Quartz--the housing market crash of `08 was catalyzed by house-flipping and not poor subprime borrowers defaulting--remembering the old real estate scene of Mars Hill

https://qz.com/1064061/house-flippers-triggered-the-us-housing-market-crash-not-poor-subprime-borrowers-a-new-study-shows/

The grim tale of America’s “subprime mortgage crisis” delivers one of those stinging moral slaps that Americans seem to favor in their histories. Poor people were reckless and stupid, banks got greedy. Layer in some Wall Street dark arts, and there you have it: a global financial crisis.

Dark arts notwithstanding, that’s not what really happened, though.

Mounting evidence suggests that the notion that the 2007 crash happened because people with shoddy credit borrowed to buy houses they couldn’t afford is just plain wrong. The latest comes in a new NBER working paper arguing that it was wealthy or middle-class house-flipping speculators who blew up the bubble to cataclysmic proportions, and then wrecked local housing markets when they defaulted en masse.

Analyzing a huge dataset of anonymous credit scores from Equifax, a credit reporting bureau, the economists—Stefania Albanesi of the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Geneva’s Giacomo De Giorgi, and Jaromir Nosal of Boston College—found that the biggest growth of mortgage debt during the housing boom came from those with credit scores in the middle and top of the credit score distribution—and that these borrowers accounted for a disproportionate share of defaults.
As for those with low credit scores—the “subprime” borrowers who supposedly caused the crisis—their borrowing stayed virtually constant throughout the boom. And while it’s true that these types of borrowers usually default at relatively higher rates, they didn’t after the 2007 housing collapse. The lowest quartile in the credit score distribution accounted for 70% of foreclosures during the boom years, falling to just 35% during the crisis.

So why were relatively wealthier folks borrowing so much?

Recall that back then the mantra was that housing prices would keep rising forever. Since owning a home is one of the best ways to build wealth in America, most of those with sterling credit already did. Low rates encouraged some of them to parlay their credit pedigree and growing existing home value into mortgages for additional homes. Some of these were long-term purchases (e.g. vacation homes, homes held for rental income). But as a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report from 2011 reveals (pdf, p.26), an increasing share bought with the aim to “flip” the home a few months or years later for a tidy profit.
...

and there's another link

The proposal that house-flipping catalyzed the housing crash rather than subprime lending to those who otherwise should not have gotten housing loans reminds me of a fad among the early Mars Hill scene.  People were encouraged to invest in real estate.  The idea was that a couple would buy a home, maybe a home they couldn't technically afford if it was all up to them and their credit, but to ameliorate this by community living and "life together".  What that meant in practice was people would rent out rooms and space to other people within the church so that a community living set up was in place.  Eventually the home owners might have a baby or two or the tenant might get married and the community living set up might change.  Maybe somebody would have to move out or a new couple would emerge and the housing situation would adjust. 

The Driscoll house that was on Montlake, for instance, ended up being a rental space taken up by anywhere between six to eight people at a time in the latter part of the last decade.

For those who can dig up the old fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness (audio and SD video (we hope))and cross reference it to the history of real estate acquisitions and Mark Driscoll's own narrative it as a Mars Hill & Mark Driscoll's Real Estate story.  The real estate situation Mark Driscoll had at the start of this century is inextricably bound up in the social and economic context within which he decided to take up the pen name William Wallace II and write "Pussified Nation".

Confessions of a Reformission RevMark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

CHAPTER FIVE, 350-1,000 PEOPLE
page 119
[this season begins in early 1999]
I had worked myself to near burnout and was still the only paid pastor on staff although there was enough work for ten people.

[remember that at this point Mike Gunn and Lief Moi still had full-time jobs, Driscoll's work was apparently part-time and he had a stipend from the advisory board and supplemented his income in other ways]

page 120
A friend in the church kindly allowed me to move into a large home he owned on a lease-to-own deal because I was too broke to qualify for anything but an outhouse. The seventy-year-old house had over three thousand square feet, seven bedrooms on three floors, and needed a ton of work because it had been neglected for many years as a rental home for college students. Grace and I and our daughter Ashley, three male renters who helped cover the mortgage, my study, and the church office all moved into the home. [emphasis added] This put me on the job, literally, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as the boundary between home and church was erased.

We ran the church out of my house for nearly two years, including leadership meetings and Bible studies for various groups on almost every night of the week. It was not uncommon to have over seventy people a week in our home. Grace got sucked right back into the church mess. She was a great host to our guests. But I started growing bitter toward her because I was again feeling neglected.

I began working seven days a week, trying to save the church from imminent death. I had decided to go for broke and accepted that I would either save the church and provide for my family or probably die of a heart attack. I lived on caffeine and adrenaline for the better part of two years, ate terribly ,and put on nearly forty pounds. 

Then from God's Work, Our Witness, linked to above:

about 27:33
The Driscolls’ Basement
Once we got kicked out of that building, literally everything moved back into our house. So offices in our house across from our bedroom, interns in the basement.

Pastor Matt: Poor Grace. Like, it was so ghetto down there because, I mean, you know bachelors. There’s like three guys living down there, and the dishes would just stack up, stack up. I remember they’d start stinking real bad. And every couple of weeks, like, we’d see the dishes done. I’d come home from work, and I’d say, “Hey, man, did you do the dishes? Thanks.” He was like, “Nah, I think Grace did them again.”

Grace: We shared laundry facilities and so, yeah, I just ended up cleaning half the time, because it was—I couldn’t even stay down there to do laundry. It was so disgusting.

Pastor Matt: Sorry, sorry, Grace. [emphasis added]

We had just picked up Pastor Tim in Albuquerque, New Mexico, around that time and he had never played an electric guitar. He’d never sung in a band. He’d never written a song, and he couldn’t sing, man. When he sang, it actually sounded like he got captured by Al-Qaeda. So we had to pay for vocal lessons and go buy him an electric guitar.

Pastor Tim: [The kind of worshipers that he is seeking are those that will worship in spirit and truth, and that is a thought that has changed every aspect of how I think.] When I came to Mars Hill, I had never really been in a band. I played a lot of acoustic guitar with hand drums, but I hadn’t really been in a band. I hadn’t ever really written a song, and I’d never owned an electric guitar—a lot of acoustic, a lot of flannel, a lot of sandals.

Tim and his wife moved out from Missouri to live in my basement and go work Joe jobs and give it a shot because we met him for twenty minutes at a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Pastor Tim: Because you weren’t at that conference.

Beth: No, no, it was just him.

Pastor Tim: You hadn’t met these people. You hadn’t read these things. I just came home from New Mexico from this conference and said, “Hey, what if we moved to Seattle now?”

Beth: That was a little harder sell for me. We had to pray about that for a while.

Pastor Tim: Yeah, because we didn’t know anybody here.

Beth: No, no.

Pastor Tim: So in August of 1999, we rolled into the Driscoll family’s driveway. It was the second time I’d ever seen Pastor Mark. We talked on the phone a time or two and exchanged a couple of e-mails. I think we both met Grace here in this basement while she was doing the laundry.
Beth: We had a dining table right here and some chairs, and there was a futon right here. It was a little nicer.

Pastor Tim: The bathroom was nice, right?

Beth: Oh, yeah. I’m not going to—I’m not sharing that part.

Jeff: Matt lived in the basement, and I was over there a lot, and I did silk screening. I cleaned off my screens in his shower downstairs and totally stained it. I think that was permanent. And so I wrecked his basement.

Beth: That’s the first thing I cleaned. I’ll just say that. It was okay for a period of time. We knew it wasn’t forever, so—

Pastor Tim: Years later, I would ask Mark, I asked him, “Why in the world did you do that? Because I’m pretty sure you haven’t just taken anybody else in, and I’m not sure I would exactly the same way, either.” And he said that he had a dream that God told him that I was moving here, and we were supposed to work together. I had no idea what was in store, but apparently God did.
Driscoll's history of telling guys he dreamed about them in connection to recruiting them into leadership roles at Mars Hill has been examined at moderate length elsewhere. 

Eventually the Driscolls moved out of that house and into another house, while returning the Montlake property as a rental which would house renters until the Driscolls put the house on the market some time around roughly 2009, maybe?  The house didn't ultimately sell until later.

It would require people who invested in the real estate scene in the Puget Sound area coming forward to share their stories to share more detail but it was relatively commonplace within Mars Hill for people to try a hand at the landlord thing.  Not everyone was cut out for it and even those who were cut out for it could find it was a hassle at times.  But the price of housing in Seattle has long been a point of vexation for those of us who live here. 

The gist of the housing scene as applicable to what was once Mars Hill, from my admittedly limited perspective, was that people were encouraged to invest in real estate and rent out to as many fellow church attenders and members as they could to consolidate a presence in the city.  This happened with the acquisition of church campus sites but it also happened in residential areas, though the extent to which this happened isn't something I'm in a position to really investigate.  Former MH real estate people could address that, perhaps.

Driscoll's own account was that he was able to get real estate in the city because someone was willing to give him a lease to own deal that was not a reflection of what his credit history would have warranted.  If the received narrative of the subprime borrower were applicable then Driscoll would have been one of those sorts of not-so-safe bets.  But if the counter-narrative were applied, the one that says that speculative house-flipping from the middle class did more to catalyze the housing bubble then that might be an angle for potential historians of the Mars Hill scene to explore.  Not that this seems practical at the moment since a roster of Mars Hill members over its whole life that could be cross-referenced to real estate transactions within King County and outlying counties would be ... hard to assemble. 

What was presented as creating a counter-culture within Mars Hill by leaders like Mark Driscoll or Jamie Munson--this acquiring real estate and renting to others and perhaps also flipping the real estate to turn a profit now and then--was handed down as a way to not be like the surrounding city.  Well, "maybe" that was the case in King County but it's hard not to have doubts about that.  The real estate practices of people who bought homes in the King County area during the Mars Hill era on the part of Mars Hill attenders, members and leaders may not only not have been counter-cultural, it might have turned out to be the embodiment of the zeitgeist of the time.
asf

Now is not the time for self-congratulation, now is the time to discover what repentance actually is

In the wake of Mark Driscoll's resignation Carl Trueman wrote a blog post and from that blog post this particular paragraph stood out.

http://www.mortificationofspin.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/the-secret-of-big-evangelicalism-is-the-secret-of-great-comedy#.VEcofZUtCUk
...

It is interesting that the crisis finally came only when the aesthetics flipped the other way, when Driscoll and his antics became more distasteful than the words of his critics.  It is important to notice that it was not the embrace of a Unitarian prosperity teacher and that decision's obvious doctrinal significance which brought things to a head.  Rather, it was the numerous allegations of bullying and loutish behaviour which finished him off -- things that are aesthetically displeasing in the current climate.  The whistleblowers, however, are still not regarded as vindicated, despite having spoken the truth.  I suspect they can -- pardon the pun -- whistle for an apology from the Top Men or for rehabilitation by the mainstream of YRR evangelicalism.  For they can even now still be dismissed as smug (an aesthetic word if ever there was one)  or simply forgotten because, whatever the truth they spoke, they were nonetheless engaged in the activity at a point in time when the aesthetics of the marketplace made their criticisms easy to characterize as unloving and thus distasteful. 

Maybe, if only in the sense of public rhetoric, but critics to the "left" of Driscoll and critics to the "right" of Driscoll had been steadfast, largely, in their condemnation of his views about gays and women on the one hand and his cavalier talk about charismata and continuationism as indisputably true for him but not necessarily others on the other. 

The crisis finally came when intellectual property, donor designations, and real estate acquisitions came under examination.  It wasn't until Driscoll was accused on air of being a plagiarist that the box was opened.  It wasn't until it turned out that, in addition to Mark Driscoll's books featuring citation problems (a euphemism for plagiarism for our time if there has to be one), Real Marriage was gamed a #1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list with the aid of Result Source Inc. and the Mars Hill Board of Advisors & Accountability defended the decision as "unwise" but still technically legal. 

But to the extent that Trueman's point holds (and it does, though in a limited sense) it wasn't until people got some insight into how Mark Driscoll was capable of addressing those he considered his relational or ideological adversaries or even those he considered merely obstacles that the aesthetic inversion happened.

But in a way this gets us to something else, the thing about the news coverage.
http://janetmefferdpremium.com/2014/10/16/janet-mefferd-radio-show-20141016-hr-1/
http://janetmefferdpremium.com/2014/10/16/janet-mefferd-radio-show-20141016-hr-2/

As important and needful as the contributions of Janet Mefferd and World Magazine were in highlighting the plagiarism issue and the sales rigging issue, these were pretty late developments in the history of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill as part of the public sphere.  There had been plenty of people informally discussing various issues about Driscoll and Mars Hill for years.  The blogs are not hard to find but blogs are dismissed for many reasons, foremost being that very few bloggers practice anything like journalistic ethics (setting aside for the moment questions about how many journalists may follow journalistic ethics). 

Yet it would be hard to credit the Christian press for being late to an investigative party that had been taken up by bloggers for years and the publishing industry that either overlooked or failed to observe the citation errors rampant in Driscoll books since, it turns out, the dawn of his publishing career bear blame as well as credit.  It does no good for Christian media and journalism to have highlighted the citation problems in Mark Driscoll's books if the media empire was a vital part of what made him a star to begin with.  If Driscoll sinned the Christian publishing industry must take ownership of letting those sins happen and if some Christian journalists have proven exceptions to the rule the rule does not seem changed for it. 

But the formal press could at least be said to have striven to have verified things, to have sought official documentation.  A major reason blogs could be dismissed that Trueman seems to have picked up on is that there was always the "sour grapes" ad hominem.  It was always possible to dismiss the blogs as nothing but the work of cranks and creeps. It was possible to dismiss blogs as unofficial and generally written by those envious of a ministry success, or those antagonistic toward a particular team, or for pettiness.  It could certainly be guessed that some blogs and blog readers and commenters would seize any occasion to remark on the evils of Mark Driscoll.  If he so much as farted on stage there'd be an outcry ... and outrage is probably the cheapest emotion on the internet.

Turning to a bit more troubling potential reference points, we may very well live in a culture in which the nature of victimhood has to be parsed before we accept allegations.  Many of those who were "thrown under the bus" were participants in the culture at Mars Hill that intimidated and bullied or browbeat people into conformity.  It's tempting for people to suppose, since we'd never be that way ourselves, to look askance on some critiques from some people because, well, you know, they were kind of asking for it.  They should have known what was likely to happen.

And soldiers who voluntarily enlisted circa 2001-2004 should have somehow known what was going to happen?  Something over at Slate might tangentially illuminate one of the difficulties of requiring a spotless victim.  It gets at the difference between the allegations of sexual assault leveled against Woody Allen on the one hand and Bill Cosby on the other.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/13/bill_cosby_sexual_assault_allegations_why_isn_t_anyone_paying_attention.html

When I asked Newsweek’s Baker why she felt that the victims she spoke with had been ignored, she told me: “I think it's because they were imperfect victims, as victims so often are,” Baker told me. The two women Baker interviewed were young at the time of the assaults, but over the age of 18. More importantly, “they were ambitious aspiring actresses and models who were hanging out with an older man who said he'd make them famous.” Maybe we take their age and ambition—their self-determination, really—as an excuse to withhold our support.

That ethos of supposing that someone was "asking for it" may be a bit of a problem across the board.  There may be a way to distinguish between some foolish decisions and the colloquial working definition of "asking for it", whether we're talking about those who have been raped; those who have been traumatized by participating in a military effort they volunteered for but did not fully understand; or for those who have "drunk the kool-aid".  Wenatchee The Hatchet has come to the possibly grim theory that humans are inherently drinkers of kool-aid.  It's what we do, particularly when we most protest otherwise.  Spending a decade at Mars Hill and possibly having not imbibed enough of the "beverage" to have fatally toxic effects (yet?) doesn't really entitle a person to look down on others.  A disposition of grace should not exactly be counting what this or that person "deserves" or "had coming to them", does it? 

If we're going to discuss abuse and victims with respect to Mars Hill or other settings we will have to set aside any mythology of "perfect victims", not because there aren't perfect victims of some kind, but because we should refrain from looking down on those who, though they may have been run over by the bus, took a hand in driving the bus in some way. 

Or, to be both more tangential and more direct, now is not the time to congratulate ourselves if Mark Driscoll has proven to be a quitter and has left Mars Hill Church.  "We" didn't do anything for more than a decade.  "We" tolerated Driscoll within evangelicalism because while he may have been a "jerk" he was "our" jerk.  Progressives can't really congratulate themselves either because a mountain of controversy about intellectual property and donor designation issues weren't even on their radar.  They were busy wanting to find Mark Driscoll guilty of thought crimes that are, technically, still defended by the First Amendment than by copyright infringement.  The temptation for us, irrespective of camp, to congratulate ourselves is far too high.  If there's a time to express remorse and regret that we let things get this far to begin with that's what we should do.

There are a whole lot of men in the history of Mars Hill who not only let all of these things happened they actively voted for it, and not just in 2007.  There was 2005 when that boondoggle at 50th street was bought without having done due diligence on the zoning issues.  To some degree the whole idiotic courtship fad circa 2002-2007 was a trial run.  If a church leadership culture could cultivate a culture of self-enforcing conformity on something as silly as the courtship fad then it would be a simple matter to expect that conformity for things like bylaws.  Dissenters could be shamed, attacked, dismissed, blackballed, or otherwise argued with and then it was just a matter of the social economy of scale.  As the saying goes, the frog doesn't know the water's reached the boiling point until its too late, or something like that.  We were all the frog.

Maybe not every last one of us.  It is to the credit of at least some progressives they saw in Mark Driscoll someone who was aiming to wage the same old culture war battles through slightly modified tactics.  Whereas the old Religious Right aimed for overt and directly politicized action Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill arguably developed a more guerrilla approach, cultivating individual cels of culture warriors.  If the old Religious Right could be described as like the AIM Sidewinder or Phoenix missile system, where the missile and the tracking apparatus had to be in tandem, then perhaps the post-Driscollian approach to the culture war could be likened more to the AMRAAM system. We witnessed the development, if you will, of a kind of fire-and-forget weaponry in the culture war and that may be one of the innovations of Mars Hill within the context of Puget Sound.  Jessica Johnson has described this Mars Hillian ethos as that of the "citizen soldier".  Go read the piece because it is one of the more accurate and prescient articles written on the ethos of masculinity that was cultivated in Mars Hill Wenatchee the Hatchet has read.

While Driscoll went to Gateway as a guest it is worth bearing in mind that in the end he seems to have declined to accept the restoration/disciplinary arrangement he was offered by the church he founded.  In this respect it would seem that the most striking thing about Mark Driscoll is that so long as he gets to dish out he's fine but as soon as he has to take even a thimble-full he ... leaves.  It has been this pervasive double standard in the leadership culture of Mars Hill that has been one of the most toxic parts of the culture.  Should Mark Driscoll and Sutton Turner receive any compensation on their way out at all then they will have added a special level of hypocrisy in having spoken against "consumerism" from the rank and file while taking severance packages of the sort Sutton Turner told underlings to neither ask for nor expect to receive if THEY quit.

Jesus warned that though you should do everything the Pharisees told you to do because they have Moses' seat that you should not follow their example.  After years of preaching against Pharisees and "religious people" the sobering observation for this moment is that Mark Driscoll and Sutton Turner may have revealed themselves to be Pharisees of Pharisees.

And yet for all of us who have ever called Mars Hill home ... we're the ones who put those people there.  We're responsible, all of us.  We let it happen. We didn't just let it happen, we came to an often spirited defense of those men who by now have abandoned the church called Mars Hill, whether Driscoll or others.  Sure, we can talk now about "drinking the kool-aid" or the snake oil but for those of us who bought it what were we buying? 

It's not hard to review the ways in which Mark Driscoll got sloppy as an author, lazy as a theologian, and aggressive as a self-appointed social pundit who clearly and actively sought to become a public figure.  Now he's gone outside of Washington to regale a sea of people about the jeopardy his family has been without once considering the role his willfully inflammatory persona played in inspiring less than stable people to confront him.  Driscoll used to teach that headship means it's your responsibility even if it's not your fault and clearly Driscoll no longer seems to believe that to the extant that he's willing to shift all the blame for the disturbance of his family not on his own inflammatory persona but on people who he used to say were the sorts of people who didn't get what "playing a character" was.

But "we" need to ask ourselves why it took so long for any of the controversies of the last year to emerge.  Why did the plagiarism scandal only erupt when Janet Mefferd made an on-air accusation?  Perhaps because until established Christian media ran stories it wasn't official and it wasn't "real".  Wenatchee The Hatchet presented a back to back comparison of Real Marriage to The Wounded Heart in September 2013 and broached the possibility of copyright infringement in Driscollian work as far back as July 4, 2013.  The reactions at the time ranged from yawning indifference to "so what?" a fairly narrow spectrum.  It seems many a Christian these days refuses to even grant that intellectual property exists except as a legal fiction and an immoral one at that. 

If Driscoll was selling something (and most assuredly he's selling something) what is it?  What did we buy?  The simplest answer would be he's selling "legacy". The invitation was to be part of a legacy that positively influenced the world for Jesus.  Over time this legacy began to look less and less like the work of a community united by a common Christian confession and more and more like a community whose narrative was increasingly defined by the personal narrative of Mark Driscoll, a narrative that has collapsed into incoherence when Driscoll's public account has changed basic details he'd previously been clear about.  Additionally, Driscoll has increasingly changed both the tone and substance of the narrative in the wake of a variety of controversies. 

That Driscoll was selling a legacy isn't hard to prove.  Malachi made it explicit.  The end of God's Work, Our Witness (the fundraising film) also made it explicit.

People are getting saved more than ever. Churches are getting planted more than ever. Leaders are rising up more than ever. Opportunities are surfacing more than ever. And this is the best possible time to get onboard, to pray, give, serve, because I promise you, what comes next is the kind of thing that you’re going to tell your grandkids about.

Mars Hill has had a long history of saying "It's all about Jesus" but as N. T. Wright used to put it, it matters a great deal which Jesus we're actually talking about and that, in turn, invites everyone who currently or previously called Mars Hill home "Which Jesus are we talking about?" Were we following Christ as revealed in the scriptures? (Wenatchee The Hatchet is anything but a mythicist, so there) Or were we following a Jesus who was essentially mediated by Driscoll and markulinity?  It increasingly seems the latter was the case. 

Romans: The Righteousness of God
Adolf Schlatter, Hendrickson Publisers (c) 1995
page 40

The individual is godless if he fabricates religion in his own interest, for the sake of his own happiness. God must be worshipped for the sake of God. ... Paul emphasizes the absurdity of idolatry. It is absurd to put the individual, under the law of death, in the place of God, because in doing so it is not even the human and the animal that are worshipped, but only their likeness. This likeness is no reproduction of living beings at all, it is merely able to copy the outline of the form, the lines shaping their figure.

page 43

... it is a lie arising from selfish covetousness, if the individual makes his image to be God's image and his lust to be God's will. 
The ideal of masculinity and legacy that Mark Driscoll has made the sales pitch for his public persona and ministry has turned out to be more image than reality and that this was the case was revealed at length in the 2012 book Real Marriage. It doesn't matter whether or not the Driscoll marriage is now closer to the ideal than it was in the first decade of Mars Hill, what matters was that for the season in which the Driscolls presented themselves as happily married it now seems as though that happiness was an idol and a sham.  But then for those of us who called Mars Hill the same must also be said about the many things we considered good. 

There were real, positive goods to be had, of course, but as Christians are wont to say, idols are generally good things that are valued about the one true God. It's easy to say that about other people but for those of us who can only confess by dint of the investment of our lives that we bought what Mark Driscoll was selling we need to ask ourselves what we were buying in for.  We also need to refrain from congratulating ourselves for anything at all.  Now is not the time for self-congratulation.  While it is a shame that Mark Driscoll seems too unscrupulous and cowardly to participate and has chosen to abandon the church he took so much credit in founding, the process of repenting of being part of and contributing to what Mars Hill has become has only just begun. 

And that goes for each and every one of us who has called that community home. Wenatchee's role is relatively small and insignificant, attempting to document the history here and there.  But there needs to be more "our" to "our witness".  Wenatchee is not and doesn't desire to be any kind of leader but if there's a way to lead it's by example.  As has been said before, Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't telling anyone they "have" to leave Mars Hill, just to re:consider the narrative.  That narrative may be our collective idol. If in the end the legacy of Mars Hill were to be founded on Mark's personality and was a legacy we were building to be able to tell our grandkids about then that would make the entire legacy of Mars Hill a narrative that in itself would be an idol.  Now that Driscoll has behaved like a hired hand we need to ask ourselves why, in so many ways, we paid him for so many years.  That's not an easy or pleasant question to answer but it's one we must deal with. 

Throckmorton quotes Driscoll "I made the mistake of trying to be under the authority of my elders" two types of revision in the history of MH

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/24/eldersauthority/

Warren Throckmorton recently highlighted a particularly curious interview between Grace Driscoll and Mark Driscoll recently that's worth commenting on.

There's a quote from Mark Driscoll that has to be heard and read to be fully appreciated.
Throckmorton writes:
At 5:23 into the video, Driscoll makes revealing statements about his views of his elders. These opinions give insight into the changes in governance at Mars Hill since 2007. Watch and take note between 5:23 and  7:00 minutes.

and the particular part of the quote Wenatchee finds interesting is here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9vbaq5cO20&feature=youtu.be
5:25
That's one practical thing is, I'd never been a member of a church until I started my own. So I didn't know a lot about church. But I wanted, I knew I was a big personality and pretty intense so I wanted to be under authority but I made a mistake of--how do I say this carefully?--trying to be under the authority of my elders but the truth is all my elders were new and young and green and they would want to help but they really didn't know what they were talking about.

And so what I should have had was a team of pastors outside of the church who were older and more seasoned that could, you know, help Grace and I put life together.
There's a good bit of material Wenatchee already covered about the early leadership of Mars HIll over here
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-ten-painful-lessons-from-early-days_9.html

But in light of Throckmorton's recent post a substantial amount of review seems appropriate. This was material ready for publication or already published as of last night but how about it just goes up now?

Anyway ...

A team of pastors outside of the church who were older and more seasoned?  Wasn't Driscoll saying something in the James series about a team of some kind?

http://marshill.com/media/james-jesus-s-bold-little-brother/james-1-1
Pastor Mark Driscoll
James 1:1
January 12, 2014

I’m not just in authority; I’m under authority. I have pastors do my performance review, can rebuke me, can terminate me, whatever the case may be. It’s important to know that everyone needs to be under spiritual authority, including those who are in spiritual authority.
...
When I felt called to start Mars Hill, I went and met with elders. When I felt called into ministry, I went and met with my first pastor. I said, “I think this is what God’s telling me to do.” He said, “I think that’s right, but you’re nowhere near ready. It’s going to be a really long time.” “OK, I’ve got a lot of work to do.” When I felt called to plant, I went through a full assessment. Pastors oversaw me, a team interviewed me, a church sent me, an overseer had authority over me.

So that sure sounds like a team of pastors outside of the church.

Then there's even this old reference to Antioch Bible Church. Greg Kappas, and stuff

http://web.archive.org/web/20001210191200/http://www.marshill.fm/who/our_history.htm
from Seasons of Grace
by Mark Driscoll

In the second season, Grace and I began attending Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, where we volunteered our time working with their college ministry. We then located in Seattle to be closer to students and after a few months I was brought on staff as a part-time intern to oversee the college group. I served in that position for nearly two years and learned a great deal in my first position of ministry leadership in a church. At that time I met Mike Gunn who had moved from a pastorate in Southern California to begin a ministry to athletes at the University of Washington. I also met Lief Moi, a local radio show host, who came in to teach a class for us. These two men and their wives and children became like family [WtH: but now Driscoll's recently claimed that at the start of MH there was no childrens' ministry because there weren't any kids] and together we began dreaming about the possibility of planting an urban church for an emerging postmodern generation in one of the least churched cities in the U.S. We began praying, studying the scriptures, reading a great deal on postmodernity, and dialoging together to formulate a philosophy of ministry appropriate for our context. Helping us formulate our launch plan was Dr. Greg Kappas, who graciously mentored us and provided wise insight and counsel.

 In the third season, we began a small Bible study in graciously loaned space from Emmanuel Bible Church in Seattle. The original small core of about a dozen people was a Bible study comprised largely of twenty-somethings from the college group, the Gunn and Moi families, and Chris Knutzen who had joined the Campus Crusade for Christ staff at the U.W. We began meeting weekly in an extremely hot upstairs youth room, and after a few months outgrew the space and began meeting in the sanctuary. It was during this season that the rest of our current elders - the Browns, Currahs and Schlemleins [but Mark was the only pastor on stuff, huh?] - and some singles and families joined us. It was also during this season that Pastor Ken Hutcherson and our friends at Antioch Bible Church began their generous financial support to cover my salary to ensure that I would not be a financial strain on the young church. [emphasis added]

In the fourth season, we launched the church in October 1996 at 6pm with an attendance around 200 [emphasis added], which included many friends and supporters. The attendance leveled off shortly thereafter, somewhere around 100 adults, and we continued meeting until the Christmas season.
And a third testimony by Driscoll about Antioch Bible Church

March 24, 2004
from 1 Timothy 5:17-25
http://marshill.com/media/1-timothy/1-timothy-5-17-25#transcript

When we started this church, I didn't get paid anything. First year, nothing. `Cause we had no people, we had no money. If you called the church, the church office was at my house, and I would answer the phone in my underwear and pretend like we were a high-powered organization. "Hi, thanks for calling Mars Hill." "I s Mark there?" "Yeah, let me get him." So I'd, you know, "Hi, how you doing?" I'd pretend like I had a secretary. I'd pretend like we were legit. I would, seriously. And I'm sitting there in my underwear just liek the short guy in the Wizard of Oz, just pulling the levers, maintaining the illusion of this tremendous empire. Woo hoo.

There's nothing, man. No money, no people, no nothing. The first year we put a box in the back, and I said, "Hey, if anybody feels led to give, feel free to give." Nobody apparently felt led. God didn't move in anybody's heart. The first year we brought in $90,000.oo, first year, which wasn't great.  It's a nice SUV, but it's not a great budget, and that first year I didn't have any money.  My wife was working full time. I was working full time while we were starting the church.

My wife started having major health complications from work, stress related. I told her, I said, "Honey, 1 Timothy says that, you know, I gotta make the money. If I don't provide for the needs of my family, I've denied the faith, I'm worse than an unbeliever. Quit your job. It's my responsbiility. I'll figure it out. I don't know how we're gonna pay the bills. We're not getting any money at the church."

And I was thinking about it, too. I started getting a little scared `cause I wanted to live in the city, do a church in the city, the least churched city in the country. I wanted to have a big family. I wanted to be able to pay my bills. I wanted to be able to have a nice church, and I'm going after 20-year old indie rockers that are committed to poverty and anarchy. Thinking, "This is not real liquid. This is not a brilliant business plan, really." You know, teenage kids who take scooters to church tend not to be a huge donor base, you know?

But I felt like that what's God said, "Go to Seattle and ... " You know, we lived in Seattle. I grew up in Seattle. I love this city. This is my home, so it was like I knew God told me to do that. I'm like, "Lord God, I mean, I'm cool with not eating, but I gotta get food fo rthe kids.  I gotta get shoes on the wife. What am I gonna do here?"

So I went to Antioch Bible Church and I said, "They're not, you know, we're not generating any revenue." Antioch Bible Church, where I'd been the college director for a year and a half, they gave me $30,000 the first year as my salary. Praise God, they gave me money, so that's waht we lived off.  My wife and I and my daughter Ashley, family of three, living in Wallingofrd on $30,000 a year. N omedical, no dental, no retirement, no nothing.  Had to pay all of that. And then we tithed out of that, and then we gave above and beyond that for hospirality and for wedding presents and food `cause all the Bible studies and all the meetings were in our home. So we'd feed everybody and have everbody over and do all that kind of stuff.

And so when you subtracted it all out just from the tithes, I mean, we're living off of about $24,000 that first year. And then out of that, you've gotta pay medical, dental, retirement, food, rent, car, the whole thing.  Family of three living in Wallingford, not a lot of bling. Didn't have the huge amount of extra the first couple of years.

Second year the church comes. Antioch kicks in again, gives me $30,000.00. Thid year Mars Hill still wasn't able to really cover a full salary for me, so I went out and raised some additional dollars from another church, Spanish River Church, in Boca Raton. They gave me about half of my salary.
...

So there were those people at Antioch Bible Church that gave Driscoll financial compensation during the years when Mars Hill didn't pay a salary.  The idea that there was no external accountability seems like it needs some explaining as to what that meant.

As for the "young and new and green".  Driscoll was the runt of the litter in terms of age and he'd made a point of recruiting older and more experienced men to help him co-plant Mars Hill.

But first let's revisit the later 2011 commentary Driscoll had so that it can be more clearly understood by the time we get back to Driscoll circa 2006 and 2000.

http://pastormark.tv/2011/12/06/10-painful-lessons-from-the-early-days-of-mars-hill-church
...
For the first five or six years of Mars Hill, I was the only paid pastor on staff and carried much of the ministry burden. I was doing all the premarital counseling and most of the pastoral work as the only pastor on staff. This went on for years due to pitiful giving and a ton of very rough new converts all the way until we had grown to about 800 people a Sunday. At one point I literally had over a few thousand people come in and out of my home for Bible studies, internships, counseling, and more. My phone rang off the hook, my email inbox overflowed, my energy levels and health took a nose dive, and I started becoming bitter and angry instead of loving and joyful. It got to the point where either something had to change or I was going to go ballistic and do something I really regretted.

Through much prayer and study of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit impressed upon me that I’d done a poor job of raising up leaders along with me to help care for his church. I was carrying the burden myself and was not doing a good job because it was too much. [emphasis added] I needed to transition from caring for all the people to ensuring they were all cared for by raising up elders, deacons, and church members. This spurred me to make some dramatic changes to increase membership and train leaders.

We began a process of intentionally challenging qualified men to step up as elders to lead, finding and training men and women to serve and lead as deacons, and we started a Gospel Class to clearly articulate what we believed about Jesus, the Bible, and the church to make clear what we expected from members. Our first teams were not amazing, but some of those people, through years of maturing by God’s grace, are now amazing leaders and servants.
...
Another problem that came from not having built a great team is that everyone expected me to be their pastor in a therapeutic model where we had 1-on-1 meetings every week.

Who was this "we" Driscoll was referring to?  Didn't he say earlier that he had done a poor job of raising up leaders with him?  Didn't he just say in the previous paragraph he was carrying the burden himself?  This ... within the first six years of Mars Hill?

For the sake of review:
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:03-10-27016-2

page 54

... The church started as an idea I shared with Lief Moi and Mike Gunn. Lief is a descendant of Genghis Khan and his dad was a murderer, and Mike is a former football player. They proved to be invaluable, except for the occasional moments when they would stand toe-to-toe in a leadership meeting, threatening to beat the Holy Spirit out of each other. Both men were older than I and had years of ministry experience, and they were good fathers, loving husbands, and tough.  [emphasis added]...

Has Mike Gunn had any thing to share in the last five years?

http://www.harambeechurch2.org/aboutHarambee.php

The Harambee story is a bit wrapped up in my (Mike Gunn’s) story. The vision began around 1992 as I began to feel the need to plant a church that represented the diversity of God’s creation, as well as a gospel that centered on God’s glory and not our own needs. I was prompted by the Spirit to engage the culture in a more meaningful and direct way, so God decided to send me and my family on an unknown journey to Seattle to begin a campus ministry for athletes at the University of Washington. This began to hone our skills in apologetics, evangelism, and discipleship, creating a desire to reach the next generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

At that point, Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland and Mark Driscoll entered our lives. My family began attending Antioch in January of 1994, and we started helping the college group, which was run by Mark Driscoll, at that time, a 23-year-old intern recently graduated from Washington State University. [emphasis added]. It became obvious that we had similar backgrounds and ministry callings, so we began to explore the possibilities of our vision (reaching truly postmodern, post-Christian people for Christ), and it became abundantly clear that we were to begin a new work in the city of Seattle.

With the blessing of Antioch and the exodus of about 30 of the students, Mark, Lief Moi, and I began Mars Hill Church in October of 1996. [emphasis added] We watched God work His mosaic miracle as He began to put together the matrix that became Mars Hill Church. The church grew to more than 1,200 people in five years, and because of facility limitations at the time, we were running seven services at three different locations in the Seattle area. One of these was Mars Hill South, which began as an evening service in October of 2001 with about 40 people. During that time it became evident that God was calling us to a different work, and that we needed to plant as an autonomous church. Subsequently, as of October 6, 2002, we became Harambee Church and began meeting at the Tukwila Community Center. [emphasis added]

They say you should show and not just tell, so here are screen caps of the elder listings from Mars Hill circa 1999-2001 that show Driscoll was basically the runt of the litter.

What exactly about all of that suggests that there was no team in the first six years of the history of Mars Hill? 

Let's also not forget that as older and more seasoned men in ministry available to Driscoll went there was David Nicholas, right?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/spring-2000-roll-out-of-mark.html

What about Grace's father, Gib Martin?

Oh, but in Real Marriage one of the points of resentment on Mark Driscoll's part was Grace's family so perhaps Mark Driscoll was of mixed feelings about Gib Martin's role as a pastor?

One of the things Driscoll asserted in 2011 was:

We began a process of intentionally challenging qualified men to step up as elders to lead, finding and training men and women to serve and lead as deacons, and we started a Gospel Class to clearly articulate what we believed about Jesus, the Bible, and the church to make clear what we expected from members. Our first teams were not amazing, but some of those people, through years of maturing by God’s grace, are now amazing leaders and servants.

Within the first six years of the church?  But if that's the case then Mark Driscoll playing some role in getting Paul Petry and Bent Meyer into the leadership structure of Mars Hill happened after this first-six-years period.  Again, who is this "we" if Driscoll was carrying the burden by himself? 

Moving along ... Driscoll wrote more in the piece about ten lessons from the early years:

While the sentiment of being a unified team was good, since we required a unanimous vote of the elders to do anything, the leadership team went from being accountable to being adversarial, stifling, and impossible. But, we could not move leaders on unless they chose to resign and leave. The truth is that when a church is planted, the first elder team will not be in place years later—even Jesus’ team of a mere twelve people did not hold together for a full three years, and we cannot expect to outperform his leadership. The goals of the church are not to secure power and position for leaders but rather to glorify God, reach non-Christians, and mature Christians by putting in place whoever is best suited for these tasks

This claim that a unanimous vote was required by some group keeps being asserted but evidence for the claim is rarely (if ever) produced.  As for the claim that "we could not move leaders on unless they chose to resign and leave" the testimony of Mark Driscoll himself suggests that they were letting people go.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/where-are-they-now-part-6b-mark.html
CONFESSIONS OF A REFORMISSION REV
MARK DRISCOLL
(C) 2006 BY MARK DRISCOLL
ZONDERVAN
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2

CHAPTER FIVE, 350-1,000 PEOPLEpage 135

We had to quickly reorganize all of our systems and staff.  Our administrative pastor, Eric, left, which we all recognized was God's call on him.  And our worship leader was a great guy and great musician but was unable to coordinate the multiple bands in the three locations, so we let him go. [emphasis added] This was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made because he was a very godly man who had worked very hard and would have been fine if the church had not gotten so crazy so quickly, and he and his very sweet wife were both close personal friends of mind. But I needed a worship pastor who could lead mltiple bands, coordinate multiple services in multiple locations, and train multiple worship pastors while keeping up with a church that was growing so fast that we had no idea exactly where it was going. I had no one who could possibly fill this role but felt compelled to wait until God let me know, so I just left a gaping hole in our leadership to create a crisis that would force a leader to emerge. 

 Strangely, even though Mark Driscoll spent time repeatedly telling Brad Currah he'd seen Currah leading worship at Mars Hill in a dream that was taken as a divine oracle ... Currah didn't have that role for really all that long before "we let him go". 

For as much time as Driscoll spent in a post from 2011 explaining how he was carrying the burden of Mars Hill by himself anyone who visited marshill.fm circa 1999 to 2002 might have the impression there was actually a team of people and of people that Mark Driscoll actively recruited to join him in planting Mars Hill Fellowship. 

As a postscript, for those interested in reading an examination of pre-2007 bylaws to assess whether or not complete unanimity in voting was actually necessary:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/mars-hillgovernance-that-required-more.html

There were decisions that executive elders made that had to have unanimous voting (with abstentions permitted) but the repeated claims that all MH elders all across the board had to agree on everything is simply not true. Not only was there a team but that team did not necessarily have to always agree on everything all the time at all levels for decisions to get made. 

Warren Throckmorton publishes March 2012 memo on Mars Hill in financial trouble: part 4 "What are SOME of the areas we should focus on?" projects declared unsustainable at or even before formal launch

The date of March 17, 2012 is important for an excerpted list

1. OC Church is not sustainable in its current form.
And since Mars Hill Orange County got evicted in May 2012, that turned out to be true.  It does raise some questions about what the executive elders did and didn't know about the launch site and is sustainability not just on financial grounds but on city land-use grounds.  Go here and here for some background as reported by Warren Throckmorton.

2. UWD is not sustainable in its current form.
That was two years ago, this last Sunday it was announced the campus was closing.

3. #of Blogs on Resurgence, MHC, and PastorMark.tv is not sustainable.
Why this presented a problem is slightly less easy to understand.  It might be that, as the memo later explains, this sort of activity was not mission-critical and distracted from main goals.  This was an interesting concern to express relatively soon after the launch of PastorMark.tv, which was a platform through which Driscoll at one point said he could broach social issues in a way that wasn't available to him before (the pulpit, the Midrash (versions 1 and 2, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all apparently notwithstanding ... .

4. Mars Hill Music is not sustainable as currently operating.
Now this one is particularly interesting because eventually ...
https://marshill.com/2012/05/02/were-starting-a-record-label-pastor-mark-interviews-jon-dunn

Did Mars Hill Music somehow become sustainable between March 17, 2012 and May 2, 2012?  Since less than a year after May 2, 2012 the label turned out to be a partnership with BEC Recordings/Tooth & Nail it might be that Mars Hill Music was ultimately no more successful as its own thing than Tim Smith's project Re:Sound was.

So if Mars Hill Music was considered a bit precarious in March 2012 why did Driscoll go to the trouble to pump the idea in a film a couple of months later?  What changed?  Anything?

5. ReLit is not sustainable as currently operating.
Re:Lit was described thusly in a number of books published under its imprint circa 2011 ...

Resurgence Literature (Re:Lit) is a ministry of the Resurgence.  At wwww.theResurgence.com you will find free theological resources in blog, audio, video, and print forms, alogn with information on forthcoming conferences, to help Christians contend for and contextualize Jesus' gospel. At www.ReLit.org you will also find the full lineup of Resrugence books for sale. The elders of Mars Hill Church have generously agreed to support Resurgence and the Acts 29 Church Planting Network in an effort to serve the entire church.

Resurgence became a for-profit publishing company.  Whatever wasn't sustainable about Re:Lit might have been fixed.

6. Central Ministries are not sustainable (currently being disbanded to local church).
If Central had been working on God's Work, Our Witness and architecting launching about half ad ozen campus launches or relaunches and also putting everything in place for the Real Marriage multimedia campaign then, yeah, most of that probably wasn't sustainable, per the list statement.

7. Printing and Branding of sermon series as currently practiced is not sustainable. ($100,000
for banners, signage, popups per sermon)

One can only speculate as to what this was referring to, though a guess could be the sheer number of promotional materials that were out on the town plugging for Real Marriage as at least one possibility. 

8. Producing movie sermons like God's Work Our Witness is not sustainable.

It was a fascinating if in some ways revisionist history of Mars Hill Church while it lasted.  Yet if the film was an example of something that was not sustainable there's a triple irony afoot. 

The first irony is that the film culminates in Driscoll chiding Mars Hill for how bad they were at giving.

The second irony was that the film was presented as part of a sermon series in the aftermath of Turner signing the Result Source Inc. contract and this takes fuller significance if you remember that during this period Mars Hill got itself embroiled in a snafu in which Stokes & Lawrence issued a cease-and-desist letter to a church over a trademark/logo concern. A subset of this second irony is that it would turn out that Real Marriage, in its first edition, would make use of ideas published by Dan Allender without giving Allender any credit. In spite of the fact that Grace Driscoll had publicly shared with the whole internet Allender was one of her favorite authors, no less, which made the omission of any credit to his ideas in the first edition all the more baffling.

The third irony is that in the film Mark Driscoll mentioned how he had a vision of starting a music label and a Bible college from the earliest period of Mars Hill even though in 2014 he would write a statement to  members claiming that what Mars Hill has become is "not even close" to what he envisioned at the start of the church.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-history-of-mh-attempts-at-record_87.html

If Driscoll these days can't remember that he'd been saying for years that the vision to start a church/Christian movement that would yield a seminary and a music label from the start then that's of a piece with not remembering that there were in fact children at the dawn of Mars Hill, even if he claimed from the pulpit otherwise in late 2013.

So if it was proposed that God's Work, Our Witness was the sort of thing Mars Hill couldn't afford to keep doing, well, no argument from Wenatchee the Hatchet on that point, either.  The question now would be what donations were reaped by the fundraising film in which Driscoll chastised the flock for their lack of faithful giving verses the amount of money it cost to make the film.

Christianity Today: Mark Driscoll Addresses Crude Comments Made Trolling as William Wallace II

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/august/mark-driscoll-crude-comments-william-wallace-mars-hill.html

It's a little too bad CT didn't published the letter.   Since CT linked to the post here at WtH that provided a historical background for the development of the pen name William Wallace II it's helpful to reiterate what was in the post published earlier this week.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-historical-and-social-setting-for.html

Driscoll has a lengthy history of expressing regret about the "tone" of what he says, how he has said things, and how people have reacted to things he has said.  What he has not shown much history of doing is apologizing for what he says, for the substance in his more inflammatory remarks over the last twelve years, and as noted in the post mentioned above, in 2011 Mark Driscoll responded to the 2011 Facebook scuffle in which he was criticized for inviting readers to share stories of effeminate anatomically male worship leaders by doing two things: 1) stating that the issue under a lot of issues was the debate about whether gender was a social construct or a God-given identity.  2) that his executive pastors wanted him to address real issues in a real way with real substance and this was a transition into not apologizing for anything he'd said on Facebook as such but a promotion of both the forthcoming book Real Marriage and what turned out to be Pastor Mark TV.

If Driscoll is willing to express regret in a way that is conveyed to Christianity Today about William Wallace II perhaps Driscoll would be willing to address the number of books in which he used the works of others without citation; or perhaps the times where he presented inaccurate claims about historic Christian doctrine and figures; or perhaps could finally address that Joyful Exiles exists. 

If Driscoll is sorry about his writings as William Wallace II that's easy enough to understand.  The cumulative case in the posts this week is that if you read past the tone and look at the substance of what he's had to say about men and women and sex and sexuality over the last twelve to fourteen years the substance of what he wrote in the thread "Using your penis" still has a significant degree of thematic continuity with the chapter "Can We ____?" from the 2012 book Real Marriage. If anything from 1998 to 2008 Mark Driscoll escalated his propensity to dismiss allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs by Christian thinkers with gay panic jokes compared to his late 1990s series "Sacred Romance". 

Back in 2012 when Driscoll discussed ways of interpreting the book of Esther he mentioned that one option is to interpret the book as being about Esther being godly from start to finish.  This is a straw man formulation of the idea that Esther, though flawed, was still potentially a righteous person.  Christians would keep saying David was a man after man's own heart in spite of everything actually in the books of Samuel and Kings and if one were to propose that the David who emerges in the Psalms seems like a narcissistic whiner people will throw down the kid gloves and fight.

But what did Driscoll say about his simplified option 1 for interpreting Esther?
http://marshill.com/media/esther/jesus-is-a-better-savior#transcript

Well, then that’s a worthless Book. If the story is, “God loves and uses good people and he doesn’t love and use bad people,” that’s a worthless Book. If that’s the story, that I have to be my own savior, I have to be my own hero, I’ve got to straighten out all that I made crooked. Or worse yet, if you’ve made it crooked, it can’t be straightened out at all, because you’re a bad person and God doesn’t love bad people, and you’ve done bad things and God doesn’t use people who’ve done bad things.

This is something Wenatchee The Hatchet has addressed in the past but it is worth revisiting.  The problem in the excerpt quoted above is in the series of rhetorical moves Mark Driscoll made with respect to the biblical text of Esther itself by of commenting broadly on the way some interpret it.  He sets up a straw man form of the proposal that Esther could be seen as a primarily heroic figure in spite of her flaws and the next move is more troubling, "Well, then that's a worthless book."  What Driscoll has done here is say that "if" someone interprets Esther as a narrative in which a heroic figure serves God and God's people then the book itself is worthless. 

Given all those years in which Mark Driscoll enjoined everyone to place themselves UNDER Scripture here is a slippery slope that no pastor should ever introduce into the pulpit, the proposal that if one has a view of the scriptures you find problematic that you declare the book itself becomes "worthless".  When a pastor is willing to say that if you endorse a view about a biblical text he finds untenable that the biblical text itself is rendered worthless the gravity of that rhetorical ploy on the part of a man professing to be a pastor and making this move from the pulpit is a bit more than Wenatchee The Hatchet can find the right words for.  It's one thing to suggest that an interpretive approach makes light of certain themes in a text (someone could suggest, as has been done recently that N. T. Wright has made the mistake of making the subsidiary theme in Paul the primary theme while downplaying Paul's primary literary theme) without disparaging the text itself if the other view holds true.  Driscoll would never make the rhetorical move of saying that the Pauline epistles are completely worthless of New Perspective ideas are true, would he?  Even if they were somehow "true" Driscoll wouldn't stop appreciating that the Pauline epistles are in the Bible. 

If Driscoll states that he has grown and changed not all of that growth and change may necessarily be positive.  Back in 2004 he warned members of the God Box and the dynamics of remote denominational executive fiat. By 2014 Mars Hill has reached a point where the local campus pastors are not capable of making decisions about real estate.  This was evinced years ago when Mars Hill executive leadership announced the closing of the Lake City campus.   In 2009 he said he didn't start a side company to manage book royalties and in 2011 he set one up.  What the publication of Real Marriage in 2012 revealed was that in spite of years and years of publicly sharing how much he loved his wife and how good things were this turned out to be, well, not entirely true.  The problematic trajectory Mars Hill has taken and that Mark Driscoll in particular has moved in is a direction in which the things he warned members against from the pulpit a decade ago have become the things that executive leadership at Mars Hill has been doing for a few years now. 

The culmination of many of these turnarounds could be found in Real Marriage.  This was the pivotal point at which Driscoll was not preaching through a book of the Bible, nor was he preaching through a topical series of doctrinal ideas or theological questions.  Instead Real Marriage constituted a series built around a book written by Mark and Grace Driscoll which now turns out to have featured content taken from the works of others without adequate citation and which was bought a place on the NYT bestseller list and this last point was admitted to by none other than the BOAA itself.  The Mark Driscoll circa 2000-2004 may be a source of embarrassment to Mark Driscoll circa 2014 but that Mark Driscoll of late has done things and said things that the Mark Driscoll of 2000-2004 warned us were characteristic of out-of-touch denominational systems and problematic pastors might just be something Mark Driscoll and the other leaders at Mars Hill may need to be reminded of. 

And, as we've noted here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, however sorry Mark Driscoll may be about his tone the substance of his ideas have not necessarily changed.  Mars Hill purging a decade worth of Driscoll's sermons and scrubbing away materials a week or so after it has been quoted at Wenatchee the Hatchet is not the most encouraging sign that Mars Hill leadership is listening or open to a public presentation of ways they have changed that run counter to the early ideals of the community. 

What is most striking about the narrative of the Driscoll marriage in Real Marriage is that during the William Wallace II days this was apparently a bitter and depressive period for the Driscolls in which Mark Driscoll might write "using your penis" under the pen name William Wallace II while the private reality was that he wasn't having as much sex or sex that was good as he wanted and he was bitter about this.  The bloggers and authors who have zeroed in just on "Pussified Nation" without grasping its historic context are going to be missing the significance of the thread and related content.  It is not possible or wise to separate the writings of William Wallace II from the Mark Driscoll who recounted in Real Marriage that in the earlier years of the church he did counseling with young couples and sexually ravenous single women just made him resent his wife a bit more.  (discussed on pages 14 and 15 of the 2012 book, and seems to refer to around the year 1998, a couple of years before "Pussified Nation"). At no point did Mark Driscoll seem to have any epiphany that if he was tending toward viewing sex as a god that he might not have ever been in the best position to rebuke other men in the church for having similar problems. 

What is most striking and least-discussed about the William Wallace II period in this week's journalism and blogging so far is to ask when or how soon or if Mark Driscoll's elders or pastors knew he was writing under this pen name and if they approved.  It is not clear whether or not Mark Driscoll did what he did as William Wallace II with the knowledge and approval of the other elders at the church that was Mars Hill or not.  To go by the stories shared in the 2011 film God's Work, Our Witness a viewer might get the impression that whatever Mark Driscoll's public remorse now in the production of the 2011 film everyone seemed eager to praise Driscoll for how he conducted himself in the period in which he was writing as William Wallace II and even Driscoll himself has not just said he cussed and yelled a lot but that God drew a straight line with a crooked stick and, particularly in the 2011 film, members and staff praised Mark Driscoll for what he did. 

If Mark Driscoll really regretted everything about that time how did that narrative element get into the 2011 film when he could have and should have rejected that entire episode as inappropriate to God's Work, Our Witness?  Driscoll said he sinned and cussed a lot during his William  Wallace II days but go back and read that account again and you may find that the predominant tone and theme in that section is Mark Driscoll talking about how the men were really getting out of hand and he was frustrated at them, took up the pen name William Wallace II along the way, and that in the end the "life change was unreal".  In other words, if there's nothing about the substance of what he said and did in that period of Mark Driscoll's life why would he ascribe the results of what he did to divine providence at any level?  Why not say, rather, that there was nothing good whatever that came from that period of his ministry when he wrote about it in 2006 or talked about it in the 2011 film? 

As discussed earlier this week, Mark Driscoll looked back on the Dead Men days in the following way in 2011.

There were maybe 100 to 120 guys at that time. Probably the average age was maybe early twenties, twenty years old. You’re talking college guys. But a lot of those guys, to this very day, they did it, man. They’re running companies. They’re deacons, elders. They’re starting churches. They’ve gotten married. They’re having kids. Their lives are changed and they are still, you know, hands up, chin down, feet forward, getting it done. And it’s just really cool what God did in this place.

Think about that for a moment "And it's just really cool what God did in this place."  Mark Driscoll has credited God with doing things through him in his William Wallace II/Dead Men stage in print and in film.  If Mark Driscoll has changed and has stopped embracing the ideas he presented as William Wallace II then the contrast between the tone and substance of "Using your Penis" and "Can We _____?" should be considerable.  Is it?

on ten painful lessons from the early days of Mars Hill, lesson 1- Driscoll said "I was doing all of the premarital counseling" so what were Mike Gunn and Bent Meyer doing being publicly listed as handling that task?

http://pastormark.tv/2011/12/06/10-painful-lessons-from-the-early-days-of-mars-hill-church

... For the first five or six years of Mars Hill, I was the only paid pastor on staff and carried much of the ministry burden. I was doing all the premarital counseling and most of the pastoral work as the only pastor on staff. [emphasis added] This went on for years due to pitiful giving and a ton of very rough new converts all the way until we had grown to about 800 people a Sunday. At one point I literally had over a few thousand people come in and out of my home for Bible studies, internships, counseling, and more. My phone rang off the hook, my email inbox overflowed, my energy levels and health took a nose dive, and I started becoming bitter and angry instead of loving and joyful. It got to the point where either something had to change or I was going to go ballistic and do something I really regretted.

Well, the unfortunate thing is that it's one thing for Mark Driscoll to simply assert that he did all the premarital counseling and another thing to just go back to the old marshill.fm site to found out who was publicly listed as actually doing that.  Because ... it sure looks like Mike Gunn's name is listed with those ministry activities, doesn't it?

http://web.archive.org/web/20010305224522/http://www.marshill.fm/who/ministries_in_mh.htm

So if Mark Driscoll's 2011 account had it that he was doing all the premarital counseling what's the deal with the December 10, 2000 screen capture on The WayBack Machine revealing that Mike Gunn was the contact person for premarital counseling and counseling? 

In fact Mike Gunn was listed at marshill.fm as handling premarital counseling and counseling at every capture point right up until ...

 ... December 22, 2001 and who, pray tell, ended up being publicly listed as handling premarital counseling and counseling? 

Oh, wow, would you look at that?  Bent Meyer.  So let's see, by December 2000 Mike Gunn was publicly listed as the elder at Mars Hill Fellowship handling premarital counseling and counseling and this stayed steady, at least according to screen captures from The WayBack Machine, until December 22, 2001 when Bent Meyer began to be listed as handling those ministries within Mars Hill Fellowship.  So how on earth could Mark Driscoll have somehow been the only elder in any capacity shouldering the great and difficult burden of premarital counseling at Mars Hill Church? 

For sake of review let's revisit what Mark Driscoll shared about the appointment of Bent Meyer to pastoral counseling from Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
copyright 2006 by Mark DriscollISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-2-7016-2
page 151

To make these transitions, I needed to hand much of my work load to my elders and deacons so that I could continue to concentrate on the future of expansion of our church.  In some ways I longed for this day because it meant the weight of the church would be off my shoulders and shared with many leaders. In other ways I lamented not being able to invest in every young couple, experience the joy of officiating at so many weddings, or know everything that was going on in the church.

I asked our newest and oldest elder, Bent, to take over the counseling load that I had been carrying. [emphasis added] He was the first person to join our church who had gray hair, and he and Filipino wife, Joanne, were like rock stars with groupies since all the young people wanted to hang out with these grandparents that loved Jesus. My problem was I loved our people so much that if I got deeply involved in the pain of too many people's lives, it emotionally killed me, and I needed to do less counseling.

But ... wait a minute ... in terms of publicly listed roles Mike Gunn was listed as doing premarital counseling and other counseling.  So was Bent Meyer taking over Mark Driscoll's role?  Perhaps but by this time Mike Gunn had transitioned out to launch Harambee as a separate entity and Mike Gunn was publicly listed as handling premarital counseling, not Mark Driscoll.  So whose workload in premarital counseling was Bent Meyer taking over, after all? 

Now, of course, it's possible Mark Driscoll may have done "all" the premarital counseling prior to some point in 2000 when Mike Gunn began to be publicly listed as handling that ... and maybe it's possible that even though Mike Gunn was publicly listed as handling premarital counseling for Mars Hill right up to the point that Bent Meyer got listed publicly as handling that instead that maybe, just maybe, Mark Driscoll wouldn't let them do any of that so that he could counsel couples considering marriage.

But by Mark Driscoll's account in 2012's Real Marriage ...

REAL MARRIAGE: The Truth About Sex, Friendship & Life Together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
isbn 978-1-4041-8352-0
isbn 978-1-4002-0383-3

from pages 14-15
In the second year of the church we had a lot of single people getting married, and so I decided to preach through the Song of Songs on the joys of marital intimacy and sex. The church grew quickly, lots of people got married, many women became pregnant, and my counseling load exploded. [emphasis added] I started spending dozens of hours every week dealing with every kind of sexual issue imaginable. It seemed as if every other young woman in our church had been sexually assaulted in some fashion, every guy was ensnared by porn, and every married and premarital couple had a long list of tricky sex questions. Day after day, for what became years, I spent hours meeting with people untangling the sexual knots in their lives, reading every book and section of the Bible I could find that related to their needs.

Although I loved our people and my wife, this only added to my bitterness.  I had a church filled with single young women who were asking me how they could stop being sexually ravenous and wait for a Christian husband; then I'd go home to a wife whom I was not sexually enjoying. [emphasis added] One particularly low moment occurred when a newly saved married couple came in to meet with me. I prayed, and then asked how I could serve them. She took charge of the meeting, explained how she really liked her body and sex, and proceeded to take out a list of questions she had about what was acceptable as a Christian for her to do with her husband. It was a very long and very detailed list. As I answered each question, she would ask related follow-up questions with more specific details. Her husband said very little, but sat next to her, looking awkward and smiling at most of the answers I gave.  After they left the counseling appointment to get to work on the list of acceptable activities, I remember sitting with my head in my hands, just moaning and asking God, "Do you really expect me to do this as a new Christian, without a mentor or pastor, in the midst of my marriage, and hold on for the next fifty years?" Peter walking on water seemed an easier task.

So by his own account Driscoll decided, in spite of his own bitterness and resentment toward his own wife on the subject of sex, to make a point of preaching through Song of Songs.  And the church grew quickly because of that?  What a surprise. 

Then, Driscoll told us, his counseling load exploded and lots of people were consulting Mark Driscoll on the subject of sex and the result of that was he resented his wife on the subject of sex even more and became even more bitter than he already was about how frigid he considered his wife to be.  Mark Driscoll even regaled the reader who took up Real Marriage with how he protested to God about how tough it was to be bitter at his frigid wife while being asked questions by fellow youngsters on the subject of sex after he'd spent a few months preaching through Song of Songs. 

So if doing all the premarital counseling (assuming he even really did all of it) just made Mark Driscoll more bitter toward his wife why even ask God if God wanted Mark Driscoll to sit in an office and listen to young sexually ravenous women share stories about how they wished they could just stop being sexually ravenous and wait for a good husband.  There were, as we've amply demonstrated, other older men who had ministry roles inside Mars Hill.  And "maybe" Mark Driscoll handed off counseling duties to those men at some point but the narrative in Real Marriage conveys that Mark kept getting more resentful on the issue of sex and not less.  And apparently this despite, by his 2006 account, of having handed of counseling duties to Bent Meyer, who was brought on some time around ... 2002? 

But here's the thing, whether it's the 2011 Mark Driscoll account about how he did all the premarital counseling or the 2012 Mark Driscoll account about how frustrating it was to preach Song of Songs and then find out all these youngsters about his age wanted his opinion, as a pastor, on all those "Can We ______?" things; it's not as though Driscoll "had" to do any of this stuff.  Driscoll didn't have to agree to any premarital counseling in any pastoral capacity that might lead him to resent his wife more than he already did on the subject of sex.  In Mark Driscoll's narrative who seems to be responsible for Mark Driscoll preaching Song of Songs and then having to deal with the counseling fall-out of a bunch of new Christian converts who don't know anything about the biblical literature Driscoll preached from and more or less transformed into a sexual pyrotechnics manual in the midst of resenting his frigid wife .... ?  The answer does not appear to be "Mark Driscoll" ... but God. 

And as we've shown from about half a year's worth of screen captures from the marshill.fm site courtesy of The WayBack Machine (because robots.txt wasn't applied very thoroughly, Mars Hill, just so you know) there's plenty of evidence that Mark Driscoll simply wasn't the only person who did premarital counseling in the first five or six years of the church.  There's no way you don't hit the year 2000 within five years after a church started in 1996. 

Maybe Driscoll stopped doing any premarital counseling by about 1999 or even mid-2000, but at this point the main observation is this--

The idea that Mark Driscoll was the "only" person doing "all" premarital counseling at Mars Hill within its first five to six years of existence is impossible to defend because within the year 2001 Mike Gunn and Bent Meyer were publicly listed as doing both premarital counseling and other counseling.  So unless Mark Driscoll meant "all" in some Calvinist fashion in which "all" doesn't literally mean all because of some limitation ... he can't have been doing all the premarital counseling in the first five to six years of Mars Hill.