Nikolai Myaskovsky String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 33, No. 1: III. Andante sostenuto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaGZUHIkypo

for the fun of it.  This was written from 1929 to 1930 when the composer was a student. The opening theme almost has a "Living for the City" in a minor key kind of groove to it that I like and the lower string vamps sound to my 21st century ears kind of like a dirge for James Bond. 

postscript

this is also a not-so-subtle hint that I want to pivot back to blogging about musical stuff.  I'll have more to say about the CT podcast at some point later and maybe even some MD books but WtH has been overdue to return to blogging about music.  Some stuff about Heinrich Albert's Sonata for guitar is in order and some stuff about other music for guitar. 

Warren Throckmorton notes Mark Driscoll now asking for 650k--revisiting Re:Sound and MH Global as precedents for whatever Driscoll's fundraising for, and noting a delicate irony in his lambasting the Meta turn of Facebook as a satanic counterfeit when his celebrity was founded on media leveraging

Recently Warren Throckmorton noted that Mark Driscoll has asked for $200,000.00

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/12/07/after-a-year-of-trials-mark-driscoll-needs-200000-to-finish-strong/

and yet more recently asked for $650,000.00

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/12/10/stop-the-presses-mark-driscoll-needs-650000-more/

 

According to the following the reasons for the fundraising ask are as follows:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211210040745/https://mailchi.mp/59b961cbdfb7/an-exciting-way-to-finish-2021?e=86d2476eea

 

Our goal is to raise $650,000 beyond our regular budget needs in the final month of 2021. We have a $150,000 matching fund that doubles your gift between now and year-end, and your generous worship gift will help us with the following:

 

1. Upgrade our outdated soundboard that is too small for our growing number of volunteer musicians

2. Add more lighting and cameras so that we can improve the worship experience in the main room and also capture the worship and baptisms (over 400 in 2021!) in audio and video format to share online to minister to the more than 100 million people who are receiving Bible teaching through Real Faith from Trinity Church

3. Reset our stage, audio tuning, and audio treatment to best use our current main room for worship, thereby allowing us to add additional future worship nights

4. Set up our new Trinity Church worship studio with 3,200 square feet of office, meeting, songwriting, recording, and practice space that is in addition to our current studio space

5. Add more worship interns and part-time trainees we are developing as worship leaders

6. Purchase a mobile sound system for the Versus worship team in Sonora, Mexico. This is a band of young leaders, mainly pastor’s kids, who are holding outdoor and indoor worship events in conjunction with a network of pastors we have supported for years. They share the gospel of Jesus Christ with the next generation and need gear for this ministry which they all volunteer in

7. Our epic final worship event of the year with 4 services on December 23-24 with a choir, orchestra, and huge party to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in Scottsdale and capture it all in audio and video to send out online to the nations

Warren Throckmorton demonstrates Mark Driscoll recyling material in a new book from an old Mars Hill era book in which women contributors went uncredited (then in that book and now in this one)

I refrained from commenting on how Mark Driscoll has recycled materials in the era of The Trinity Church from the era of Mars Hill Church much in the past because it seemed that even if I pointed out how Good News for Bad Christians was a recycled series from the Mars Hill era series Christians Gone Wild with serious cuts in at least one sermon, people attending Driscoll's newest church might not know or care.  Or at least I refrained for the most part. By now, however, anyone who carefully tracks Mark Driscoll's literary output likely understands just how much recycling he's done over the decades and may already be familiar with controversies about the extent to which his books have relied on a content management system.

Well, it seems that the labors of people who worked within the Mars Hill content management system are still getting re:purposed and re:cycled with Mark Driscoll's most re:cent ministry and Warren Throckmorton has shared details. 

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/12/06/mark-driscoll-claims-credit-for-the-work-of-mars-hill-church-women/

Brad Vermurlen's Reformed Resurgence, another book I recommend as providing some background on the rise and fall of Mars Hill

Many years ago Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, wrote about the coming evangelical collapse. 

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

https://imonk.blog/2009/01/27/my-prediction-the-coming-evangelical-collapse-1/

https://imonk.blog/2009/01/28/the-coming-evangelical-collapse-2-what-will-be-left/

https://imonk.blog/2009/01/29/the-coming-evangelical-collapse-3-good-or-bad/

 

Now, Brad Vermurlen has a book out that builds a case that in order to understand the rise of New Calvinism, real or perceived, we can’t  begin to properly understand that “Reformed resurgence” without understanding a dissolution of American Evangelicalism as a field rather than as any coherent, identifiable set of beliefs or practices.  Field theory doesn’t seem hugely difficult for me to understand but over at Mere Orthodoxy there were some jokes about how abstract the concept of relative growth of subcultures within a larger dissolving culture seemed to be.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/reformed-resurgence-with-brad-vermurlen/

"Aftermath" and the problem of Mark Driscoll's law-gospel dyad: there's no gospel beyond scripts of adulthood explicated by Driscoll exemplar rather than christus exemplar

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/mars-hill-podcast-driscoll-finale-aftermath.html

Now that Mike Cosper has finished episode 12 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill he brings things to a head with a question, what was the actual “good news” of Mark Driscoll’s idea of “the Gospel?”  In the episode “Aftermath” he surveys the fate of churches that were relaunched in the wake of the corporate dissolution of Mars Hill after Mark Driscoll resigned. He also interviewed a number of women and men about some disastrous experiences they had at the hands of Mars Hill “biblical living” counselors. If you weren’t subjected to that or subjected yourself to that while at Mars Hill you wouldn’t have known the nomenclature but that’s what it was.