Driscoll is working on the resurgence of The Resurgence

Since Driscoll seems to have gotten most of the intellectual property that was associated with the former Mars Hill during its period of dissolution this isn't particularly surprising.  Driscoll is working on the resurgence of The Resurgence, which is a reminder that I was going to read A Call to Resurgence before getting to Spirit-Filled Jesus.

https://theresurgence.com/

Whether this new The Resurgence will bring back his old materials about Oprah as a cult leader (possibly the more ironically themed post in light of the last years of Mars Hill and what has been written about his leadership style in the past), his response to the Ted Haggard controversy, his post on Adriana Lima as the naked virgin Catholic model, or on Jenna Jameson, remains to be seen.   Possibly, those posts won't be part of the resurgence of The Resurgence.  Whether Driscoll will bring back John Catanzaro's contributions to The Resurgence is also an open question. Whatever form the resurgent The Resurgence takes it will probably have to be refurbished.

another blast from the past 10-17-2008 "Introducing Dr. Catanzaro", formerly the naturopathic personal doctor of Mark Driscoll

Since Driscoll blogged this week about ways to be a good friend ... it might be interesting to revisit a post in which the world was given an introduction to one of those friends back on October 17, 2008

https://www.facebook.com/notes/resurgence/introducing-dr-catanzaro/40016302845

Introducing Dr. Catanzaro
.
October 17, 2008 at 1:16pm

Seattle is one of the most progressive cities in America when it comes to alternative medicine. This is in part due to the influence of Seattle’s Bastyr University which is one of the leading schools in the world for alternative medicine. And, this trend is growing rapidly around the nation and world as witnesses in the fact that nearly every grocery store now has an organic section and collection of naturopathic remedies for everything from colds to allergies.

Admittedly, the entire industry is not yet well regulated which leaves room for poor medical alternatives. And, much of the naturopathic world is dominated by non-Christian and even pagan thinking.

Yet, the question persists, where can Christians go to get wise counsel on navigating the world of alternative medicine? Now, they can go to The Resurgence.


Some years ago I chose a naturopathic doctor named John Catanzaro. He is a godly Christian brother, ordained evangelical pastor with a Masters Degree in theology, and also a practicing naturopathic doctor. Thanks to his help in such areas as diet and nutrition I am in the best health of my life after hitting a place of fatigue and burnout a few years back. He is a gifted doctor, wise brother, and is very sympathetic to the need of Christians to have wise counsel in navigating the growing world of alternative medicine. So, he will begin blogging at Resurgence to help serve God’s people as they pursue wisdom and health.

Dr. Catanzaro's first post

Dr. John A. Catanzaro is President and Founder of Health and Wellness Institute. He is an author, lecturer, has guest appearances on television and radio as an advocate on integrative medicine. He is affiliate clinical faculty of Bastyr University and is responsible for the advanced medical training of medical students and residents. He has served on the Washington State Healthcare Quality Assurance Commission as the Vice Chair of the Naturopathic Advisory Committee from 1999-2005. He has served as integrative medical advisor for a CDC sponsored Cancer Control Partnership in Washington State responsible in paving a new direction for integrative cancer treatment. He was selected by Seattle Magazine as one of the twenty best naturopathic physicians in Seattle. He is married and has 5 children. You can learn more about his Dr. Catanzaro’s work here.

None of the links work and the sites are down.  After Catanzaro had a license suspension all and any mention of him by Mark Driscoll seemed to vanish into thin air, as if Driscoll had never even met the guy.  For folks who are interacting with the Driscolls in the Arizona area it might be pertinent to ask, in the spirit of asking Driscolls how they live out their advice about friendship in their own lives, if they know how Catanzaro's been doing lately.

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/694169588691374080
Real friends are like socks. You might lose them for a while but eventually they show back up.

6:45 AM - 1 Feb 2016

What's perhaps most peculiar and telling about this tweet is that by describing real friends as being like socks the simile breaks down at the point in which it expects the friends to eventually show back up because the only way to lose your socks for a while is to abandon them somewhere, forget where you left them, and then decide you'll go looking for them.  If you wear your socks and put them thoughtfully somewhere where you can get them you don't lose them. 

Which could just keep us thematically on the question of where, since Driscoll's seen fit to tweet bromides about friends in general, what he knows about some friends of yore in more specific ways.

Driscoll tweet on how real friends are like socks, might be lost a while but they show back up. So ... what about Driscoll's old friend and doctor John Catanzaro?

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/694169588691374080
Real friends are like socks. You might lose them for a while but eventually they show back up.

6:45 AM - 1 Feb 2016

Well ... in the interest of considering a sock ... what about Mark Driscoll's friend naturopath John Catanzaro?  For those who don't remember him, he was the subject of a few blog posts here.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/ct-drew-dyck-interview-of-mark-driscoll.html

 https://www.healthcoach7.com/dr-john-catanzaro/

how about Driscoll's little forward on page 4 of this?
http://storage.cloversites.com/communitybiblechurch5/documents/Marijuana%20Medial%20Information.pdf

FORWARD
"With the legalization of marijuana in Washington State I wrote a free ebook on the issue theologically and pastorally. I did not address the medical issues because that was beyond my scope of expertise. However, my doctor and friend Dr. John Catanzaro was kind enough to research the medical aspects of marijuana usage and write them up. We genuinely hope this helps Christians make wise decisions and provide wise counsel--especially parents and ministry leaders."
Mark Driscoll
Pastor Mars Hill Church

http://web.archive.org/web/20130425211223/https://theresurgence.com/authors/john-Catanzaro

Well ... turns out there's robots.txt for Catanzaro's actual articles still, after all.

Catanzaro follow up, HealthCoach 7 is up, Health and Wellness Institute site down

for folks who have lost track of things to do with the former doctor/naturopath of Mark Driscoll, whose license was suspended early in 2014 ...
http://www.casewatch.org/board/nat/catanzaro/agreed_order_2014.shtml

the Health and Wellness Institute website is not currently active.
http://hwifc.com/

This site is ...
https://www.healthcoach7.com/about-us/
which corresponds with ...
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-john-catanzaro/6/357/b67

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-catanzaro/7/856/90

Physician, Consultant, Educator, Public speaker

HealthCoach7

January 2011 – Present (4 years 11 months)

Developing program for client interface, Client consulting in personalized genetics and functional medicine. Developing education interface. Public speaking in personalized genetics, epigenetics and functional medicine.

Former: Founder And Ceo

HWIFC Cancer Treatment

January 1996 – January 2014 (18 years 1 month)

Whether Catanzaro or Mark Driscoll will ever speak of the other again, well, that may just be a little mystery.  If you want to review the history of stuff Driscoll used to say about Catanzaro follow-up reading can be done through the posts with the appropriate tag.

a short update on John Catanzaro--"not currently practicing but is on site as a nutritional counselor and patient advocate"

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20140129/NEWS01/140128856

Last year readers may recall that naturopath John Catanzaro, who was at one time Mark Driscoll's naturopath, had his license suspended. 
http://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1500/NewsReleases/2014/14-169-CatanzaroFollowUpNewsRelease.pdf

a press release late last year clarified that he would have his license suspended until at least the end of January 2015.  He's to be on probation for eight years when his license is reinstated. Catanzaro reached a settlement over the suspension.

In a peculiar irony the press release about the license suspension came out the same month Mark Driscoll was featured in Christianity Today in the Leadership Journal section discussing health and health care for pastors. By Driscoll's account:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/winter/survivor.html
... First I went to a conventional doctor, who told me I needed blood pressure meds, heartburn medicine, sleep medicine, anxiety medicine. I'm like, Man, I'm in my 30s. That's a lot of medicine! So I went and found a naturopathic doctor, who said, "You need to quit your job and find a different vocation."

 
I said, "Well, Jesus said to do this, so that's not really an option." So I found another naturopathic doctor. He gave me supplements, vitamins, minerals, IV treatments for adrenal support, and custom tailored vitamins. He put me on a regimen for wellness and recovery. His approach was to naturally rebuild the body, to not just treat the symptoms. He told me, "You've got to work really hard to change your lifestyle and your organization, everything."

As previously noted, the irony was that while by Mark Driscoll's account he didn't want to be taking a ton of pills, when in the 2008 spiritual warfare session he described his routines he mentioned taking something like 25 vitamin supplements a day.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-year-after-cts-survivor-profile-on.html

http://castroller.com/podcasts/MarsHillChurch3/1599379
Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 4 Q&A
35:29
I'll tell you what this looks like for me. My doctor is trained in naturopath and traditional medicine in Eastern and Western. He loves Jesus. I mean I go in for IV treatments. Just for additional vitamins and minerals and supplements I take 25 vitamins a day. [emphasis added]

But not everyone seems to be on board with the idea that dozens of vitamin and mineral supplements taken daily necessarily helps.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/vitamin-bs/386126/

Meanwhile, for those who don't want to read that piece or read it already, there's another peculiar irony:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/winter/survivor.html?start=3
...
I've seen so many young guys go up fast and come down hard. Some years Rick Warren invited me down to California. I had dinner with a couple of other young leaders and pastor Rick, and I said, "Okay. So like why am I here? Did I do something wrong? Usually I get called into meetings when I've said something wrong." Rick said, "No, you didn't do anything wrong. Years ago I put together a list of young up-and-coming evangelical pastors, and I prayed for them. And every time a guy disqualifies himself or quits or whatever, I cross his name off the list." And he said, "More than half the list is gone, but you guys are still on the list. So I wanted to see how you are doing." Sometimes I think ministry is like MMA. If you're just still standing at the end, there's a good chance you're the winner. [emphasis added]

Within the calendar year Mark Driscoll had resigned,

http://www.religionnews.com/2014/10/15/exclusive-mark-driscolls-resignation-letter-to-mars-hill-church/

At the moment Driscoll isn't confirmed as a pastor of or a member in a church, and has not been in the media much since he resigned from being preaching pastor at Mars Hill late last year. 

And a year later, it looks like Mark Driscoll's former naturopath is not yet back into formally licensed medical practice.

http://hwifc.com/staff/dr-john-catanzaro/

**Dr. John is not currently practicing but is on site as a nutritional counselor and patient advocate. If you need a prayer for your health, he is here for you so come on in and pray with Dr. John.**

While the article from January 2014 was titled "The Survivor" this year, for the moment, neither Mark Driscoll nor John Catanzaro are currently in their respectively documented careers for now.  This doesn't mean we may not see either or both of them return to preaching and naturopathy within the calendar year.  That remains to be seen.

The year after CT's "The Survivor" profile on Mark Driscoll looks at how he went from a doctor to a naturopath, the 2008 warfare session Q&A mentions his taking 25 vitamins a day and getting IV shots.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/mark-driscolls-eye-twitch-naturopath.html

Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship & life togetherMark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
(c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (ie)
page 208

I had multiple stress-related symptoms--heartburn, headaches, nervous eye twitch, aggressive driving, constant low-level anger, high blood pressure, and self-medicating with foods and drinks packed with fat, sugar, and simple carbohydrates, along with caffeine.

Perhaps a few months after things had reached this level, a godly friend in the church, named Jon, scheduled a meeting with me. God had laid it on his heart to speak some wisdom into my life. He did so with great humility, and in that meeting he gave me some insights that were life changing.  [emphasis added]
Jon had been taking notes on how he organized his life, things he had learned, and what he felt the Holy Spirit had asked him to tell me. His wisdom was a priceless gift. He called it "Reverse Engineering." The big idea is to anticipate life forward and live it backward.  ... For my health I found a doctor named John who was a naturopath and ordained pastor and started doing what he told me to do, which has changed my life. 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/january/survivor.html

...  Put my head down, worked seven days a week. I preached, gosh, 48 or 50 Sundays a year, five or six times a Sunday, an hour or more per sermon. And I traveled to speak, to make ends meet, because I was still supplementing my income. I didn't even have a full-time assistant until we hit 6,000. And by then my wife and I had five kids.

It was go, go, go, and at some point my body just couldn't go anymore. I once had an old car and the ignition would get stuck. You'd have to literally pop the hood and disconnect the battery to make it stop. I was like that car. I couldn't shut down. I couldn't sleep. I'd fall asleep for an hour, wake up, and then be up all night. I'd be exhausted but unable to sleep. I had adrenal fatigue.

What finally happened?

First I went to a conventional doctor, who told me I needed blood pressure meds, heartburn medicine, sleep medicine, anxiety medicine. I'm like, Man, I'm in my 30s. That's a lot of medicine! [emphasis original] So I went and found a naturopathic doctor, who said, "You need to quit your job and find a different vocation."

 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/january/survivor.html?start=2

I said, "Well, Jesus said to do this, so that's not really an option."  So I found another naturopathic doctor. He gave me supplements, vitamins, minerals, IV treatments for adrenal support, and custom tailored vitamins. He put me on a regimen for wellness and recovery. His approach was to naturally rebuild the body, to not just treat the symptoms. He told me, "You've got to work really hard to change your lifestyle and your organization, everything."

And what did this start to look like?

http://castroller.com/podcasts/MarsHillChurch3/1599379
Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 4 Q&A
35:29
I'll tell you what this looks like for me. My doctor is trained in naturopath and traditional medicine in Eastern and Western. He loves Jesus. I mean I go in for IV treatments. Just for additional vitamins and minerals and supplements I take 25 vitamins a day. [emphasis added] We do blood work. I work out. I read my Bible. I pray. I sleep. I, you know, drink so many ounces of water a day. Get time with my wife and kids. Proper physical [and] emotional affection from my family. Time with my friends. Silence and solitude. My whole life is integrated and if the body's off the mind is effected, if the mind is off the soul is effected. Everything works together and so for me it's having an integrated approach to my walk with God.

A lot of the stories Driscoll recounted about his roller coaster health suggests he may have risked (or actually arrived at) caffeine dependency.  Even if we were to bracket off Mark Driscoll's accounts of spiritual attacks altogether his caffeine use, sleep deprivation, and other health problems might suggest he was overdue for a full medical and possibly a psychological evaluation for some time.  While Driscoll's formal profession of the importance of viewing life as an integrated whole is commendable the majority of testimony Driscoll gave about himself is that he's never really been assessed by a professional psychologist or gotten much by way of counseling.  This introduces the somewhat unnerving possibility that Driscoll spent nearly twenty years in ministry doing his thing without ever once having been on the receiving end of the kind of counsel he's given to others or the kind of counsel he at one point was instructing Mars Hill pastors to use in dealing with members and attenders of Mars Hill Church.

And ironically, it would seem after feeling it would be weird to take a lot of doctor prescribed medications in his 30s as he recounts his 2007 thinking in a 2014 interview, turns out that by early 2008 he was sharing with Mars Hill leaders he was taking twenty-five vitamins a day. It's as though so long as the door to a jaw-dropping regime of pills and shots was prefixed with "naturopath" instead of conventional doctor Mark Driscoll was okay with it.

Catanzaro agrees to settlement and suspension of his license with a probation, found to have acted unprofessionally in information but did not harm patients

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2025046136_naturopathsettlementxml.html

Details in the article.  Say what you will about Catanzaro as a naturopath, he's agreed to a license suspension and a probationary period.

That's more than can be said about either Mark Driscoll or the leadership of Mars Hill that let Driscoll resign his membership rather than face a restoration process. 

2-5-2008 spiritual warfare Part 2 part 3: some commentary and a news item courtesy of Warren Throckmorton about John Catanzaro

One of the things Driscoll mentioned in his discussion of false religions was how desperate people can turn to questionable healers.  Wenatchee The Hatchet is surprised at the providence with which Warren Throckmoron has recently published news of the status of John Catanzaro's suspended license.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/11/18/john-catanzaros-naturopath-license-suspended-can-apply-for-reinstatement-in-january-2015/

Something Wenatchee The Hatchet noticed about John Catanzaro(s) via LinkedIn profiles was the recurrence of Deepok Chopra.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/warren-throckmorton-blogs-more-about.html

Was it this Chopra?
http://theresurgence.com/2009/03/26/watch-abc-nightline-debate-now
The ABC Nightline debate with Pastor Mark and Annie Lobert versus Deepak Chopra and Carlton Pearson is up online now. Watch it here. Go to the Resurgence Facebook Page or use #mhc (twitter) to talk about it.      

Because if John Catanzaro was a Chopra buff to any degree at all why on earth would Mark Driscoll, who debated the existence of the devil with Chopra a bit more than a year after his 2008 spiritual warfare session, have not at any point gotten any red flags about Catanzaro.  If the red flags didn't go up over the nature of Catanzaro's naturopathic practice wouldn't they have gone up if Driscoll had ever noticed if his naturopath had made any nods toward Chopra? 

Throckmorton: the lead pastor and executive pastor wellness program and John Catanzaro

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/07/megachurch-methods-the-lead-pastors-and-executive-elders-wellness-program/

Catanzaro's hearing is apparently in November.  Mars Hill and associates purged all references to Catanzaro as far as practical but ... for those who are curious to read at least a little bit about Catanzaro's history with Mark Driscoll you can read these.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/catanzaro

Apparently this was a topic about which Justin Dean bothered to reply to Warren Throckmorton, which would be interesting if up until now Dean had shown himself capable of saying anything that seemed either informative or accurate.  Then again ...  pleading organizational incompetence as the explanation for how Andrew Lamb's disciplinary situation ended up being posted about on The City does make sense.

It was over here in this thread that Wenatchee The Hatchet spotted a not-so-stray comment about OC homes.

Warren Throckmorton: John Catanzaro prepares defense in license suspension situation, describes self as special advisor to Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/06/05/press-release-suspended-naturopath-special-advisor-to-mark-driscoll-mars-hill-church/

John Catanzaro, a naturopath whose license was suspended earlier this year in the wake of allegations that he misled cancer patients into taking vaccines that were not approved, has been preparing for his hearing in August and has been building the case for his defense in media activities.

Warren Throckmorton links to materials Catanzaro has made available and notes that Catanzaro describes himself as having been special advisor to Mark Driscoll and to Mars Hill Church.

The part about being on the Advisory Board Council might be something to investigate further but there's a blog post already available noting how significantly publicly listed statements about the governance of MHC in 2012 and 2013 have been. 

Throckmorton has noted that Wenatchee The Hatchet has documented that Catanzaro's contributions to The Resurgence have been pulled and that Catanzaro is no longer a featured writer.  What Throckmorton didn't mention that is worth repeating is that The Resurgence website now has robots.txt so that all the links Wenatchee the Hatchet had via The WayBack Machine to Catanzaro's contributions no longer work.  However, as recently as a January 2014 interview Mark Driscoll was making reference to the second naturopath he consulted and cumulatively the case seems to be from the last eight years of Driscoll statements that John Catanzaro was his naturopath. That "John" who was a naturopath and a minister Driscoll referenced would seem to be Catanzaro.

To date there's no indication that Mark Driscoll has acknowledged since the suspension that he's even had a naturopath.  Something that could use some clarification is that there are two John Catanzaro LinkedIn profiles Wenatchee The Hatchet has found and one of them has "a" John Catanzaro mentioning Deepak Chopra

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/warren-throckmorton-blogs-more-about.html

There are, in fact, multiple John Catanzaros but if the two linkedin profiles were for one and the same naturopath in the Bothell area it's weird to think that Mark Driscoll's naturopath made any linkage to Chopra, who was one of the people Mark Driscoll debated in 2009 on the existence of the devil.

What is not clear from Catanzaro's recent reference to himself as having a special advisory role to Mark Driscoll and an Advisory Board Council role is how formally he was contracted as a member.  That would "seem" like a good guess, that he was in some capacity a contracted member, and yet in 2014 MH has stressed that the Board of Advisor's and Accountability has men who are not actually part of Mars Hill in any fashion now and that this means they are not as likely to be beset by conflicts of interest.

Evidence for that claim has not, as yet, been produced.  In fact in the overall history of Mars Hill Church it would seem more that the members of the BOAA may not only be historically interested parties through personal contact with Driscoll or MH pastors, but have played advisory roles in the past or are active and current executive elders.

While Mark Driscoll has mentioned from the pulpit about how grace toward leaders is a good thing and that everyone makes mistakes if this approach were applied to the relationship Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll seem to have had with John Catanzaro the massive purge of materials Catanzaro contributed to Mars Hill associated websites wouldn't have happened, would it?  Not only did Mars Hill associated websites purge every active trace of John Catanzaro they've even got robots.txt active so you can't even use archive resources to find what Catanzaro published under the umbrella of Mars Hill Church and with the endorsement of Mark Driscoll.  If Mark Driscoll got the same treatment from Mars Hill for his seven books with verifiably plagiarized content in them that Catanzaro seems to have gotten merely for the ALLEGATION that he has misled patients (Catanzaro does still have time to clear his name here in August 2014) would Mark Driscoll even be a pastor?  Driscoll can talk from the pulpit about how leaders and public ministry figures need grace all he wants but until his apparently former naturopath gets a comparable extension of "grace" from Mars Hill it seems as though there could be a double standard at play here in which Driscoll talks about getting grace and people who have advised him over the years get scrubbed away from the public history and internet presence of Mars Hill.

Not that that's never happened before.

stories of anger and poor health followed by new governance, a supportive wife, and new health ... 2007 and 2014 at Mars Hill

Mars Hill Church is nearing the twenty year point and this year has seen more controversy connected to it and its president than possibly at any time in its history.

Ever since Janet Mefferd accused Mark Driscoll of plagiarism on air there has been a cascade of controversy and inquiry into what has been going on at Mars Hill Church from both outsiders and insiders (it seems). 

In the last few months Mars Hill Church has been scrubbing away a decade's worth of preaching that at one point was easily accessible.  In a post such as the following:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/06/joy-in-anxiety-driscolls-gloss-on.html

Wenatchee The Hatchet was able to compare what Driscoll shared from the pulpit to controversies that were brewing within the church that were not fully brought to light for public consideration in at least one case until the emergence of Joyful Exiles. Even if you could look up and listen to "The Rebel's Guide to Joy in Anxiety" from the Phillipians series from 2007 it comes across now less as an expository sermon on a passage from a Pauline epistle and more as a Driscollian gloss on that particular moment in Mars Hill history and his own anxieties about controversies within the church and about the church.  And the sermon, of course, is gone from the Mars Hill media library.

So is everything prior to the Doctrine series in 2008. 

One of the trends Wenatchee The Hatchet has documented about the history of Mars Hill leadership has been to note that it's possible for someone to be a convicted felon on his second marriage and still get rather quickly into a significant leadership role within Mars Hill Church after helping play some kind of role in getting to Mars Hill real estate Mark Driscoll said from the pulpit he had wanted for Mars Hill for ten years.

For those who don't follow every link:

http://marshill.com/media/rebels-guide-to-joy/the-rebels-guide-to-joy-in-humility

Mark Driscoll on November 4, 2007

... The last one is James. He was running a drug and alcohol treatment center, I think for the Union Gospel Mission. He was an elder at Doxa Church in West Seattle. He and Pastor Bill were there and I approached them and said, “I think we should partner together,” and turned that building into Mars Hill West Seattle. I don’t know what the building’s worth – $4 million, whatever.  He said, “Well what’s the deal?” I said, “Give us the building, resign as elders, work through the membership process, work through the eldership process. I guarantee you nothing – no power, no job, no eldership. If you meet the qualifications and the men vote you in, we’ll make you an elder, but I guarantee you no job. Nothing. If you believe it’s right for Jesus, give us the building, resign, give up all power of authority, give up your position. Walk away from it all for the cause of Jesus.”

He said, “Okay, I think it’s best for Jesus.” He resigned, voted to hand us the building and the people. Humbly went through the eldership process. After he finished the membership process, oversees our drug and alcohol addiction recovery. We just voted him onto the Board of Directors. Why? Because God opposes the proud and he gives grace to the humble. 

 

http://marshill.com/media/1st-corinthians/spiritual-gifts-part-ii#transcript

Part 26: One Body, Many parts

1 Corinthians 12:12-26

Pastor Mark Driscoll

July 30, 2006

… In the meantime, we also picked up another miracle. This is West Seattle. This is on 35th at the top of the hill in West Seattle as you head toward White Center. I grew up in this neighborhood. This is a church building that is an absolute miracle. I’ll tell you the story on this space. I tried to launch Mars Hill Church in that building ten years ago, and we were rejected, and I’ve always wanted to be in there since. And what happened was, is we were growing. I went to Pastor Bill Clem, who was leading that congregation. He planted it for Acts 29 Church Planning Network [emphasis added], him and James Noriega, who is the other elder there and I said, “We’re maxed out. You got a fat building, 50,000 square feet, 1,000 seats.:” It’s a bigger building and the one you’re sitting in right now. I said, “Is there any way we to use it?” They said, “Well, we wanna reach as many people in West Seattle as possible. How about if we give it to you and work together?” we prayed about it for a second and said, “Yes.”

That is a $5 million gift. That is a $5 million gift, right? And I don’t know if you’ve been tracking the real estate market, people aren’t giving away a lotta real estate right now in Seattle and so we have – we’ve taken Pastor James and Pastor Bill on staff at Mars Hill. We have taken their members through the Gospel Class and they’re now members of Mars Hill. [emphasis added] They’ve been meeting as a core group over there. As we speak, there is $1.5 million of construction going on at the West Seattle campus, with the intention of opening in October in time for our ten year anniversary, and we want to expand over to West Seattle as well. We were thinking, “Well, we can borrow $8 million from the bank. We can spend $3 million and for $11 million, we can open up a 40,000 square foot location.” Well, we can now open more square feet for $1.5 million. So obviously, you take that opportunity.

The two cool aspects of this particular campus is one, is already zoned as a church, so we don’t need to fight use permits. We don’t have to bring it up to code. We can just walk in and use it immediately and it saves us, literally, a few years of permitting. Secondly, the lot that it is on is only zoned for 15,000 square feet of building and it already has 50,000 square feet, and because as grandfathered in, we could use it all. We could never build this building today as it exists.  And the cool thing with this building, a very Godly church that loved the Bible – started this church, built it, their denomination went liberal, dropped the doctrine of the inerrancy or perfection of Scripture and this building went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was the test case for who owns the church building, the congregation or the denomination. The congregation lost and these people actually bought their own building back, because they refused to drop the authority of Scripture as their value. [emphasis added] And so, there were some Godly older saints who paid for this building twice. It then went into decline but there is still a core of these people, like in their 70s and 80s, that are now members of Mars Hill. Grandmas tithing, waiting for us all to show up and fill that thing up again, and they’re praying us in. It’s a really cool God story and what God has done is pretty amazing.

 

Now in other church settings there would have been some debate about whether Noriega was ready to be a pastor, let alone a pastor in charge of recovery/addiction groups with a history of felonies and only a few years into a second marriage.  True, he converted to Christianity in 1998 but he may have been fast-tracked too quickly into leadership.  Then again, precisely how, when and why Jamie Munson was qualified to be the legal president of Mars Hill as a corporation never really got an explanation, either.

 

But let's consider what Driscoll had to say in a letter from November 8, 2007 about where he was at in late 2007.  He was willing to explain at least some things.

 

http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf

 

... My wife and I are closer than ever and she is the greatest woman in the world for me. I deligth in her, enjoy her, and praise God for the gift that she is. She recently brought me to tears by sweetly saying, "It's nice to have you back," as apparently I had been somewhat gone for many years. [emphasis added]Our five children are wonderful blessings. I love being a daddy and am closer to my children with greater joy in them than ever. ...

 

The past year has been one of the most difficult of my entire life. It has been painful to see a few men whom I loved and trained as elders become sinful, proud, divisive, accusatory, mistrusting, power hungry, and unrepentant. It has, however, been absolutely amazing to see all but one of those men humble themselves and give up what is best for them to do what is best for Jesus and our entire church. In that I have seen the power of the gospel, and remain hopeful to eventually see it in the former elder who remains unrepentant but to whom my hand of reconciliation remains extended along with a team of other elders assigned to pursue reconciliation if/when he is willing.  Furthermore, sin in my own life has been exposed through this season and I have also benefited from learning to repent of such things as bitterness, unrighteous anger, control, and pride. As a result, I believe we have a pruned elder team that God intends to bear more fruit than ever.  This team of battle-tested, humble, and repentant men is now both easy to enjoy and trust.

 

Emotionally, I told our Board of Directors recently that I felt like I walked Mars Hill down the aisle and married her off so that she could be best cared for and loved in the next season of her life. I remain her father who loves and cares for her and is vitally involved in her growth and well-being, but now trust the elders to take good care of her thanks in part to a structure that enables her to be loved well. [emphasis added] Subsequently, for the first time in my tenure at Mars Hill I am able to work in my area of gifting with men I trust on a mission I believe in with church members I love and a Jesus I worship. That harmony is priceless. 

 

So let's revisit what one of the signal events was that Mark Driscoll said was a positive change in 2007.

 

http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
"Jamie Munson is head of the elder board. Jamie Munson is executive pastor. He is legal president of the organization. And for me, to be honest, it was the most freeing, liberating thing I could have dreamed of because now I don't have all that conflict of interest. I can be friends with someone but I don't have to fire them, do their performance review, and decide how much they get paid. It's just too conflicting for me." 

 

What conflict of interest was Mark Driscoll referring to, since he made a point of using those specific words? What about appointing Jamie Munson as head of the elder board, executive pastor, and legal president of Mars Hill as an organization freed Driscoll up from conflict of interest?  The above explanation invites more uncertainty than certainty.  Why?

 

Because Mark Driscoll became legal president of Mars Hill at some point in later 2011 or early 2012.  If the process of letting Jamie Munson draft bylaws that made himself legal president was likened by Mark Driscoll to walking Mars Hill Church (as though it were his daughter) down the aisle to marry her off to a good guy then what did Mark Driscoll resuming legal presidency of Mars Hill Church indicate? 

 

Something about the more recent internal communication from Mark Driscoll posted on The City that was republished by Warren Throckmorton is worth noting. 

 

http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/MHCletterMD.png

 

Personally, I find all of this relieving. the pressure and pace has increased every year since I started in 1996. [WtH what about the previous quote about the hand-off of 2007?] I don't want to be burned out or angry, and I want to become more like Jesus every year. I want to teach the Bible, love well, and run at a pace to finish my race many decades from now. My health is actually in the best place it has been in recent years [WtH--no word from Driscoll about John Catanzaro, still]. I have a skilled and unified team that loves you and can handle more responsibility [WtH--like the one alluded to in 2007?], if I can free up the time and energy to love them and invest in them.  Grace and the kids are doing very well, and my family is still my joy and my priority. This year we will have three of our five kids as teenagers, and our oldest will be a senior preparing for college. I don't want to miss this season, as these are years I can never get back. If I am going to err, I want it to be on the side of guarding too much time and energy for family and church family rather than not enough.

 

To be clear, these are decisions I have come to with our Senior Pastor Jesus Christ. I believe this is what He is asking of me, and so I want to obey Him. The first person I discussed this with was our first, and still best, church member, Grace. Her loving agreement and wise counsel only confirmed this wonderful opportunity to reset some aspects of our life. I want to publicly thank her, as it was 26 years ago this week that we had our first date. She is the greatest friend and biggest blessing in my life after Jesus. When we recently discussed this plan to reset our life together, late at night on the couch, she started crying tears of joy. She did not know how  our life more sustainable, and did not want to discourage me, but had been praying that God would reveal to me a way to reset our life. [emphasis added] Her prayer was answered, and for that we are both relieved at what a sustainable, joyful, and fruitful future could be. As an anniversary present, I want to give her more of her best friend.

 

I have also submitted these decisions to the Board of Advisors and Accountability. They have approved of this direction and are 100 percent supportive of these changes. It's a wonderful thing to have true accountability and not be an independent decision maker regarding my ministry and, most importantly, our church.

And yet Grace Driscoll herself, as Mark Driscoll quoted her in early 2007, was willing to tell Driscoll to his face that the person in the book of Ruth he most resembled was Elimelech.  Since, of course, all the Driscoll sermons prior to 2008 aren't exactly available at marshill.com these days ... :

 

http://marshill.com/en/transcript/redeemingruth/gods-hand-in-our-suffering

January 7, 2007
Redeeming Ruth
Part 1: God's Hand in Our Suffering
Ruth 1:1-1:22


Let me wrap all of this up. As your pastor, who loves you very much – I say that sincerely – would you be as honest as Naomi today, and would you acknowledge that your life and mine are like Naomi and Ruth’s stories in which the providential hand of God is at work, in which he calls us to be honest and to run to him and one another as God’s people, to work out those parts of our life that we consider afflictions, but not yet have received them as sanctified? And would you identify yourself with someone in the story – who are you? How many of you, you’re Elimelech-ish? You’re Elimelech-ish. Elimelech is the guy – Everything falls apart. It looks dark. It looks bad. He takes a poll. He makes a plan. He decides Moab has a lower cost of living. Moab has more vocational opportunity. Moab has food on the table – I will make a plan. I will be the sovereign. I will take care of everything. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. He leads well. He plans well. He tries to be the sovereign. Everybody dies anyways.

I am Elimelech. I asked my wife, “Which one am I?” Oh, my wife – she didn’t even breathe. Didn’t even take a breath. “Oh, you’re Elimelech.” And his name means what? My God is King! That was me. If you ask me, Jesus, sovereign, Lord, King, God, and if I ever need ‘em, I’ll call, but I don’t think I do ‘cause I got this all taken care of. Elimelech-ish.

And then there's this old nugget:

http://townhall.com/Columnists/ThorTolo/2008/03/06/the_gospel_according_to_mark_driscoll

When the Lord isn’t talking to this man, kiddingly called a short-fused drama queen by his wife, his critics are blogging about him. Some of the sharper barbs make it difficult for Driscoll to hide the hurt.

 

Mark Driscoll presented a narrative of how he used to be angry but everything is better now that a new governance system has been put in place before.  It happened in 2007 and it seems to have happened again in a more piecemeal fashion through 2012-2014.  Only back in 2007 no one had produced evidence that Mark Driscoll had plagiarized anyone else's work or that anyone at Mars Hill had signed a contract with an entity like ResultSource to secure a place on the NYT bestseller list for a book that turned out to use the ideas of others without giving them credit in the first edition.

There was no controversy about the extent to which executive leadership was aware of or ignored city zoning ordinances with respect to a Mars Hill campus.  Well, actually ... there kind of was about the 50th street building.  Which may be a sober reminder to people who have at some point called Mars Hill Church home that the more things change the more some things, even after all this time, might still be the same.

John Catanzaro breaks silence regarding suspension of license and associated allegations

http://www.king5.com/news/local/Suspended-Bothell-naturopath-breaks-silence-257769221.html

Wenatchee The Hatchet has tried to keep some track of this story as it progresses.  At one point the blog had a listing of all the content John Catanzaro published at The Resurgence website.  But since January 30, 2014 theresurgence.com has robots.txt to preclude The WayBack Machine being used to let readers consult what Catanzaro had at one time published at the website. 

So many things at theresurgence.com that has been quoted here at Wenatchee The Hatchet that has also been referenced via The WayBack Machine has now been scrubbed.  At least some of the relevant materials published in which Catanzaro seems to have been discussed have been preserved at the following posts.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/mark-driscolls-eye-twitch-naturopath.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/ct-drew-dyck-interview-of-mark-driscoll.html

Precisely why Mars Hill Church and its assorted sites employ robots.txt to preclude WayBack Machine captures would be the subject of conjecture.  Precisely why Mars Hill Church in the last two months has obliterated about a decade's worth of Mark Driscoll sermons also remains to be explained.  There's surely some explanation (and proposing that the sermons have been available for years already is not an explanation of why they're not easily available now) but so far MHC in its various forms has been kind of quiet. 

Meanwhile, Catanzaro has been in the process of making his appeal. 

Resurgence introduced robot that precludes WayBack Machine crawls, semi-related news, John Catanzaro makes a counter-accusation amid his license suspension appeal

http://theresurgence.com/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /v

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

http://web.archive.org/web/http://theresurgence.com

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

So after linking to all of Catanzaro's previously published content at The Resurgence via links and captures from The WayBack Machine it looks like The Resurgence has opted to introduce a robot that disallows all WayBack crawls. 

On April 3, 2014 the Bothell/Kenmore Reporter published an update on Catanzaro's suspension and response.

http://www.bothell-reporter.com/news/253773281.html

Catanzaro has stated that a Swedish Medical Center oncologist reported him in response to having lost a patient to Catanzaro.

So it seems Catanzaro is not only appealing his suspension but has made counteraccusations of his own.

Valerie Tarico publishes article on Mars Hill/Driscoll at Alternet & Salon, an overview of factual errors in the article

Wenatchee The Hatchet has been dormant for a week but is now back with a post.

On April 1, 2014 an article went up at alternet.org by Valerie Tarico.  This piece warranted enough fact-checking and consideration that WtH has offline for a while going through primary source materials.  You see, dear reader, the Tarico article, which apparently got enough traffic to get picked up by Salon, has a variety of statements and summations of events that are either fuzzy or that can be proven to be factually inaccurate.  Before getting to where the details are wrong, here are the links to the article.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/christian-right-mega-church-minister-faces-mega-mutiny-abusive-behavior
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/christian-right-mega-church-minister-faces-mega-mutiny-abusive-behavior?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark


April 1, 2014  
republished in Salon at the following link:
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/christian_right_mega_church_minister_faces_mega_muntiny_for_abusive_behavior_partner/

Presenting Mark Driscoll as founding Mars Hill Church has not been paying attention to the range of blogging and journalism that has been published over the last year.  Furthermore, to list only Driscoll as the founder rather than one of three co-founders of Mars Hill Church would display ignorance of Mark Driscoll's own published work from 2006 that mentioned Mike Gunn and Lief Moi as co-founders.  That will probably seem pedantic to a reader of AlterNet or Salon, perhaps, but the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details in this article that have devils in them.

As we'll see throughout Tarico's article second and third hand statements are presented where primary source material has been available.  That can happen from time to time but there are several mistakes that are simply astonishing. 

Let's get the biggest one out of the way, perhaps a copy editor simply betrayed Tarico here, who took the trouble of linking to Janet Mefferd's on-line content but doesn't seem to have realized those links have been dead for about half a year now. This at least establishes that Tarico must have known how the name is spelled.  Something seems to have happened along the way. 

Of late, though, the armor of invulnerability may be cracking. Last November, a conservative fan of Driscoll’s theology, radio host  Janet Merford [emphasis added], accused Driscoll of plagiarizing material for his book, A Call for Resurgence. Further research revealed other incidents of apparent plagiarism which Merford detailed carefully (here, and here), leading others to back her claims and follow up with examples of their own.

And yet somehow Janet Mefferd gets transformed into some "Janet Merford" in Tarico's piece.  "Merford" is used in place of "Mefferd" in both the AlterNet and Salon iterations of the article, an error that is unfortunate and inexcusable.

Now let's get to another significantly problematic statement in Tarico's piece, just a few paragraphs into the article.

Though Driscoll rarely dabbles directly in politics—his followers know implicitly where he stands—his comments about queers and, in particular, women have been a source of ire for many. When Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals was caught with meth and a male prostitute, Driscoll pointed the finger at Haggard’s wife: “It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness.” Outrage on the part of feminists merely stoked Driscoll’s fire.

No, Driscoll didn't.  Tarico quotes the David Goldstein HuffPo piece from 2006 which in turn quotes a single bullet point from Driscoll's relevant commentary at Resurgence and from local commentary from The Stranger's Dan Savage, which Tarico has linked to for the backing for her statement.  So a partial quote from Mark Driscoll joked about by Dan Savage and then summarized by an author at HuffPo gets presented by Tarico as the basis for claiming that Driscoll pointed the finger at Gayle Haggard when Ted Haggard was caught with meth and a male prostitute. This looks like a fourth hand account basis for backing up a claim that doesn't hold up.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061116040025/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits

Go read it in full.  Here's the more notorious bullet point.
Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

There's nothing in there referring to any Haggards at all.  Some authors and bloggers transformed this into a comment about Gayle Haggard by force of will.  Nobody asked how on earth Mark Driscoll was going to be constantly probing other pastors in active ministry about whether they were satisfied with their sex lives with their wives.  How many was "most" supposed to be referring to? Five?  Twenty?  Seven hundred? The obviously rhetorical flourish apparently meant nothing and a variety of people seized on the bullet point as having to mean something about Gayle Haggard. 

Let's not forget that Driscoll has spent about a decade telling guys that their standard of beauty is their wife and not some external standard of beauty.  By this paradigm how is it possible for a wife to "let herself go" if she is, in whatever shape she takes, her husband's standard of beauty?  Tarico's piece relying on essentially fourth-hand back-up for an easily disproven statement is the second most unfortunate and avoidable factual error in the alternet/Salon article.

Then we get to the very next paragraph and we have an anecdote that, while basically true, never gets backed up by any primary citation. Tarico wrote of Driscoll:

Another time, he set the blogosphere abuzz by recounting a self-congratulatory story in which he advised a woman in his congregation that she should apologize to her husband for the sin of not
“serving” him, and then should get down on her knees and give him a blow job. By Driscoll’s account this excellent advice caused the husband to start attending church.


And the source?
http://barthsnotes.com/2009/06/27/mark-driscoll-slammed-by-baptist-press-over-sex-teaching/

Hey, not the worst second hand source as far as things go but why didn't Tarico or her editors go a step further? It's not like Peter Lumpkins hadn't presented a synopsis of the content years ago.

http://peterlumpkins.typepad.com/files/driscoll-scotland-sermon-copypdf.pdf

And it's not as though the sermon has not been made available recently. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws

At this point what reason can there be for not citing the primary source, Mark Driscoll himself, instead of relying on second and third hand commentaries?  To be sure, Mars Hill Church and associates have purged content at an epic rate in the last month but it's still possible to find the materials that have been getting purged.  This anecdote from Driscoll about oral sex from the Scotland sermon can be sourced and verified and it's a shame that Tarico's article didn't go the full distance in establishing the credibility of the account. 

On to the next paragraph where ... :

In Mars Hill theology, female members are viewed through the lens of complementarianism, a theological position that prescribes separate roles for women and men including male headship. A woman being advised to get down on her knees and give her husband a blow job represents just one of a spectrum of submissive behaviors touted for females, who are encouraged to find their meaning in the traditional roles of wife and mother. The virginity of women is prized, and by some reports Driscoll’s late discovery and fury that his wife had sex with another male as a teenager became bizarrely significant in their relationship and in the life of the church even though he himself was not a virgin when he married.

Let's just float the idea that complementarianism may be described as the proposal that sex differences are, in general, biologically derived and that a set of specialized trade-offs in the genders can be inferred as the basis from which differentiation in gender role can be inferred.  The problem in proposing that "complementarianism" is a theological position is that the idea that sex differences play out in practical ways could, in theory, be an entirely secular proposal. 

Now Tarico went on to say the virginity of women is prized.  So is the virginity of anybody who isn't married at Mars Hill Church.  The report Tarico proposes made the statement that Mark Driscoll made a late discovery that his wife had sex with another male as a teenager comes out of thin air.  There's nothing presented as direct evidence that Kyle Firstenberg ever even proposed this idea that Tarico magically extracts from nowhere in particular at Firstenberg's blog.

That neither Mark nor Grace Driscoll were virgins when they met each other is recounted by none other than Mark Driscoll himself in page 7 of Real Marriage. It's the first sentence at the top of the page, no less.  Even if, against all odds, Tarico thought Kyle Firstenberg made any claim to the effect that Mark was angry to discover Grace wasn't a virgin, even if Firstenberg had ever made such a claim (and there's no evidence he has) Mark Driscoll's own account sets the issue to rest.  Tarico could have avoided all of this by, once again, consulting primary source material. 

The closest thing I could spot at Firstenberg's blog to anything Tarico seems to have found in it is the following:

http://sinrepentancegraceforgiveness.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-official-charges-against-mark.html

You have led the staff in bitterness and rage for years because of your unforgiven sin that Grace committed against you. (This was very obvious in the abusive tone during staff meetings and trainings for several years, leading to demoralization and fear.)

But there's nothing there indicating the nature of what Mark perceived Grace's sin against him to have been.  

The unique element of the Mark Driscoll narrative about discovering that Grace had cheated on him in an early stage of their relationship was not the discovery itself but the attribution of this discovery by Mark Driscoll to a dream/oracle he had, in his account at Real Marriage, shortly before the birth of their first child, Ashley Driscoll.  Here at Wenatchee The Hatchet we've examined how the nightmare that led Mark to wake up, throw up, and stay up all night shortly before Ashley's birth as recounted in the 2012 book seems similar to the 2006 account in Confessions of a Reformission Rev of a dream Mark Driscoll said he had a few years after Ashley Driscoll's birth but that he considered a demonic attack.  That is discussed at some length over here.

Tarico, unfortunately, chose to emphasize the unsupportable and easily disprovable claim that Mark Driscoll thought Grace was a virgin when he met her.  Tarico's article not only makes a statement that can be refuted by direct quotation of Mark Driscoll, the statement that Mark was furious to discover Grace wasn't a virgin can't be attributed in any clear way to anything Kyle Firstenberg published at his blog.  Tarico or an editor seems to have simply seized this assertion about Mark angrily discovering Grace had sex with other men out of thin air.

At length we get to the paragraph referring to some Janet Merford rather than Janet Mefferd. We'll skip ahead to this:

Then, in early March, another ideological ally, World Magazine, reported that church funds had been used to buy thousands of copies of Driscoll’s book Real Marriage (written with his wife, Grace) in an attempt to force it onto the bestseller list. The books were purchased by Driscoll’s publicist through a variety of channels to make it appear that the sales came from an array of booksellers and buyers. In a deal signed by Mars Hill executive pastor John Sutton Turner, over $200,000 changed hands. The contract specified that the church would “provide a minimum of 6,000 names and addresses for the individual orders and at least 90 names and address [sic] for the remaining 5,000 bulk orders. Please note that it is important that the make up of the 6,000 individual orders include at least 1,000 different addresses with no more than 350 per state.”

If there were any demonstrated history of any connection between World Magazine and Mars Hill Church it would be an incredible find!  Readers of Alternet and Salon may not particularly care for World Magazine and that's as would be expected, but Warren Smith's articles establishing that Mars Hill Church and Result Source contracted to put Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list is more actual journalism, in the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet, than anything in Tarico's article.  Tarico could be generally correct in observing that the most trenchant criticism of Driscoll has been coming from evangelicals and religious conservatives rather than self-identified progressives or emergents but leading the paragraph saying that World Magazine is an "ideological ally" may just be a reminder that this piece appeared at AlterNet and then Salon. 

Now we get to a bit further on in the article.
In a rare public moment of contrition, via a letter published on Reddit, Driscoll committed never to game the bestseller list again, and further, said he would pull back from his place in the spotlight.

No on all counts.  Mark Driscoll's letter, which has made the rounds, was probably published to The City. It was leaked to several outside parties and found its way on to Warren Throckmorton's blog and to Reddit.  It was never published on Reddit by anyone that can be demonstrated to be Mark Driscoll.  If anything, given that Wenatchee The Hatchet published content leaked from The City through basically the entire 2013 calendar year, and given that Stephanie Drury posted a statement from Mark Driscoll dated Dec 18, 2013 to Twitter, it would be safe to suggest at this point that Mars Hill has been aware how unsecure content from The City has been and how quickly it can be leaked to outsiders.  The tentative opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet has been that the people who leaked the open letter and published it may have inadvertently given MH some fantastic PR.

That a variety of Christian news outlets reported the open letter that was published to The City as though it were a public act of contrition simply reinforced the unreality.  At no point has Mark Driscoll addressed that seven of his published books showed evidence of plagiarism.  When Mefferd confronted him directly on air about plagiarism Driscoll pleaded that he may have made a mistake and that a mistake is not a sin.  Intellectual property lawyers may or may not care about intent in dealing with a perceived violation and the intent did not seem to be foremost in the concerns raised when, in 2011, a cease and desist letter got sent out to a church perceived to have infringed on MH logo and trademark.  You can go read about that at your leisure. 

So, not only has Mark Driscoll not publicly addressed plagiarism in his books, the BOAA publicly stood by Driscoll and the executive elders amid what it claimed were false accusations.
... The BOAA stands unreservedly behind Pastors Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas as the Executive Elders of Mars Hill Church. We deeply appreciate their endurance through false accusation, their submission to authority, and their humility where regrettable decisions from the past have come to light.

Meanwhile, as Throckmorton has been documenting at his Patheos blog, the publishers of Mark Driscoll's books have been steadily and quietly correcting editions and adding citations in the wake of the plagiarism controversy.  It's worth noting that at no point in any of Mark Driscoll's internal statements to The City that have been leaked (assuming their wording has been preserved) has he ever even conceded that there has been a plagiarism controversy.  There is no evidence, yet, of public contrition about anything.

While Firstenberg's primary account seems to be holding up Wenatchee The Hatchet is not ideally situated to comment on whether Tarico accurately describes Firstenberg as seeking to start a MH franchise in OC.  Reports have had it that it was Bogardus who had a more prominent role in spear-heading the start of MH OC and that Firstenberg's role was a supporting one. 

Now regarding Mars Hill Refuge, Tarico may simply have failed to understand the significance of the language employed within Mars Hill Church.  IF you didn't sign a membership covenant (i.e. contract) then you were never formally a member of Mars Hill Church.  Period.  Jamie Munson's odd 2007 era bylaws withstanding that claimed even regular attenders could be disciplined as though they were members, there's a difference between a regular attender of a Mars Hill campus or church plant and a contracted member.  From the Mars Hill perspective Sophia couldn't be a former member if she never signed even one membership covenant.  This is not a mundane detail.  By refusing to sign the covenant Sophia demonstrated a clearer understanding of what was at stake than Tarico seems to have. 

Moving along, this paragraph has some unfortunate fuzziness about facts and details. Tarico's piece states.

In March, a Mars Hill blogger and elder, a naturopath by profession, was stripped of his professional license because his idiosyncratic cancer treatments, often provided to members of church family, were exposed as failing to meet minimal standards of evidence and efficacy. When the problem hit the Seattle paper, Mars Hill removed his posts from their Resurgence blog. But the incident raises broader questions about how authoritarianism, group think, suspension of disbelief, and in-group trust at Mars Hill may contribute to vulnerability on the part of members.

The man is never named and so one could only speculate as to his identity.  But John Catanzaro's license suspension has been covered by the local press and Wenatchee The Hatchet has a whole series of posts tagged in connection to Catanzaro.  Catanzaro, so far, cannot be proven to have even been a member of Mars Hill Church, let alone an elder in either a paid or unpaid capacity.  It remains to be seen how his appeal of his license suspension plays out but he's successfully withstood legal action against him in the past and it is entirely possible he may withstand this recent controversy.  That Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill have opted to purge rather than wait and see is what it is. 

This paragraph from Tarico unfortunately suggests that authoritarianism, group think, suspension of disbelief and in-group trust can apply to any side of any ideological spectrum.  Someone should have caught the various demonstrated factual errors before this article ever saw print. 

Sure, cumulatively a lot of the basic narrative in the Tarico article holds up but there are enough egregious and preventable factual errors paragraph by paragraph that, in its way, it manages to function as a kind of PR for MH to MH regulars.  But on a paragraph by paragraph basis Tarico's article bungles so many basic, easily established points in the history of Mars Hill Church in general and Mark Driscoll in particular it's unfortunate both AlterNet and Salon ran with this piece.  When numerous statements in Tarico's article can be shown to be inaccurate based on direct quotations from Mark Driscoll himself her article has problems, significant problems.  It's a shame Salon picked up the AlterNet piece and ran with it because it may be one of the most widely disseminated articles about Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll dealing with 2013 controversies may have the largest number of avoidable and egregious factual errors. 

Suspended naturopath John Catanzaro has made appeal/response over license suspension

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023163716_catanzaroresponsexml.html

He's cleared his name or gotten past accusations at least once before so it's conceivable he could do it again.  Meanwhile, it's been a while since we checked whether Driscoll or Resurgence have decided to restore Catanzaro's 18-some posts that were at the Resurgence blog.  After all, if Catanzaro's name turns out to get cleared what was the point of removing references to Mark Driscoll's doctor? 

Of course more than just Catanzaro guest posts have been getting scrubbed lately.

Mark Driscoll's eye twitch, naturopath and reverse-engineering life since 2005

In chapter 11 of Real Marriage Mark Driscoll recounts how preaching five services a Sunday took a toll on him. He refers to having worn out his adrenal glands and gotten himself an ulcer and how he was preaching up to five services a Sunday (that would have been most likely for holiday services since on average it seemed that four was more usual, though around 2004-2005 there could have been up to two or three Good Friday services and probably five Easter services for an Easter weekend, so the number of services Driscoll and all the other staff and volunteers were at could and did get ridiculously high).

Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship & life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
(c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (ie)
page 208

I had multiple stress-related symptoms--heartburn, headaches, nervous eye twitch, aggressive driving, constant low-level anger, high blood pressure, and self-medicating with foods and drinks packed with fat, sugar, and simple carbohydrates, along with caffeine.

Perhaps a few months after things had reached this level, a godly friend in the church, named Jon, scheduled a meeting with me. God had laid it on his heart to speak some wisdom into my life. He did so with great humility, and in that meeting he gave me some insights that were life changing.  [emphasis added]

Jon had been taking notes on how he organized his life, things he had learned, and what he felt the Holy Spirit had asked him to tell me. His wisdom was a priceless gift. He called it "Reverse Engineering." The big idea is to anticipate life forward and live it backward. 

... For my health I found a doctor named John who was a naturopath and ordained pastor and started doing what he told me to do, which has changed my life. 

So let's consider exactly when "Reverse Engineering" got developed. 
http://wbmason.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/reverse-engineering_your_life.pdf
Reverse-Engineering Your Life
(c) 2005 by Mark Driscoll and Jon Phelps.

So Mark credits Jon Phelps with the idea but gets first billing in the copyright?  Interesting.  Let's keep in mind that date because Reverse-Engineering Your Life ended up being the first session at the 2005 Mars Hill Men's Training Camp:

http://marshill.com/files/theology/1/Mens%20Training%20-%20Mars%20Hill%20-%202006%20Reverse%20Engineering.pdf

A portion of this reverse-engineering process involves managing physical health. So it's possible that from 2005 on there began a process of Mark Driscoll seeking medical advice for his health.  As noted before, in an interview at Christianity Today Mark Driscoll mentions how he found a second naturopath after the first one told him he needed to quit his job and how got to that first naturopath:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/january/survivor.html

...  Put my head down, worked seven days a week. I preached, gosh, 48 or 50 Sundays a year, five or six times a Sunday, an hour or more per sermon. And I traveled to speak, to make ends meet, because I was still supplementing my income. I didn't even have a full-time assistant until we hit 6,000. And by then my wife and I had five kids.

It was go, go, go, and at some point my body just couldn't go anymore. I once had an old car and the ignition would get stuck. You'd have to literally pop the hood and disconnect the battery to make it stop. I was like that car. I couldn't shut down. I couldn't sleep. I'd fall asleep for an hour, wake up, and then be up all night. I'd be exhausted but unable to sleep. I had adrenal fatigue.

What finally happened?

First I went to a conventional doctor, who told me I needed blood pressure meds, heartburn medicine, sleep medicine, anxiety medicine. I'm like, Man, I'm in my 30s. That's a lot of medicine! [emphasis original] So I went and found a naturopathic doctor, who said, "You need to quit your job and find a different vocation."

 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/january/survivor.html?start=2

I said, "Well, Jesus said to do this, so that's not really an option."  So I found another naturopathic doctor. He gave me supplements, vitamins, minerals, IV treatments for adrenal support, and custom tailored vitamins. He put me on a regimen for wellness and recovery. His approach was to naturally rebuild the body, to not just treat the symptoms. He told me, "You've got to work really hard to change your lifestyle and your organization, everything."

So it looks like by Mark Driscoll's account when his health was in trouble he went to a conventional doctor, was disappointed at the level of medications he would be prescribed and opted to consult a naturopath instead.  When the naturopath told him he needed to quit his job Mark Driscoll opted to consult another naturopath who diagnosed him as having adrenal trouble.

Now it may be this second naturopath Mark Driscoll makes reference to in early 2007:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070320075759/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2007-03-17_of_brokenness_and_buddies

I write this blog while flying somewhere over the United States late on a Thursday night heading home from a conference in the great nation of Texas. I have blogged very little thus far in 2007 as I have been playing hurt in terms of my health. I have been pushing it for ten years since Mars Hill Church opened up, and the end of last year was a particularly rough patch. I was looking forward to a few weeks off after Christmas to catch up on sleep. Sadly, what happened is that I would be very tired and go to bed at a decent hour only to wake up a few hours later, unable to return to sleep. I was not stressed out or thinking, but it seemed something was physically wrong. Even sleeping pills were of little to no help and by the end of the holidays I was exhausted, having slept an average of perhaps three hours a night. A naturopath said I had overextended myself and worn out my adrenal glands (which regulate my sympathetic nervous system). [emphasis added]

This would probably have had to have to transpired somewhere between April 2006 and we'll get to an account from Mark Driscoll that says things reached a low ebb in 2006 later.  There's no mention of the concept adrenal failure in Confessions of a Reformission Rev, which was published in April 2006, and no mention of naturopaths that spring to mind.  The phrase "reverse-engineer" does show up in reference to Jamie Munson and Tim Smith so it would make sense that this term could show up in the 2006 book if Driscoll and Phelps had copyrighted "reverse engineering your life" in 2005.

Now, finally, we get to the eye twitch.  Driscoll mentioned in Real Marriage that one of his symptoms was an eye twitch.  While a reader could infer this happened when Driscoll was preaching five services a day, Driscoll has provided ample evidence that the eye twitch significantly predates services in Ballard in 2003.  That he was running ragged and in poor health for a lengthy period of time could be easily established and it was, by Driscoll's own account, he had many of the symptoms he described in chapter 11 of Real Marriage going as far back as 1999.

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll
Zondervan
(c) copyright 2006 by Mark Driscoll

pages 122-123

...  During this difficult season, I was burned-out, overworked, out of shape, stressed, and had picked up a nervous eye twitch in my eye along with ongoing acid reflux and high blood pressure. I was not sleeping much [emphasis added], and my sleep was often interrupted due to stress that kept me awake, thinking. I would also often wake up after a prophetic dream or spiritual attack to pray strategically, which only contributed to the fatigue. ...

This would have been in the period of about 1999, and was also what was happening in Driscoll's health before he had the worst experience of his life, the nightmare discussed elsewhere at this blog.
The health problems Driscoll mentions as showing up at the time when he was preaching up to five sermons a Sunday were showing up significantly earlier before Mars Hill was even in the property now known as the Ballard campus.  So Mark Driscoll's account should not be construed as being very picky about details and linearity.  It is also possible, since Driscoll and Jon Phelps copyrighted "reverse-engineering your life" in 2005.

And yet for that copyrighted document by November 8, 2007 Mark Driscoll was informing Mars Hill Church:
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf

A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007

By the age of twenty-four we were gathering the core group for the church plant while I was working part-time at Antioch Bible Church and a Christian bookstore that was open in Greenwood at the time.  Joining me in the plant were two godly men named Mike Gunn and Lief Moi who were very much devoted to the work and, although young and inexperienced, I praised God for the support of those men who remain friends to this day by God's grace.

At the age of twenty-five I had the privilege of preaching the opening sermon at Mars Hill Church and I have remained the primary preaching pastor ever since. I have learned a lot over the years. Much of that learning has been through mistakes, failure, and pain. The early years of the church, chronicled in my book Confessions, were very difficult in every way. In more recent years, our fast growth has been a wonderful blessing but also fraught with difficulties.

For me personally, everything culminated at the end of 2006. Despite rapid growth, the church was not healthy and neither was I. My workload was simply overwhelming. I was preaching five times a Sunday, the senior leader in Mars Hill responsible to some degree for literally everything in the church, president of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network which had exploded, president of The Resurgence, an author writing books, a conference speaker traveling, a media representative doign interviews, a student attending graduate school, a father with five young children, and a husband to a wife whom I have adored since the first day I met her and needed my focus more than ever. I was working far too many hours and neglecting my own physical and spiritual well-being, and then I hit the proverbial wall. For many weeks I simply could not sleep more than two or three hours a night. I had been running off of adrenaline for so many years that my adrenal glands fatigued and the stress of my responsibilities caused me to be stuck "on" physically and unable to rest or sleep. [emphasis added]  ...

And yet there were by-laws in place that decentralized a lot of activities and accounted for campus activity.  Site elders were accounted for in the by-laws that were available up until the ones Munson drafted in 2007 that got voted through.  If Driscoll was president of The Resurgence how did that become Resurgence Publishing Inc?  Was it a for-profit way back then?  With Driscoll as President of Acts 29, that just raises the question of how and when Driscoll ended up taking over A29 and when David Nicholas departed.  After all, Nicholas was a co-founder.  Driscoll used to joke that guys who went to seminary didn't have real world experience so what was the process through which Driscoll began to care about formal credentialing? The point is that the Driscoll letter lists all the hugely stressful things as though these were not all things that Mark Driscoll voluntarily took on that he either didn't have any real need to do or could have, in some cases, have left delegated to other people in some fashion.  A significant stretch of the end of Confessions detailed how Mark Driscoll entrusted other men in leadership at Mars Hill to take on the things he couldn't handle any longer, like Bent Meyer taking on counseling.  In other words, it's mysterious how and why Mark Driscoll felt any obligation to keep doing all these things, few of which he actually probably needed to do. 

And when Driscoll relates that he went to a convention doctor we can't know precisely when that was.  But we know he decided he didn't want to take so many medications and then turned to a naturopath.  When the naturopath told him he needed to quit his job Mark Driscoll went back to the divine command/calling and then found another naturopath who told him to change his lifestyle and prescribed vitamins, supplements and other things.  Driscoll has practically conveyed to us that when he realized his health was in a bad way he went through at least two medical practitioners before he got to one who told him something he was willing to agree with.  Yes, Driscoll has regaled us for years with stories of his travails but it's worth asking how many of them have been self-inflicted.

And it's worth noting that to go by Mark Driscoll's November 2007 letter, things got to be their worst in 2006, the year after Mark Driscoll and Jon Phelps copyrighted "Reverse-Engineering Your Life" in 2005. And as we've seen, it was a prominent feature in the 2006 Men's Training Event.  And yet while Mark Driscoll was talking to men about how important it was to reverse-engineer life it now appears both from the November 2007 letter and from Real Marriage, that Mark Driscoll himself had not actually pulled off reverse-engineering his own life yet. The method may have worked for Jon Phelps just fine, we can't know for sure, but it looks like Mark Driscoll may have taken up to two years to get it working in a fashion that he came to feel was satisfactory.  For that matter, as we've noted earlier by looking at a 2007 sermon in light of documents that were made available at Joyful Exiles, the stress and controversy weren't over even a month later, it seems. To go by his sermon from December 9, 2007, "The Rebel's Guide to Joy in Anxiety", Mark Driscoll wasn't out of the woods even then possibly two years after copyrighting "Reverse-Engineering Your Life" with Jon Phelps.