We’ve noted that Robert Morris stepped down from pastoring Gateway Church recently and revisited Robert Morris’ self-credited role in advising Mark Driscoll to resign from Mars Hill in 2014 to take time off and heal up before going back into ministry, but there have been new developments in the last week.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_83.html
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_73.html
Owing to the purges of Mars Hill materials online a substitute from the original source link is necessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGfBvC6-zU
(00:19:11)
…
4. Tell me everything you see no
matter how odd it may seem. Some people actually see things. This may be gift
of discernment.
On occasion I see things. I see
things. Like I was meeting with one person, and they didn't know this but they
were abused when they were a child and I said, "When you were a child, you
were abused. This person did this to you, physically touched you this
way." They said, "How do you know?" I said, "I don't know,
it's like I got a TV right here and I'm seeing it." They said, "No,
that never happened." I said, "Go ask them. Go ask if they actually
did what I think they did and I see that they did." They went and
asked this person, "When I was a little kid did you do this?" and the
person said, "Yeah [slowly], but you were only like a year or two old. How
do you remember that?" They said, "Well, Pastor Mark told me."
I'm not a guru. I'm not a freak. I don't talk about this. If I did talk about
it everybody'd want to meet with me and I'd end up like one of those guys on
TV, but some of you have this visual ability to see things.
Sometimes your counselee, they
will see things. I found this with people, I'm, okay,-like, "I'm gonna ask
the demon questions, you tell me what they say." They don't say
anything. I say, "What do you hear?" and they say, "Nothing, but
I'm seeing stuff."
"What,
oh, oh. What's that?"
"I'm
seeing, you know, when I was little, my grandpa molested me. I didn't know
that."
I said, "Well, let's not
assume it's true. Go ask your grandpa." Grandpa says, "Yeah [slowly],
when you were little I molested you." Grandpa was assuming they'd be too
young to remember so he'd only molest grandkids up until a certain age. But
they saw it. Supernatural. It's a whole other realm. It's like the Matrix. You
can take the blue pill. You can take the red pill. You can go into this
whole other world and that's the way it works.
So I say tell me everything you
hear, tell me everything you see and sometimes I see things, too. I see things,
too. I've seen women raped.
I've seen children molested.
I've seen people abused. I've seen people beaten. I've seen horrible things
done. Horrible things done.
I've seen children dedicated in
occult groups, and demons come upon them as an infant by invitation and I
wasn't present for any of it but I've seen it, visibly.
Upon occasion when I get up to
preach I see, just like a [makes "whif" sound] screen in front of me,
I'll see somebody get raped or abused and I'll track `em down and say,
"Look, I had this vision, let me tell you about it." All true.
One I had, I was sitting in my office at the old Earl building. This gal
walks by, nice gal, member of the church. This was when the church was
small. And there just like a TV was there and I saw the night before her
husband threw her up against the wall, had her by the throat, was physically
violent with her and she said, "That's it. I'm telling the pastor."
And he said, "If you do, I'll kill you." He was a very physically
abusive man. She was walking by and I just saw it. Just like a TV. I
said, "Hey! come here for a sec. ... Last night did your husband throw you
against the wall and have you by the throat, physically assault you and tell
you if you told anyone he would kill you?" She just starts bawling. She
says, "How did you know?" I said, "Jesus told me." I call
the guy on the phone, "Hey, I need you to come to the office." Didn't
give him any clue. [He] comes in. I said, "What did you do to your wife
last night? Why'd you this? Why'd you throw her against the wall?"
And he gets very angry, they're sitting on the couch, he says, "Why did
you tell him?" I said, "She didn't, Jesus did." Jesus
did.
…
But for all those
claimed super-powers apparently literally on loan from God, Mark Driscoll had
no inkling that Robert Morris allegedly molested a girl when she was 12 until
she was 16 years old? Would not that
have been precisely the kind of thing, based on Mark Driscoll’s claims about “I
see things” that he should have perceived about Robert Morris decades ago? And what of recent reports just in the last
week?
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/4-gateway-church-elders-take-leave-amid-
investigation-into-allegations-involving-pastor-robert-morris/
as reported by
Mike Hixenbaugh for NBC:
Robert Morris, a pastor
and the founder of Gateway Church, wanted to know what it was going to take to
prevent the woman on the phone from going public with her accusation that he’d
sexually abused her as a child.
“Put a price on it,”
Morris said on Sept. 22, 2005, according to a document that appears to be a
transcript of a phone call. The document was provided to NBC News by a former
Gateway staff member.
…
The document — titled
“Transcription of recorded phone conversation with Cindy Clemishire” — was
provided to NBC News by a former member of Gateway’s IT department. The worker
said he discovered the Microsoft Word document more than a decade ago while transferring
files from Morris’ computer to a new laptop. The IT worker shared the
transcript on the condition that he not be named.
The document sat for years on a shared server at Gateway
that primarily held archival sermon notes and was accessible to members of
Gateway’s technology teams, the worker said. Metadata from the document shows
it was created on Oct. 19, 2007, about two years after the call, at a time when
Clemishire said she and Morris were negotiating a possible legal settlement
that never materialized. The file was created by someone who listed their title
as “Administrator” and company as “Gateway Church,” and has not been modified
since the day it was created, according to its metadata.
…
Did Mark “I see things” Driscoll not know of any of that at the time he stood on the stage at the behest of Robert Morris at the Gateway conference in 2014 shortly after his resignation from Mars Hill Church? So far it would seem that Driscoll did not "see" the molestation reported or the reported phone conversation. Now as a caveat, I would venture to say that if the field of psychology and counseling had not developed the idea of recovered memory practices Mark Driscoll could not have made use of them in his demonic counseling sessions (take the ambiguity of that phrasing as deliberate). Driscoll could not be wielding therapeutic jargon to advice one of the Lindells to "differentiate" if no one had formulated the concept of things like an undifferentiated ego mass in family dynamics. But, with those thoughts in mind, Mark Driscoll's counseling sessions probably involved written materials so his reads were not "cold" reading of a counselee but relatively "warm" or "hot" readings based on known histories. That the results may have been a mutual confabulation on the part of counselor and counselee might mean nothing more than that Mark Driscoll did what any number of licensed professionals managed to do from the 1980s into the 1990s.
Which might, potentially, be an explanation for why, if Mark Driscoll never knew anything of allegations against Robert Morris, he wouldn't have even stopped to conceive of such things being possible. Driscoll's "sight" needed enough background on his counselees from which to develop some kind of conjecture, which might not even potentially exist for men whose public support and patronage Mark Driscoll relied upon to rehabilitate his reputation just enough to launch The Trinity Church..
Meanwhile, those
glowing endorsement blurbs Robert Morris gave for Mark Driscoll’s Charisma
House publications aren’t going away until new editions of Spirit-Filled
Jesus, Win Your War and Pray Like Jesus come along.
UPDATE 7-1-2024
In light of reported claims from Driscoll about what he perceived to be spiritually negative influences in John Lindell's church earlier this year the lack of any comparable claims made by (or at least credited to) Mark Driscoll about Robert Morris becomes more striking.
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