The
Roys Report account eludes to Mark Driscoll being expelled from Acts 29
leadership and while that’s certainly one way to put it, the TRR reference is
to Christianity Doay coverage. For those
of us who were chronicling things here in Seattle there are other ways to cite
the incident.
Showing posts with label Driscoll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Driscoll. Show all posts
Monday, March 02, 2026
yet another Acts 29 leader has had to get removed
Sunday, June 30, 2024
further developments in the Robert Morris' resignation from Gateway Church coverage, considering the question of why Mark "I see things" Driscoll didn't or doesn't seem to have been able to "see" things about Robert Morris
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.
Sunday, October 08, 2023
On lives and deaths and Mars Hill a year after Lief Moi's death; Mike Gunn in late 2022 on how there was good but "We were arrogant fools"; culture war breeding vs peacemaking in the month of "The Domino Revival"; and thinking about Mark's Irish kingly backstory and my Native American Calvinist part of my history
I should warn you up front that
this is a blog post that is neither short nor focused. It does not just so
happen that my friend Lief Moi died about a year ago; that that other co-founding
elder of Mars Hill Church has shilled a book and a sermon series that reveals
what an incompetent fool he’s become about reading biblical texts (no person
worth functional matter in their brain pain can honestly claim that from
Jeroboam of the northern kingdom to Ahab that there was a continuous father
begets son series of relationships. The Omride dynasty supplanted Jeroboam’s
dynasty and was itself wiped out by Jehu, whose own dynasty collapsed. But in Driscoll’s fantasy-land to prove his
point about father curses magic he needs all these kings of the northern
kingdom in 1 Kings to be blood relatives to shill his self-help gimmick about
fathers. Ahem, I also have lost two
parents in the last few years and have had some time to think about how Mark
and Lief were always up front about presenting Mars Hill as a place where a
Christian community would and could discover ways of being family together that
would counter the neglects or misdirections Generation X got (or allegedly got,
at any rate).
That’s
not a small amount of stuff to think about.
So you’ve been warned, this is a long one even by the standards of
Wenatchee The Hatchet. It's after the break if you feel like reading 22,344 more words. If you don't, I understand! If you do read it, hey, thanks for reading. This will help to explain, if not always directly, how and why Wenatchee The Hatchet has been relatively or actually unproductive compared to earlier periods of the blog.
Saturday, September 09, 2023
today Mark Driscoll tweets that livestream isn't church and your pastor isn't online but in the spring of 2009 he was excited to announce week-delay DVD rebroadcast of his sermons to Mars Hill satellite campuses
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1700547651056640348
Church isn’t a
building, it is the gathering of saints—usually in a building. Livestream isn’t
church. Your pastor isn’t online. Go to church this weekend.
9:32 AM · Sep 9, 2023
IF there’s anything I’ve observed about Mark Driscoll over
the span of 25 years it’s that he has a pragmatism as principle streak. While
he’s got a single building as a church campus in Arizona he’s set on the idea
that livestream isn’t church. Back in 2009 he was excited to announce to Mars
Hill Church that his preaching would stop being live satellite simulcast and
would start being rebroadcast at non-Ballard campus via DVD. He was so excited
he spent several minutes explaining the change.
In all the decades there have been transcripts of Mark
Driscoll sermons this didn’t seem to make the cut. I had to go dig up the sermon audio myself
and transcribe it. It’s a useful testament from Mark Driscoll himself that his
views on the relationship between pastors, their audiences, and technology
could evolve on the basis of pragmatic brand development considerations. I documented this material back in March 2014
and Mars Hill has long since dissolved; with the media library being a bit
tricky to find if you haven’t kept tabs on it since the dissolution. What’s
worse is that, as anyone who has tried to follow links from the old Mars Hill
days will have found out, many former Mars Hill domain links skew toward
gambling and pr0n sites so if you’re reading Wenatchee The Hatchet posts in 2023 it’s advisable to not just click away
on links. Given the history Mars Hill had of deploying robots.txt to preclude
archive.org being able to, you know, archive, Wenatchee The Hatchet has had the
sometimes tedious task of preserving material for the public record as it was
getting purged by Mars Hill public relations.
What you are about to be able to read is from the guy who
just tweeted that your pastor isn’t online and you should go to church this
weekend. Back in later 2009 if you went
to Mars Hill Church and weren’t at the Ballard campus where he preached, you
were not only not going to see him in person, you’d be hearing him preach on a
screen a sermon he preached the previous week.
Does “that” count as more of “church” than a pastor who livestreams a
sermon or homily in real time? So let’s
revisit what Driscoll said about the week delay procedure Mars Hill introduced
in the spring of 2009.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-start-of-week-delay-broadcasting-at.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20111010010057/http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
Prophets, Priests and
Kings
Trial: 8 witnesses from
1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5
starting about 5:30
This leads to an
enormous change in how we do things. You may know that today we use satellite
television technology where we live satellite the sermon to our various
campuses but (you may have noticed, as well) we're on the Left Coast, left in
EVERY way. We're over here on the Left Coast and on the Left Coast we're behind
the other time zones.
So we need to find a
way to sync up the sermon with every time zone so we're going to a week delay
of the sermon beginning this month. Here's how it'll work. I'll preach Sundays at Mars Hill Ballard as I
always do. We'll take the best
sermon--and, yes, they're not all good. Some of them aren't good at all, and
some of them, SOME weeks there's a good one.
Some weeks, you just take what you get.
And sometimes, you
know, one sermon's better than the other. We'll edit it. We'll take out the
technical difficulties, things that I said that could get me picketed, we'll
fix it, for Jesus, and then we'll send it out to the campuses. They'll play it
back and once it's played back at all the campuses on week delay THEN we'll put
it online. It won't go on the internet
until it's played at all the campuses. And that's how it will work.
There are eight reasons
for this. I'll tell you why.
Again, different time
zones. To go to different states, potentially different nations we need a different
delivery method.
Number two, it does allow the bust sermon. Currently over half of the church is on
video. The majority of Mars Hill is on video, not at Ballard where I preach
live. Going forward, if we attain our goal of reaching 50,000 only ten percent
MAXIMUM will be at Ballard hearing the sermon as I speak it. Ninety percent of the church will be watching
it on week delay on video so I want to get the best sermon to the majority of
our people.
Number three, campuses
get a better preparation timeline. By getting the sermon in advance they can
put together their music for Sunday, kids ministry, small group discussion
questions, pastoral care and follow-up. Right now they have no idea where the sermon
is going because I have no idea where the sermon is going. They keep asking,
"Tell us what you're going to talk about." I don't know! Preaching happened. That's how
it works, I just go and sometimes they're having a really hard time putting a
service and following it up and I understand this and that will help.
Number four, it's
cheaper. Right now the television satellite technology requires a lot of gear
that we're able to sell to turn some profit. It requires the renting of
satellite time, downlinks, dishes on campuses.
All of this can be eliminated it saves, literally, over the course of
our history, will save us millions of dollars. It's a big savings and it makes
facilities much easier.
Here's what's
happening. Our new campus which we're hoping to launch in Federal Way needs a
facility. Olympia needs a permanent facility. Shoreline needs a bigger
facility. And as we expand it becomes very difficult and limiting to do
satellite. It requires a permanent installation. Schools, community centers, theaters, they
don't allow that because it's their building and they don't want the
infrastructure of their technology adjusted in any way and rightfully so. By
going to week delay it allows WAY more flexibility to use innumerable
facilities and move quickly from one to the other.
Last few reasons why
we're doing this.
Number six, technical
simplicity. Right now it's like a dish on your home and your cable. If the wind
blows hard and it shifts we lose signal.
Also, if it snows we have a real problem. We call them interns. We put them
up on the roof with a broom and they're literally dusting off the satellite
dish hoping not to fall off the church and meet Jesus prematurely. You can
always tell who the interns are who do the short straw. They're the ones on the
roof during the snow storms. This makes it more simple. It's easy playback
technology.
Number seven, it allows
translation and close caption. Right now I THINK my sermons are on TV in Korea.
They translate the redneck jokes into Korean. I don't understand this. Apparently there ARE redneck Koreans and what
this allows, this allows us to translate to different languages and also
potentially to do closed caption for those who are hearing impaired. It allows
us
more flexibility.
Now this leads to the
last question. Some have asked, "Why not do a Wednesday or Thursday night
service, capture the service, and then play it back?" Couple of reasons.
One, I travel during the week. I've got
book deadlines, media deadlines. It really would be a big imposition on the
Ballard campus. Additionally, I don't
have as much time to prepare the sermon. It won't be as good and if I don't do
a good job the majority of the church is stuck with the worst sermon. Also,
some have asked, "Well, why not do Saturday night?" And I won't.
But, after he said all that in 2009, now he tweets
that livestream isn’t church and your pastor isn’t online. Since Puget Sound was practically a ground
zero for covid-19 outbreaks and Gov. Inslee locked down on a lot of gatherings
livestream church was often the only way to keep church going. Driscoll, of
course, relocated to Arizona and has his own take on various issues but I’m
setting all that aside compared to his own self-accounting regarding technology
and homiletics. Is livestreaming a full church service “not” church? If it’s
not church what would Driscoll say about his own preaching rebroadcast at the U
District campus a week after he preached a sermon at Ballard? This is an
obvious case of the pot calling the kettle black if Mark Driscoll were
attempting to stake out a coherent and consistent position.
As Mike Gunn said in a vodcast in late 2022, Mark’s been the kind of guy who would say childrens’ ministry would not be the tale wagging the dog at Mars Hill before he had kids … and then when Mark Driscoll became a dad it was as though suddenly having a great childrens’ ministry was hugely important. (47:10 is where you want to be for this statement) Amen, Mike! Yeah, we’ve met this guy. He is “present”.
This means for those of us who pay attention to the past as well as the present
and future Driscoll’s present-ism means he means what he says at exactly the
moment he says it but he has a demonstrable history of doing 180 degree
turns on issues and acting and speaking like either his old position didn’t
matter or he just saw the light. He’ll
berate the “seed of Chucky” interpretation of Genesis 6 during his Mars Hill
years but then he’ll read, what, a couple of books by Michael Heiser and
endorse the view he scoffed. Some of us
have kept in mind that there have been a range of interpretations of Genesis 6
and not make fun of the views we don’t subscribe to. Augustine pointed out that
the angel/human hybrid take was normative in early Christian doctrine but few
subscribed to it. If you want to get
into how and why that interpretive shift happened there are academic monographs
on the topic but I’m not going to bore you with those. I
have a reading list for that if you want to get into that.
If livestream isn't church then I don't see how recording your sermons on DVD and rebroadcasting them a week later at satellite campuses counts as a preacher preaching to his congregation. At least in a livestream the pastor or priest is directly speaking to the congregation in the flesh and via internet. For those who don't know this, the week delay rebroadcast Mark Driscoll described in the 2009 sermon quoted above was the norm from about May 2009 through to the December 2014 dissolution of the corporation known as Mars Hill Church. If livestream "isn't" church was what Mark Driscoll did for half a decade to the campuses of Mars Hill where he didn't preach in person actually preaching?
POSTSCRIPT 9-10-2023
Back in his Mars Hill years Mark Driscoll sometimes joked that it was a fertility cult. I couldn't laugh at jokes like that because it seemed like the kind of joke that was made in earnest. There have been secularist and progressive writers who as far back as the 1990s pegged Driscoll as waging culture war but in postmodernist branded terms. Driscoll's old Daily Evergreen rants from his college days are what he seems to have ultimately come back to in his fifties.
Have kids. One of the best ways to affect the culture is to overwhelm the future with who you're sending into it. The rainbow people don't multiply much (besides STDs) with their Romans 1 lifestyle.
8:25 AM · Aug 29, 2023
He did used to say he had himself a fertility cult. Admitting it via tweet is just what it is. Kids whose parents "sort of" planned for them to be born may be better off in the long run than kids who were brought into the world by parents who took (or take) their cues on reasons to parent from the Mark Driscolls of the world. After all, even Nazi stumpers could say one good boy of Aryan stock could impregnate twenty willing girls were it not for the problematic dogma of monogamous pairing. That's the thing about breeding to win culture wars, its history is not particularly distinguished in any good way, last I checked.
POSTSCRIPT 9-13-2023
Pastor Mark Driscoll@PastorMarkWhy is it always the KJV guys who send me self published books on the apocalypse4:31 PM · Sep 10, 2023
If self-publishing your book on a book of the Bible is supposed to be a sign of incompetence what are we supposed to make of Mark Driscoll self-publishing New Days, Old Demons? Or has Mark Driscoll's legacy of double-standardized testing ensured that when he self-publishes it's timely and prophetic witness for a pathetic age and not equivalent to the implied ravings of KJV guys who self-publish their books on the apocalypse.
After all, at the relevant Amazon page it says:
New Days, Old Demons is a prophetic study of sex, gender, woke politics, and how progressive Christianity is just a rebranding of ancient paganism. The same demons that were active in the days of Elijah are active today castrating the men, mutilating the children, closing the churches, and silencing the Bible teachers.
We’re fighting back by self-publishing this book when nobody else would because it’s a prophetic message for pathetic times. This book reads like the book of Revelation meets a death metal band in a cage fight on Halloween.
Maybe those KJV guys sending Driscoll self published books on the apocalypse have simply come to understand him as a fellow prophet and traveler. Sure, they're not G. K. Beale or Richard Bauckham but, hey, they can self-publish as well as Mark Driscoll can.
Sunday, May 30, 2021
Mark Driscoll's spectrums of trust past and present (2011 and 2021), and the barnyard animals of ministry from Confessions of a Reformission Rev, 2006
Julie Roys has lately reported that
there is a “spectrum of trust” code at The Trinity Church (as attested by
former volunteer security director of the church Chad Freese):
https://julieroys.com/mark-driscoll-cult-like-actions-24-7-surveillance-loyalty/
…
On
April 7, Freese said Mark Driscoll pulled the entire staff into a “training
session.” Driscoll then reportedly drew his “spectrum of trust” on a dry-erase
board, rating people’s loyalty from 0 to 10 to determine their access to
Driscoll’s family.
Freese said Anderson then said that Freese’s security team was at a
“level nine.” But because Freese and his wife had appeared in a picture posted
on social media with former worship pastor, Dustin Blatnik, who reportedly had
been fired by Trinity, Freese and his wife were a “level 8.”
Freese said that was the “tipping point,” and he officially resigned the
following week.
Freese said what bothered him even more than the loyalty scale, though,
was the slandering of the Manueles by Driscoll and other pastors.
…
Warren Throckmorton has also noted the
spectrum of trust.
…
As extensive as Roys’ report is, there
are more stories to tell. She mentions shunning, but there are more stories of
families being shunned because they are not sufficiently loyal to Mark
Driscoll. Roys introduces us to the very culty phrase “spectrum of trust.” The
higher you are on the spectrum of trust, the more the Driscolls trust you and
the more access to them you have. Sadly, if you not high on that spectrum, you
may drag your family members down a notch or two. Ranking people in terms of
their loyalty to the dear leader is a characteristic of a mind control group.
An extension of that is shunning family members over loyalty to the dear leader.
…
That is certainly possible but rather
than confirm or contest the statement about The Trinity Church being a mind
control group I want, instead, to highlight that for those of us who were at
Mars Hill or even those of us who left Mars Hill but kept tabs on Mark Driscoll’s
prolific blogging at The Gospel Coalition and the Acts 29 blogs that the idea
of a “spectrum of trust” isn’t the least bit new.
I read Driscoll’s numbered ranking 0-10
concept for enemies and friends back in 2011. Of course, the relevant posts
were purged from both the Gospel Coalition website and the Acts 29 website so
the material is only accessible via archive access or, barring that, material
that was preserved at Wenatchee The Hatchet.
Because the blog posts were not necessarily preserved even by The
Wayback Machine we’ll have to make do with what I preserved back in June of
2011 for the actual numbered ranking system itself.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2011/06/friend-is-useful-at-all-times-and.html
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Warren Throckmorton has started a postcards from Phoenix series about The Trinity Church, the first from former security director/volunteer Chad Freese on whether a PI was consulted and addressing at whose initiative the consultation was made, reviewing Driscoll's history of firing elders at MHC in `07 where everything seemed mediated by proxies
I would have leaned toward postcards from Scottsdale since that's the location but for the time being "postcards from Phoenix" is the theme.
One of the recent questions that emerged was who allegedly arranged for a private investigator to tail someone who was formerly affiliated with the church.
...
The first one is complex in that it was triggered by a report from an anonymous witness to a recent spirited conversation between Grace Driscoll and another woman after women’s Bible study group. The argument was centered around a woman leaving the church amidst the current upheaval and controversies at The Trinity Church.
As a part of the argument, Grace Driscoll reportedly alleged that former director of security Chad Freese hired the private investigator who surveilled the Manuele family (see here and here for details). The implication was that the church shouldn’t be held responsible for this since Freese did it. This caught my attention for a couple of reasons. One, it demonstrates that recent news reporting is being followed widely in the church. Two, I wondered if there was any truth to the allegation that Chad Freese both instigated the hiring of the PI and then later complained about it.
One of the things that springs to mind about this report is that while it is a report that might need future corroboration or disconfirmation as may happen, there is something that should be kept in mind from Mars Hill history. The report above states that there was a spirited conversation between Grace Driscoll and another woman after a study group in which Driscoll reportedly alleged that the former director of security at The Trinity Church Chad Freese hired the private investigator who surveilled a family.
Monday, April 26, 2021
Warren Throckmorton has an update on the elderless The Trinity Church that Mark Driscoll is President and CEO of; revisiting the post-MHC resignation role of some board members of TTC and Driscoll on governance as "throne down not pew up"
Warren Throckmorton has noted that The Trinity Church seems to be an elderless church. There are pastors but they aren't listed as elders. If Throckmorton's account tells us anything it's that former members of The Trinity Church have indicated that the church does not have elders.
...
During the past couple of weeks, several former members of The Trinity Church in Scottsdale have contacted me to talk about about aspects of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. They contacted me due to my coverage of Mars Hill from late 2013 until 2015. They tell stories remarkably similar to those I heard from former Mars Hill members during that span of time. There is one major difference. In the current church, there are no elders who are putting on any brakes. There are no elders to whom appeals can be made. Several former members and staffers have told me that The Trinity Church does not have elders.
Some things do sound the same. Non-disclosure agreements are again being used. Money is again conditioned on silence. People are describing abrupt decisions about membership without due process. Friends and family who are considered disloyal to the church are being shunned. At some point, these stories may be told. For now, according to former members and staff, the pastors who are there in addition to Driscoll are not elders in the decision making sense of the office. If elders hold you accountable in one place, eliminate them in the next place.
...
If that means "friends and family of Mark Driscoll" who are considered disloyal to Mark Driscoll then that may be the case but is also, at the moment, impossible to verify. At some point those stories may be told but to go by the history of Mars Hill Church the likelihood is low. Few people I can think of off the top of my head have ever opted to go on record about unpleasant experiences they had at Mars Hill. They don't have to, of course. Nobody should feel compelled or coerced into going on the record about unpleasant experiences. So perhaps stories may be shared but let's not presume upon that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)