Christianity Today reports 39 (41 as of 7-28) former Mars Hill pastors state Mark Driscoll unfit for ministry, and within minutes Driscoll tweets a link to a story about how this one total stranger pastor podcast fan of his had a vision and that confirmed that moving to Arizona was the will of God

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/july/mars-hill-elders-letter-mark-driscoll-pastor-resign-trinity.html

Their statement also includes a never-before-released document from October 2014 that details how the church investigation, conducted by members of the elder board at the direction of Mars Hill’s board of overseers, found Driscoll to be quick-tempered, arrogant, and domineering.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/assets/22730.pdf

Based on my own reading and study of Mars Hill Church history the statement was actually released, or rather leaked, some time ago.

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/02/20/from-the-past-the-mars-hill-church-board-of-elders-wanted-mark-driscoll-out-of-ministry/

Warren Throckmorton has started a postcards from Phoenix series about The Trinity Church, the first from former security director/volunteer Chad Freese on whether a PI was consulted and addressing at whose initiative the consultation was made, reviewing Driscoll's history of firing elders at MHC in `07 where everything seemed mediated by proxies

I would have leaned toward postcards from Scottsdale since that's the location but for the time being "postcards from Phoenix" is the theme.

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/05/26/postcards-from-phoenix-who-suggested-the-trinity-church-hire-a-private-investigator/

One of the recent questions that emerged was who allegedly arranged for a private investigator to tail someone who was formerly affiliated with the church.  

... 

The first one is complex in that it was triggered by a report from an anonymous witness to a recent spirited conversation between Grace Driscoll and another woman after women’s Bible study group. The argument was centered around a woman leaving the church amidst the current upheaval and controversies at The Trinity Church.

As a part of the argument, Grace Driscoll reportedly alleged that former director of security Chad Freese hired the private investigator who surveilled the Manuele family (see here and here for details). The implication was that the church shouldn’t be held responsible for this since Freese did it. This caught my attention for a couple of reasons. One, it demonstrates that recent news reporting is being followed widely in the church. Two, I wondered if there was any truth to the allegation that Chad Freese both instigated the hiring of the PI and then later complained about it.

One of the things that springs to mind about this report is that while it is a report that might need future corroboration or disconfirmation as may happen, there is something that should be kept in mind from Mars Hill history.  The report above states that there was a spirited conversation between Grace Driscoll and another woman after a study group in which Driscoll reportedly alleged that the former director of security at The Trinity Church Chad Freese hired the private investigator who surveilled a family.  

Warren Throckmorton on the elderless church of Mark Driscoll in AZ parts 2 and 3 (also 4), revisiting how neither a board of directors nor a board of advisors & accountability seemed to have restrained consolidation of powers in the Mars Hill years

Warren Throckmorton now has a multi-part series on how Mark Driscoll's newest church, The Trinity Church, has no elders and a board that seems to simply exist.

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/04/26/mark-driscolls-elderless-church/

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/04/28/mark-driscolls-elderless-church-part-two/

That there is a board of directors that includes men who don't attend the church may remind long-time readers who know the history of Mars Hill of the Board of Advisors and Accountability that had a Board of Overseers. 

Throckmorton has noted that Mark Driscoll Ministries is doing business as Real Faith.

https://www.guidestar.org/profile/47-2485096

https://pdf.guidestar.org/PDF_Images/2020/472/485/2020-472485096-17362425-9.pdf

The board members on Mark Driscoll Ministries are 

(1) MARK DRISCOLL, PRESIDENT

(2) RANDAL TAYLOR, SECRETARY (TREASURER)

(3) BRANDON THOMAS, BOARD MEMBER

(4) JOSH MCPHERSON, BOARD MEMBER

For the last of these names that's a name that has, in fact, shown up a handful of times here at this blog.

Throckmorton linked to some audio that Driscoll preached at McPherson's church that went away after a while but a transcript is at the following link:

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/09/mark-driscoll-posts-excerpt-of-his.html

There was also a listing for Josh McPherson as a Mars Hill pastor for a while, back around September 2014.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/so-is-there-mars-hill-wenatchee-in.html

Now for Throckmorton's part three "Where's the Board?"

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2021/04/30/mark-driscolls-elderless-church-part-three-wheres-the-board/

postlude to Throckmorton interview with Turner and Bruskas: Justin Dean tweets links to interview, discovers he's been blocked by Driscoll

Now I've written that I loathe Twitter in general and refuse to use it. This does not mean I don't keep track of things on Twitter that seem relevant to me.  So, for instance, it did not pass unnoticed that Justin Dean tweeted links to Warren Throckmorton's interview with Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas.

for those who read much faster than people talk, Sutton Turner has published transcripts of his talk with Throckmorton and Bruskas

https://investyourgifts.com/honest-answers-1/

https://investyourgifts.com/honest-answers-2/

It's no less than about 20,000 words, though, so it won't necessarily be a faster read for everyone than listening to two hours of conversation.  

Other projects have my attention but I hope to eventually discuss the interview and a few things that were and were not discussed in it.  It's got a ton of inside baseball stuff that won't necessarily (or quickly) make sense at every point in the conversation to someone who wasn't fairly closely connected to events and people at MHC over the course of it's 18 year run. 

Warren Throckmorton publishes part 1 of interview with Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner

Part 1 has gone up as of this morning.
https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/07/28/blog-theme-mars-hill-church-interview-with-dave-bruskas-and-sutton-turner/

notes on Ep 8 of Older Pastor/Younger Pastor--Sutton Turner confirms that Mark Driscoll has blocked him across social media and won't talk to him in any capacity, and some other things

I thought it was going to be a seven episode run but there are eight episodes.
https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e8-lessons-on-recovering-after-crisis/
What is more, Sutton Turner has published the transcript of episode 8
https://investyourgifts.com/recovering-after-crisis/
Ah, thanks!  That sure beats Wenatchee The Hatchet having to spend a uncounted hours transcribing things like Mark Driscoll's 2008 spiritual warfare series before being able to do any analysis of it!

Excerpts from and thoughts/notes on Episode 8 are below:

notes on the Older Pastor/Younger Pastor series with Ryan Williams, Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner on lessons from Mars Hill--UPDATE: quotes from transcripts

So the seven-part series has recently, if it goes to seven parts, wrapped up.  As Sutton Turner has commented and fielded questions here at Wenatchee The Hatchet he would probably not be too surprised that Wenatchee The Hatchet has taken the five hours needed to listen to all seven episodes, and likely Bruskas and Ryan Williams would not be surprised at this post either.  Nobody who knows the history of this blog as a chronicle of the life and death of Mars Hill would be. So ... some notes ...

Julie Roys: Elders at Harvest Formally Disqualify James MacDonald From Ministry (i.e. former MHC BoAA member James MacDonald)

https://julieroys.com/elders-at-harvest-formally-disqualify-james-macdonald-from-ministry/

James MacDonald has been declared formally disqualified from serving in pastoral ministry on the basis of findings with regard to his conduct and character. 

We've looked at Roys' coverage of James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel in the past.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/12/julie-roys-article-at-world-mentions.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/10/statement-from-james-macdonald.html

Here in 2019 it can seem that a few of the people who endorsed Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage back in 2012 landed themselves in some controversy.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/07/real-marriage-in-2016-looking-back-on.html

MacDonald is the highest profile recent example but Bob Coy, Perry Noble, Les & Leslie Parrott and Darrin Patrick all had varying levels of controversy.  What makes the MacDonald situation unique is simply that the HBC board has issued a public statement declaring that he is currently not considered by them to be qualified to work in continuing ministry.

This blog having more of a history of dealing with things Mars Hill this isn't the venue for advocates for JM or HBC to comment and expect that to make it out of moderation. 

That MacDonald was with Mark Driscoll when he decided to crash The Strange Fire conference has been easily established. 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html

That other party-crashers with Driscoll included Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner along with James MacDonald seemed, to me, to establish that Paul Tripp was correct when he assessed that the BoAA was incapable of doing what it was expected to do, keep Mark Driscoll accountable.  In light of subsequent discoveries and coverage about MacDonald's conduct, termination, and the recent announcement from HBC that he is not regarded as qualified to be in ministry right now, this is something that should be kept in mind in light of Mark Driscoll's repudiation of the Calvinist TULIP and his claim that the young, restless Reformed guys are little boys with father wounds who prefer big brother figures and don't want to be accountable to father figures.  In light of James MacDonald's conduct and role on the MHC BoAA it might be fair to ask whether Mark Driscoll has avoided even "older brother" figures for accountability.  As noted earlier, Darren Patrick was born a month after Mark Driscoll, he of whom Driscoll once said "He's my pastor, you know?"  As for Jamie Munson, the at one time legal president of Mars Hill from 2007 to 2011, Driscoll was formally subordinate to Munson as president but the nickname "Mini-Mark" was not without cause.  Munson could be regarded as another case in which Mark Driscoll had men on a board to which he was said to be accountable that featured people who were arguably "little brother" figures rather than "older brother" figures. 

There was a kind of father figure pastor in the early Driscoll public career, David Nicholas.


http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2000/fall/6.44.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2000/fall/6.44.html?start=2


How do you do this over such long distance?

Driscoll: We talk all the time. David is my pastor.[emphasis added] He prays for me. He invests in me. He doesn't tell me what to do, but when he sees things in my character or theology that need to be challenged, he speaks to that very directly. I desperately need that. I tend to be stubborn and aggressive. I need someone strong speaking into my life, saying, "Think about this." But it has to be predicated on friendship and love.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2000/fall/6.44.html?start=3
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2000/fall/6.44.html?start=4
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2000/fall/6.44.html?start=5

But what happened to that relationship is anybody's guess.  The possibility that what Mark Driscoll has called accountability might be a formality or involve a set of relationships in which the people to whom he says he's accountable are people that under a variety of circumstances would be, in his historic pattern of teaching, people who would have to submit to him is something that's been discussed here in the past.  For sake of review.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/spiritual-authority-accountability.html

MacDonald, of course, resigned from the MHC BoAA about the same time Paul Tripp, though providing a drastically different rationale for resignation.  Where Tripp declared the MHC BoAA was incapable of accomplishing its purpose, MacDonald said he was so confident in Pastor Mark's goodwill he saw no reason to continue being on the MHC BoAA. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20141031231408/https://marshill.com/2014/08/04/the-weekly-8-4-14

…

UPCOMING CHANGES TO THE BOAA

Dr. Paul Tripp joined our Board of Advisors and Accountability in November 2013 and has been an immense help to our leaders over the past year. Dr. Tripp has extensive experience in discipleship and biblical counseling. Earlier this month, we made the decision together to open the opportunity for him to work with greater focus on issues directly related to his expertise, namely the continued development of our community and redemption ministries. Because simultaneously being a board member and a consultant does not allow for the required definition of independence, Dr. Tripp graciously submitted his resignation from the BOAA in early June so that he can more extensively serve our church as a consultant. We are excited to continue this work with him, and are thankful for his continued support of Mars Hill Church.

Similarly, Pastor James MacDonald informed the board at the July meeting of his decision to transition from his current role on the board pending his replacement. Pastor James has been a great help in forming the current board’s direction, and we are very grateful for his time and wisdom over the last several years. He said about this transition, “I have great love and affection for Mars Hill Church and I want to make clear this change is not because I am unhappy with Mark’s response to board accountability. On the contrary, I have found him to be exemplary in his current readiness to live under the BOAA oversight. I am not resigning because I doubt Mark’s sincerity in any way. I believe in Mark Driscoll and his heart to leverage difficult lessons [emphases added] in service to Christ and his church in the years ahead. I am excited to continue to support that trajectory as Mark’s friend, as I focus my efforts on Harvest Bible Fellowship.” [emphases added]

Considering these transitions, Pastor Mark shared, “I am thankful for the service of both Paul and James, two men I admire and respect. Their service on our board has been a blessing to me and Mars Hill Church in countless ways. The amount of hours they have given as volunteers is extraordinary, especially in light of their other ministry demands.” Candidates are currently being interviewed to replace these open board positions. They will be submitted before the Full Council of Elders for their approval as soon as possible.

A couple of months later Driscoll resigned to the stated surprise of the BoAA, a matter that former BoAA member Larry Osborne could potentially address now if willing to field questions on the topic of Mark Driscoll's resignation.

That MacDonald has been found unfit to currently serve in ministry probably should be kept in mind in assessing the nature of Mark Driscoll's resignation in late 2014.  MacDonald, after all, was not necessarily involved in the investigation that Driscoll said was made and if he wasn't then on what basis could MacDonald be confident that Driscoll would or could not be found unfit to continue in pastoral ministry without some kind of restoration plan? 

Julie Roys mentions that Mark Driscoll slated to speak at Larry Osborne conference, sponsors drop

https://julieroys.com/disgraced-pastor-mark-driscoll-to-speak-at-larry-osbornes-conference-on-healthy-thriving-ministries-sponsors-drop/

This has come up recently and while Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't necessarily writing much about what's been going on at The Village Church (connections being Matt Chandler and Dave Bruskas) it doesn't mean I don't keep any tabs on those kinds of developments.  Tim Smith did end up listed on staff at Door of Hope in Portland, for instance, after what used to be Mars Hill Portland shuttered.

Of former MHC associated leadership James MacDonald was a bit more newsworthy in the last year on account of, among a number of things, reporting done by Julie Roys.  The latest bit of news connecting to Driscoll is Roys has reported that Driscoll is scheduled as a speaker at a Larry Osborne connected conference on healthy, thriving ministries, and some named sponsors are no longer sponsors or have not yet made decisions.

What is of significance with respect to both Driscoll and Osborne is the degree to which I've documented Mark Driscoll saying that a meeting with Osborne proved fateful for inspiring him to reorganize Mars Hill, something he announced in the closing chapters of Confessions of a Reformission Rev which was undertaken in the period from roughly 2006 to 2007.  Along the way there were substantial revisions to the governing documents that consolidated and centralized power from a two-dozen elder board to anywhere between three to five executive elders who were given the power to decide to acquire real estate, for instance.  

I reviewed some history between Mark Driscoll and Larry Osborne in the following series of posts.  

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/osborne%20driscoll%20talk

Something that is worth mentioning is that, you'll need to plug this into the Wayback Machine or find a corrresponding link at marshill.se, Osborne was listed as a member of the Mars Hill BoAA in 2013.  This notice was made around the time of the fateful late 2013 interview with Janet Mefferd in which Mefferd accused Mark Driscoll of being a plagiarist on air and shortly thereafter provided documentation establishing the credibility of the accusation.  Eventually Warren Throckmorton would chronicle the ways in which books spanning what was up until 2013 Mark Driscoll's catalog of books turned out to have citation errors. Those citation errors have since been fixed in second editions and some books are in the process of revision, most notably Doctrine, which Mark Driscoll said he's rewriting this year.

Osborne and MacDonald were both on the BoAA during the plagiarism controversy of late 2013
http://marshill.com/2013/11/23/dr-paul-tripp-joins-mars-hill-s-board-of-advisors-and-accountability
...
Paul Tripp
Michael Van Skaik
James MacDonald
Larry Osborne
Mark Driscoll
Dave Bruskas
Sutton Turner
...

According to the Wayback Machine, as far back as May 2012 the following were listed as part of a committee that would investigate allegations against Mark Driscoll.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120531232846/http://marshill.com/governance
...
In the event that a formal charge and/or accusation is made against Pastor Mark that, if investigated and found to be true, would disqualify him from his position as an elder in Mars Hill Church, a group of five men consisting of both elders within Mars Hill Church and Christian leaders outside of Mars Hill Church, will investigate the charge or accusation and determine if it is true. This group currently consists of Jamie Munson, Dave Bruskas, James MacDonald, Darrin Patrick, and Larry Osborne. If the charge or accusation is found to be true, this group can rebuke Pastor Mark or, if warranted, remove him as an elder at Mars Hill Church. If Pastor Mark is removed as an elder, he automatically ceases to serve on the Board of Elders, on the Executive Elder Team, and as president of Mars Hill Church.
...
Jamie Munson doesn't seem to be listing anything of his executive elder days with Mars Hill in his resume lately.  If you didn't know from being at Mars Hill from about 2000 to 2013 that Jamie Munson was one of the fixtures of Mars Hill leadership you might not be able to guess he had anything to do with any ministry Mark Driscoll was ever connected to this year.  

Dave Bruskas is quoted by Roys in her recent coverage.
https://julieroys.com/disgraced-pastor-mark-driscoll-to-speak-at-larry-osbornes-conference-on-healthy-thriving-ministries-sponsors-drop/
...

Driscoll resigned from Mars Hill in 2014 after an internal investigation at the church found Driscoll guilty of “arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading . . . in a domineering manner.” But prior to his resignation, Driscoll had already publicly been accused of plagiarism. His church had also admitted that it had used more than $210,000 of church funds to buy Driscoll’s 2013 book, Real Marriage, to put the book at the top the New York Times best-seller’s list.

Driscoll, known by some as the “cussing pastor,” was also known for degrading talk about women and vulgarity. (He once said women were created to be “homes” for men’s penises and that oral sex was biblical.) And in 2016, several former members brought a class-action suit against Driscoll, accusing him of running Mars Hill like an organized crime syndicate—systematically soliciting donations for one purpose, but then using them for another. (This suit was later dismissed because the plaintiffs said they didn’t have the money to pursue the suit.)

Yesterday, I talked with Dave Bruskas, one of three former executive elders at Mars Hill, who now serves as campus pastor at The Village Church Fort Worth. Bruskas said Driscoll refused to go through the restoration plan that Mars Hill had suggested in 2014. And to Bruskas’ knowledge, Driscoll has not gone through any restoration plan since. In addition, Bruskas said that he knows people whom Driscoll has hurt who are not reconciled with him.

...

Let's take a digression on the penis homes material.  There may be those in 2019 who might be skeptical that Mark Driscoll could have written that a penis needs a home and that he would have ever described a woman as a fit home for a penis.  

Wenatchee the Hatchet published the raw text of Mark Driscoll's "Using Your Penis", published under the pseudonym William Wallace II, on July 29, 2014.  Somebody kept a text file of the whole thing for years and gave it to Wenatchee The Hatchet. Eventually an html file was provided and a jpeg of that was added.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-raw-text-no-pun-intended-of-william.html

There was an interesting trajectory comparing Mark Driscoll in his William Wallace II days to his WSU Evergreen op ed days.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/real-marriage-in-january-2012-and.html

To get into the full extent of Driscoll's writings about Song of Songs and what Jessica Johnson has called "biblical porn" you can read through an extensive amount of material over here:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/mark%20driscoll%20and%20the%20influence%20of%20porn

As Roys has reported, James MacDonald got himself in some trouble, and also gave some assistance to Driscoll, which we've discussed a bit here.  Where the man is of note for Wenatchee The Hatchet is because MacDonald was with Mark Driscoll when Mark Driscoll decided to crash the Strange Fire conference.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html



Darrin Patrick ... he was the guy of whom Mark Driscoll said "He's my pastor, you know?" back in 2008.  That's a theme we'll have to come back to later in light of Mark Driscoll saying that there are guys with father wounds who surround themselves with older brother figures rather than father figures because if we go back and look at Mark Driscoll having Jamie Munson being executive pastor and president of the corporation that was once known as Mars Hill a person could be forgiven for having an impression that Mark Driscoll didn't necessarily even want "older brother" figures keeping him accountable if "younger brother" figures could work.  Darrin Patrick was born the month after Driscoll was, after all.  

Larry Osborne has stuck by Mark Driscoll.  MacDonald may or may not still be connected and it may or may not be that Patrick and Driscoll have stayed in touch.  For that matter it's not known whether Driscoll and Munson have spoken in years.  There could be any number of leaders from the Mars Hill days with whom Driscoll hasn't said much of anything.  Based on what Roys has reported Dave Bruskas has said to her, it could be there are any number of people with whom Driscoll is not observably in restored relationship, or relationship of any sort.

When the last time was that Mark Driscoll talked to the co-founders of Mars Hill Church would only be knowable, perhaps, to Mark Driscoll, Mike Gunn and Lief Moi.  

What's noteworthy about Osborne is not just his persistence on the MHC BOAA but that he was on the BOAA during the period in which it presented an explanation of the use of ResultSource to secure a No. 1 place on the New York Times bestseller list for Real Marriage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140311063444/http://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability

...
Result Source
In 2011, outside counsel advised our marketing team to use Result Source to market the Real Marriage book and attain placement on the New York Times Bestseller list. While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.
...
It wasn't illegal or unethical but it was unwise. 

Osborne was part of the BoAA at the time the statement was provided. All of that may be necessary to keep in mind when Roys quotes Bruskas regarding Mark Driscoll in the present:

...

I asked Bruskas if he believed Driscoll was fit to serve in ministry and he replied, “Do I believe Mark is permanently disqualified, no—but presently, yes. If he hasn’t gone through a restoration process, then he should not be serving.”

Bruskas added that he’s heard Driscoll confess and express remorse for the things he did at Mars Hill. Yet to date, Bruskas says he hasn’t seen evidence of repentance and change. When asked what he thinks about Larry Osborne’s continued partnership with Driscoll, Bruskas said, “That’s perplexing to me.”...

In terms of connections to Leadership Network Driscoll's connection may go as far back as the late 1990s even if he may not have been personally interacting with Osborne much in those days.  

Driscoll and Osborne discussed governance and how power goes from the throne down not the pew up.  We looked at some length at that philosophy regarding power and looked at the governing document of the former Mars Hill Church.  In sum, Mark Driscoll had either complete formal corporate power over the church he was a member of or, should he have resigned his leadership role, he'd not be a member of Mars Hill Church.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-recent-exchange-between-warren.html

When Driscoll talks in more recent days about how there are guys with father wounds who want older brother figures and to not have to be accountable to real father figures Driscoll has, for those who wade deeply into the history of the governance of Mars Hill Church in corporate terms, arguably been the best case study of such a weakness regarding accountability.  Driscoll claimed that he agreed to the restoration plan the board came up with but then received some kind of oracle saying he was "released".  Despite the fact that Driscoll had said he wouldn't leave and wasn't going anywhere, by late 2014 he was "released" but he did not share this account until 2015.  Osborne, who was part of the BOAA possibly as far as its dissolution, could at least be in a position to clarify to Roys for the record if Mark Driscoll's account of agreeing with the restoration plan proposed by the board is accurate.  

Osborne's policy, by way of solidarity with the MHC BOAA during the plagiarism controversy of late 2013 and the Result Source controversy of early 2014 was to stand by his man.  That Driscoll went back and fixed citation errors in his books could be commended if Mark Driscoll could admit that there were so many citation errors in his books that they needed to be corrected.  Adding a note of thanks in Real Marriage regarding the debt Mark and Grace Driscoll have had to the work of Dan Allender, for instance, raises a new problem--if Grace Driscoll (or, if applicable, a ghostwriter) claimed that there were basically no resources at Mars Hill to help victims of sexual abuse then if Dan Allender's work was known and used by Mark and Grace Driscoll then how, exactly, can it be true to say that Mars Hill had no resources?  It's possible to argue, based on statements made by former biblical living pastor James Noriega that there was a philosophy within Mars Hill leadership that aspired to have it so that no one would ever need to make use of resources that were not specifically developed within Mars Hill, but that's not the same thing as saying there were no resources when Grace Driscoll shared with her husband she had been abused.  

Nor can we just ignore that Mark Driscoll claimed that he and Grace were both virgins when they met in an interview with Christianity Today despite the fact that both attested they were not virgins in the text of Real Marriage itself.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/januaryweb-only/mark-driscoll-sex-marriage.html

Interview by Katelyn Beaty and Marlena Graves/ January 5, 2012

...

Is there tension in teaching sexual purity before marriage while encouraging frequent and wonderful sex within marriage?

M: No, and for us, we sinned, quite frankly. We were virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend. Then Grace came back to Christ, and I came to Christ in college, so we had to stop sinning sexually. I'd say if we both could go back and rewrite history and change one thing, that would probably be the thing we would change. [emphasis added] But we did repent and met with our pastor. And then we did get married, between our junior and senior years of college

Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)

Page 7

Neither Grace nor I was a virgin when we met, and before long we were dating and sleeping together, which continued even after she went off to college while I was finishing high school.

Now it's possible that after giving so many interviews a person can forget something as basic as whether or not one was a virgin at the time of meeting the person who would become one's spouse but the conditions under which such forgetfulness seem most probable involve significant breakdown of mental acuity and function.  Another possibility is that answering interview questions can become a kind of performance art in which the answer is tailored to the recipient, although some might say that risks being deceptive, depending on what answer is given.

Mark Driscoll would at times in his Mars Hill days say "We broke some rules, but God is faithful."  In the wake of the controversies surrounding his leadership style and decisions made on behalf of his brand name recognition in contrast to the reputational welfare of what used to be Mars Hill Church, it can seem as though Mark Driscoll presents a cumulative story in which he's allowed to break rules and there is "grace" for him that has not, was not, and presently unlikely to be extended to others within his orbit.  One of Mark Driscoll's complaints in Real Marriage was that sometimes there would be Christian counselors but they would turn out to have marriages as bad as the one Mark felt he had so they weren't qualified to help.  Yet year after year Mark Driscoll counseled married couples and that gets at one of the core difficulties with Driscoll continuing in ministry that isn't really a thing you can reduce down to a zippy single sentence observation--you can "say" that Mark Driscoll's trouble has been that he operates on the basis of double standardized tests where he receives grace and people who cross him get put in the woodchipper, but it's the sum of the life that has to be observed first.  

Yet a  man who can't consistently establish for the record whether or not he was a virgin when he started dating the woman who would become his wife is someone who we should not trust simply because he says God told him he was supposed to be a pastor or that he's been "released" from ministry at Mars Hill Church.  The trouble with that claim is that even if we take it at face value, the most prominent case of a man being appointed by God to be a leader of God's people who was then "released" from that leadership role would be someone like King Saul.  

POSTSCRIPT
10-30-2019
9.22pm

Should Roys want to compare notes on what she's found on the James MacDonald side with what Wenatchee The Hatchet has been documenting on the Mars Hill/Mark Driscoll side, comparing notes would be interesting.  Osborne seems to be more significant a figure in the history of Mars Hill than any of us were able to grasp at the time and Osborne's continued support of Driscoll does raise a number of questions as to how much Osborne knows about the 2007 period or about the accuracy of Mark Driscoll's account to Brian Houston that Mark agreed to submit to the restoration plan but was then "released" according to some kind of oracle experience.  Documents from the time of Driscoll's 2014 resignation indicate surprise and disappointment on the part of the boards of Mars Hill.  Was Osborne surprised?  If not, why not?  

With the Result Source contract having been signed by Sutton Turner years ago Osborne, as a former member of the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability, could perhaps field a statement to Roys about what his thoughts on that decision were.  Turner has stated for the record he had issues with the plan but decided to sign the contract because if he didn't someone else would.  That invites a question as to who that someone else could have or would have been but that's arguably also moot.  

One thing that becomes clearer is that if Mark Driscoll were to decide to make a complete break with everything to do with his past with Mars Hill a break from Osborne might, eventually, be necessary.  Osborne's role on the MHC BOAA in its final years was too readily documented for both men to completely avoid the questions that can come up about Result Source, the plagiarism controversy and how and why they believe or believed Mark Driscoll was not found unqualified to serve in pastoral ministry on the basis of either of those controversies.   

USCAL Bridge Summit 2019 interview with Mark Driscoll excerpts--world history as a governance war between God and Satan, church governance is from "the throne down, not the pew up".

http://www.uscal.us/upcoming-events/2018/7/10/the-bridge-2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs2UoP79j8c&t=17937s
05:00:58

Mark Driscoll: For me I grew up in a marginal Jack Catholic, not an evangelical, home and got saved in college as a freshman reading the Bible.  And I was in a church that was an evangelical-based Bible church, not a charismatic church or Pentecostal.  Great, great, folks.

And I was at a men's retreat and God spoke to me audibly. He said I should marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches. Audible. I didn't even know God still DID that.  So I go to my pastor and I'm like, "Does God still talk to people?" "Yeah, He does." I didn't know that. And so I submitted that word to the leadership in the church and said, you know, I'm a new Christian. I don't know if this is God or not. And they prayed and came back and said, "Well, this is God's word for you, this is God's will for you." 

05:01:47
So at that time I married this girl Grace that I was in love with. We have now begin together more than thirty years and got five kids.  And [i} got a communications degree in speech from one of the top five programs in the country and then we moved back to our home state, state of Washington. We were, I call it "The People's Republic of Seattle".  That's where we set up shop  [emphasis added] and so we were there and started a little Bible study for college kids that eventually really started to, more. A lot of people got saved and we started getting a LITTLE bit of media attention around that time.  I was an expositional Bible teacher, teaching through books of the Bible kind of guy.  But we started getting a lot of interest from the media because we were very young, very urban, very punk rock, very subculture--this is all kinda  during the grunge era.  

05:02:34
So a lot of young pastors started contacting ME asking, "What are you doing? How does this work?" I wasn't even in a denomination, network [or] tribe. I had no  apostolic oversight, spiritual father.  I'm just a guy with a bunch of punk rock kids ...

05:02:56

This was `96 we started. The first year we were under a hundred.  Before it was all said and done these pastors started contacting me, young guys, "We wanna plant." So we started pushing them, assessing them, just trying to help them. It was very informal.  

Before we move further along, I have to stop and point out that there's this geographic conundrum in the story.  How ... how could Mark Driscoll go to college to get his degree in speech from a top-tier school and then move ... back to his home-state and joke about the "People's Republic of Seattle?"  Look, I know western Washingtonians joke that eastern Washingtonians are "like" a different state but  let's go look at this:

https://markdriscoll.org/about/#

Born in North Dakota in 1970, Mark Driscoll grew up the son of a union drywaller in south Seattle. After graduating from high school, he attended Washington State University on scholarship. He graduated from WSU with a Bachelor’s degree in Speech Communication from the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication. He later completed a Master’s degree in Exegetical Theology from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

Washington State University was founded in 1890 and has always been in the state
https://wsu.edu/about/facts/

You can't possibly move away from your home state to go to college by going from the Seattle area to Washington State University and then somehow move back ... you're merely traversing distances within one state.  At the risk of highlighting the problem of this in a way that is informed by much older Mark Driscoll sermon style humor ... that's as impossible as trying to pass the same fart two different times.  It's just not physically possible. He never made that joke that I'm aware of, I'm simply using an analogy.  But I trust you get the point.

Now ... Driscoll said a few things about governance and I won't quote all of it.  But I will quote some of it.

***

Answering a question about what he does differently in Scottsdale than Seattle

05:05:04

I think a big emerging issue for the church is governance.  Because of all the legal liabilities that we got regarding marriage and gender  and litigation. In addition, I think,  the governance issue is really big because now as churches are going multisite that requires a more apostolic format of government. Any time you have trans-local and not just local leaders and so our first one did not have any sort of trans-local or apostolic level of leadership. I've since been spending some good time with Pastor Robert  Morris and Pastor Jimmy Evans who I love very much. They're serving on my board at our church as founding overseers but a lot of what the work is coming out of Gateway and networks like that is helping to reset governance for churches and I think governance is like a pot for a plant. If the plant's too small, excuse me, if the pot's too small,  the plant gets rootbound and it can't grow. 
05:05:03
And so if the governance is LARGE enough it gives enough room for the leadership and the Holy Spirit to grow something that's more fruitful. So I think, a lot of times, they want more fruit but they've got the wrong pot.  And that's governance. And once you get the right pot you can have a more fruitful harvest.

05:06:18
So we've architected the governance quite differently. ...

and ...

05:08:17

So, governance is always two things. It's singular headship and plural leadership. And, and to me on the governance issue, so, the kingdom of God is, quite frankly, just a governance issue. We talk a lot about the kingdom of God. It's a governance issue. There's a king who establishes a kingdom and what God had in Heaven was a singular headship, plural leadership governance structure. The Father, Son and Spirit are the plural leaders. The Father is the singular head. And then Satan has a governance war in Heaven.  He really wants to upend the governance and he wants to overthrow.  He loses, gets cast down to earth. He immediately goes after Adam because Adam is the head of the human race. Jesus shows up. He goes after Jesus because Jesus is the head of the new covenant.  He goes after Peter because Peter is the head of the disciples and so Jesus says "Satan has asked to sift you as wheat but I have prayed for you."  

05:09:09

So there's ALWAYS a governance war, and the governance war is always the one that was lost by Satan in heaven being replayed out in churches, families, missions and networks.  So, ultimately, governance is a demonic foothold and ultimately--you look it, too, like,  the end of the book of Revelation ... 05:09:41 and the war in all of human history is "Who gets to sit on that throne?"  That's really the governance war.   And, you know, what I like to say as well, been doing some work on this theologically ... 05:09:55 I believe God has a 

governance in two realms. I believe He has a spiritual family, not just of angelic beings but  what the Bible call the heavenly hosts, the divine counsel, the sons of God and He works through them.  And then He has a human family and He works through us. 
...

On governance at Scottsdale
05:12:10

I said singular headship, plural leadership.  But in that, as well, they run thrown down, not pew up.  A lot of governance structures in churches are pew up. What do the people want? Let them vote. They will tell the leaders what to do. [interviewer says "Congregational governance"] Yeah. And if you get too big of a board you get a de facto congregational government.  Because those families constitute such a large percentage of the population within the church.  ...

Driscoll's got a line that culture is either pulling Hell up or inviting Heaven down.

Okay ... so when Mars Hill leaders decided that signing off on the Result Source contract was a good idea for promoting Real Marriage to a No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, a decision the that Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability described as not so much uncommon  or illegal as "unwise", were the Mars Hill leaders, which included Mark Driscoll at that time, inviting Heaven down or pulling Hell up when they made that decision?  It's one thing for Mark Driscoll to share the pithy zinger bromide as a bro among bros, it's another thing to consider the implications of a claim that either church culture is pulling Hell up or inviting Heaven down and asking some blunt questions about which of the two Mars Hill was doing with any given decision.  It's possible there are wheat and tares in a field, after all.

What is apparently going on is that Mark Driscoll has come to regard the praiseworthy and innovative work on church governance and theories about leadership as being generated not in the neo-Calvinist scene but in something else, more the Robert Morris wing.  Twenty years ago when his patronage base was more in the neo-Calvinist wing he was more neo-Calvinist and now?  Now it seems to be more new apostolic ideas.  For the number of us who were around Mars Hill twenty years ago and have chronicled that history it could look as though what this recent interview signals is that Mark Driscoll may have said he was a Calvinist and said he leaned toward elder governance but that there was a pragmatic element to this.

more reports of alleged curious behavior and conduct from James Macdonald, who served on the MH BoAA and endorsed Driscoll's Spirit-Filled Jesus,

James Macdonald has been a topic of consideration at this blog over the years inasmuch as he was listed as a member of the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability. So there are by now enough posts to warrant a tag for them.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/MacDonald

A few particular posts that may be of interest

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/10/statement-from-james-macdonald.html
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/12/julie-roys-article-at-world-mentions.html

Macdonald's most noteworthy public activity in connection to Mars Hill during his membership on the BoAA was ... probably ... being with Mark Driscoll when Driscoll crashed the Strange Fire conference to promote his then new book A Call to Resurgence.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html

He resigned from that board around the time Paul Tripp did.  The contrast between his departing statement and Tripp's was interesting, for those who remember those.

http://julieroys.com/chicago-radio-host-former-bodyguard-say-james-macdonald-asked-arrange-murders/

https://www.christianpost.com/news/megachurch-founder-james-macdonald-allegedly-sought-murder-for-hire-police-investigating.html

That Macdonald reportedly gave $50,000 to Mark Driscoll's efforts to launch The Trinity Church has already been reported.  That Macdonald made a point of writing an endorsement blurb at the front of Spirit-Filled Jesus can also be confirmed by anyone who has picked up a copy of the book.

Now in light of Driscoll's memorable claim back in 2008 of having spiritual discernment, as he put it "I see things", whatever comes to light as having been said or done by Macdonald there's a persistent question that remains open to consideration regarding Mark Driscoll's self-described discernment.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/09/regarding-10th-anniversary-of-mark.html

...

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_73.html

http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v

Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Christus Victor (Part 3)

19:19

On occasion I see things. I see things. Like I was meeting with one person, and they didn't know this but they were abused when they were a child and I said, "When you were a child, you were abused. This person did this to you, physically touched you this way." They said, "How do you know?" I said, "I don't know, it's like I got a TV right here and I'm seeing it." They said, "No, that never happened." I said, "Go ask them. Go ask if they actually did what I think they did and I see that they did."  They went and asked this person, "When I was a little kid did you do this?" and the person said, "Yeah [slowly], but you were only like a year or two old. How do you remember that?" They said, "Well, Pastor Mark told me." I'm not a guru. I'm not a freak. I don't talk about this. If I did talk about it everybody'd want to meet with me and I'd end up like one of those guys on TV, but some of you have this visual ability to see things. [emphasis added]

...

What is striking about the above passage is that when Driscoll described all the stuff that he would see it was sexual abuse or physical abuse.  The sins were sexy sins, so to speak.  Whether Driscoll in his visionary moments saw stuff like wire fraud or embezzlement or ... plagiarism ... we'll never know.  But what we do know is that in 2008 Mark Driscoll said that the belief that the executive elders didn't really love the people of Mars Hill was a demonic lie.  Of course for the many who left Mars Hill in the 2007-2008 period the question was not really so much "do the executive elders of Mars Hill Church love the people of Mars Hill Church?" because even abusers think they love they people they abuse in many cases.  The question was whether or not the level of power that had been consolidated to the executive elders during the controversial course of events in 2007 was proper was the question. It would eventually transpire that the executive eldership team was not, taken as a whole, necessarily being very honest or truthful about the nature of what happened in 2007.  

...
Here in 2019, about five years on the other side of what was Mark Driscoll's late 2013 plagiarism controversy and the associated controversy about the use of Result Source to promote Real Marriage to a #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, a germane question about Mark Driscoll's self-described spiritual discernment is how and why, if he had such discernment, his citations were so sloppy as to lead him into a plagiarism controversy to begin with.  Now, perhaps, it should be said that whatever spiritual discernment may be described as being it doesn't automatically entail scholarly competence.  In light of Driscoll's documented account of how great his long term memory was for books ... it would seem he didn't have much of an explanation for how so many of his books had citation errors and in the course of later 2013 it was made clear by the Docent Group that the PR move of implicitly blaming Docent research assistants was not on the table.

What has been reported about Macdonald and Harvest Bible Chapel in connection to the now dropped defamation suit and more recent reports of allegations of ... well, it remains to be seen what the results of investigation are.  It's conceivable nothing will come up or things could come up. 

Without access to documents of what was discussed at Mars Hill BoAA meetings it's not possible to establish that James Macdonald did anything as a part of the BoAA that can be established for the record besides being with Mark Driscoll at some point during the time Driscoll decided to crash the Strange Fire conference. 

Whether what has been alleged about Macdonald recently is true and can be backed up is still seeming like an open-ended issue at the moment, so the point of interest here is not so much directly what turns out to be the case with respect to Macdonald but a character question regarding Mark Driscoll's self-attested history of "I see things".  If it turns out that some things said and done by James Macdonald were bad, and bad enough to entail some kind of investigation, it wouldn't be the first time that people at some point willing to endorse Mark Driscoll books turned out to have some vices that led people to conclude they were not fit to remain in formal, employed ministry in the settings where they were well-known.  For a review of some other folks who endorsed Driscoll books who ended up in scandals ...

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/07/real-marriage-in-2016-looking-back-on.html

additional coverage and updates on the Harvest Bible Chapel/James MacDonald situation, with a comparison to the MH statement regarding Driscoll's three areas of weakness as a leader

https://www.harvestbiblechapel.org/2019/02/02/campu-pastor-update/
https://www.harvestbiblechapel.org/2019/02/13/february-2019-elder-update-2/
https://www.harvestbiblechapel.org/2019/02/17/february-2019-elder-update-3/
http://julieroys.com/mancow-interview-former-worship-leader-harvest-accuses-james-macdonald-inappropriately-touching-private-plane/

https://www.harvestbiblechapel.org/2019/02/18/response-statement-regarding-pastor-james-and-anne-green/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-harvest-bible-chapel-future-20190217-story.html
...

The turning point for church leadership may have been the audio recordings broadcast on Erich “Mancow” Muller’s morning radio show on WLS-AM 890 in which MacDonald appears to disparage his critics.

Muller, once friends with MacDonald, said last week that MacDonald is “a carnival barker actor” who was running the church as “essentially a giant Ponzi scheme.”

In a January message to church members announcing he was temporarily stepping aside, MacDonald did not specify the “sin.” But Harvest leadership has been accused by a few vocal former members of financial mismanagement and dishonest operations.

...

Even though the former pastor’s contributions for growing the church will be remembered, said Sperling, “the elders concluded that there is a sinful pattern of inappropriate language, anger and domineering behavior.” [emphasis added]

It isn't that difficult to recall how and why that might resemble another church situation from just a few years ago.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141016105922/https://marshill.com/2014/10/15/pastor-mark-driscolls-resignation
Pastor Mark Driscoll's Resignation
By: Mars Hill Church
Posted: Oct 15, 2014

On Tuesday, October 14, Pastor Mark Driscoll submitted his resignation as an elder and lead pastor of Mars Hill Church. The Board of Overseers has accepted that resignation[emphasis added] and is moving forward with planning for pastoral transition, recognizing the challenge of such a task in a church that has only known one pastor since its founding. We ask for prayer for the journey ahead.

As is well known, inside and outside of Mars Hill, Pastor Mark has been on a leave of absence for nearly two months while a group of elders investigated a series of formal charges brought against him. This investigation had only recently been concluded,[emphasis added] following some 1,000 hours of research, interviewing more than 50 people and preparing 200 pages of information. This process was conducted in accordance with our church Bylaws and with Pastor Mark’s support and cooperation.

While a group of seven elders plus one member of the Board of Overseers was charged with conducting this investigation, the full Board of Overseers is charged with reaching any conclusions and issuing any findings. In that capacity, we believe it appropriate to publicly mention the following:

1. We concluded that Pastor Mark has, at times, been guilty of arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner. While we believe Mark needs to continue to address these areas in his life, we do not believe him to be disqualified from pastoral ministry. [emphasis added]

...
Finally, Mark Driscoll was not asked to resign; indeed, we were surprised to receive his resignation letter. [emphasis added]

It would seem that Driscoll and MacDonald ended up being described by their own respective boards at their respective churches as having similar character flaws.  These were not character flaws that precluded the men from being considered fit for ministry to begin with, obviously, but were character flaws that came to be seen as ... liabilities to the public reputation of a church as corporation?


It is worth remembering that MacDonald left the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability about the time Paul Tripp did.

Julie Roys article at WORLD mentions a 50k gift given by HBC/James MacDonald to Mark Driscoll to help launch of The Trinity Church, an overview of MacDonald's role in Mars Hill board leadership

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/12/julie-roys-article-at-world-mentions.html

https://world.wng.org/2018/12/hard_times_at_harvest
...

Bob Langdon, the former financial director of HBF who also participated in the audit, confirmed Wisen’s account. He said some of the items HBF paid for appeared to benefit Harvest Bible Chapel much more than the fellowship. For example, Langdon said HBF paid $500,000 for a church management systems upgrade that included new hardware for Harvest’s main campus in Elgin.

HBF also paid about $570,000 that Langdon said his boss, former Harvest Chief Financial Officer Fred Adams, had allocated for “overhead” and discretionary expenses. (Adams resigned at the end of 2017 and did not respond to a request for comment.) Langdon said those expenses included a percentage of the salaries for certain top Harvest Bible Chapel executives and a $50,000 donation to pastor Mark Driscoll’s Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Driscoll, a longtime friend of MacDonald’s, resigned from the former Mars Hill Church in Seattle in 2014 amid charges of domineering leadership.) Langdon said that during the audit, Wisen and auditors repeatedly asked Harvest executives to give justification for various HBF allocations “and there really wasn’t one.” [emphases added]

...
MacDonald, for those who may remember that Mark Driscoll had a book out last year, endorsed Mark Driscoll's Spirit-Filled Jesus by way of a blurb at the front of the book.

Driscoll, who is hosting a church governance conference, used to have MacDonald, for a time, on the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability.  In light of the recent statements from Harvest Bible Chapel about their former preacher it has begun to seem as though the two men Driscoll and MacDonald have been described by their own former leadership boards as having similar vices.  The descriptions, however, are still rather general.  The future of HBC is in transition. 

Whether or not it survives remains to be seen.  Maybe it will.  Most of the former Mars Hill campuses survived, with a few notable exceptiosn that folded before Mars Hill was dissolved and the recently folded former Mars Hill Portland.  HBC may weather the storm ... but a sermon on David dealing with Amalekites doesn't seem like it might be the most apt sermon text in light of what has taken place.  Then again, there's a long and not necessarily venerable tradition of preachers transforming sermons on narrative literature from the Old Testament into talking points about recent church politics.  Who at Mars Hill during the 2007 period could  entirely forget the Nehemiah sermons? 

We'll get back to other topics that are more musical in some time but the events of late in the realm of megachurches have enough ties to the former MH it seems necessary to note some of the recent events.

on the "Mancow" broadcast and the MacDonald removal from Harvest Bible Chapel, the lesson to not learn might be as important as some "lessons learned"

In a post- Mars Hill Puget Sound I've shifted blogging back to things that bore people out of their minds like musicology and associated topics, but it still comes up now and then that things connected directly or indirectly to the legacy of Mars Hill comes up at this blog.  Since James MacDonald was at one point on the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability, he is occasionally a topic of interest here.

The most blunt headline account of what happened that I saw was at The Wartburg Watch.

James MacDonald Has Been Deposed and It Took a Recording Played by Mancow to Send the Elders Over the Edge

http://thewartburgwatch.com/2019/02/13/james-macdonald-has-been-deposed-and-it-took-a-recording-played-by-mancow-to-send-the-elders-over-the-edge/


https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2019/02/14/what-now-for-harvest-bible-chapel-and-james-macdonald/

Something I've been thinking about is that a radio broadcast by a radio personality seems to have been the catalyst for the elders of Harvest Bible Chapel removing MacDonald.  As these things go it would seem we're talking about one mass media figure publishing material that catalyzed the removal of another media figure.  It might be too soon or too dubious to suggest that members of a spiritual community can bring issues to light about problems in a leader or leadership culture without facing retribution across the board.  It's hard to suggest such a thing not just because things are still playing out but also because, and I think this part is crucial, we're talking about elders removing someone at MacDonald's level with someone with a radio program made a point of publishing material.  In mass media and broadcast media terms this is still an intra-media caste situation.  

Justin Dean once tweeted about:

https://twitter.com/justinjdean/status/625932503082233856
Had that dream again where the bloggers won and our church closed down.
12:35 AM - 28 Jul 2015 

The tweet is gone by now, but it once existed.  The bloggers didn't "win" because Mars Hill Church shut down.  Maybe thousands of people were leaving Mars Hill because of what was published and discussed at blogs, but it would be a stretch to say that "the bloggers" could be said to have "won" and that by Mars Hill Church closing down.  I admit for some time I prayed that either the culture of Mars Hill would truly reform or that, if its leaders wouldn't reform, it would die a miserable death.  If Justin Dean would be willing to grant that believers who prayed such prayers had their prayers answered then, okay, that might be one thing we could agree about, that God answered the prayers of those Christians who prayed that if Mars Hill leaders wouldn't repent and reform their culture that God would providentially destroy that empire.  I'm not holding my breath about that if you hadn't guessed that by now.

But these kinds of moments with Harvest Bible Chapel do invite a question as to what level of public status a person has to have before the things they disclose become game-changers for governance boards inside of churches of any size.  

Does Harvest Bible Chapel have a crisis plan along the lines prescribed by Justin Dean in PR Matters?  We won't find out directly, in all likelihood.  

Are all the HBC suits actually dropped?  Not just the suit involving bloggers, what about the other one with a lending institution?  At this point having active suits may be the prerogative of an entity to keep pursuing but amidst a leadership change other questions haven't gone away.  There are other issues pertinent to HBC that don't just go away even if MacDonald does.

Whether or not HBC makes it remains to be seen.  Mars Hill dissolved but even in his promotional discussions of his book, Dean seems to have indicated a good number of the churches that were once Mars Hill campuses are doing fine.  Not Portland, obviously, which got absorbed into Door of Hope without so much as a single indication I've been able to see that Tim Smith is in any capacity on staff.  That's mysterious ... but in the history of Mars Hill guys suddenly vanishing from online sites without any explanation is basically normal.

Where ever MacDonald lands next he probably won't land at a place that has congregational polity.
This is still the guy who at one point published that Congregational Government is From Satan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110612112311/http://jamesmacdonald.com:80/blog/?p=7552
and claimed that critics of his criticism were satanic
https://web.archive.org/web/20110616020203/http://jamesmacdonald.com:80/blog/?p=7592

Although I personally attend a Presbyterian church I would never say congregational polity is from the devil.  There can be very healthy and unhealthy ways for just about any sort of ecclesiology paradigm to function, whether congregational, presbyterian, episcopal or so on. 

It's been reported the suit against the bloggers said to be associated with The Elephant's Debt and aso against Julie Roys has been dropped and the report has been it was dropped because a court stated that discovery was going to be what discovery normally is, as best I understand it, where lawyers can ask for a variety of documents as part of litigation.  While HBC was at liberty to drop its suit rather than deal with the realities of discovery this raises a question as to how and why anyone at HBC wouldn't have thought about those issues before filing a suit to begin with.  If it seems esoteric and pedantic, it is, but it's relevant because in the history of this blog I got a certified letter from a leader who was at Mars Hill asking to meet with him to talk about my blogging, despite the fact that publicly Mark and Mars Hill were pretty dismissive of bloggers having any relevance at all.  Back in 2012 or so I had some folks who had left MH or were leaving ask what could it hurt to meet with leaders at Mars Hill if they wanted to talk?  I had an admittedly cryptic response, from the end of Judges 8 through Judges 9. 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/06/interesting-story-about-self-appointed.html

But even in the case of Mars Hill, the bloggers didn't "win".  It wasn't until the mainstream and independent press picked up that something was going on and began to investigate more fully that crises developed from which mars Hill did not manage to recover.  Blogs played a role in keeping material available for public consideration but Mars Hill did not die because of a hostile secular liberal press corps having it out for Pastor Mark.  If that was all that was necessary Mars Hill would have crumbled in 1998 under the coerage of Mother Jones.  Clearly that didn't happen.

It has seemed that by opting for litgation HBC took a path that suggests from here in Puget Sound, that some people thought it was better to double down on a defense-by-offense approach.  That ... seems to have boomeranged on HBC.  The Mancow broadcast, which I haven't taken the tie to hear yet and might postpone until later, is still, when all is said and done a radio broadcast.  This is media figure vs media figure in the most important ways.  It may make the difference between a Mancow broadcast that leads an elder board to remove a pastor on the one hand and a storm of prolonged press coverage and social media controversies that culminate in a board putting a pastor on some kind of leave during which he designs to resign rather than start complying with the restoration plan he said he agreed to submit to.  At the risk of putting this in terms that even I feel are a bit too stark and jaded, the difference between a Mars Hill resignation and an HBC removal seems to have had something to do with the prestige level of the media format in which audio with incriminating statements tied to a by-now-former pastor at a church has been disclosed. 

Mark Driscoll's fortunes as a public figure and preacher took a substantial hit when he was confronted on air by Janet Mefferd who, in her own way, could be thought of as a sort of Reformed radio personality.  The parallels are perhaps cosmetic but it would seem "possible" to say in both cases it took radio figures bringing material to light for things to change in the case of what used to be Mars Hill and for the current Harvest Bible Chapel.

That should not give anyone who could otherwise think of themselves as rank and file tithing members of a church, or even on staff members of a church leadership culture, the impression that it will go in a remotely similar way of they attempt to use social media or mass media to confront what they regard as problems in the life of a local church.  I realize that maybe Justin Dean felt, at one point, and possibly no longer at that, that "the bloggers won" but anyone who carefully combs through the history of Mars Hill's long history of public relations crises and disasters would be hard pressed to say that "bloggers" were the reason the former Mars Hill shuttered its doors. 

We'll get to find out how Harvest Bible Chapel weathers the current circumstances and wehther it makes it without its founding personality.  The former Mars Hill campuses are, for the most part, still active and stable as best as I have been able to keep some track of them.  The future of Harvest Bible Chapel is going to be a topic best left to other people much closer to the situation and people.  But it does seem worth noting that, as Wartburg Watch led in their headline, it took a radio broadcast to change things at HBC with respect to MacDonald.