Janet Mefferd blogs about a book by Vince Manuele about The Trinity Church and his experiences there (update 5-2-26 do not waste your time on it)

https://www.janetmefferd.com/p/mark-driscoll-an-innocent-moment

Apr 25, 2026

It’s been almost 13 years since I confronted now-disqualified Pastor Mark Driscoll about his plagiarized book on my radio show and watched as the dominos of his celebrity-pastor con game began to fall, one by one. 

I last wrote about him in 2014, in a fit of frustration that this scandal-riddled charlatan was somehow still at the helm of Mars Hill Church, even after everything that I and others had revealed about him (he left Mars Hill soon thereafter to launch The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ). 

I said in that article that I was done, and I have been done ever since. I can only take so much, after all. But I’ve decided to come briefly out of self-imposed Driscoll hibernation after reading Vince Manuele’s new book, “Kiss and Tell: The Innocent Moment that Shattered Mark Driscoll’s Cult.”

...

Huh ... kind of a weird title ... since it would sure seem like Mark Driscoll Ministries is plugging along pretty well if there's a new capital campaign announced for a recently acquired building and stuff like that.

Wenatchee The Hatchet has never said "I'm done" with this stuff. There's less to write about but sometimes something sparks up.  I reviewed Justin Dean's PR Matters ... so ... I guess I should get around to this one, too.  

To the best of my knowledge, there have been no memoirs about being at churches founded or co-founded by Mark Driscoll.  I can't seriously count Mark Driscoll's own books because memoir and anecdote are so inextricably woven into his self-help volumes they can't really be considered memoirs or autobiographical accounts as such.  Every story gets rolled out to make a fairly literally dogmatic (it runs in the family and is part of the family business).

I could be wrong.  Maybe somebody has published a memoir about their time at Mars Hill Church already and I just never heard of it.  

UPDATE 5-2-2026 (after the break)

For those who hadn't read the comment thread already, don't waste your time on the book.  

All of the claims and statements that get made in the book that can be verified were already published at The Roys Report in 2021.  Everything else in the book consists of statements and characterizations I'm not interested in repeating.  One of Driscoll's kids is reduced to a stockpile of ammo aimed at claiming Pastor Mark is a bad, bad man. 

If you claim you kept all the receipts, and then don't produce any of them, then you can't honestly say you kept all the receipts in a book that gives no documentation.  If one of the central themes of this book is that somebody has never been allowed any agency; and then you self-publish a 200-page memoir making that somebody the lynchpin and McGuffin of your narrative; then you're not giving that somebody any agency, either. 

Irony alert, had Vince Manuele never self-published Kiss and Tell he would not himself be guilty of using that somebody as a prop in a story he wants to tell about his own heroic suffering at the hands of that somebody’s awful dad, who has his own history of sharing tales of woe about his wife and kids as a way to bolster sympathy from his followers.  Giving Team Driscoll 200 more pages of self-published reasons to trust their instincts further has not shattered anything.

Then there is the writing itself. Barney the dinosaur only wishes he could be as purple as this kid's prose, bleached by the harshness of the Arizona summer sun:

What that winter did was cut out a window in the wall. I had pressed my ear to the wood for months and believed I was hearing things wrong. The window showed me the room. Decisions moved down. People adjusted. Language cleaned the edges. Fear drove the engine. Everything was arranged to keep one man and his house unharmed and on schedule.

Or then there’s a passage like this, which I can hear coming from Mojo Jojo:

When the meeting ended, he dismissed me with a simple nod. That was all it took to make it clear the conversation was over. I walked out into the hallway with quiet anger building in my chest. It was not that kind of anger that burst out. It was the kind that sat deep and slow, burning behind the ribs. ... 

Manuele’s writing style seems meant to evoke the idea that he is like an Alexandr Solzhenitsyn scribbling out fragments of what will become The Gulag Archipelago.  

But this is not the history of our sewage disposal system, it’s the story of a kid who had a paid internship and got fired from it because the person in charge of paid interns told him that it was evident the kid couldn’t decide between doing the paid internship and being on the worship team.  The person in charge even said the kid seemed like a good kid but was not someone to be relied upon. Manuele even gives dialogue from the man. 

And along the way, the kid was trying to date some pastor’s daughter and enough rules were bent or broke by both of them that, even though nothing untoward happened (as the account has it), the kid was viewed as so untrustworthy by the top brass they drove the kid and his family out of the church.  Were the rules draconian and absurd?  Yeah ... probably ... but Manuele never once connects the dots between how Mark and Grace "broke some rules" in their dating relationship. The possibility that what he regards as paranoia may not "just" be paranoia but is informed by two parents afraid of the possibility that one of their daughters might act the way Grace did when she was a party girl teenager never occurs to Manuele.  Since I actually slogged through Real Marriage back in 2013 and recall some things Mark said about what he wished differently in a sermon or two, I can at least give the guy some benefit of a doubt. The rules may be crazy and draconian, but they didn't come out of thin air.  There may have been history that went into their making Manuele can't be bothered to consider.

Andrew Lamb contacted Matthew Paul Turner. Vince Manuele and his family reached out to The Roys Report.  It is possible, even easy, to believe both that the churches Mark Driscoll has led wield draconian and brutal double-standardized forms of church discipline; and also that the kinds of people who make themselves the tragic suffering heroes of their own stories don’t understand how much they resemble the man behind the pulpit.  

Has Mark Driscoll got a history of wielding the power of the sob story to influence his followers?  Sure, I made that case back in 2014.

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: part 1--the November 8, 2007 letter in which Driscoll explained the re-org and the termination/trial process for Petry and Meyer

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_28.html

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: part 2a 12-6-2011 "I was carrying the burden myself ... "

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_32.html

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: part 2b--12-06-2011 having no team meant everyone expected Mark to be there ... except there was a team

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_35.html

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: part 3--excerpts from Real Marriage (2012) describing the 2006-2007 period

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_48.html

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: part 4 "Stepping Up" a 2013 explanation of a 2006-2007 process

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story.html

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: part 5 October 26, 2013 "The Hardest Part of Ministry"

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_63.html

 

Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story: a survey and a proposal

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/mark-driscoll-and-power-of-sob-story_9.html

That was six years before Vince Manuele set foot in The Trinity Church and obviously more than a decade before the publication of Kiss and Tell.  

As a form of self-therapy I grant that Kiss and Tell had to be written.  As an actually published work I think it is not worth your time. 

Steer clear of this dog fart of a book.  You've got better things to do with your time.  I've saved you the trouble, or at least I’ve tried to. 

POSTSCRIPT 5-25-2026

It is worth noting that Manuele's account of being surveilled invites a pretty natural question about Mark "I see things" Driscoll.  If Driscoll has the prophetic powers of discernment he has claimed to have over the years, why would he have felt a need to have any security staff or investigators keeping track of Vince?  Wouldn't Driscoll's super-powers of perception be enough?  

Now I have written at some length about how the early 2008 claim of "I see things" was made within a Mars Hill leadership clique setting in the wake of the firings and trials of Bent Meyer and Paul Petry, and that the claim should be understood as a context specific threat that people who were against Driscoll were supposed to know he claimed to have some kind of clairvoyant power to know stuff. Why squander so much money on surveillance gear and investigators at The Trinity Church if Mark Driscoll has those prophetic super-powers for real?