http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/11/05/mars-hill-fallout-corban-university-looking-for-new-location-to-provide-education-in-seattle/
Well, third time's a charm for dying a miserable and humiliating death when it comes to Mars Hill getting a school off the ground, even in the case of a partnership. Capstone had three academic years mapped out but fizzled, possibly because once Mars Hill discovered its 50th street building was a boondoggle with respect to Driscoll's vision-casting in his 2006 book the school wasn't a priority any longer. So Capstone died without even a whimper and around 2009 Driscoll announced that Mars Hill Global was part of a big fundraising push to get the Resurgence Training Center up and running.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
And Resurgence Training Center had all of one academic year that may or may not have lasted two calendar years and then it, too, withered on the vine. So Mars Hill Schools was the third attempt to start a bible college/seminary on the part of Mars Hill.
And now it's dead, too. Corban is looking for an alternate location.
It can't be said too many times that Driscoll had always envisioned the movement he was starting up to start a school and a record label alongside planting churches.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-history-of-mh-attempts-at-record_87.html
And the evidence of its history shows that Mars Hill kept committing to starting a school even though at best it was a nascent denomination that had neither the financial nor infrastructural soundness to be undertaking such a project within the founding generation. Driscoll and company apparently were determined that Mark Driscoll be able to see this stuff in his own lifetime. Whereas David did not build the temple in his lifetime and left the foundational materials to his son, Driscoll seemed to want to be able to see everything for his envisioned legacy come together for him within his own lifetime. Because, maybe, Mark Driscoll never took to heart the part in Hebrews 11 that said the heroes of the faith died having not seen what was promised ... .
And so now the odds of Mark Driscoll being part of a movement that founds an evangelical seminary in the Pacific Northwest seems even more remote in the wake of the plagiarism controversy, the Result Source controversy, his own resignation from the church he co-founded and the dissolution of the corporation known as Mars Hill Church.
Showing posts with label a history of schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a history of schools. Show all posts
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Thursday, June 19, 2014
end of fiscal year approaching for Mars Hill, probably nothing to be particularly concerned about
Warren Throckmorton has recently posted an email that is said to be making the rounds. Quoting just some of the message attributed to Sutton Turner ... :
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/06/18/mars-hill-solicitation-signs-of-struggle-or-just-a-normal-emergency/
,,, From 2007 to 2011, I was a podcaster like many of you. My family and I would download Pastor Mark's sermons weekly and Jesus used them to grow our family in godliness. As I think back, I don't know if I ever received a communication from Mars Hill asking me to financially give back to the church that blessed my family and me week in and week out. That's why I'm writing this quick email. The financial picture of Mars Hill for the rest of the year depends largely on how we finish this year. Right now we're making plan as for what we can do -- and what we can't do -- next year.
Thankfully you and I believe in a God who is in control of everything. But you and I still have a role to play. In the near future I'll be asking if you can make a special gift to Mars Hill to help the church end the fiscal year strong.
Your gift to Mars Hill means that Pastor Mark's sermons are recorded and streamed for free, to anyone in the world who wants to learn more about Jesus and love more like Jesus loves. ...
It's not as though Mars Hill never solicited micro-gifts from online podcast listeners but it would make sense why Turner might never have been contacted given that he wasn't necessarily staying in the US at the time MHC was soliciting gifts.
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 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
So Mars Hill has solicited donations from their online audiences over the years. And why not? Turner just may never have been on the list.
Although Throckmorton and others have wondered if MHC is not doing well financially the numbers reported in the last two fiscal years suggest that while the number of people who give nothing is potentially the highest it has been since the earliest days of Mars Hill the number of high end and mid-tier donors giving has increased and the revenue seems to have gone up. Unless something truly catastrophic has happened (and to go by the public statements and activities of Mars Hill the lead pastor Mark Driscoll being shown to have plagiarized in at least seven of his published books and had one of those books bought a place on the NYT bestseller list apparently doesn't count as catastrophic) Mars Hill probably doesn't really want for money.
While Munson was formally president he publicly endorsed the idea of growing even when it's not necessarily a good idea but Turner seems to be more fiscally restrained. Or at least that's been suggested out and about and it seems probable.
Although by June 2012 Driscoll announced that MHC had run into another difficult season and that a lot of people had to be laid off because of shortcomings in the financial model, these things were said to be fixed by switching from an annual budget to a weekly budget.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The cycle of falling short by at least a little here and there sort of continued, though.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mark-driscoll-appeals-to-mars-hill.html
Then again, falling short of budget and laying a few people off became normal enough around Ballard that it's hard to describe that as anything close to emergency mode, though some bloggers and commenters might be tempted to see things that way.
But then it could be that in 2012 when there was a lean season there were different kinds of expenses. It may have been FY2012 was when MHC entered an agreement with Result Source to buy a place for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list. There was also a brief, tossed off comment from Driscoll about something else that had happened, apparently some time in 2012.
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me
After Easter, We’ll launch a new sermon series called the Seven, looking at Revelation 1–3 and the seven churches to which John writes in those chapters. Most of the series was filmed live on location in Turkey—and it’s epic. We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day.
So how much did it cost to rent the city of Ephesus for a day? Between buying a spot for Real Marriage on the NYT best seller list and renting the city of Ephesus for a day for some epic film-making what did that cost? Those may be the kinds of expenses that have been dialed back by a new and more fiscally cautious Mars Hill, perhaps?
Back then Driscoll was sharing how MH had historically stunk at giving. But that seems a bit unfair. The church could, on the spur of the moment, donate about eleven tons of food to a regional food pantry when asked. The change in policy that was set up in 2012 would eventually get described by Mark Driscoll as Mars Hill avoiding its own fiscal cliff. Curiously, about a month later Driscoll was apparently sharing with Mars Hill this idea that "we're not a wealthy church" as though 30+ million dollars was poor. Compared to an oil company, sure, but how many not-wealthy churches have even one Red camera, let alone have a pastor sharing in a tossed off line how they even rented the city of Ephesus for a day. It's not that they can't spend money on stuff like that, of course, it's that spending money on renting cities overseas while legal officers and pastors hemorrhage out of the leadership culture might send mixed signals. The first half of 2012 was also when the Driscolls moved out of the city of Seattle and out of King County into a million-dollar home in Snohomish county. Whatever tight season was afoot at Mars Hill in the first half of 2012 that lean season did not necessarily apply to the Driscolls. And if it had turned out that Real Marriage didn't have any plagiarism in it and if its spot at the top of the NYT bestseller list hadn't been bought then congratulations on an honest success would be in order, truly. Unfortunately ... well ...
Anyway, by June 2012 Driscoll had shared how things were changing and by the end of FY2013 it was another "best year ever" but this time it was Sutton Turner rather than Mark Driscoll sharing the news that:
We’re in the best financial health in the history of Mars Hill Church, with ample finance staff, policies, and contingency to ensure good stewardship.
So the idea that now, of all times, Mars Hill might in any way be short on funds seems improbable, unless something really terrible has transpired in the last year but to go by Mars Hill's public statements and activity there's not much sign that anything bad in the way of finances would even be reasonable to infer. You don't hire a capital development manager if you 1) think there's no money out there and 2) you think you can't possibly get some of it. Sure, the International Paper Building didn't turn out to be quite as God's will as originally advertised by Thomas Hurst but maybe the elders of Mars Hill just misheard what Jesus was allegedly telling them.
Mars Hill is probably doing fine, based on what they've shared publicly. IF there is any concern about money being in short supply this would more likely be because of the massive capital expansion projects of finding a new corporate headquarters home in Bellevue and taking a second-or-third shot at starting a school that would necessitate more funds. Considering the whimper with which the Resurgence Training Center seems to have ended after no more than a sort of two year academic year it remains to be seen whether investing in Mars Hill Schools as either a student or as an investor is necessarily a great move. A school started with some association with his church planting community was something Driscoll envisioned back in the earlier days of the church.
The mere possibility that in the earliest days of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll DIDN'T have a vision of starting a Bible college or seminary of some kind is so easily contested by so many years of public testimony from Driscoll himself that it was the subject of a blog post.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
But then these days a majority of Driscoll preaching and teaching is actually no longer available at the Mars Hill website. So if you're giving to the cause there's possibly half or more of the formerly available materials that are no longer available.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html
For that matter, Driscoll's relatively recent attempt to cast himself as being a fatherly type doesn't quite account for how recently he's leaned on anger as part of his homiletic style. It's not as though proposing that most people don't even do anything until they get ticked off wasn't part of the roll out for A Call to Resurgence. 2009's "How dare you!?" wasn't really that long ago. That was back when Driscoll was sharing publicly from the pulpit that he didn't have a side company for book royalties and wouldn't have one. Then in 2011 that changed. Driscoll's never been a stranger to controversy but in the last year at least some of the controversy has touched upon the fact that if you just look at what he publicly said about pastors and publishing and God boxes then and compared all of that to how he has spoken and written and behaved in the now that the 2014 Mark Driscoll can come across as though he's the kind of person 2004 Mark Driscoll warned everyone at Mars Hill Fellowship to be wary of.
But so far all of that does not suggest that people aren't giving faithfully to the mission of Mars Hill Church or that there's any reason the financial situation in FY2014 should prove to be poorer than previous fiscal years. Of course ... it's conceivable that maybe behind the scenes there are significant concerns but let's just assume for the sake of discussion that that would actually come to light in some documentable form. The average attendance DID go down from FY2012 to FY2013 and more and more people in the last few years who have called MH home aren't giving anything at all ... but it's tough to infer from that a real financial crisis because it's common for a minority of hugely dedicated people to keep an organization like MH fiscally floating.
To date there have been grand visions of starting a music label that sort of turned into a partnership with Tooth & Nail. There have been grand visions of a Resurgence Training Center that's turned into Mars Hill Schools, a partnership with Western Seminary and Corban University. And along the way there was sort of a good-for-Bellevue thing. So far Mars Hill has a track record of trying to build something in Mark's vision-casting plan from the early years from scratch that seems to fizzle and fade to then later get replaced by Mars Hill partnering with or somewhat assimilating an already functioning iteration of the basic concept a year or two or three later. After all ... it's not like re:sound is easy to spot these days. And the Capstone Institute ... it sort of doesn't exist any longer, either. Not that music labels and Bible schools are bad ideas, just that Mars Hill has been trying to get these two particular elements of Driscoll's early vision-casting plan off the ground off and on for at least a decade, give or take a particular project. Arguably Mars Hill is too young a religious movement to really have the infrastructural competence and capital to pull these things off in the homegrown/home-brewed DIY fashion so assimilating the moderate successes of others may be the most reasonable approach for them. And it's not like the Pacific Northwest has been famous for a distinctly evangelical seminary so that's actually, to a fellow evangelical, a theoretically very laudable goal.
It's just that after seven books have been shown to have citation errors and a number of egregious factual errors ... Driscoll and Mars Hill have not quite shown themselves the ideal peeps to be spearheading these projects on behalf of evangelicalism in the Pacific Northwest ... strictly in the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet.
But ... if a person is going to give to the cause then finding out how much it actually cost to rent the city of Ephesus might be interesting. MHC has said that the Result Source contract cost significantly less than the $210,000 reported by World Magazine but has yet to provide the evidence for why this would be the case and what the real number would be. As the vision of global expansion and funding for that expansion continues the numbers get bigger along with the ambitions. That's not necessarily a bad thing ... but it's worth thinking about how many iterations of the record label and Bible college have been cast off and forgotten about as if they never existed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll seem to have gone through in the last ten years before cutting a check for yet another attempt at something that has been aimed for since the earliest days of Mars Hill Fellowship. Maybe the third or fourth time will be the charm, though. Who knows?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/06/18/mars-hill-solicitation-signs-of-struggle-or-just-a-normal-emergency/
,,, From 2007 to 2011, I was a podcaster like many of you. My family and I would download Pastor Mark's sermons weekly and Jesus used them to grow our family in godliness. As I think back, I don't know if I ever received a communication from Mars Hill asking me to financially give back to the church that blessed my family and me week in and week out. That's why I'm writing this quick email. The financial picture of Mars Hill for the rest of the year depends largely on how we finish this year. Right now we're making plan as for what we can do -- and what we can't do -- next year.
Thankfully you and I believe in a God who is in control of everything. But you and I still have a role to play. In the near future I'll be asking if you can make a special gift to Mars Hill to help the church end the fiscal year strong.
Your gift to Mars Hill means that Pastor Mark's sermons are recorded and streamed for free, to anyone in the world who wants to learn more about Jesus and love more like Jesus loves. ...
It's not as though Mars Hill never solicited micro-gifts from online podcast listeners but it would make sense why Turner might never have been contacted given that he wasn't necessarily staying in the US at the time MHC was soliciting gifts.
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 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
So Mars Hill has solicited donations from their online audiences over the years. And why not? Turner just may never have been on the list.
Although Throckmorton and others have wondered if MHC is not doing well financially the numbers reported in the last two fiscal years suggest that while the number of people who give nothing is potentially the highest it has been since the earliest days of Mars Hill the number of high end and mid-tier donors giving has increased and the revenue seems to have gone up. Unless something truly catastrophic has happened (and to go by the public statements and activities of Mars Hill the lead pastor Mark Driscoll being shown to have plagiarized in at least seven of his published books and had one of those books bought a place on the NYT bestseller list apparently doesn't count as catastrophic) Mars Hill probably doesn't really want for money.
While Munson was formally president he publicly endorsed the idea of growing even when it's not necessarily a good idea but Turner seems to be more fiscally restrained. Or at least that's been suggested out and about and it seems probable.
Although by June 2012 Driscoll announced that MHC had run into another difficult season and that a lot of people had to be laid off because of shortcomings in the financial model, these things were said to be fixed by switching from an annual budget to a weekly budget.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The cycle of falling short by at least a little here and there sort of continued, though.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mark-driscoll-appeals-to-mars-hill.html
Then again, falling short of budget and laying a few people off became normal enough around Ballard that it's hard to describe that as anything close to emergency mode, though some bloggers and commenters might be tempted to see things that way.
But then it could be that in 2012 when there was a lean season there were different kinds of expenses. It may have been FY2012 was when MHC entered an agreement with Result Source to buy a place for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list. There was also a brief, tossed off comment from Driscoll about something else that had happened, apparently some time in 2012.
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me
After Easter, We’ll launch a new sermon series called the Seven, looking at Revelation 1–3 and the seven churches to which John writes in those chapters. Most of the series was filmed live on location in Turkey—and it’s epic. We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day.
So how much did it cost to rent the city of Ephesus for a day? Between buying a spot for Real Marriage on the NYT best seller list and renting the city of Ephesus for a day for some epic film-making what did that cost? Those may be the kinds of expenses that have been dialed back by a new and more fiscally cautious Mars Hill, perhaps?
Back then Driscoll was sharing how MH had historically stunk at giving. But that seems a bit unfair. The church could, on the spur of the moment, donate about eleven tons of food to a regional food pantry when asked. The change in policy that was set up in 2012 would eventually get described by Mark Driscoll as Mars Hill avoiding its own fiscal cliff. Curiously, about a month later Driscoll was apparently sharing with Mars Hill this idea that "we're not a wealthy church" as though 30+ million dollars was poor. Compared to an oil company, sure, but how many not-wealthy churches have even one Red camera, let alone have a pastor sharing in a tossed off line how they even rented the city of Ephesus for a day. It's not that they can't spend money on stuff like that, of course, it's that spending money on renting cities overseas while legal officers and pastors hemorrhage out of the leadership culture might send mixed signals. The first half of 2012 was also when the Driscolls moved out of the city of Seattle and out of King County into a million-dollar home in Snohomish county. Whatever tight season was afoot at Mars Hill in the first half of 2012 that lean season did not necessarily apply to the Driscolls. And if it had turned out that Real Marriage didn't have any plagiarism in it and if its spot at the top of the NYT bestseller list hadn't been bought then congratulations on an honest success would be in order, truly. Unfortunately ... well ...
Anyway, by June 2012 Driscoll had shared how things were changing and by the end of FY2013 it was another "best year ever" but this time it was Sutton Turner rather than Mark Driscoll sharing the news that:
We’re in the best financial health in the history of Mars Hill Church, with ample finance staff, policies, and contingency to ensure good stewardship.
So the idea that now, of all times, Mars Hill might in any way be short on funds seems improbable, unless something really terrible has transpired in the last year but to go by Mars Hill's public statements and activity there's not much sign that anything bad in the way of finances would even be reasonable to infer. You don't hire a capital development manager if you 1) think there's no money out there and 2) you think you can't possibly get some of it. Sure, the International Paper Building didn't turn out to be quite as God's will as originally advertised by Thomas Hurst but maybe the elders of Mars Hill just misheard what Jesus was allegedly telling them.
Mars Hill is probably doing fine, based on what they've shared publicly. IF there is any concern about money being in short supply this would more likely be because of the massive capital expansion projects of finding a new corporate headquarters home in Bellevue and taking a second-or-third shot at starting a school that would necessitate more funds. Considering the whimper with which the Resurgence Training Center seems to have ended after no more than a sort of two year academic year it remains to be seen whether investing in Mars Hill Schools as either a student or as an investor is necessarily a great move. A school started with some association with his church planting community was something Driscoll envisioned back in the earlier days of the church.
The mere possibility that in the earliest days of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll DIDN'T have a vision of starting a Bible college or seminary of some kind is so easily contested by so many years of public testimony from Driscoll himself that it was the subject of a blog post.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
But then these days a majority of Driscoll preaching and teaching is actually no longer available at the Mars Hill website. So if you're giving to the cause there's possibly half or more of the formerly available materials that are no longer available.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html
For that matter, Driscoll's relatively recent attempt to cast himself as being a fatherly type doesn't quite account for how recently he's leaned on anger as part of his homiletic style. It's not as though proposing that most people don't even do anything until they get ticked off wasn't part of the roll out for A Call to Resurgence. 2009's "How dare you!?" wasn't really that long ago. That was back when Driscoll was sharing publicly from the pulpit that he didn't have a side company for book royalties and wouldn't have one. Then in 2011 that changed. Driscoll's never been a stranger to controversy but in the last year at least some of the controversy has touched upon the fact that if you just look at what he publicly said about pastors and publishing and God boxes then and compared all of that to how he has spoken and written and behaved in the now that the 2014 Mark Driscoll can come across as though he's the kind of person 2004 Mark Driscoll warned everyone at Mars Hill Fellowship to be wary of.
But so far all of that does not suggest that people aren't giving faithfully to the mission of Mars Hill Church or that there's any reason the financial situation in FY2014 should prove to be poorer than previous fiscal years. Of course ... it's conceivable that maybe behind the scenes there are significant concerns but let's just assume for the sake of discussion that that would actually come to light in some documentable form. The average attendance DID go down from FY2012 to FY2013 and more and more people in the last few years who have called MH home aren't giving anything at all ... but it's tough to infer from that a real financial crisis because it's common for a minority of hugely dedicated people to keep an organization like MH fiscally floating.
To date there have been grand visions of starting a music label that sort of turned into a partnership with Tooth & Nail. There have been grand visions of a Resurgence Training Center that's turned into Mars Hill Schools, a partnership with Western Seminary and Corban University. And along the way there was sort of a good-for-Bellevue thing. So far Mars Hill has a track record of trying to build something in Mark's vision-casting plan from the early years from scratch that seems to fizzle and fade to then later get replaced by Mars Hill partnering with or somewhat assimilating an already functioning iteration of the basic concept a year or two or three later. After all ... it's not like re:sound is easy to spot these days. And the Capstone Institute ... it sort of doesn't exist any longer, either. Not that music labels and Bible schools are bad ideas, just that Mars Hill has been trying to get these two particular elements of Driscoll's early vision-casting plan off the ground off and on for at least a decade, give or take a particular project. Arguably Mars Hill is too young a religious movement to really have the infrastructural competence and capital to pull these things off in the homegrown/home-brewed DIY fashion so assimilating the moderate successes of others may be the most reasonable approach for them. And it's not like the Pacific Northwest has been famous for a distinctly evangelical seminary so that's actually, to a fellow evangelical, a theoretically very laudable goal.
It's just that after seven books have been shown to have citation errors and a number of egregious factual errors ... Driscoll and Mars Hill have not quite shown themselves the ideal peeps to be spearheading these projects on behalf of evangelicalism in the Pacific Northwest ... strictly in the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet.
But ... if a person is going to give to the cause then finding out how much it actually cost to rent the city of Ephesus might be interesting. MHC has said that the Result Source contract cost significantly less than the $210,000 reported by World Magazine but has yet to provide the evidence for why this would be the case and what the real number would be. As the vision of global expansion and funding for that expansion continues the numbers get bigger along with the ambitions. That's not necessarily a bad thing ... but it's worth thinking about how many iterations of the record label and Bible college have been cast off and forgotten about as if they never existed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll seem to have gone through in the last ten years before cutting a check for yet another attempt at something that has been aimed for since the earliest days of Mars Hill Fellowship. Maybe the third or fourth time will be the charm, though. Who knows?
Sunday, June 01, 2014
Question: what exactly happened to the Resurgence Training Center?
For all the ramp up for Mars Hill Schools, replete with reports that Steve Tompkins taking on a directorial role; Mars Hill stating it needed to raise $40 million buy one Bellevue College Building; and possibly even leasing real estate; it needs to be asked what happened to the Resurgence Training Center and its Masters in Missional Leadership. After all, the Resurgence Training Center got a bit of a roll out from Christian media in 2009 and Driscoll even referenced the Re:Train program from the pulpit, as documented over here very recently.
To be blunt, if we can't find some public accounting for what happened to that MH attempt to start a school with what was apparently one tenth the start-up costs who would have a reason to give to the $40 million dream MH executive leadership wants people to give to now? Where are the graduates of the Re:Train Masters in Missional Leadership these days? Since it sounded as though Driscoll said in his 2009 sermon that Mars Hill Global was partly assigned a role in fundraising for Re:Train would there be a way to document the revenue raised for the Resurgence Training Center? Would there be a way to even figure out where ANY monies donated to the somewhat opaque entity known as Mars Hill Global actually go?
Warren Throckmorton has recently blogged about how the options for gift designation have changed for Mars Hill Global. If Mars Hill Global donations at this point simply get absorbed into the Mars Hill General Fund those funds could pretty much go anywhere, couldn't they? Mars Hill Global may distribute books to people overseas but in this respect all that means is that the book distribution of the Mars Hill Military Ministry that was absorbed into Mars Hill Global in 2012 has been assimilated into whatever Mars Hill Global is. That's not a role or task that gives Mars Hill Global itself any manner of distinction. At the risk of quoting yet another MH page that's gone 404 ... :
http://marshill.com/2012/04/14/military-mission
... Because of the enormous growth of this ministry, we are needing to make some changes that will allow us to keep up with the great number of orders that are flowing in. The Military Mission will now become part of our new Global Ministries department. Because distribution is a large part of what Mars Hill Military Mission does, this strategic move will allow us to send out more resources at a quicker, less expensive, and more efficient rate. We have also combined Global Ministries and Military Mission’s financial contributions to one account. This will not only simplify our accounting processes but it will enable our ministries to have more of a global impact. Those of you who are currently giving specifically to the Military Mission might ask “Will my donations still be funding the Military Mission?” Our answer would be, “Yes—and then some.”
So Mars Hill Global may fund missionaries and church planters but they'll have to document it. When Mars Hill Church seemed to be extricated from Acts 29 in 2012 it's possible that when the external donations to missions nose-dived in FY2012 to FY2013 that the alternate avenue "could" have been to give to missions via Mars Hill Global. But if Throckmorton's recent blogging states that MHG gifts go to the Mars Hill General Fund in terms of what Mars Hill Global donation options offer for designation that might just raise the question as to whether Mars Hill Global is even meaningful an entity unto itself. There is no Mars Hill Global with a separate UBI in the Washington Secretary of State listings, so far. If Mars Hill Global has no distinct identity from Mars Hill Church then in a way it would make sense why any donations to one might be immediately accepted as general fund gifts ... but ... it seems weird that Mars Hill Global would get any promotion or exposure as an entity with any identify of its own in fundraising activity, and why any discussion of any Ethiopia anything would come up if Mars Hill Global may have that as only a fraction of activity relative to the revenue raised through its public role as a means to solicit funds. If WtH has understood Driscoll's 2009 sermon properly it sounded like Driscoll mentioned Mars Hill Global being devoted to fundraising for Mars Hill global expansion rather than as a missionary venue or even as a venue for doing any work of any kind overseas.
The opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet is that prospective donors to Mars Hill Global and to the Mars Hill Schools shouldn't even think about cutting checks to Mars Hill Global without getting a detailed explanation for why the last Mars Hill attempt at a school seems to have fizzled out.
To be blunt, if we can't find some public accounting for what happened to that MH attempt to start a school with what was apparently one tenth the start-up costs who would have a reason to give to the $40 million dream MH executive leadership wants people to give to now? Where are the graduates of the Re:Train Masters in Missional Leadership these days? Since it sounded as though Driscoll said in his 2009 sermon that Mars Hill Global was partly assigned a role in fundraising for Re:Train would there be a way to document the revenue raised for the Resurgence Training Center? Would there be a way to even figure out where ANY monies donated to the somewhat opaque entity known as Mars Hill Global actually go?
Warren Throckmorton has recently blogged about how the options for gift designation have changed for Mars Hill Global. If Mars Hill Global donations at this point simply get absorbed into the Mars Hill General Fund those funds could pretty much go anywhere, couldn't they? Mars Hill Global may distribute books to people overseas but in this respect all that means is that the book distribution of the Mars Hill Military Ministry that was absorbed into Mars Hill Global in 2012 has been assimilated into whatever Mars Hill Global is. That's not a role or task that gives Mars Hill Global itself any manner of distinction. At the risk of quoting yet another MH page that's gone 404 ... :
http://marshill.com/2012/04/14/military-mission
... Because of the enormous growth of this ministry, we are needing to make some changes that will allow us to keep up with the great number of orders that are flowing in. The Military Mission will now become part of our new Global Ministries department. Because distribution is a large part of what Mars Hill Military Mission does, this strategic move will allow us to send out more resources at a quicker, less expensive, and more efficient rate. We have also combined Global Ministries and Military Mission’s financial contributions to one account. This will not only simplify our accounting processes but it will enable our ministries to have more of a global impact. Those of you who are currently giving specifically to the Military Mission might ask “Will my donations still be funding the Military Mission?” Our answer would be, “Yes—and then some.”
So Mars Hill Global may fund missionaries and church planters but they'll have to document it. When Mars Hill Church seemed to be extricated from Acts 29 in 2012 it's possible that when the external donations to missions nose-dived in FY2012 to FY2013 that the alternate avenue "could" have been to give to missions via Mars Hill Global. But if Throckmorton's recent blogging states that MHG gifts go to the Mars Hill General Fund in terms of what Mars Hill Global donation options offer for designation that might just raise the question as to whether Mars Hill Global is even meaningful an entity unto itself. There is no Mars Hill Global with a separate UBI in the Washington Secretary of State listings, so far. If Mars Hill Global has no distinct identity from Mars Hill Church then in a way it would make sense why any donations to one might be immediately accepted as general fund gifts ... but ... it seems weird that Mars Hill Global would get any promotion or exposure as an entity with any identify of its own in fundraising activity, and why any discussion of any Ethiopia anything would come up if Mars Hill Global may have that as only a fraction of activity relative to the revenue raised through its public role as a means to solicit funds. If WtH has understood Driscoll's 2009 sermon properly it sounded like Driscoll mentioned Mars Hill Global being devoted to fundraising for Mars Hill global expansion rather than as a missionary venue or even as a venue for doing any work of any kind overseas.
The opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet is that prospective donors to Mars Hill Global and to the Mars Hill Schools shouldn't even think about cutting checks to Mars Hill Global without getting a detailed explanation for why the last Mars Hill attempt at a school seems to have fizzled out.
2009 Mark Driscoll sermon sheds some light on the earlier years of Mars Hill Global and its stated functions
While the sermon itself and the entire series of which it was a part have been removed a sermon that Wenatchee The Hatchet has referenced that was formerly available to the public has at least a little bit of information that may shed some light on the history of Mars Hill Global and what it was designed for for those who may be unfamiliar with it. Arguably the most opaque and unfamiliar aspect of the Mars Hill orbit for outsiders (or even, perhaps, insiders) Mars Hill Global has been getting more promotion and fundraising attention from Mars Hill in the last few years. Since the arrival of Sutton Turner the publicly shared face of Mars Hill Global seems to put some emphasis on the "global" part.
This sermon cited below was the one in which Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a company on the side to manage the royalties from book sales. It was also the sermon in which he publicly announced what has since become the standard delay between live preaching at one campus and playback at other campuses before the sermon was made available online for the general public. Never actually transcribed (highly unusual in the history of sermons preached by Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church) this sermon is something of a gold mine for announcements about significant projects at Mars Hill in the 2009 year.
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 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
At one point the Mars Hill Military Ministry was distinct from Mars Hill Global but it was absorbed into Mars Hill Global around April 2012 as previously documented by Wenatchee The Hatchet. Since this material that has been quoted here at WtH has been pulled by MHC you're going to have trouble finding primary source documentation.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-rsi-contract-with-mars-hill-and.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/14/military-mission
... Because of the enormous growth of this ministry, we are needing to make some changes that will allow us to keep up with the great number of orders that are flowing in. The Military Mission will now become part of our new Global Ministries department. Because distribution is a large part of what Mars Hill Military Mission does, this strategic move will allow us to send out more resources at a quicker, less expensive, and more efficient rate. We have also combined Global Ministries and Military Mission’s financial contributions to one account. This will not only simplify our accounting processes but it will enable our ministries to have more of a global impact. Those of you who are currently giving specifically to the Military Mission might ask “Will my donations still be funding the Military Mission?” Our answer would be, “Yes—and then some.”
Then again the Global Ministries department circa 2012 might actually have nothing to do with the Mars Hill Global Mark Driscoll seemed to describe in his 2009 sermon. But in April 2012 someone at Mars Hill Church explained that Global Ministries and Military Mission's financial contributions were combined into one account. This was said to simplify accounting processes and provide for the ministries to have more global impact. Which could make it seem to an outsider as though Mars Hill Church absorbed a ministry or two into Mars Hill Global something-or-other into a single account of some kind.
So the old sermon from the Trial sermon series in 2009 seems to have shed quite a bit of light on some things that have gotten some attention from other bloggers this year, whether Mars Hill Global or sermon editing and sermon broadcast delays online
This sermon cited below was the one in which Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a company on the side to manage the royalties from book sales. It was also the sermon in which he publicly announced what has since become the standard delay between live preaching at one campus and playback at other campuses before the sermon was made available online for the general public. Never actually transcribed (highly unusual in the history of sermons preached by Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church) this sermon is something of a gold mine for announcements about significant projects at Mars Hill in the 2009 year.
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 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
At one point the Mars Hill Military Ministry was distinct from Mars Hill Global but it was absorbed into Mars Hill Global around April 2012 as previously documented by Wenatchee The Hatchet. Since this material that has been quoted here at WtH has been pulled by MHC you're going to have trouble finding primary source documentation.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-rsi-contract-with-mars-hill-and.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/14/military-mission
... Because of the enormous growth of this ministry, we are needing to make some changes that will allow us to keep up with the great number of orders that are flowing in. The Military Mission will now become part of our new Global Ministries department. Because distribution is a large part of what Mars Hill Military Mission does, this strategic move will allow us to send out more resources at a quicker, less expensive, and more efficient rate. We have also combined Global Ministries and Military Mission’s financial contributions to one account. This will not only simplify our accounting processes but it will enable our ministries to have more of a global impact. Those of you who are currently giving specifically to the Military Mission might ask “Will my donations still be funding the Military Mission?” Our answer would be, “Yes—and then some.”
Then again the Global Ministries department circa 2012 might actually have nothing to do with the Mars Hill Global Mark Driscoll seemed to describe in his 2009 sermon. But in April 2012 someone at Mars Hill Church explained that Global Ministries and Military Mission's financial contributions were combined into one account. This was said to simplify accounting processes and provide for the ministries to have more global impact. Which could make it seem to an outsider as though Mars Hill Church absorbed a ministry or two into Mars Hill Global something-or-other into a single account of some kind.
So the old sermon from the Trial sermon series in 2009 seems to have shed quite a bit of light on some things that have gotten some attention from other bloggers this year, whether Mars Hill Global or sermon editing and sermon broadcast delays online
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Mars Hill Church and Resurgence Training Center's Master in Missional Leadership, what happened?
http://www.christianpost.com/news/mars-hill-church-to-open-school-39256/
Back on June 18, 2009 the Christian Post announced that Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church planned to announce the launch of a new school.
Now all this stuff, for all of the purging Mars Hill has been doing in the last week, may only truly be visible by way of a visit to a cached site. But here's something from the ramp-up and launch phase.
http://theresurgence.com/2009/10/08/the-resurgence-training-center
Mars Hill Church has started a school to serve as the leadership development engine for our global vision. As of August, the inaugural year of The Resurgence Training Center (Re:Train) is well underway.
What is Re:Train?
The purpose of the school is to train missional leaders to lead churches to transform cultures for Jesus. Our goal as a church is to start 100 new campuses and 1,000 new churches (in partnership with Acts 29) by 2019. In order to achieve this vision, we need as many men—trained and equipped—to be pastors and leaders within the movement. Pastor Mark Driscoll began The Resurgence a few years ago as a website with lots of free theological resources for missional leaders and the broader church in general. Re:Train is a further extension of this idea, offering premier missional leadership training and education.
What sort of classes does Re:Train offer?
Currently, Re:Train students participate in a yearlong graduate program that culminates in a Master of Missional Leadership. Participants are divided into "cohorts" based on area of interest. Once a month, all 75 students spend a weekend under the teaching of a nationally recognized professor. These classes are taught by men including John Piper, Bruce Ware, Gregg Allison, Ed Stetzer, Sam Storms, and Mars Hill Church Pastors Mark Driscoll and Bill Clem [emphasis added]. Lord willing, beginning in the Fall of 2010, Re:Train will also offer university-style courses to equip the Mars Hill Church body in theology, biblical studies, missions, counseling, worship, biblical living, and other areas.
Who can attend Re:Train?
Re:Train participants come from all around the US and Canada. International students are expected next year, and our current student body includes a lot of Mars Hill leaders and members; we hope that many more will step up from within our community. Are you a future campus pastor? A future church planter? A faithful member who will be sent out as part of a core group to help start a new work? If you're interested in attending Re:Train in order to better prepare, we'll soon begin accepting applications for next year's graduate program (info at retrain.org).
This got a roll out in the Christian Post, a website, and there was even some discussion of the project from the pulpit. This is a sermon that never got a transcript and we've linked to it in the past when discussing how in 2009 Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a side company for book royalties at that point. Of course by 2011 he'd done a complete 180 degree turn on precisely that issue and set up On Mission LLC and eventually Lasting Legacy LLC and OMCRU Investments LLC. But the sermon that never got transcribed from the 1 & 2 Peter series is also interesting for the history it brings to light about the acquisition of Mars Hill Albuquerque and, particularly germane to the upcoming Mars Hill Schools project, a blast form the past on previous efforts to set up a seminary-style educational program.
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
02:00
... Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders. He's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed for a long time, to the glory of God, from John Piper in Minneapolis. And he is also running the Resurgence Training Center. It is a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking 50 students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise $4 million above and beyond budget. And Pastor Jamie [Munson] has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermon and content every year. Asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool. We recently got checks as large as $10,000--people are saying, "We love you. We've listened a lot of things. Here. How can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We invite you to give as well above and beyond your general tithes and offerings.
And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said, "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars. And so that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
So, uh, what exactly happened to the Resurgence Training Center and the Masters in Missional Leadership?
What exactly happened to Capstone Institute? There wasn't enough space for that and while Gary Shavey ran that it didn't last longer than a couple of years. The Resurgence Training Center seems to have been similarly short-lived but had the distinction of being a cause for which Mark Driscoll said from the pulpit needed giving of $4,000,000.0 above and beyond normal budget.
And is there a Masters of Missional Leadership available to be earned now or did this program functionally produce only one or "maybe" two academic years' worth of student activity?
Scott Thomas used to list having a Masters in Missional Leadership from the Re:Train program. Possibly doesn't list that lately. There have been people who have graduated from the program but since the program didn't seem to have any accreditation and was designed to raise up a new generation of MH and A29 leaders what was it, in the end?
It seems that as with music labels so it may have gone with a school. After a grand announcement that Mars Hill Church was starting a music label a year later Driscoll was excited to mention a partnership with Tooth & Nail. In 2009 there was Driscoll's announcement from the pulpit they were starting this Re:Train thing and the Christian Post covered it and now what's the big, exciting opportunity? Partnership with Corban University, Western Seminary, and the like. It's hard to shake the impression that Mars Hill Church has lacked the finances and infrastructural capability of getting several of the things Mark Driscoll envisioned since before the formal launch of Mars Hill Church up and running in a sustainable way.
There's too much testimony not just in Confessions of a Reformission Rev but also in God's Work, Our Witness to the effect that Driscoll had envisioned launching a record label and establishing a Bible institute since before Mars Hill was official for anyone to seriously believe the recent claim that MHC as it is now is not even close to what Driscoll originally imagined would or could happen. Given the speed and thoroughness with which Mars Hill Church has been obliterating content why don't they just take down the entirety of the God's Work, Our Witness material seeing as several key people in the film have since left Mars Hill Church and in a couple of cases have made public statements? In light of the Result Source contract controversy the end of God's Work, Our Witness, where Driscoll regales the viewer (probably envisioned as a contracted member of Mars Hill Church) about how much the church has historically stunk at giving let's bear in mind that was a 2011 fundraising film that was connected to the annual report for the fiscal year 2011. Now we have a clearer idea what some of those expenses entailed for which Driscoll gently chided the whole church on its need to be more generous.
For that matter over at this post we've discussed how during the 2012 period Mark Driscoll asked people to give more and more and in May bought a million-dollar house in Snohomish county and in June conceded that Mars Hill Church was running systemic deficits at every campus and a mass layoff had happened and it wasn't because anybody sinned but because Mars Hill Church had a financial model that was not sustainable for the long-term future. When Driscoll told the church "You're the money fairy." it seems to have been meant as some kind of gentle and humorous rebuke about the flock not getting that THEY are the money fairy that pays for stuff. That Driscoll bought a million-dollar house outside of the city of Seattle by itself is scarcely problematic, it seems weird, though, in light of his at times condescending words about how the people in the trenches seemed to imagine money would just show up.
And yet Driscoll has also had a history of claiming that Mars Hill Church is not a wealthy church. That post is, without doubt, the most viewed post in the history of this blog. Renting the city of Ephesus for a day to do some "epic" filming may not make a church exceptionally rich (Greece's economy has pretty much been in the toilet for a while now) but that Driscoll could casually toss off in a little forgettable sentence "We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day" was worth a post.
So where does all this sort of money go? What happened to the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll announced so confidently from the pulpit in 2009? For that matter what happened to the sermon and series in which the announcement about Re:Train was made go? If Mars Hill can't get its own homegrown attempts at music labels and Bible institutes to work then, well, they can at least assimilate the actually successful projects started by others. But if that's how these things have worked out in the history of Mars Hill then it makes the entire organization seem to have ... at the risk of putting this indelicately and as the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet, a basically parasitic relationship to the outside world.
If Capstone Institute fizzled and the Resurgence Training Center seems to be no more what's the reason Mars Hill Schools is going to work at all? The assimilation of functioning and self-sustaining entities so that "Mars Hill" can be put in front of some real estate and some academic programs is not exactly a stamp of success at this point. Driscoll's never issued a public apology for the Result Source contract or for the seven books featuring plagiarism and simply letting the press and bloggers erroneously believe that a leaked and nebulous open letter to Mars Hill members posted to The City count as if it were a public confession won't suffice.
That does not exactly instill confidence in Mark Driscoll as an academic or a pedagogue. If the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll so happily mentioned in 2009 was successful then wouldn't the bold-type big names have made more of a point of mentioning this thing in their CVs?
Stuff to consider as Mark Driscoll and company ask people to give big and make sacrifices for what may actually be the THIRD attempt at getting that Bible institute Mark wanted started in the wake of his movement going along.
Back on June 18, 2009 the Christian Post announced that Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church planned to announce the launch of a new school.
Now all this stuff, for all of the purging Mars Hill has been doing in the last week, may only truly be visible by way of a visit to a cached site. But here's something from the ramp-up and launch phase.
http://theresurgence.com/2009/10/08/the-resurgence-training-center
Mars Hill Church has started a school to serve as the leadership development engine for our global vision. As of August, the inaugural year of The Resurgence Training Center (Re:Train) is well underway.
What is Re:Train?
The purpose of the school is to train missional leaders to lead churches to transform cultures for Jesus. Our goal as a church is to start 100 new campuses and 1,000 new churches (in partnership with Acts 29) by 2019. In order to achieve this vision, we need as many men—trained and equipped—to be pastors and leaders within the movement. Pastor Mark Driscoll began The Resurgence a few years ago as a website with lots of free theological resources for missional leaders and the broader church in general. Re:Train is a further extension of this idea, offering premier missional leadership training and education.
What sort of classes does Re:Train offer?
Currently, Re:Train students participate in a yearlong graduate program that culminates in a Master of Missional Leadership. Participants are divided into "cohorts" based on area of interest. Once a month, all 75 students spend a weekend under the teaching of a nationally recognized professor. These classes are taught by men including John Piper, Bruce Ware, Gregg Allison, Ed Stetzer, Sam Storms, and Mars Hill Church Pastors Mark Driscoll and Bill Clem [emphasis added]. Lord willing, beginning in the Fall of 2010, Re:Train will also offer university-style courses to equip the Mars Hill Church body in theology, biblical studies, missions, counseling, worship, biblical living, and other areas.
Who can attend Re:Train?
Re:Train participants come from all around the US and Canada. International students are expected next year, and our current student body includes a lot of Mars Hill leaders and members; we hope that many more will step up from within our community. Are you a future campus pastor? A future church planter? A faithful member who will be sent out as part of a core group to help start a new work? If you're interested in attending Re:Train in order to better prepare, we'll soon begin accepting applications for next year's graduate program (info at retrain.org).
This got a roll out in the Christian Post, a website, and there was even some discussion of the project from the pulpit. This is a sermon that never got a transcript and we've linked to it in the past when discussing how in 2009 Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a side company for book royalties at that point. Of course by 2011 he'd done a complete 180 degree turn on precisely that issue and set up On Mission LLC and eventually Lasting Legacy LLC and OMCRU Investments LLC. But the sermon that never got transcribed from the 1 & 2 Peter series is also interesting for the history it brings to light about the acquisition of Mars Hill Albuquerque and, particularly germane to the upcoming Mars Hill Schools project, a blast form the past on previous efforts to set up a seminary-style educational program.
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
02:00
... Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders. He's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed for a long time, to the glory of God, from John Piper in Minneapolis. And he is also running the Resurgence Training Center. It is a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking 50 students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise $4 million above and beyond budget. And Pastor Jamie [Munson] has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermon and content every year. Asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool. We recently got checks as large as $10,000--people are saying, "We love you. We've listened a lot of things. Here. How can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We invite you to give as well above and beyond your general tithes and offerings.
And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said, "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars. And so that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
So, uh, what exactly happened to the Resurgence Training Center and the Masters in Missional Leadership?
What exactly happened to Capstone Institute? There wasn't enough space for that and while Gary Shavey ran that it didn't last longer than a couple of years. The Resurgence Training Center seems to have been similarly short-lived but had the distinction of being a cause for which Mark Driscoll said from the pulpit needed giving of $4,000,000.0 above and beyond normal budget.
And is there a Masters of Missional Leadership available to be earned now or did this program functionally produce only one or "maybe" two academic years' worth of student activity?
Scott Thomas used to list having a Masters in Missional Leadership from the Re:Train program. Possibly doesn't list that lately. There have been people who have graduated from the program but since the program didn't seem to have any accreditation and was designed to raise up a new generation of MH and A29 leaders what was it, in the end?
It seems that as with music labels so it may have gone with a school. After a grand announcement that Mars Hill Church was starting a music label a year later Driscoll was excited to mention a partnership with Tooth & Nail. In 2009 there was Driscoll's announcement from the pulpit they were starting this Re:Train thing and the Christian Post covered it and now what's the big, exciting opportunity? Partnership with Corban University, Western Seminary, and the like. It's hard to shake the impression that Mars Hill Church has lacked the finances and infrastructural capability of getting several of the things Mark Driscoll envisioned since before the formal launch of Mars Hill Church up and running in a sustainable way.
There's too much testimony not just in Confessions of a Reformission Rev but also in God's Work, Our Witness to the effect that Driscoll had envisioned launching a record label and establishing a Bible institute since before Mars Hill was official for anyone to seriously believe the recent claim that MHC as it is now is not even close to what Driscoll originally imagined would or could happen. Given the speed and thoroughness with which Mars Hill Church has been obliterating content why don't they just take down the entirety of the God's Work, Our Witness material seeing as several key people in the film have since left Mars Hill Church and in a couple of cases have made public statements? In light of the Result Source contract controversy the end of God's Work, Our Witness, where Driscoll regales the viewer (probably envisioned as a contracted member of Mars Hill Church) about how much the church has historically stunk at giving let's bear in mind that was a 2011 fundraising film that was connected to the annual report for the fiscal year 2011. Now we have a clearer idea what some of those expenses entailed for which Driscoll gently chided the whole church on its need to be more generous.
For that matter over at this post we've discussed how during the 2012 period Mark Driscoll asked people to give more and more and in May bought a million-dollar house in Snohomish county and in June conceded that Mars Hill Church was running systemic deficits at every campus and a mass layoff had happened and it wasn't because anybody sinned but because Mars Hill Church had a financial model that was not sustainable for the long-term future. When Driscoll told the church "You're the money fairy." it seems to have been meant as some kind of gentle and humorous rebuke about the flock not getting that THEY are the money fairy that pays for stuff. That Driscoll bought a million-dollar house outside of the city of Seattle by itself is scarcely problematic, it seems weird, though, in light of his at times condescending words about how the people in the trenches seemed to imagine money would just show up.
And yet Driscoll has also had a history of claiming that Mars Hill Church is not a wealthy church. That post is, without doubt, the most viewed post in the history of this blog. Renting the city of Ephesus for a day to do some "epic" filming may not make a church exceptionally rich (Greece's economy has pretty much been in the toilet for a while now) but that Driscoll could casually toss off in a little forgettable sentence "We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day" was worth a post.
So where does all this sort of money go? What happened to the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll announced so confidently from the pulpit in 2009? For that matter what happened to the sermon and series in which the announcement about Re:Train was made go? If Mars Hill can't get its own homegrown attempts at music labels and Bible institutes to work then, well, they can at least assimilate the actually successful projects started by others. But if that's how these things have worked out in the history of Mars Hill then it makes the entire organization seem to have ... at the risk of putting this indelicately and as the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet, a basically parasitic relationship to the outside world.
If Capstone Institute fizzled and the Resurgence Training Center seems to be no more what's the reason Mars Hill Schools is going to work at all? The assimilation of functioning and self-sustaining entities so that "Mars Hill" can be put in front of some real estate and some academic programs is not exactly a stamp of success at this point. Driscoll's never issued a public apology for the Result Source contract or for the seven books featuring plagiarism and simply letting the press and bloggers erroneously believe that a leaked and nebulous open letter to Mars Hill members posted to The City count as if it were a public confession won't suffice.
That does not exactly instill confidence in Mark Driscoll as an academic or a pedagogue. If the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll so happily mentioned in 2009 was successful then wouldn't the bold-type big names have made more of a point of mentioning this thing in their CVs?
Stuff to consider as Mark Driscoll and company ask people to give big and make sacrifices for what may actually be the THIRD attempt at getting that Bible institute Mark wanted started in the wake of his movement going along.
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