Warren Throckmorton revisits the demise of Mars Hill on the tenth anniversary of Mark Driscoll's fateful interview with Janet Meffered

https://warrenthrockmorton.substack.com/p/a-decade-ago-janet-mefferd-accused

If Warren Throckmorton publishes a book about Mars Hill I would definitely be interested in reading it.  I have not written about Making Christianity Manly Again much yet but I am afraid I did not come away with a favorable impression of it.  It seemed to be rehashing observations and ideas that were made more cogently and with far more formidable documentation by Jessica Johnson in Biblical Porn.  McKinney's reference to Jesus and John Wayne may be a clue to readers that you'd be better off reading Kristen Kobes du Mez for yourself.  If you want a sociological treatment of Mars Hill as part of the larger New Calvinist movement skip McKinney's book altogether and go read Brad Vermurlen's Reformed Resurgence.  As frustrated as I was by Mike Cosper's sprawling, diffuse, and overstuffed The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill I would sooner recommend you listen to all of that then read McKinney's book.  Actually, now that I recall, you should read Katelyn Beaty's Celebrities for Jesus before you read McKinney's book, too.

McKinney's book had several profoundly aggravating elements to it that I am probably not going to express my frustrations about until 2024 because while it was an exasperating and tedious book I'm not sure it's worth talking about here in 2023.  She did nothing to situate Driscoll's ideas in light of his Charismatic Catholic family members or his conversion to Protestantism and she couldn't even bring herself to quote Doug Wilson except via Kobes du Mez.  That's absurd for a scholar.  It's not like Doug Wilson isn't relentlessly giving away material each November these days as part of his No Quarter November give-aways.  Leaning on the secondary sources of scholars writing about Doug Wilson when you could cite primary sources seems ... unscholarly.  Particularly since Doug Wilson was openly cited as a major influence on Mark Driscoll by Mark Driscoll himself a sociological take on Driscoll that doesn't try to situate him as having his conversion experience in the American Redoubt (see Crawford Gribben's pretty readable overview of the American Redoubt published by Oxford University Press) seems like a bungle. 

Having kept track of other books that touch on topics dealing with Mars Hill by way of geographic region or doctrinal movement it amazes me that Making Christianity Manly Again is as bad as it is.  At the risk of revealing my alma mater, when I went to the little school by the canal I met an older guy who told me that he attended Seattle Pacific University because of its favorable student to teacher ratio.  He liked being able to be taught by professors with thirty or so fellow students rather than being in a room with five hundred people at the UW in a class that was being taught by a teaching assistant because the actual professor was busy working on another peer-reviewed project or seeking tenure-related stuff.  That said, he told me, SPU was not a research school and never would be.  That was the very big opportunity cost of the school being so good at being an actual teaching institution.  I didn't think about that observation he made for decades until Jennifer McKinney's book came out and then the full implications of his observation really struck me this year.  There are and have been capable scholars at the school, but McKinney's book ... I'll probably wait until 2024 to discuss it.  

Meanwhile,  Throckmorton seems well-positioned to write a book about Mars Hill.  I would also, frankly, like some people who were part of Mars Hill who are also not Mark Driscoll to write books if they feel up to it.  I even have Justin Dean's PR Matters.  It was alright, actually.  I would sooner recommend you read that than Making Christianity Manly Again and I never would've imagined writing that after I first finished reading Dean's book but it's true.  :)  

UPDATE

Given how few books there have been on the topic of Mars Hill I suppose there's the old proverb that beggars can't be choosers.  But McKinney's sermon selections turned out to be from series I documented underwent some significant purges so even I wonder whether or not the versions of the sermons she accessed for her book weren't redacted in some way by the time she got the audio.  That Team Driscoll would purge, redact and re:release material is something even the most fastidious scholar couldn't exactly control for.  

Bob Smietana's at The Roys Report on Jed Ostoich's time as a Docent Group research assistant to Mars Hill, revisiting how the initial MHC response to the 2013 plagiarism controversy was to shift blame to a research assistant

Bob Smietana has something at Julie Roys Report on how a pastor was caught having plagiarized Mark Driscoll sermons who, as longtime readers will know, had his own plagiarism scandal a few years back.

https://julieroys.com/plagiarize-sermon/

Smietana also has an article about ghostwriting that mentions Jed Ostoich.

https://julieroys.com/why-some-preachers-rely-on-holy-ghostwriters-and-other-pulpit-helps/

Even longtime readers of Wenatchee the Hatchet might not recall that we looked at what the inadvertent ghostwriter for Mark Driscoll had to say back in 2019 about his time with the Docent Group.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/04/no-compromise-radio-podcast-interview.html

Now the reason I mention all of this is because having even a single person go on record about doing Docent Group research on behalf of Mark Driscoll in the past is salient due to the fact that when the plagiarism controversy erupted in late 2013 with Janet Mefferd's on air conversation with Mark Driscoll, an early public response on the part of Mars Hill was to admit to citation mistakes but shift them to research assistant by implication. This was something that was covered back in December 2013 when the situation had just begun:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

Page 7

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

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

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

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

POSTSCRIPT
10-30-2019
9.22pm

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

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

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

some price comparisons on different editions of Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll in which the Spanish language editions are notably pricier than English language editions

We've had a few posts about the Mark and Grace Driscoll book Real Marriage over the years.

But of particular relevance to today's post is a publishing agreement from February 28, 2011 regarding Real Marriage, published here at Wenatchee The Hatchet at roughly the start of 2016.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/01/an-agreement-from-february-28-2011.html

At the time the agreement was settled the working title of the book was A New Marriage to the Same  Spouse.  That is, in many respects, a more honest-seeming title.  But we don't need to recite at too great a length the extent to which the narrative of the 2012 book retroactively cast doubt on the veracity of any number of stories or summations Mark Driscoll gave from the pulpit about how happy he was in his marriage from the years 2000 through 2007 or in statements to church members.

No, we're going to focus on a segment from page 4 of the agreement known as Section 1.4.8, "Foreign Language Publication Rights". There's reference to the publisher and English and Spanish language versions of the book that is the subject of the agreement.

Well, the book came out in 2012 and the Janet Mefferd conversation with Mark Driscoll in which the the plagiarism controversy that Mark Driscoll had about his works was in later 2013.  What's the significance of that for pricing in different language editions?  Not sure there's any, actually but it does seem worthwhile to note that the prices for Real Marriage in its English and Spanish language formats are pretty different.

This is most vividly apparent with the Kindle editions.  The English language Kindle edition of Real Marriage, today, goes for $1.99.  How much does Matrimonio Real go for?

So why would Harper Collins have the English language Kindle edition at a penny under two dollars while the Spanish language edition is a penny under ten?  This is even more vividly apparent if we go hunting for Kindle editions with Grace Driscoll as the search category.

We're going to get around to reviewing Spirit-Filled Jesus, the first book Mark Driscoll has formally published through a publisher that he seems to have completed since A Call to Resurgence.  But that can wait until 2019 and since it seems the new book may not even have charted there's a couple of levels at which whatever he says in his new book is actually in some ways not as intrinsically interesting as a potential portrait of pop Christian publishing as the substantially different prices for the English and Spanish editions of what is arguably his most famous book.  Whether or not Dan Allender's work receives an acknowledgment in the first edition of the Spanish language Matrimonio Real might be something someone else can tackle.

By early 2019 Nadia Bolz-Weber is going to have her book out on the topic of sex and perhaps we'll just wait until then to do a potential compare or contrast between Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll.  For now, it's interesting to notice how much more the Spanish language editions of the Driscolls' book currently cost than the English language editions.  If one were to ask why on earth there's such a price difference could it be because of how many copies of the English language editions were printed?  Or did the plagiarism controversy have any role in what seems like a substantial price drop?  Of course the fact that a self-help book from 2012 might cost little in Kindle could be an effect of Kindle books getting cheaper (unless you're getting academic monographs!).

POSTSCRIPT
12-15-2018
0358pm

Commenter Eric Love mentioned that the price could be lower because Kindle books could be resold, which could drive the price down.  I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case about Real Marriage specifically. Amazon's site states that in both the English and Spanish language editions the Kindle price for Real Marriage and Matrimonio Real are set by the seller, which in this case looks to be Harper Collins.

Amazon can have discounts on Kindle and ebook formats, to be sure, but in this case it would seem that Harper Collins set the respective prices and Amazon has noted that. 

But on the American Amazon.com site I'm not seeing that you can find Kindles in the third-party "used" or "new" categories you could with more traditional books.

10-22-2011 "Clarification on some rumors that have been on some blogs", MH fielded the trademark controversy the week after the Result Source Inc contract was signed, implications for 2013

If we were to cast about for an example of "what" blogs have discussed about Mars Hill that Mars Hill saw reason to respond to, then we'll benefit from understanding that blogs in themselves (and their bloggers) only warranted responses when the "what" of what they were talking about was a big enough of a deal to get addressed.  Take, for instance, the late 2011 trademark and logo incident where a cease-and-desist letter was sent out.  The reason it's valuable to wade back into this particular kerfuffle is to reveal that it set a precedent that should be borne in mind for a controversy that would erupt two years later.

http://web.archive.org/web/20111024075722/http://blog.marshill.com/2011/10/22/clarification-on-some-rumors-that-have-been-on-some-blogs/

http://blog.marshill.com/2011/10/22/clarification-on-some-rumors-that-have-been-on-some-blogs/

Clarification on some rumors that have been on some blogs

Miscellaneous
by Mars Hill Church on Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 8:34 pm 

At Mars Hill we like to be generous with everything we’ve been given. For over ten years, we’ve made all of our sermons available for free online, invested significant time and money to help raise up thousands of leaders around the globe through theresurgence.com, and given millions of dollars to plant dozens of churches through Acts 29. Recently, this has grown to include such things a free Leadership Coaching and Campaign research to help other churches and ministries grow. We love other churches and ministries, and we love giving generously to serve them.

By God’s grace, our ministry has grown to the place where we’re recognized by people all over the world. With this kind of recognition, we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the influence that God has given us to tell people about Jesus.

Sadly, in addition to giving things away, we’ve also had things taken. We’ve had churches cut and paste our logo, take our website code and copy it completely, had ministry leaders cut and paste documents of ours, put their name on them to then post online as if it were their content, and even seen other pastors fired for preaching our sermons verbatim.

We’re not the only church called Mars Hill, and occasionally there arises confusion between us and other churches that share the “Mars Hill” name, particularly as we now have our churches in four states. This was the case recently when one of our members called us to find out if we had planted Mars Hill churches in the Sacramento, California area. We had not, but when we went to these churches’ websites, it was obvious to us how people could be confused. Each of these three connected churches in the Sacramento region—planted in 2006, 2007, and 2010—bore the “Mars Hill” name and their logo was substantially similar to the logo we’ve used since 1996.

When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians. On Friday we spoke with the pastor of Mars Hill in Sacramento to apologize for the way we went about this. We had a very productive conversation and look forward to continuing that conversation in the days and weeks ahead.

We made a mistake in not calling these churches prior to sending the letter. We should have picked up the phone before sending any other communication.

Unfortunately, rather than hearing from the church in Sacramento, we began hearing that the matter was instead being speculated on by a blogger who did not verify any facts with us and, as a result, provided an inaccurate version of what transpired. This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion.

As a clarification, we have not sued any churches and have no plans to sue any churches.
We have not sent any similar letters to any other “Mars Hill” churches, and we are not planning on asking any church with “Mars Hill” in their name to change their name.
What's striking now that robots.txt has been dropped from Mars Hill sites (here and there) is to consider that the trademark imbroglio Mars Hill Church was involved in with that cease-and-desist letter, it was publicly addressed on October 22, 2011.  That's basically a week after Sutton Turner signed the contract with Result Source Inc. to ensure a #1 spot for the Driscoll book Real Marriage, a book which turned out to have made use of ideas published by Dan Allender in 1990 but which did not cite him or give him credit in the first edition. To go by what Warren Throckmorton compiled on the range and number of citation errors in Mark Driscoll's books, there were more citation problems found in Real Marriage than in any other book with Mark Driscoll's name on it. That the citation problem was eventually remedied would "seem" to confirm the significance of the lack of proper thanks to Allender's work having been observed and conceded in the original print edition.

You can go see for yourself on the contract it was dated October 13, 2011.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/03/06/the-signed-contract-that-helped-get-mark-driscolls-real-marriage-on-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/

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

So it's worth remembering that when the plagiarism controversy erupted two years later there had been a precedent of Mars Hill collectively expressing regret that people had been copying their work without giving them credit slightly more than two years prior.  Which, for the purpose of public figure distinctions, kinda looks like an example of Mars Hill and its leadership publicly broaching the subject of copyright infringement of others' works two years before Janet Mefferd had her on-air confrontation with Mark Driscoll about his failure to adequately give reference to the intellectual property of others.  While some of Driscoll's fans may still feel that on-air confrontation was unfair if the heads of Mars Hill hadn't made a point of raising the issue of their IP two years earlier there wouldn't have been a public record basis from which Mefferd could have felt there was a legitimate ground for a public challenge to Driscoll about whether he had given credit where it was due.

The Faults in Our Stars featuring some ... interesting explanations for the resignation of Mark Driscoll

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/faults-our-stars

In addition to quotes from a Gerry Breshears authoritatively describing his relationship with Mark Driscoll in the past tense, we get to read him explain that Driscoll was arrogant.  Considering that Breshears co-wrote four books with Driscoll would somebody who's formally in the press ask Breshears how Death By Love managed to end up being co-authored by the two of them when by Mark Driscoll's account he had mostly finished that book by 2006?

Driscoll mentioned that it was co-authored in his February 2008 spiritual warfare teaching seminar.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-3-part_53.html

but ...

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-blast-from-past-resurgence-blog-post.html

in September 2006 Driscoll mentioned mainly being done with the book that came to be known as Death By Love. The Relevant magazine article didn't single out that book for some reason but the nature and extent of Breshears' co-authoring relationship with Mark Driscoll would seem to warrant further interview questions since those co-authored works constitute Breshears' only significant published work since the dawn of the millennium.  For a bit more on that, over here:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/01/heidelblogs-on-driscollbreshears.html

A number of theories are proposed in the Ruth Moon piece, a couple of which are interesting.  That branding and media were a strength gets noted.  Wenatchee The Hatchet thinks it could be stated more forcefully that Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll had an Achilles heel in social and broadcast media immersion.  What this meant was the sheer tonnage of statements put out there became easier to collate, cross-reference, and examine for what turned out to be some startling ... continuity errors. 

More significantly, in its commitment to sustaining meteoric growth Mars Hill committed to an informational infrastructure that couldn't possibly keep up with the numbers it was assimilating.  The reason that matters can be explained after we get to a not-quite-passing reference to a theory proposed in the article by William Vanderbloemen, that Mark Driscoll resigned in response to, not some scandal about possible misappropriation of money or a sexual transgression but ... a steady stream of criticism from popular bloggers ... ?

Seriously? 

Let's go back to 2012 and see how Driscoll tended to publicly discuss "bloggers".  Since the pertinent page probably can't be found where it first appeared; since said materials can't be dredged up by the Wayback Machine due to robots.txt; and since the post in question somehow didn't migrate over to markdriscoll.org ...  it seems that Wenatchee The Hatchet will have to rely on having previously documented and discussed some Driscoll material, again.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/mark-driscoll-shows-us-hat-but-does-not.html
http://pastormark.tv/2012/04/16/an-official-response-to-the-kerfuffle-at-liberty-university

The trouble started with a Southern Baptist blogger . . . yes, you should have seen that one coming. Now, to be fair, the blogger quoted an anonymous “source.” And, we all know that almost everything bloggers say is true. But, when they have something as solid as an anonymous “source,” then you can rest assured that when Jesus talked about the truth over and over in John, this is precisely what he was referring to. I have a degree from Washington State’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication and worked professionally as a journalist, and I can assure you that The Kerfuffle is a very serious matter to be taken with the utmost sobriety and propriety. In fact, one anonymous “source” I spoke to said that Watergate pales in comparison.
Perhaps we can cross reference another, ahem, blogger here:
http://fromlaw2grace.com/2012/04/17/driscoll-the-lu-kerfuffle-failure-to-communicate/
But, to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he was poorly briefed about “The Kerfuffle” by his community relations manager:

“So, I asked our community relations manager, who gets to enjoy reading blogs about me while eating breakfast every day (it’s amazing he holds anything down), to give me a summary of this kerfuffle.” (An Official Response to The Kerfuffle at Liberty University)

So by Driscoll's account, admittedly quoted second-hand of necessity, not only did Driscoll not seem to take the blogger of that moment seriously, he also seems to have summarized that he consulted his community relations manager to summarize "this kerfuffle".  That would seem to have been ... Justin Dean?

As for that blogger?  This seems to be his response to the Driscoll response.

And here's some coverage from the time
http://m.christianpost.com/news/mark-driscoll-pokes-fun-at-liberty-university-kerfuffle-73331/

Now it's possible Driscoll found it useful to be at the center of a controversy connected to a blogger, but there's nothing in any of the above material that suggests Mark Driscoll was someone who was swift to take bloggers or things they said seriously.  So what would Vanderbloemen suggest popular bloggers could have published that would have mattered to someone like Mark Driscoll? If someone like William Vanderbloemen were to suggest Mark Driscoll's late 2014 resignation could have anything at all to do with popular bloggers (never mind what "popular" might be or which bloggers) this would still seem to fly in the face of some direct statements on Driscoll's part that suggest the LAST thing he'd do is resign of materials published by any bloggers, popular or otherwise.

Perhaps things Vanderbloemen said at the end of 2014 could illuminate things?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/12/19/ive-never-seen-anything-quite-like-this-chaotic-situation-that-led-to-famed-pastors-resignation-has-prominent-church-expert-issuing-a-major-warning/

Driscoll‘s recent resignation from the church he founded was followed by another shocking announcement: Mars Hill is dissolving by year’s end, with its 11 congregations becoming independent houses of worship.

 And Vanderbloemen said that the stunning situation carries with it a plethora of lessons to be learned. “Mark stepped down at his own choice, but it wasn’t without a lot of pressure,” he said. “Mark’s departure didn’t contain any of the normal elements of a scandal.”

There wasn’t an extramarital affair nor any other explosive singular event that contributed to his downfall, he argued, calling Driscoll a “brilliant communicator.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Vanderbloemen said, noting that Driscoll ended up leaving over a wide variety of smaller infractions and debates that were perpetuated on the Internet. “We have seen a lot of guys have to leave, but never from the death of a thousand cuts that happened online.”

He continued, “There was a weird sort of perfect storm of critics and disorganization.”
In the end, Vanderbloemen said that Mars Hill grew very fast and simply wasn’t prepared for the level of expansion it experienced. As an anecdotal result, he said that churches need to do what businesses have done, drafting plans in preparation for uncertainty.

Pressure?  From where? 

But Vanderbloemen doesn't seem to have camped too much on whether or not a wide variety of smaller infractions revolved around any themes.  How about plagiarism?  Consult Warren Throckmorton's blog, or maybe a post or two in which Wenatchee The Hatchet raised a question of whether Dan Allender's work was adequately acknowledged in the first edition of Real Marriage.

Speaking of that book ... wasn't it pretty much a year ago that World Magazine's Warren Cole Smith broke a story about the use of Result Source by Mars Hill to secure a #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list for that book?

http://www.worldmag.com/2014/03/unreal_sales_for_driscoll_s_real_marriage

So between the plagiarism controversy and the controversy surrounding Result Source, both of which featured Real Marriage, what would be the basis for Mark Driscoll's resignation to have been catalyzed by .... popular bloggers?  Wouldn't it seem more likely that the double-whammy of being confronted by Janet Mefferd on air about plagiarism and then having it revealed by World Magazine sales were rigged for one of Driscoll's books seem like bigger deals than bloggers? 

Driscoll's resignation statement didn't seem to give any indication bloggers had anything to do with his decision. You can go read the whole thing if you want.  Here's the pertinent pair of paragraphs
http://www.religionnews.com/?p=109053
... Prior to and during this process there have been no charges of criminal activity, immorality or heresy, any of which could clearly be grounds for disqualification from pastoral ministry. Other issues, such as aspects of my personality and leadership style, have proven to be divisive within the Mars Hill context, and I do not want to be the source of anything that might detract from our church’s mission to lead people to a personal and growing relationship with Jesus Christ.That is why, after seeking the face and will of God, and seeking godly counsel from men and women across the country, we have concluded it would be best for the health of our family, and for the Mars Hill family, that we step aside from further ministry at the church we helped launch in 1996. I will gladly work with you in the coming days on any details related to our separation

This does not sound like someone who was saying popular bloggers had anything to do with his decision, does it? 

Is it possible Ruth Moon misunderstood what Vanderbloemen said?  For that matter, would anyone associated with the Driscoll family be willing to clarify whether or not William Vanderbloemen was given any permission to make statements to any effect about the reason for Mark Driscoll's resignation?  That seems to Wenatchee The Hatchet something for which Driscolls could understandably break social media silence, especially if there needs to be any statement that would set the record straight about what has lately been recounted in an article in Relevant magazine.

2-5-2008 spiritual warfare Part 2 part 7 commentary, if we compare the 2008 session to the 2012 narrative of Real Marriage it seems the "ordinary demonic" abounded.

At this point there is no plausible deniability as to whether or not Mark Driscoll could have somehow stumbled upon the concepts of "one-ism" and "two-ism" by some providential happenstance.  He explicitly credited Peter Jones with the concepts back in 2008 in the spiritual warfare seminar he gave to leaders. 

Noting this on the anniversary of Janet Mefferd's on air accusation that Mark Driscoll was a plagiarist who, in particular, used a lot of Jones' ideas with sparse citation, is simply noting what people should have already been aware of.  But since not everyone heard or became familiar with the 2008 spiritual warfare session it seemed good to transcribe and comment on this session to get to this specific point and then move forward from it.

Because the way Mark Driscoll describes idolatry as worship of fame and money and sex can lead a person to ask whether or not since he gave that talk in 2008 Driscoll hasn't confessed to a kind of worship of those things.  In Real Marriage Driscoll's concession that he tended to view sex as a god was a given.  What Driscoll didn't clear up in the 2008 session was whether one of his precepts worked in reverse, if sexual sin is idolatry would idolatry of sex also be sexual sin, too?  In other words, while Driscoll was going on about the usual suspects for conservative Protestants and sexuality one can't help but ask why an idolization or idealization of the sexual/marital bond in itself could not constitute an idolatry that needed to be repented of.  For those who read Real Marriage the resolution of the tension between Mark and Grace Driscoll was resolved how?  Apparently by Mark Driscoll convincing his wife that having more sex with him would cure his mood swings and depression.  How was that supposed to be repenting of making a god of sex, exactly?

A case could be made that Driscoll has idolized fame?  Why? Simple, he admitted to using Result Source for Real Marriage, a book which has turned out to have never credited Dan Allender's work in its first edition. In fact the number of citation errors in Real Marriage is so high that between the citation errors and the Result Source deal and the problematic questions the narrative of Real Marriage opens up in light of both the general public narrative of Mark Driscoll from 2000 to 2008 on the one hand and the 2012 narrative in Real Marriage itself on the other, the writing and promotion of the 2012 book can be construed as the book that at every conceivable level destroyed the legacy of Mars Hill Church.  The Driscolls saying they were privately bitter and resentful and confused while Driscoll preached some of his most salacious sermons on sex upended the veracity and credibility of the narrative Mars Hill members and leaders had tended to believe.  The book gaining a place on the NYT bestseller list by way of Result Source Inc activity showed the book gained its reputation through a dishonest method, and then it turned out, at length, that a lot of ideas that were written and published by others were not adequately cited. 

And in light of the scope of the problems in the Driscoll dating and marriage relationship, especially when all the axiomatic teaching from the 2008 spiritual warfare teaching is accounted for so far, one is virtually forced to ask whether or not Mark Driscoll, by the metrics of his own ideas of the "ordinary demonic" started into and stayed in a marriage for many years that was simply characterized by the demonic, the ORDINARY demonic, but the demonic nonetheless.

After having admonished pastors to use reduction ad absurdum in apologetics and debate it's possible to quote Driscoll accurately; quote him completely in context; and cross reference the cumulative and disparate narrative strands of his public statements in ministry, and suggest from that that by now the burden of proof is going to be on Mark Driscoll himself and the Board of Overseers and the Board of Advisors & Accountabilty to explain why Mark Driscoll ISN'T demonized and HASN'T been demonized for at least some stretch of his ministry career.  Go through every category of "ordinary demonic" from the 2008 session and cross reference it to the scandals and stories associated with Driscoll and this possibility seems exceptionally hard to rule out. 

It's not that Wenatchee The Hatchet thinks Mark Driscoll is actually demonized, as such, but that Mark Driscoll's own axioms and anecdotes, taken as a whole and in context, seem to testify on a grand scale against Mark Driscoll's own spiritual health and any board that would to any degree exonerate Driscoll in light of his cumulative self-testimony and axioms on spiritual warfare simply may not have the competence in theology, biblical interpretation, or normal human relations to have any business speaking on these matters in public. 

It's not just that the 2012 book up-ended the previous narrative and showed that it may have been a sham, it's that for those leaders and laity in ministry who heard the 2008 spiritual warfare session it raised some pretty awkward questions about whether by Mark Driscoll's own teachings we'd all have to consider his marriage so fraught with the "ordinary demonic" it may have passed into something more extraordinary.  A more generous explanation could be that Mark Driscoll, after a year or two of sleep deprivation and self-attested symptoms that could indicate a caffeine dependency, crashed both mentally as well as physically and has been overdue for sounder physical and psychological care than he may have been getting from the likes of Catanzaro since about 2007. The best possible thing for Mark Driscoll at this point would be to be away from any kind of ministry altogether and to just be a rank and file member of a church learning how to actually submit to authority, a thing he's been so famous for advising others to do.

Or, if Driscoll wants to be measured by his own axioms ... the burden of proof is on him and his defenders to explain why he didn't end up demonized.  Wenatchee The Hatchet is going to suggest the alternative is the more generous explanation.

2-5-2008 spiritual warfare Part 2 part 7: idolatry as ordinary demonic and Driscoll name-drops Peter Jones' one-ism and two-ism

http://castroller.com/podcasts/MarsHillChurch3/3699801
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil

1:08:21

Last, too, ordinary demonic, idolatry. 1 John 5:18-21 talks about idolatry. I hit it on Sunday that idolatry is worshipping creatION instead of creaTOR. Romans 1:25 says they exchanged the truth of God for a lie or THE lie and the worshipped and served created things rather than the creator God. Peter Jones, a leading scholar in the world on paganism, lectured here not long ago, did a great job in Romans 1. He said there really are only two world views, there's THE truth and THE lie. And THE truth is that God is creator and he rules over creation and we exist to worship creator and steward creation. The lie is that God and creation are the same. It's two-ism vs one-ism. Two-ism is creator/creation. One-ism is that creator and creation are essentially the same. It comes out in philosophical language like monism, pantheism, panentheism, (pantheism [is] that all creation is God, panentheism that creation is the body which contains God). This is most Eastern religions, most pagan religions, radical environmentalism, it's one-ism. We believe in two-ism. We believe that God made things not that God and those things are esentially the same.

What happens is if you believe the lie instead of the truth, if you believe one-ism instead of two-ism, you worship created things rather than creator God. And in Romans 1 he says this leads to lesbianism and homosexuality and sexual perversion and sin of all kinds. You know what it is? God made the body very good. He made everything good. He made the body very good. Gender, sexuality, pleasure, I read for you guys Sunday Steven Arterburn, a Christian counselor who says that the only thing as pleasurable as sex, chemically, is heroin, that's why it's so addictive. God intends sex to be between one man and one woman and the pleasure and passion that bond them together as a loving married couple (which is why when sex is outside of marriage it leads to devastation, addiction and destruction) people who commit sexual sin, they are worshipping the body, they're worshipping nudity, they're worshipping parts of the body, they're worshipping the pleasures of their body, they're worshipping the appearance, taste, touch, sight, smell of someone else's body. Sexual sin is idolatry.  It's worshipping creation rather than creator. It's a much bigger issue than just a lifestyle issue. It's a worship issue.

1:10:56ish
I shared with you on Sunday, as well, the insight of Martin Luther, who said that the first two commandments is that there's only one God and the second is that you're only to worship God and Luther says if you don't break the first two commandments you won't break the rest. You won't murder anybody. You won't commit adultery. You won't covet, you won't lie, you won't steal, you won't because if you worship God ONLY you won't worship sex, power, fame, money and glory and you won't commit idolatry. Peter Kreeft, the philosopher, says the opposite of Christianity is not atheism but idolatry. That we're all worshippers. We all GIVE ourselves to someone or something. Romans 11:36 he talks about, you know, "to God be the glory now and forever. Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And there he's talking about glory, holding something in glory. He's talking about worship, giving yourself to it. Sacrifice time, energy, money, health, for the good of this person, this thing, this feeling, this experience, that in that way sports is religion and sex is religion and work is religion and intellect is religion and power is religion and fame is religion and it's ALL idolatry. It's ALL the worship of ME and US and the feelings and the passions and the joys and the pleasures and the pride that we enjoy.
That ultimately Satan just wants to take our Imago Dei that is made to worship and have it worship created things rather than creator God. That's all he wants to do and he's so good at it and people are idolatrous and they're worshipping Satan when they commit idolatry.

POSTSCRIPT: 11-23-2014
The lecture(s) potentially in question may be the following:
https://marshill.com/2008/01/07/free-pagan-training-jan-8

January 8, 2008 and for a second reference to the same lecture, Gary Shavey was mentioning tha tit was coming up in December 2007.

http://theresurgence.com/2007/12/20/our-land-of-blur-and-the-5-points-of-paganism
...
Resurgence is hosting two free events on January 8, 2008 to help the church and believers understand and address this root issue. We invite all Pacific Northwest pastors, church planters and ministry leaders to join Dr. Peter Jones, professor and author, for a free morning workshop that includes lunch. ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 43

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

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

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