Warren Throckmorton publishes part 2 of interview with Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner

It may be July 30th where Warren is, but it's still July 29th here where Wenatchee The Hatchet lives.

So ... 

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/07/30/blog-theme-mars-hill-church-interview-with-sutton-turner-and-dave-bruskas-part-two/

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 ...

Foundation Church, formerly Mars Hill Everett, has closed down and has merged with Reach Church in Everett, WA

Thanks to a comment, Wenatchee The Hatchet has been notified that the former Mars Hill Everett, which became Foundation Church in the wake of the Mars Hill closure of late 2014 through 2015, closed its doors at the start of March 2020.

https://www.heraldnet.com/news/mars-hill-everett-becomes-foundation-church/

Ryan Williams had shifted from Foundation to North Church in 2014

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-williams-05029667


http://foundationchurch.org/#welcome-section

FOUNDATION CHURCH HAS OFFICIALLY CLOSED IT’S DOORS AS OF MARCH 1, 2020.

It has been our hope to bring the whole Gospel to Everett, Snohomish County, and to the ends of the earth. We’re grateful for the years of serving God’s kingdom, and our prayer is that all who we’ve served will continue to trust and be satisfied in Christ alone.

Both our facility and remaining church body will be grafting into the family at Reach Church in Everett, WA. Click the link below to be directed to their website.

if you want to get some background on the real estate of Foundation Church, aka the former Mars Hill Everett plug in parcel # 00439162701300 into the Snohomish County Assessor's Property Summary search tool on properties.

Sutton Turner discusses Mars Hill Global allocations in recent post, a small fraction of the money raised went overseas and a lot went to US church planting, revisiting how some money went to the now defunct Resurgence Training Center in light of a 2009 Driscoll sermon

emphases in red and/or bold are added
http://investyourgifts.com/dismissed-whats-next/
Posted by Sutton Turner on August 25, 2016
...
Mars Hill Global

Mars Hill Global began in 2009 to raise money from the global audience (those who listened via podcast) to help fund the mission of Mars Hill Church: “Making Disciples and Planting Churches.” Until late 2011, Mars Hill had not significantly funded international church planting but was heavily invested in US church planting. From 2009 to 2012, Mars Hill spent $8.6M in U.S. church planting and $170k outside of the U.S. [WtH, slightly less than 2% of expenditures went to church planting outside the US] but we'll get to a 2009 sermon that explains why this wouldn't be a surprise to potentially impatient readers]

When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.

When people started to question the distribution of funds given to Mars Hill Global, the church brought in ECFA and independent auditors, Clark Nuber. Both groups gave Mars Hill a clear opinion that the church had done nothing wrong. In spite of these findings, we felt led to send 3765 emails and 6000 letters to 100% of donors to Mars Hill Global from 2011 to 2014 to clarify their gift intent. Less than 40 families responded; Mars Hill Church sent an additional $40,000 to Ethiopia because donors requested their donations to Mars Hill Global be for Ethiopian church planting.

A full and total timeline from 2009 to 2014 with videos, blogs and other information is stored here.
From 2012 to 2014, Mars Hill Church spent $13.7M in church planting in the US and sent $545k to Ethiopia and India. [WtH--spent from an amount of ... ?] During its existence, Mars Hill Church invested over $23M in church planting in the US and around the world. [WtH--not necessarily the same thing as having done it through Mars Hill Global, given that Mars Hill began in 1996 and Global started in 2009] This amount is over and above the general and administrative costs of Mars Hill Church’s central operations and staffing. (47% of the funds given to Mars Hill Global from 2012-2014 were large donations from a small number of donors who specifically asked prior to giving for their donations to be counted in Global.  Many of these donors did not attend one specific Mars Hill location and wanted their donations supporting all Mars Hill operations including U.S. and international church planting.)

[ WtH--so it reads like that 47% of the funds given to Global from 2012 were from a small number of donors who wanted their giving to be counted in/toward global. Though these donors did not attend one specific location they wanted their gifts supporting all operations, but this raises a question of whether or not that was unusual because the donors requested this or because under normal circumstances donors might have expected or requested their gifts to be restricted to the campus they were giving to Mars Hill through/from]

Many have asked for these numbers. There was I time when I was restricted from providing these numbers. Now, everyone has the Mars Hill Global information that I had when I resigned in September 2014 (Eph. 5:13).

Actual financials reports with line items would have been nice.

Back in the pre-Turner era of Mars Hill Driscoll described the aims of Mars Hill Global as follows:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html

http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
http://download.marshill.se/files/2009/05/03/20090503_humble-pastors_sd_audio.mp3
[it's mistitled "Humble Pastor", it was originally listed as Prophets, Priests and Kings" and discussed earlier at Wenatchee The Hatchet.  The 5-17-2009 sermon is a different sermon even though in the media library at the marshill.se site it will appear to be "Humble Pastors", too.]

Prophets, Priests and Kings
Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5
starting about 0:47
... I have announcements for you.

First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.

Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.  

Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term. [emphasis added]

For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.

marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico.  ...

Turner mentioned that more than $23 million was spent in church planting.  That's telling us what it was more than.  What we don't necessarily get is a number that would tell us how much went into The Resurgence Training Center (for anyone who even remembers what that was these days).  So some of the money given into Mars Hill Global would have gone to the Resurgence Training Center.  There are folks who are willing to say they went there and graduated from there but let's not forget the big E on the eye chart.  Mark Driscoll had had a personal ambition to start a movement that started a Bible college.  No matter how great the education was at Re:Train there's a hindsight we can have today through which we observe that this was part of the legacy Driscoll wanted to be able to look back on. It's also something to keep in mind as part of the basis for Global in its early stages.  We don't need to be so focused on how much went to overseas that we forget that at its inception Global was never explicitly designed for overseas missions but for the global expansion of what we can now regard as the Mars Hill brand.

The amount of money given/designated to The Resurgence Training Center could get some clarification, since it, too, was part of the Mars Hill expansion included within the fundraising activities of Mars Hill Global. 

And the thing to keep in mind, that commenter Nathan priddis mentioned recently at Phoenix Preacher, is that we should ask ourselves--even if "all" the money raised by Mars Hill Global went to overseas activity, who's to say that would have made the conditions in those regions in Africa or India better?

http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=26619#comment-344282

In other words, let's not forget that even if all the monies that people gave that they thought were going to go from Mars Hill Global to Africa went there, what in the end would this have been except for the global expansion of the Mars Hill brand?  Why would anyone in Africa need that?  This is not to say people don't have any right or reason to be upset about all sorts of things Mars Hill Global.  Turner gets that these things were worrisome to people, too.  But Nathan priddis raised a point that doesn't seem to have come up among those who have been close to the Mars Hill side of things in online discussions (that I know of)--that we can't assume that all that Global money going to the missionary work Mars Hill had in mind would have been any good for people in Africa in the end.

RICO suit against Mark Driscoll and Sutton Turner dismissed without prejudice--mentions that in 2012 he sought to meet with former MH people from 2007 but was denied permission to do so.

Turner has posted an update on the recently dismissed RICO suit

http://investyourgifts.com/dismissed-whats-next/

For those who were concerned about the Global fund, Turner has published the following:
...

Mars Hill Global began in 2009 to raise money from the global audience (those who listened via podcast) to help fund the mission of Mars Hill Church: “Making Disciples and Planting Churches.” Until late 2011, Mars Hill had not significantly funded international church planting but was heavily invested in US church planting. From 2009 to 2012, Mars Hill spent $8.6M in U.S. church planting and $170k outside of the U.S.

When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.

As I've written a few times in the past, from the Munson period there was a pretty clear explanation of what Mars Hill Global was for and that it could be for anything connected to Mars Hill global expansion as, for want of a better term, a brand or organization.  Unfortunately, the sermon in which Mark Driscoll most explicitly articulated that vision from the Peter series never got transcribed and the sermon got pulled down after a while. 

Turner explains a bit more as follows: [linkage removed, emphasis original]

When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.

When people started to question the distribution of funds given to Mars Hill Global, the church brought in ECFA and independent auditors, Clark Nuber. Both groups gave Mars Hill a clear opinion that the church had done nothing wrong. In spite of these findings, we felt led to send 3765 emails and 6000 letters to 100% of donors to Mars Hill Global from 2011 to 2014 to clarify their gift intent. Less than 40 families responded; Mars Hill Church sent an additional $40,000 to Ethiopia because donors requested their donations to Mars Hill Global be for Ethiopian church planting.

A full and total timeline from 2009 to 2014 with videos, blogs and other information is stored here.
From 2012 to 2014, Mars Hill Church spent $13.7M in church planting in the US and sent $545k to Ethiopia and India. During its existence, Mars Hill Church invested over $23M in church planting in the US and around the world. This amount is over and above the general and administrative costs of Mars Hill Church’s central operations and staffing. (47% of the funds given to Mars Hill Global from 2012-2014 were large donations from a small number of donors who specifically asked prior to giving for their donations to be counted in Global.  Many of these donors did not attend one specific Mars Hill location and wanted their donations supporting all Mars Hill operations including U.S. and international church planting.)

Many have asked for these numbers. There was I time when I was restricted from providing these numbers. Now, everyone has the Mars Hill Global information that I had when I resigned in September 2014 (Eph. 5:13).
Once Mars Hill Church/Mars Hill Fellowship became inactive as a corporation ...

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/mars-hill-church-corporation-listed-as.html
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=601677819
MARS HILL CHURCH
UBI Number 601677819
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Inactive
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 12/22/1995
Expiration Date 12/31/2016
Inactive Date 03/24/2016

it seemed like it would be a matter of time before Turner presented some general numbers.  I'd wondered whether the hesitation to discuss and then keep numbers up for public consideration had a connection to the active status of the corporation. 

We'll skip over the compensation parts for the time being.  There's something else Turner mentions that's worth quoting:
...
Many staff heard me say during my tenure, “It is a miracle this church still exists.” Jesus was saving people and growing the church in spite of issues with organizational structure, dissension within the staff, and dissension with former members. A 2007 bylaw change had split the church. The issues that led to that bylaw change and its implementation heavily impacted the culture of Mars Hill. In 2012, I asked permission to meet with those directly affected by the events of 2007; permission was denied. Those events in 2007 had unfortunately begun the cycle of distrust and a lack of transparency. [emphasis added] One fed upon the other to build an unhealthy culture.

The Result Source contract decision was made within the context of this successful, but unhealthy church. As I have stated before, I was not a part of that decision making process back in the summer of 2011. Because of the Result Source mistake along with other cultural issues, Pastor Dave Bruskas and I began to campaign for greater outside accountability. I wrote two long blogs about the resulting new board (Result Source 2 & Result Source 3). This new Board decided to never use Result Source again and rightfully so.

For those who didn't instantly catch the import of the bolded section, Sutton Turner stated that he asked permission in 2012 to meet with those people directly affected (effected?) by the events of the 2007 re-org but permission was denied.  By who?  Based on the by-laws that were in place the only person who seems could have outranked Sutton Turner as a legal officer would have been Mark Driscoll himself.  It's a little difficult to imagine Dave Bruskas forbidding such a thing, in any case, because Bruskas wasn't even a part of Mars Hill in 2007.  Since Bruskas couldn't have plausibly had any material interest in forbidding Sutton Turner from meeting with former members and staff and since no one else seems to have been higher up the hierarchy than Turner, it seems that either one person above Turner insisted that he not speak to former members or the Board forbade it.  But none of that explains why whoever outranked Turner would have done so.

Remember this comment Driscoll made in 2014?

http://web.archive.org/web/20141031232443/https://marshill.com/2014/07/21/the-weekly-7-21-14
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/b1dd5d1b6b3a14b6e7f3/raw/6c9dfc093dda78bb1a6b7ae29a9909045ad2a9e3/MHMW20140718

Mark Driscoll from a video statement July 21, 2014

"If I’m real honest with you, at first it was just a little overwhelming and a bit confusing. We, and I were not exactly sure what was happening and so it took a little while to sort that out... As well, one of the things that has been complex is the fact that a lot of the people that we are dealing with in this season remain anonymous. And so we don’t know how to reconcile, or how to work things out with, with people because we’re not entirely sure who they are [emphasis added], and so that has, that has made things a little more complex and difficult as well."

And yet this very day, Sutton Turner published, "In 2012, I asked permission to meet with those directly affected by the events of 2007; permission was denied." How could Turner have been denied permission to contact people from the 2007 debacle if, according to Mark Driscoll in 2014, they weren't sure who was trying to meet with them to reconcile with them.  Based on Turner's account published today, it seems that when someone from the Mars Hill side proposed meeting with former MH people he was denied permission to do so from within the Mars Hill side.  For those not already familiar with the officers listed for Mars Hill circa 2012:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mh-governance-in-2013-and-in-2012.html

Who are the officers of Mars Hill Church?
For state law purposes, Mars Hill has a president, Mark Driscoll; a vice president, Dave Bruskas; and a secretary/treasurer, Sutton Turner. Mars Hill also has a chief financial officer, Kerry Dodd; and a chief legal officer, Chris Pledger.

Of those officers exactly one of them was even at Mars Hill in 2007.  So if Turner has reported things reliably whoever denied him permission to meet with former MH people had to know who they were or at least had to stake out a general principle of forbidding Turner from meeting. 

But if the leaders of Mars Hill Church weren't sure who those people were, according to Mark Driscoll from July 21, 2014, what's the explanation from Team Driscoll as to why, according to Sutton Turner's recent account, he tried to meet with people who were at Mars Hill in 2007 but was denied permission to do so?  You can't forbid someone like Sutton Turner from meeting with people when you're not even sure who they are, can you?

Mars Hill Church still not listed as "Inactive" with Washington State Secretary of State website.

Even as of ... right about now (March 17, 2016 at about 9:15pm) Mars Hill Church is still not inactive according to ...

https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=601677819

MARS HILL CHURCH
UBI Number 601677819
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Nonprofit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 12/22/1995
Expiration Date 12/31/2016
Inactive Date 
Duration Perpetual

Agent Name
Joshau Bowen
1416 NW 46th ST #106 [a UPS store for those who haven't worked that out just by looking]
SEATTLE WA 98107 
Governing Persons

Title
Name
Address
President
Dodd, Kerry 1416 NW 46th St
Suite 105
SEATTLE, WA 98107
Secretary
Walters, Caleb 1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107

However, Caleb Walters has listed his employment with Mars Hill as past-tense.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebwalters

Chief Operating Officer | COO
Mars Hill Church
December 2014 – February 2016 (1 year 3 months)

Dodd, however:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-dodd-a4174712

President and General Manager
Mars Hill Fellowship, Inc.
2015 – Present (1 year)
- Keen management to daily operations to guarantee proper handling of all legal affairs and creditor obligations
- Tactical administration to the liquidation of real property and other assets; along with the distribution of net assets
- Recognition for the successful launching of 11 new independent entities by separating the organization from its 15 operating locations
- Appointment as corporate president of the board of directors; as well as promotion to general manager, in charge of leading the transition team
Still present-tense president and general manager. 

So it would seem that we're not looking at a case where the inactive listing just hasn't kicked in on the WA SOS side.  It's seeming more likely there may be a transaction or two that need to be finalized in the near future before the organization can officially be considered inactive.

Last year Sutton Turner blogged to the effect that he had intended to publicly disclose numbers connected to Mars Hill Global activity but was threatened by lawyers connected to Mars Hill.  Once the corporation is formally inactive and dissolved perhaps Turner will disclose all those numbers? 

In closing ... that listed agent name may be misspelled. There is ... a Joshua Bowen ...
check out the LinkedIn here.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-bowen-09158b4a
Experience

Mars Hill Church
Enterprise Risk and Contracts Manager
Mars Hill Church
March 2014 – Present (2 years 1 month)Greater Seattle Area
I get to serve one of the largest churches in the United States.

Mars Hill Church
Real Estate Manager | Insurance & Legal Administrator at Mars Hill Church
Mars Hill Church
May 2013 – February 2014 (10 months)Greater Seattle Area

Mars Hill Church
Legal and Insurance Administrator
Mars Hill Church
February 2012 – May 2013 (1 year 4 months)

Mars Hill Church
Legal Administrative Assistant
Mars Hill Church
October 2011 – February 2012 (5 months)Greater Seattle Area
Administrative tasks, budget review, legal research, federal regulation research and compliance, risk management, social media review for legal/risk compliance, drafting organization best-practice policy,

It ... kinda looks like there isn't a single non-Mars Hill job mentioned anywhere in that professional history.  From the year he finished studies at the University of Washington in 2011 until now he's only listed Mars Hill as his employer.  Well, that's interesting.

There are pastors who were at Mars Hill who say less on their LinkedIn profiles about their time there. 

So, anyway, it would appear that with at least two guys saying they are still currently employed at/by Mars Hill Church that there's some work left to be done.

revisiting Turner's recent account of Global in light of Mars Hill's history of fiscal cliffs and mass layoffs

We've discussed the conundrum of Sutton Turner having reported:
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
Posted by Sutton Turner on May 5, 2015
*Unfortunately, Mars Hill’s attorneys have requested that I not blog. I have removed some of the financial information as well as other non-financial information in response to their request.

When in the earlier statement they were:
http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 24, 2015
For the past several weeks, I have been planning to discuss the lessons I have learned from events and mistakes at Mars Hill Church on my website. Earlier this week, I wrote three separate blogs regarding the ResultSource decision in 2011 at Mars Hill. Today, I planned to focus on Mars Hill Global. However, last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill’s former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week.

More recently, Turner seemed to indicate that attorneys in association with Mars Hill had recently invoked litigation.  This comment quoted below does not seem to have referred to a reported pending suit against former MH legal officers, but against Turner individually.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/05/sutton-turner-talks-mars-hill-global-says-lawyers-asks-him-to-leave-out-financial-information/#comment-2011875134
Sutton Turner > Warren Throckmorton  • 9 hours ago  

The litigation threat was against me (personally), nothing outside. I honestly don't understand it. As I said before in my blog, if the church was still a church, I would not communicate about anything, however the church is dead and it is time to learn from my mistakes and my sin.

I wanted to publicly apologize to people that had been hurt by my sin and my mistakes, following my 1:1 meetings with people directly that I needed to reconcile with. I thought it was time to communicate the full story - in detail with $ - however "they" got wind (honestly, don't know how) of what I was doing and told me to stop, with a threat. If I get sued for doing what I have done, my wife and I are fine with it.

It would seem Turner has nothing to lose and everything to gain by sharing where the money was spent and when in terms of clearing the air.  It's a shame that it took the process of the formal dissolution of the corporation to spur him to considering this option. 

However, something that seems worth noting is that the lack of clarity about what Mars Hill Global did and didn't do came in during the Sutton Turner regime.  Back when Munson was legal president, there didn't seem to be any lack of clarity about what Global did. Driscoll explained the 2009-era vision for Global in a sermon that did not get transcribed and that Wenatchee The Hatchet had to transcribe.  It's worth revisiting to see what was being said on behalf of Global in those years.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html

Whether or not it was former or current Mars Hill attorneys who have insisted that Turner not blog about Mars Hill has yet to be clarified but the statements made dealing with Mars Hill Global can be dealt with independent of questions as to which attorneys that were or weren't with Mars Hill got in some kind of touch with Turner.

Now we can get to the Turner era.
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
Posted by Sutton Turner on May 5, 2015
...
Over the last twelve months, many have criticized the intentions and practices surrounding Mars Hill Global. This criticism focused around the claim that the leadership of Mars Hill confused donors who were giving to the Global Fund leading them to believe that 100% of all donations to Mars Hill Global went to Ethiopia and India.

I am sorry that some who contributed to Mars Hill Global (as well as those who did not contribute) were mistakenly led to believe incorrect information. That was neither my nor the church’s intention, but as the accusations came in, we quickly made a change on the online giving site to remove the term “Global Fund” (which had been used since 2009) to make it clearer. Secondly, we had the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), as well as an external, independent auditor, conduct thorough investigations. Both of these groups found that we could have been clearer during our communications (and in hindsight, we certainly agreed), but they reported that we did nothing wrong. [emphasis original] Although neither the ECFA nor the auditor gave us any course of corrective action, my leadership team and I wanted to do everything we could to remedy the situation and correct our mistakes.

We quickly established a plan to go above and beyond what was expected of us (nothing) to rectify the situation and make it right with anyone who felt that the communications about Mars Hill Global since 2012 were unclear about our intentions for their monetary gifts. To do this, we directly contacted all donors who designated their gifts as “global” from 2012 to 2014. We did this both through email correspondence and by regular mail. We sent out 3765 emails and approximately 6000 letters to these donors.** In these letters, we apologized for any confusion that the Global ministry communications caused among our donors. We offered to immediately reallocate the dollar amount of their donation(s) to church planting efforts in Ethiopia, if they desired. The amount was less than $40,000 and requests came from less than 40 families.** The funds were then sent on to support efforts in Ethiopia.

So ECFA and the auditor did not think Mars Hill had done anything wrong regarding communication about what Global did and didn't do, but Turner states that "we" wanted to make sure things were addressed.

What Mars Hill was discovering during that period was that just because something wasn't technically illegal or considered wrong didn't mean it couldn't be scandalous.  Result Source being used to secure a #1 spot for Real Marriage on the New York Times wasn't technically illegal but the revelation was considered a scandal.  At the risk of pointing out the obvious to fellow evangelicals, just because abortion is legal doesn't mean evangelicals don't consider it a terrible thing.  By extension, the crisis surrounding the lack of clarity about where money from Global went was not automatically a matter of assuming malice but about competence.  For an organization so dedicated to meteoric growth it didn't seem likely the leadership culture would have thought far enough ahead to consider how the public and how donors might react to a retroactive revelation like the following:

Such as, in a memo (or part of a memo) published by Warren Throckmorton noted that there was a proposal that a fixed percentage of Global resources would be assigned to highly visible, marketable projects. The percentage was not to be fixed and not communicated to the public.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/01/mars-hill-global-fund-help-the-helpless-or-use-the-helpless/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png

Just a few observations about the following:
...
Global Focus
The vision and activities connected to the Global Fund must focus on reaching the worldwide church. As a person sits in front of his computer in Qatar, London, Cape Town, or Sydney, he does not care about Mars Hill planting in Everett. As an international citizen, however, he cares greatly about global evangelism, global missions, global causes for Jesus, global church-planting, etc. Though the sentiment is rare among Americans, people abroad feel a sense [of] belonging kinship with the global community.

Flagship Projects
of the money that comes into the Global Fund, designate a fixed percentage internally for highly visible, marketable projects such as mission trips, orphan care, support for pastors, and missionaries in the third world, etc (ten to fifteen strategic operations in locations where Mars Hill wants to be long term). This percentage should be flexible (not a "tithe"), and not communicated to the public. Support for Mars Hill Global would be support for Mars Hill Church in general, but the difference and the draw would be that a portion of Global gifts would also benefit projects that spread the gospel and serve the needs of people around the world.

Even if unintentional the gap between the global/Africa emphasis in soliciting funds and the reality of local use created a problem.  The problem was, basically, that some people felt that if Mars Hill was going to solicit money the solicitation ought to have accented the majority of activity and expenditure. 


asf



http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/01/mars-hill-global-fund-help-the-helpless-or-use-the-helpless/
...
The purpose statement in the November 2011 memo below is almost identical to another November 2011 memo I posted in early May of this year which signaled a change of focus for Mars Hill Global.
[WtH the other memo can be found here]

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
BENEFITS
The Global Fund could be beneficial in a number of ways, besides the obvious gain of increased funding:
* For a relatively low cost (e.g. $10k/month), supporting a few missionaries and benevolence projects would serve to deflect criticism, increase goodwill, and create opportunities to influence and learn from other ministries
* Many small churches who may consider joining Mars Hill hesitate because they do not believe we support "missions." While we need to continue to challenge the assumptions underlying a claim, the Global Fund would serve as a simple, easy way to deflate such criticism and help lead change in those congregations
* The ability to communicate and interact with supporters of Mars Hill Global provides an avenue for promoting events, recruiting leaders, and developing Mars Hill core groups in strategic cities
IMPLEMENTATION
* EE sets specific guidelines on what Global Fund will financially support
  * Possible suggestions: Church Planting, Orphan Care, and Widow Care in Developing Countries
  * Specific targets will easily allow MHC to say "no" to the flood of request that will come.
* Launch MH Global 3 weeks before Easter 2012
  * Website
  * Video
  * Testimonies of Jesus working in developing countries
  * Call to give
* Monthly updates from all global fund projects.

What Turner and the others may not yet fully appreciate is that what can seem controversial about Global is that whatever good it did and whatever funds it raised, the nature of the memo highlights the benefits of Global for the brand of Mars Hill more than those whose needs would be met by Mars Hill's financial resources and activity.

There's an obvious point that could be easy to miss in the memo.  You might not have spotted it but it's the Easter 2012 part.  The November 2011 memos published by Turner explore Global as a "sleeping giant" but why would Turner and company have been interested in that?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf

In the spring of 2012 Turner sent a memo indicating that Mars Hill, at the risk of putting things to simply, was teetering on the brink of financial ruin, pursuing a series of projects at the same time that were not financially sustainable.  The multiple campus launches and relaunches, the promotion of Real Marriage, these things were taxing the resources.  Turner seemed convinced giving was not what it could have been.  Whether the church should have been renting the city of Ephesus for a day didn't come up but it might have been part of the concern, maybe.

The point is, let's suggest that given that by the spring of 2012 the memo linked to above suggests a panic mode about the fiscal competence of the Martian culture.  Global looked like an untapped resource, "a sleeping giant" that would be beneficial to the church.  Now in the spring of 2012 there were mass layoffs and adjustments.  In spite of that Driscoll would go on to declare that FY2012 had been the best year ever.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
http://marshill.com/media/jesus-loves-his-church/jesus-gave-us-communion#transcript
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5, 2012
... And in that same spirit, we like to notify the church of how things are going. That includes monthly updates for all of Mars Hill. In one sense, we’re one church, in another sense, we’re fourteen local churches scattered across four different states, and pregnant with five more churches, hopefully to be birthed in about a year. And what we like to do is give a global update for how Mars Hill is doing, and then also allow the lead pastors of each local church to give a local update for how things are going at that particular location.

Our fiscal year, our budget year, runs from July through June, so we just finished our fiscal year, and those who are administratively gifted and allow us to steward the resources that God has given us, have put together a final year-end report, and I’m really excited to share it with you.
Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been. [emphasis added[

In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.

... 

Just off the top of my head, I know that Pastor Sutton Turner, your executive pastor, is negotiating deals for Mars Hill Everett, as they’ve outgrown their kid’s space, Mars Hill Downtown, as they’re at five services having outgrown their facility as well, in negotiations for Mars Hill Orange County, also in negotiations for Mars Hill Federal Way, also hoping, trusting, praying that we’ll be able to open Mars Hill Tacoma, Mars Hill Renton, Mars Hill Kirkland/Bothell-ish, and so lots of real estate negotiations in play, in addition to others that I’m sure that I’ve forgotten. But, just be in prayer for that, that we would have the space to see more people come to church and come to Jesus.

Driscoll had landed a best-selling author status (thanks to Result Source) and had scored a million dollar home in Snohomish county. His star was higher than it had ever been and he could afford to issue pre-emptive character attacks on Justin Brierley and rear-guard defenses of shaking hands with T. D. Jakes.  2012 was probably a "best year ever" for Mark Driscoll.  But what about Mars Hill as a whole? What about the Orange County eviction?  What about the more rank and file staff?

The situation behind the scenes in 2012 looked a bit different.  There's the "we're in a big mess" memo, and then there's Dave Bruskas' communication from May 25, 2012.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/
...

We Really Need Your HelpFrom Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:

As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.

First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]
...
Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals
...

Internally layoffs were happening in the first half of 2012 that Bruskas said could not and should not be appealed.  The financial situation of Mars Hill was bad enough that potential lends would consider Mars Hill an unattractive candidate for future financing. In June 2012 Driscoll mentioned that Mars Hill had been operating on a financial model that wasn't good for its long-term future. You won't find that in the sermon if you go to download it at Mark Driscoll Ministries, because it's been cut out.
While Bruskas was internally urging laid off staff to not make appeals and Driscoll had bought a roughly million-dollar home in Snohomish county, and in June 2012 mentioned a tough "season" by August 2012 he was declaring in his sermons that 2012 had been the greatest year ever for Mars Hill.

Then ... by 2013 Driscoll was talking about how Mars Hill managed to avoid slipping over a fiscal cliff.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-mars-hill-managed-to-avoid-slipping.html

With Mars Hill at times seeming to be teetering on the edge of fiscal cliffs every other year, it's "possible" the leadership was so focused on finding some way to keep the corporation solvent it was not nearly as careful as it could have and should have been about the nature of what Mars Hill Global was.  It's not necessary to propose all out intent to deceive if we connect all the dots, if Mars Hill was as fiscally incompetent as Sutton Turner's 2015 narrative indicates, a failure to grasp the gravity of the fiscal situation could fuel a subsequent lack of proper concern for how to convey what Global had become.

Or, of course, it is also possible to propose that the way Global was promoted was too slippery and evasive, too.  These are not mutually exclusive explanations being proposed. Wenatchee leans more toward the sloppy incompetence theory as to what went wrong with Global.  What does seem to be the case, given the evidence and narratives at hand, was that the controversial lack of clarity about Mars Hill Global didn't come up until the Turner era.  Whatever Turner's general story of the fiscal incompetence of late Munson-era leadership on Mars Hill financials (and one can only wonder how long Munson's going to let that stand as the new public narrative about his era of leadership), it can be said in Munson's defense that there seemed to have been nothing at all about Mars Hill Global during his tenure that could become any basis for controversy.

Sutton Turner blogs about Mars Hill Global in "Mars Hill Global – My Heart, My Mistakes, and My Critics", some observations about nose-diving missions giving numbers and a question of whether it's former or current attorneys objecting to Turner's posts

Earlier this week Sutton Turner published a blog post dealing with Mars Hill Global, which later became Mars Hill Go.

http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/

Posted by Sutton Turner on May 5, 2015
...
When I began my employment in April 2011, Mars Hill Church had limited investment in international missions. The extent of international missions was the financial support of Vision Nationals, which totaled $X for 2009-2011.* I knew Mars Hill could certainly do more work with international missions given its size and influence. With over 200,000 podcasters a week and some of those podcasters overseas, Mars Hill had the potential to impact church planting in the United States and internationally in a major way—both through our own church planting efforts and by partnering with existing church planting organizations in other foreign countries.

...
*Unfortunately, Mars Hill’s attorneys have requested that I not blog. I have removed some of the financial information as well as other non-financial information in response to their request.

Well, that could use some clearing up. 
Based on the FY reports Mars Hill reported that it gave the following amounts to missions (aka Acts 29) according to fiscal years.  If you don't happen to have all the annual reports Mars Hill released to the public since 2008 then these numbers are things you'll have to go independently verify.

FY2006         $776.059.00
FY2007      $1.110.365.00
FY2008      $1.058,000.00
FY2009      $1,200.000.00
FY2010      $1,378,000.00 (global fund giving was indicated at $1,209,000 for this fiscal year)

For missions and benevolance, the following numbers were reported in the FY2011 annual report
FY2010     $2,060,000.00 (that's obviously a little different in the math)
FY2011     $2,190.000.00

In the Mars Hill Financial Disclosure Package for 2013
Church planting
FY2011     $1,764,973.00
FY2012        $821.182.00

From the MH FY2013 annual report Church Planting and Partnerships list as
FY2012      $821.182.00
FY2013      $233.268.00

Keep in mind these are the publicly disclosed numbers in the annual reports.  It looks like, if anything, that giving was modest but robust for Mars Hill's budget up until the year Turner showed up and then by FY2013 giving to church planting was about a tenth what it was the year Turner arrived. 

And as has been noted here and within a memo published at Warren Throckmorton's blog
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/another-thought-about-march-2012-memo.html
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
16. Having ministries like Film and Theology and Military Missions is not sustainable.
17. Doing anything other than weekly capture and next week playback is not sustainable.
18. Supporting Acts29 and spending $800,000 to $1.2M per year is not sustainable.
19. Doing anything that is not Making Disciples, Training Leaders and Planting Churches is not sustainable.
So based on a leaked memo apparently authored by Sutton Turner he's presented as believing that the giving rate Mars Hill had going on in 2011-early 2012 was in some sense "not sustainable". 

All that said, Turner could well be right that Mars Hill was not particularly interested in international missions, and under Turner's tenure giving to Acts 29 seems to have been dubbed "not sustainable" at the level Mars Hill had been giving previously.  If Turner's not able to disclose the amount Mars Hill gave to Vision Nationals could Vision Nationals independently verify those numbers?  At this point Vision Nationals could be moot for the larger question of Mars Hill Global.  But that's not the next thing we'll be looking at.

Let's return to the asterisk, which led to this:

*Unfortunately, Mars Hill’s attorneys have requested that I not blog. I have removed some of the financial information as well as other non-financial information in response to their request.

The link goes to a statement which says the following:

http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 24, 2015
 
Learning, Growing, & Communicating Under Criticism
For the past several weeks, I have been planning to discuss the lessons I have learned from events and mistakes at Mars Hill Church on my website. Earlier this week, I wrote three separate blogs regarding the ResultSource decision in 2011 at Mars Hill. Today, I planned to focus on Mars Hill Global. However, last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill’s former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week. [emphasis added] 

So are the attorneys the former attorneys of Mars Hill as a corporation or the current attorneys of Mars Hill? 

POSTSCRIPT
09.00PM
Turner has made comments at Throckmorton's blog recently that may be of interest.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/05/sutton-turner-talks-mars-hill-global-says-lawyers-asks-him-to-leave-out-financial-information/#comment-2011587153
Sutton Turner > Warren Throckmorton  • 11 hours ago 
Mars Hill "Church" does not exist, as a church. It is just some form of a holding company at this point. It is ridiculous not to disclose this information.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/05/sutton-turner-talks-mars-hill-global-says-lawyers-asks-him-to-leave-out-financial-information/#comment-2011875134
Sutton Turner > Warren Throckmorton  • 9 hours ago  

The litigation threat was against me (personally), nothing outside. I honestly don't understand it. As I said before in my blog, if the church was still a church, I would not communicate about anything, however the church is dead and it is time to learn from my mistakes and my sin.

I wanted to publicly apologize to people that had been hurt by my sin and my mistakes, following my 1:1 meetings with people directly that I needed to reconcile with. I thought it was time to communicate the full story - in detail with $ - however "they" got wind (honestly, don't know how) of what I was doing and told me to stop, with a threat. If I get sued for doing what I have done, my wife and I are fine with it.
If the attorney's are former or current attorneys for Mars Hill then do some Christians still feel obliged to roll out 1 Cor 6 and remind everyone that litigation is un-Christian?  After all, it's been a popular text for explaining why Christians should not sue other Christians and if the attorneys are former attorneys for Mars Hill it would seem they have no legal basis from which to say anything on behalf of the corporation.  If they are currently attorneys for Mars Hill then if what Turner's reported is true then is Mars Hill situated to bring litigation against a former executive elder?  If nothing else, Turner's "If I get sued for doing what I have done, my wife and are fine with it" seems clear enough.

Turner's account of how he signed the Result Source contract despite dissent and how, later, a split emerged in the BoAA as to whether to blame him alone for it and Global

http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource1/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 20, 2015
...
In July 2011, a new marketing proposal was already in the works at Mars Hill: ResultSource. I learned of the project from the manager who was overseeing it. ResultSource was a marketing practice that purchased books through small individual bookstores that would qualify the book for the New York Times Best Seller List. Then, these books would be shipped to Mars Hill and sold in our nine church bookstores. It was proposed that being listed on the New York Times Best Seller List would increase the awareness of the church, support the upcoming sermon series, and increase church size.

I had a couple of meetings with the manager who was working on this project and at the time he stated his concern with the marketing proposal. I was not invited to any meetings to discuss ResultSource in my role as General Manager overseeing finance. However, I wrote several memos to my supervisor sharing my concern and lack of support for this marketing practice. I was relatively new to the staff and obviously not on the Board of Directors, nor was I asked to be a part of this particular decision. But due to my adamant disagreement and desire to best serve the staff and church, I wrote a memo on August 26, 2011 to my supervisor saying the following:

•The plan was poor stewardship.
•If the plan were to be revealed, it would look poorly on the stewardship of Mars Hill Church.
•If the plan were to be revealed, it would look poorly on Pastor Mark Driscoll.

A week later, I was notified that my advice was not taken and the plan to use ResultSource was approved. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions was broken and it needed to be fixed.
...
Shortly after the decision to execute the ResultSource marketing plan was made, my supervisor resigned. After him, I was the highest-ranking employee in administration. The decision had been made but the contract hadn’t yet been signed. On October 13, 2011, I signed the ResultSource contract as General Manager a full month before being installed as an Executive Elder. After signing the contract, I emailed an elder, stating my frustration with having to be the one to sign the contract when I had voiced my disagreement with it. But few in the organization (or in the media since then) knew of my disagreement. When you stay in an organization and you do not agree with a decision, you have to own that decision as your own. Unfortunately, I will always be linked to ResultSource since my name was on the contract even though I thought it was a bad idea. If given the same opportunity again, I would not sign the ResultSource contract, but honestly, my missing signature would not have stopped it. Someone else would have signed it anyway since the decision had already been made.

To date Turner has not explained why he had to be the one to sign the contract.  He would not have been the highest ranking officer ... although in the wake of Munson's resignation he could have been the highest ranking employee in the organization. But under Munson's bylaws (or Driscoll's, we've discussed the ambiguity of whose creation the 2007 bylaws ultimately was over here earlier this week) if Munson resigned as president the vice president was the preaching pastor, Mark Driscoll.

Still, there's a sense in which we should remember that Turner describes himself as willing to comply with policies he disagreed with.  So in a sense while his name will always be attached to the Result Source Contract we should move forward a bit.

http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 24, 2015
...
When the criticism of Mars Hill Global began in the Spring of 2014, I wanted to communicate about what happened with Global, its history, the financials, and my mistakes. Unfortunately, I was not permitted to discuss these things just as I was not permitted to discuss the ResultSource situation in the detail that I felt it deserved. There was actually a division on the Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) as some men wanted to put all the blame for both Global and ResultSource on me, but I am thankful for men who did not allow that. [emphasis added]

Eight difficult, grievous months have passed since I resigned; four sad, yet hopeful months have passed since Mars Hill held its last service. I began to work on each of these topics through blog posts several months ago with the wisdom, counsel, prayer, and blessing of many friends who are former elders and staff members at Mars Hill.

After the first blogs were published, many people asked me, “Are you stabbing Pastor Mark, Pastor Dave, Mars Hill and … in the back?”

Since leaving Mars Hill in September, I have been in frequent contact with Pastor Dave Bruskas, Matt Rogers, and other pastors with whom I directly served, board members with whom I served, and many other top leaders with whom I have served shoulder-to-shoulder while at Mars Hill. Many of these men remained at Mars Hill after my resignation and some still faithfully remain at Mars Hill selling assets and closing the organization. Our ongoing contact has been as friends, not in any managerial or oversight context with regards to Mars Hill—I’m thankful that Jesus has allowed our friendships to extend leaps and bounds beyond that. We are family in Christ.

Conspicuous for the moment by absence is mention of Mark Driscoll. Whether this omission indicates anything is impossible to say but toward the end of giving Turner at least some benefit of a doubt let's observe the following--in a way what matters is not so much that Turner signed the contract (though, of course, that matters), what matters is who was invoiced for that contract?

Courtesy of Warren Throckmorton, we have access to those invoices:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/05/27/who-at-mars-hill-church-authorized-church-funds-to-buy-a-place-for-mark-driscolls-real-marriage-on-the-nyt-best-seller-list/

By Turner's account there was a party or a group within the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability that was willing and supportive of the idea of letting Sutton Turner alone be the fall guy for controversy surrounding Result Source and Mars Hill Global.  Turner also recounts that this split the BoAA and that some objected to this idea.  Well, thanks to the reporting we've had access to in the last two years there's a very simple reason why we can accept this account as at least plausible.  Mars Hill BoAA members would have known that regardless of whether or not Sutton Turner's name was on that contract, the invoices Result Source sent were to Mark Driscoll.

There might be those who would read skeptically everything Turner has published in the last week.  That's understandable but so far, at least, while Turner's account seems to uncritically accept some "history" of MH governance that has been disproven years ago, Wenatchee The Hatchet's current impression is that Turner may have simply repeated the history of Mars Hill governance ("everybody had to all agree for anything to get done) that was told him when he arrived.  In that case he was told a basically false story he was not in a position to have corrected.  And since between the 2007 post-trial statements and Mark Driscoll's "Stepping Up" video we can't be quite sure if Jamie Munson wrote the bylaws or Mark Driscoll wrote the bylaws that were approved in 2007, Sutton Turner's story has at least remained consistent on the essential details. 

What's more, Turner's account also squares with documents leaked from Mars Hill to Warren Throckmorton.  Now if people dispute the accuracy of what Turner has said they should set the record straight.  At the moment it seems as though Turner's recent account of a split in the BoAA in which some part of the group wanted to scapegoat him seems to reinforce the validity of Paul Tripp's statement that the BoAA was incapable of providing the kind of accountability it was designed to do. How would a BoAA split on the issue of whether or not to make the guy who signed a contract on behalf of Mars Hill to rig a #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list for Mark Driscoll a scapegoat be able to hold Mars Hill leadership accountable?  As Paul Tripp stated last year about the BoAA, the most such a board could do was ensure financially restrained decisions, it could not meaningfully provide any other accountability.

Turner's account says "some men", meaning Turner's understanding was there was more than one man on the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability who wanted to basically scapegoat him over Result Source.  That's quite a claim.  We can work out from the invoices of Result Source being sent to Mark Driscoll that those who opposed the scapegoat gambit could have done so on the basis of the fact that while Sutton Turner signed the RSI contract as a Mars Hill employee it was done to promote one of Mark Driscoll's books and Mark Driscoll had become the legal president of the organization.  

As we've discussed at some length earlier this week, when the plagiarism scandal erupted and Janet Mefferd presented evidence that the Trial study guide infringed on a copyright the initial Mars Hill public response was to spread the blame on to a team of research assistants for an introductory essay that only had Mark Driscoll's name on it.  Which is to say, as scapegoating the employed help goes, there seems to be some precedent for this having been done before in the face of controversy.  Turner's story may yet get rebutted from elsewhere but for the moment what Turner has shared seems plausible (if incomplete) and would even fit what has demonstrably happened in the past when Mars Hill has reacted to public controversy. 

If anyone previously or currently associated with the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability wants to clarify or correct any of the statements Sutton Turner has lately made now might be a good time.

Turner explains that he was going to explain the Global thing but former attorneys for MH have asked him not to ... and he's not going to get into concrete numbers

The most notable excerpts are quoted in blue, but you can (and may wish to) read the whole thing.

http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/

Posted by Sutton Turner on April 24, 2015 | Featured

Learning, Growing, & Communicating Under Criticism

For the past several weeks, I have been planning to discuss the lessons I have learned from events and mistakes at Mars Hill Church on my website. Earlier this week, I wrote three separate blogs regarding the ResultSource decision in 2011 at Mars Hill. Today, I planned to focus on Mars Hill Global. However, last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill’s former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week.

Iron Sharpens Iron

In a previous blog, I wrote that if you leave an organization because decisions are made that you do not agree with, then you should not go to social media and blog about it. If Mars Hill was still a church, I would not be discussing these things in a public way, but the church’s epic implosion was historic. In our modern day, a church of its size, influence, and scope has never failed in such a public way nor experienced such unprecedented circumstances. Unless, we study the leadership, events, decisions, victories, and failures—the whole history of Mars Hill Church—it may very well be repeated. My goal in discussing these events is to get a better and more full account of what transpired. Proverbs 27:17 says, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another,” and I believe that this is just such an opportunity for sharpening other believers. I want to spare another church from facing the challenges Mars Hill faced. I also want to spare another pastor and church family from walking through what we did.

...

As I’ve said, I do believe there are helpful lessons to be shared that might prevent what happened at Mars Hill from ever happening again. Consequently, I will not be able to fully comply with the request of Mars Hill’s former attorneys. However, I will rework the Global blog post content this weekend and remove many of the financial numbers that people are so eager to know.

So apparently we were going to get some numbers but Mars Hill's former attorneys did not want Turner to be posting anything at all about Mars Hill and requested that he removed what has already been published this week.  Former attorney's?  Curious ...

UPDATE
10.23pm

As Throckmorton has noted in a blog post discussing other details of the recent Turner post, there's some striking statements in it.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/04/24/sutton-turner-mars-hill-churchs-former-attorneys-want-blog-posts-removed/
...
There are several stunning lines in this post. Here’s one:

There was actually a division on the Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) as some men wanted to put all the blame for both Global and ResultSource on me, but I am thankful for men who did not allow that.

Turner closes with more surprises:

As I’ve said, I do believe there are helpful lessons to be shared that might prevent what happened at Mars Hill from ever happening again. Consequently, I will not be able to fully comply with the request of Mars Hill’s former attorneys. However, I will rework the Global blog post content this weekend and remove many of the financial numbers that people are so eager to know.

What could possibly be the problem with releasing the numbers?  How are Mars Hill Church’s former attorneys (plural?) even players at this point?

That there was internal division within the BoAA as to whether Turner should have been made the solitary scapegoat for whatever the scandal was for both Mars Hill Global and ResultSource is pretty amazing.  Mars Hill had historically presented the idea that the elders were all in agreement.  This could at various times turn out to not even be true but the illusion of unity could be important.Turner seems to have lifted the curtain a bit to show that in the midst of the RSI and Global controversies the BoAA split on the possibility of scapegoating Turner.

Turner has also indicated Mars Hill's former attorneys contacted him to ask that he not post more and take down what he's already posted.  What for is a mystery, and why Mars Hill's former attorneys even have any interest or business in making such an overture is also mysterious.  If they are NO LONGER Mars Hill's attorney's anyway whose attorney's are they that they should even care whether or not Turner would publish the financials associated with Mars Hill Global?  On what basis could the as yet unidentified attorneys even have for discouraging Turner from presenting for public consideration what numbers were involved?

For those who may not remember what Wenatchee The Hatchet has had to say about Global, it seems the simplest way to clear everything up would be to just make the entire ledger of where every penny went available for public consideration.  It's not so much "good people have nothing to hide" because everybody has something they'd at least rather not advertise, it's that doubt about Global was substantial enough that restoring trust would seem to be best served by 100% financial transparency, or so it would seem to Wenatchee The Hatchet.
But it looks like we won't be presented any of the numbers associated with Mars Hill Global/Go, or whatever it's called now.

American Atheist: Becky Garrison's "Money over Mission" an overview of the history of Mars Hill financial and governmental shifts

https://twitter.com/becky_garrison/status/541052528914202624

http://twitdoc.com/view.asp?id=166394&sid=3KE2&ext=PDF&lcl=Money-Over-Mission-at-Mars-Hill-Church.pdf&usr=Becky_Garrison&doc=249310966&key=key-J3mAvnqVOEgyRTGZQ17h

While having taken a bit of a break from blogging about MH here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, others have written a few things.  Becky Garrison has a piece published with American Atheist that does a review of the financial and governmental shifts that have taken place in the history of Mars Hill.

MH Pastor Scott Harris ... executive director of ministries - Global? formerly or currently?

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/scott-harris/8/671/411
Senior Leader - Executive Director of Ministries - Global
Mars Hill Church
November 2012 – Present (2 years 1 month)|Greater Seattle Area
Oversaw and led ministries across all 15 Mars Hill Churches in 5 states. This included Community Groups, Redemption Groups and Biblical Living, Worship, Students, Kids, Women's Ministry, Mars Hill Network of Churches and Leadership Development. My role was to work with the ministry directors in leading each of these ministries to provide leadership and direction as we make disciples and plant churches.
• Formulated standards for existing and new Mars Hill locations and implemented best practices of core services.
• Propelled growth through key initiatives in seven different ministries including 200+% increase in Next Gen.
• Collaborated with Executive Leadership to envision future strategy and direction.
 In 2012, Mars Hill was the 3rd fastest growing churches in America. Mars Hill has planted over 481 churches through its www.Acts29Network.org and trains disciples through www.theResurgence.org

There's no indication of that internally of late .... though Harris is apparently still listed as a pastor, which confirms a statement from the Ballard News Tribune about his continuing presence ...

asgd

Throckmorton: complaint filed to WA attorney general obtain injunction regarding Mars Hill Global Fund Dissolution

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/11/06/should-washingtons-attorney-general-hold-up-the-dissolution-of-mars-hill-church/

You can read about that at the link.

Transcribing the 2008 spiritual warfare project is still coming along but's not a swift process and there are other things to keep tabs on as the corporation breathes its death rattle.  It's going to be important to present and discuss the 2008 warfare session to shed some light on what Tompkins called the "ad hominem" narrative and for other reasons Wenatchee The Hatchet will eventually get to.  It will even touch upon the work of Peter Jones, actually.

Turner may have already packed his bags and left Washington state.  Since Driscoll deeded the Woodway house to his sister anyway he may have already had plans to move out of state years ago and those could just become more official.  People are speculating that he might go to Orange County.  In light of the allegations that have come to light about the executive elders knowing of the eviction risk and deciding to play chicken with a city in California then California might not be ideal.

Texas, though, might be a possibility, since Driscoll showed up at a conference in Texas.  More crucially, Texas refuses to acknowledge debts legal and fiscal in other states that don't involve a federal issue.  Since there's no chance the IRS will get involved with anything to do with Mars Hill even if the WA attorney general did investigate things if Driscoll moved to a place like Texas, Wenatchee's understanding is that Texas won't care too much about whatever money hijinks might be alleged to happen in Washington. Since Sutton Turner was/is Texan it's not like Driscoll couldn't have heard of the potential benefits and unique traits of the state. Texas would be a more "fresh start" state and Driscoll's basically been a televangelist for close to a decade now anyway so maybe he could seek out TBN style church and ... well, it's not like he hasn't slowly become everything else he used to make fun of from the pulpit by now, unfortunately.

Wherever Driscoll goes he may or may not take the Mars Hill branding with him and rumor is he's asking for his intellectual property.  Now that we've had a chance to learn that his intellectual property is not that great in terms of originalty of thought or quality of doctrine Driscoll "could" lean more word-faith.  After all, he shook hands with T. D. Jakes in 2012 and revealed the pragmatic streak running in his approach to pastoral ministry. 

But it remains to be seen if the Washington state attorney general does anything just yet and whether the legal officers of Mars Hill Church who have the most to answer for about the Mars Hill Global fund are even in Washington state and within the actions of the state by the time the attorney general may do anything (assuming for sake of the public discourse there's stuff to investigate).

Throckmorton asks "Why did Mars Hill Tacoma and Everett wait until 2014 to thank Mars Hill Global?"

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/14/why-did-mars-hill-tacoma-and-everett-wait-until-2014-to-thank-mars-hill-global/

https://marshill.com/2014/06/05/thank-you-mars-hill-global-sincerely-mars-hill-everett
Mars Hill Everett thanked Mars Hill Global on June 5, 2014.  For what?  For a home.

Throckmorton linked to a bit of coverage from July 2013, and here's the link.
http://www.theheraldbusinessjournal.com/article/20130712/SCBJ02/707129993
... The property was ultimately purchased for $1.275 million not long after Mars Hill Church purchased the 104-year-old First Congregational Church building in Tacoma for about $1.9 million. The organization is not shy about handling restorations of historic properties.

Seems to be true, but when did Mars Hill Everett get purchased?

https://www.snoco.org/proptax/(ndmj4bz14tatuwb0k4g3z445)/result.aspx

Property Account Summary

Parcel Number 00439162701300 Property Address 2730 OAKES AVE , EVERETT, WA 98201-3628 Parties - For changes use 'Other Property Data' menu Role Percent Name Mailing Address Taxpayer 100 MARS HILL CHURCH 1411 NW 50TH ST, SEATTLE, WA 98107 Owner 100 MARS HILL CHURCH 1411 NW 50TH ST, SEATTLE, WA 98107 Well ... Property Sales (since 7/31/1999) Transfer Date Receipt Date Sales Price Excise Number Deed Type Grantor (Seller) Grantee (Buyer) Other Parcels 1/30/2013 1/31/2013 $0 E021220 QC STATE OF WASHINGTON MILITARY DEPT MARS HILL CHURCH No

Looks like it was January 30, 2013.  Why wait about a year and a half to thank Mars Hill Global publicly for real estate that was bought back in 2013? 

If there was no Mars Hill Global fund why thank it?  Or if there was one but there stopped being one why did Mars Hill Everett wait so long to issue a public thank you for a fund that either never existed to begin with or stopped existing at some indefinite time before or after the purchase? 

The gap between January 30, 2013 and June 5, 2014 seems kind of big.