas:
But
here were the two points of differentiation and they were significant. The
investigative group, the elders, wanted Mark to be disqualified from the office
of elder and have an open timeline with his restoration process to restore him
to the office of elder and ultimately to resume his role as an executive elder
at Mars Hill Church. The overseers did not want Mark to be disqualified as an
elder and they had set a target date of I believe it was January 4th, 2015, so
roughly … what would that be? Two and a half months for Mark to resume his duties,
albeit in a reduced role of power. That was very clear in their plan. [emphasis
added]
At
this point we can cross-reference Dave Bruskas’ account of that week in October
with Mark Driscoll’s account given to Brian Houston in 2015:
And we didn't expect to resign. I met with the board. There
was a whole list of things that were charged by current and former leaders and
there was an internal governance struggle and threats of legal action that it
got very complicated. And a lot of it was anonymous through the internet so you
don't know who is saying or doing what. And so I invited the board to do a full
examination, interview anybody, anything, and we would submit to whatever
verdict that they determined.
... When I think about eight weeks we met
Friday and Saturday, October 10 and 11. I remember because the 11th was my
birthday and so Grace and I were present with the board and they said: "We
see in your history of leadership, less in more recent years but particularly
in the past, "pride, anger and a domineering leadership style." That
would be the exact words they used. "We don't see anything
disqualifying. These are areas we want you to grow. We want you to leadership
at the church soon." They wanted to do some clean up internally. "We
want you back on January 4 in the pulpit, give you time to heal, things to cool
down, and for some changes to be made." [emphasis
added]
We agreed to that. I sent in a go-forward plan
and then we went home to have birthday cake with the kids. I think it was on
Monday night. I was in the bedroom. Grace was in the living room. And so we
told the board and told the kids, you know, we come back and ["will
do"? garbled] preaching and try and love and serve and, and fix what was a
struggling church and God had provided a way for us to do that as volunteers.
And so our plan was to come back as volunteers.
So clearly, by both Bruskas’ and Driscoll’s account the Board
of Overseers went with the restored by January, 2015 proposal. But
the Board of Elders who undertook the investigation, per Bruskas, wanted Mark
Driscoll to be found disqualified from ministry as much as the Board of
Overseers apparently did not want him found disqualified from ministry.
Bruskas
told Throckmorton more about the impasse between the BoO and the BoE:
Dave
Bruskas:
Sutton
had already resigned. I’d already communicated to the Overseers that I would
step away as soon as Mark came back in the pulpit, but Mark needed a clean
start and he needed new guys around him to gain credibility. He needed a new
place to begin from. So during that meeting, Warren, on that Monday, it was
clear that those two groups were at an impasse, and a decision was made by the
Chairman of the Board of Overseers to have a follow-up meeting where they could
maybe resolve those two differences. Again, whether Mark was disqualified or
not, and at what point in time if there was any set in the calendar for him to
come back.
Dave
Bruskas:
I
was very convinced that neither side was going to budge. I was very certain
that if … What I mean by that is, if the overseers would have said, yes this is
what … we’re doing this and you guys got to live with it, I think there would
have been mass resignation from the Board of Elders and maybe even the Lead
Pastors in their entirety. I don’t believe the Board of Overseers was open to
Mark being disqualified from ministry, from the elder role. I don’t think they
were going to give an inch on that issue, and I do think they were set on him
coming back in January.
Dave
Bruskas:
Before
those two groups could reconvene and come up with some sort of resolution, Mark
resigned. So yeah, it’s left the story open ended in a way that I think it just
needs to be told. I think people need to know what happened.[emphasis added] I will say
this. Looking back on the work that the Board of Elders did, and even after
they were finished with their work, I know Sutton and I met with several of the
people that were hurt that they interviewed. Just to see the devastation and
the hurt in those folks, they did a tremendous amount of work.
Sutton
Turner: Yeah.
Dave
Bruskas:
They
were very principled. Their contention was we can’t be pragmatic in this at
all. We’re either going to follow out what the Bible says regarding Biblical
qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and domineering as it’s addressed in
1 Peter 5. They felt like to not disqualify Mark would be partial to him in a
way that they wouldn’t be for any other elder in that position and place.
Dave
Bruskas:
So
yeah, it was tough. I don’t believe they were free to tell their story after
that was said and done. I don’t know that anybody’s really shared anything from
that to this day. Anyway, there was an impasse. I don’t believe it was going to
be resolved. Before there could be a follow-up meeting between those two
groups, Mark resigned.
The
mystery at this point is why the Board of Overseers consisting of Michael Van
Skaik, Larry Osborne, John Phelps and Matt Rogers would have decided that Mark
Driscoll was not disqualified from ministry if the Board of Elders who
investigated him concluded that he was disqualified from serving in
ministry. If Bruskas and Turner have presented statements that were
inaccurate or with which the members of the Board of Overseers disagree there’s
been months since Throckmorton published his interview in which to make
counter-statements.
What
we can now move along to is the question of what Mark Driscoll meant by saying
he heard God tell him “a trap has been set”. For sake of review, here’s what
Driscoll told Brian Houston about the Monday night after he’d met with the
board (of overseers):
And then on that Monday night I was in the bedroom, Grace was
in the living room and he spoke to me and he spoke to her in a supernatural way
that neither of anticipated or expected. Ah, and so Grace walked in and she
said, "I feel like the Lord just spoke to me and said what we're supposed
to do." and I said "I feel like the Lord spoke to me and said what
we're supposed to do." It's not what we wanted; it's not what we agreed
to; it's not what we've planned for. And so I asked her, "Well, what did
the Lord say to you?" cuz I didn't wanna influence and she said, uh, she
said we're [Grace Driscoll speaks but it's low and indistinct, Driscoll pauses
a moment and is urged to continue by Houston] "The Lord revealed to me
that , you know, a trap has been set, there's, there's no way, chance we can
return to leadership" and I didn't know what that meant or what was going
on at the time. And I'm, I said, [garbled] "We need to resign".
So this is not what we anticipated and a lot of people've thought, you know,
"maybe he's another plan" but we didn't. We didn't know what we were
doing.
And Grace fell to the floor and she was just
sobbing uncontrollably and I'd never seen my wife like that. She was
devastated. So we prayed and slept on it and decided we would make sure we got
this right. Talked to pastors, those that we trust and sent in our resignation
then on, it would have been Tuesday. ...
So
Throckmorton asked:
Warren
Throckmorton:
The
resignation was an interesting story. He said something about he and Grace got
separate messages from God about being ambushed or a trap had been set. I don’t
know if either of you have any insight into that from knowing him or just
knowing of the situation, but the Elders again said one thing, and the Board of
Overseers said another thing. So do you have any insight into what that might
mean?
Sutton
Turner:
Yeah.
So I don’t know, Dave, if Mark called you. He called me to tell me that Grace
was upstairs. He was downstairs. That God spoke to him and said that it was
going to be ambush, that they were going to be ambushed by obviously the
Elders. Then she came downstairs and had the same thing. Therefore, that’s why
they resigned. So that was on that day, and that’s just what he told me.
[emphasis added]
While
Driscoll never clarified what he thought “a trap has been set” referred to,
Sutton Turner stated for the record he thought it was obvious Mark Driscoll was
referring to the Board of Elders wanting him found disqualified from
ministry. If that’s true then, well, nobody like Mark Driscoll
needed a word from the Lord to know that one of the boards of his church
thought he was no longer fit for ministry. If he did need
an oracle from the Almighty to even come to that moment of recognition that
could be construed as a reason he wasn’t fit for ministry. After all, the cases
in which God explicitly let leaders of Israel know they were no longer going to
be in X ministry is a hall of shame ranging from Eli the priest through King
Saul through to Ahab. When God tells you you’re released from your job in the
Old Testament the results are rarely good. As Mark Driscoll used to joke, even
among Jesus’ own chosen disciples there was a Judas.
So
now we know that Mark Driscoll called Sutton Turner the day he received his
oracle. This establishes that Driscoll told someone in 2014 about his
experience of being told by God “a trap has been set”. Turner interpreted the
statement to mean Mark Driscoll was aware the Board of Elders wanted him found
disqualified from ministry.
Did
Bruskas hear anything?
Dave
Bruskas:
Yeah,
he and I never spoke about that, so we really didn’t talk about that.
Warren
Throckmorton:
So
in the middle of the impasse between those two boards, that’s when the
resignation came.
Dave
Bruskas:
Yeah,
I think it was literally … I think the resignation was submitted the day after
that first meeting or the second day after that first meeting.
Since
the closure of Mars Hill former members and leaders have wondered whether or
not there even was a formal report that any of the boards
had. Sutton Turner has stated for the record he had the raw
interview materials but the question of whether there was ever a formally
presented report has remained unanswered.
Warren
Throckmorton:
Now,
there was to be a report that was released, or maybe I’m wrong about that, but
everybody was kind of chasing that report for a long time. The elders were very
tight lipped about it. Was there ever a written report or was it more of a word
of mouth report given to the decision making body, the Overseers?
Sutton
Turner:
So
we don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if it was a written report that the
leader of those Board of Elders was producing. I do know that there were those
meetings on the first, the eighth, the 13th and the 14th that
you see the documentation of the Elders basically giving their findings to the
Overseers verbally on conference calls. Then those conference calls having
detailed notes of this person said this, this person said this, that type of
transcript I would say.
Dave
Bruskas: I’ve never seen a formal report.
If
even the executive elders of Mars Hill Church have said they don’t know if there
was a written report then the members of the Board of Elders would have to
clear things up and that still would not clear up whether such a report was
retained by the Board of Overseers. If the Board of Overseers decided that they
did not find Mark Driscoll disqualified from ministry as stated by Turner and
Bruskas, then why would the Board of Overseers have any incentive to retain
documentation of the Board of Elders arguing Mark was disqualified?
So now, more
recently, there are podcasts discussing
other elements of the history of Mars Hill decline.
https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/06/22/podcastalooza-three-podcasts-i-can-recommend-today/
Particularly striking are the accounts
of Aaron Gray and Tim Smith to the effect, in Smith’s case, that Mark Driscoll
claimed to Smith that the Board of Elders wanted to collect enough dirt on Mark
Driscoll to ouster him from leadership and take over the church. That sounds like a straightforward conspiracy
theory, No one who has testified about
Driscoll’s resignation from the Board of Overseers or the Board of Elders up to
this point agrees that there was any conspiracy theory so “if” Mark Driscoll
was so convinced there was a conspiracy against him to depose him why should he
have such ideas? There have been reports
over the years to the effect that Driscoll was no stranger to orchestrating the
ouster of leaders behind the scenes which may or may not be a topic for future
podcasts. We’ll have to find out.
What a more recent podcast discusses is
how, if we think of Mars Hill Church as a Generation X movement, that that
movement depended on the infrastructure and patronage of the Boomer churches.
What is also becoming more apparent is
that when Driscoll claimed that around 2014 they were dealing with people who
were mostly anonymous and that “we don’t know who they are” that he was, most
likely, lying. Andrew Lisi, to go by his
statements recently published by Warren Throckmorton, was neither anonymous nor
evasive in stating his concerns about Driscoll’s approach to ministry.
Ironically, or providentially, Wenatchee
The Hatchet had documented Lisi’s departure in passing and I’ve since updated
and corrected some missing linkage testifying to that transition out of
executive pastorship I more detail.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/07/warren-throckmorton-published-statement.html
One of the challenges in chronicling the
life and death of Mars Hill Church has been the sheer extent of link rot and
robots.txt that happened over the course of the institution’s life and death,
especially in the 2013-2014 period. But
another challenge has been, as I have demonstrated above, that Mark and by
extension Grace Driscoll changed their public stories enough times that even if
we do not reach a conclusion that they are willing to lie we should be cautious
about taking their accounts at face value.
More recent statements by former
attenders or members of The Trinity Church have raised the issue of what Grace
Driscoll has claimed about the history of Mars Hill. Was there a security guard who helped take
down Mars Hill? That’s largely
impossible to know for certain but it seems unlikely, although it is hard to
establish what, if anything, Grace Driscoll has actually said. To go by what Mark Driscoll has claimed it is
hard to take his statements at face value.
His claim that the late Mars Hill Church fell apart after a years long
internal struggle within leadership over LGBTQ issues that he declared to Carey
Nieuwhof is not only not grounded in any evidence but has been cumulatively
refuted by public statements by Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas about the demise
of Mars Hill Church made in conversation with Warren Throckmorton.
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