THE RISE AND FALL OF MARS HILLEPISODE 7|1 hrState of EmergencyMIKE COSPER AUGUST 9, 202100:44:22COSPER: That same day, Scott Thomas was assigned to lead an Elder Investigation Taskforce looking into charges from Driscoll that Paul and Bent had disqualified themselves as elders.SCOTT THOMAS: What we determined, with a group of godly men, who were coming together, and what we determined was Paul nor Bent had done ANYTHING to disqualify themselves from eldership and that was our [brief pause] report. I've got the full report right now but we determined there was nothing to disqualify them from eldership.
COSPER: You would think with a conclusion like that, that it would be a sort of open and shut case with the rest of the elders but there's a weird disconnect that happens in the middle of this. The team that Scott Thomas was leading, investigating Paul and Bent, did clear them of wrongdoing but they didn't communicate that to them directly. Instead, in all of the formal communications that I've seen, they simply said the investigation was complete and that Paul and Bent didn't need to attend their own trial before the rest of the elders. ...
SCOTT THOMAS: 00:46:12Both came and spoke and thought we were saying they were guilty and they approached it that way and began to blast, you know, most everybody in the room. And so it didn't help their cause and so the elders said, "Well, we gotta take action now." And it was a different way from what the team that was investigating it, WE said they did nothing to disqualify themselves from eldership. And, uh, but after they spoke we said, "Well, maybe they should, at least, be reprimanded."
Showing posts with label reasons for re-org. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reasons for re-org. Show all posts
Thursday, August 12, 2021
initial thoughts on episode 7 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill: Scott Thomas' statements in `21 on `07 are difficult to reconcile with what he wrote in `07 about the terminations and trials of Petry and Meyer
The newest episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is, frankly, baffling in a few spots. No part of the episode seems more puzzling than the statements made by Scott Thomas about the 2007 terminations and trials of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer. What Scott Thomas told Mike Cosper for the podcast I have transcribed below:
So, the thing is, none of that sits very easily beside the actual statements Scott Thomas was making in 2007 during the months of the investigation, trial, verdicts and subsequent shunning orders but it will take time to revisit all the materials preserved both at Joyful Exiles and materials made available to Wenatchee The Hatchet. If you're up for reading through a pile of material, proceed.
Thursday, July 08, 2021
Part 3 of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast has gone up, this part includes a story of a woman who was declared a heretic for suggesting Driscoll surround himself with older, more mature men who would stand toe to toe with him
The story of Karen Schaeffer, former assistant to Mark Driscoll, is the stand-out story from the recent podcast. Her account of suggesting at a dinner that Driscoll surround himself with older, wiser men who could go toe to toe with him and that he'd be surrounded with fewer yes-men is also an account of how, not long after she said these things, she was summoned to meet with Mark Driscoll ad Jamie Munson and then dismissed from her job, and told she was a heretic.
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Simply Seattle store broken into early Saturday morning, local coverage, a post-Mars Hill update on things for former executive elder Jamie Munson
from January 9, 2021
an article from September 2019
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/simply-seattle-owner-has-simply-had-it-after-jerseys-stolen/990816912/
It's been a while since there's been news in connection to former executive Mars Hill elder Jamie Munson but there has been some news, break ins at Simply Seattle have been frequent according to reports from KOMO and KIRO from September 2019 and earlier this week. That Munson has purged any traces of his Mars Hill involvement from his LinkedIn would only be obvious to someone who had a Mars Hill connection between its founding and dissolution but it's a point of consideration since this blog, at one point, chronicled a mountain range of stuff about the megachurch.
Downtown Seattle has been boarded up in all sorts of stretches for months. Even CrackDonalds (let the Seattle readers understand) was boarded up and non-operational for months last year. Break-ins have become more frequent, per coverage above. While there's not been a tag for Munson specifically, there is one now, and tags are included at the bottom of the post that cover topics pertinent to Munson's era as legal president of Mars Hill.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
USCAL Bridge Summit 2019 interview with Mark Driscoll excerpts--world history as a governance war between God and Satan, church governance is from "the throne down, not the pew up".
http://www.uscal.us/upcoming-events/2018/7/10/the-bridge-2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs2UoP79j8c&t=17937s
05:00:58
Mark Driscoll: For me I grew up in a marginal Jack Catholic, not an evangelical, home and got saved in college as a freshman reading the Bible. And I was in a church that was an evangelical-based Bible church, not a charismatic church or Pentecostal. Great, great, folks.
And I was at a men's retreat and God spoke to me audibly. He said I should marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches. Audible. I didn't even know God still DID that. So I go to my pastor and I'm like, "Does God still talk to people?" "Yeah, He does." I didn't know that. And so I submitted that word to the leadership in the church and said, you know, I'm a new Christian. I don't know if this is God or not. And they prayed and came back and said, "Well, this is God's word for you, this is God's will for you."
05:01:47
So at that time I married this girl Grace that I was in love with. We have now begin together more than thirty years and got five kids. And [i} got a communications degree in speech from one of the top five programs in the country and then we moved back to our home state, state of Washington. We were, I call it "The People's Republic of Seattle". That's where we set up shop [emphasis added] and so we were there and started a little Bible study for college kids that eventually really started to, more. A lot of people got saved and we started getting a LITTLE bit of media attention around that time. I was an expositional Bible teacher, teaching through books of the Bible kind of guy. But we started getting a lot of interest from the media because we were very young, very urban, very punk rock, very subculture--this is all kinda during the grunge era.
05:02:34
So a lot of young pastors started contacting ME asking, "What are you doing? How does this work?" I wasn't even in a denomination, network [or] tribe. I had no apostolic oversight, spiritual father. I'm just a guy with a bunch of punk rock kids ...
05:02:56
This was `96 we started. The first year we were under a hundred. Before it was all said and done these pastors started contacting me, young guys, "We wanna plant." So we started pushing them, assessing them, just trying to help them. It was very informal.
Before we move further along, I have to stop and point out that there's this geographic conundrum in the story. How ... how could Mark Driscoll go to college to get his degree in speech from a top-tier school and then move ... back to his home-state and joke about the "People's Republic of Seattle?" Look, I know western Washingtonians joke that eastern Washingtonians are "like" a different state but let's go look at this:
https://markdriscoll.org/about/#
Born in North Dakota in 1970, Mark Driscoll grew up the son of a union drywaller in south Seattle. After graduating from high school, he attended Washington State University on scholarship. He graduated from WSU with a Bachelor’s degree in Speech Communication from the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication. He later completed a Master’s degree in Exegetical Theology from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.
Washington State University was founded in 1890 and has always been in the state
https://wsu.edu/about/facts/
You can't possibly move away from your home state to go to college by going from the Seattle area to Washington State University and then somehow move back ... you're merely traversing distances within one state. At the risk of highlighting the problem of this in a way that is informed by much older Mark Driscoll sermon style humor ... that's as impossible as trying to pass the same fart two different times. It's just not physically possible. He never made that joke that I'm aware of, I'm simply using an analogy. But I trust you get the point.
Now ... Driscoll said a few things about governance and I won't quote all of it. But I will quote some of it.
***
Answering a question about what he does differently in Scottsdale than Seattle
05:05:04
I think a big emerging issue for the church is governance. Because of all the legal liabilities that we got regarding marriage and gender and litigation. In addition, I think, the governance issue is really big because now as churches are going multisite that requires a more apostolic format of government. Any time you have trans-local and not just local leaders and so our first one did not have any sort of trans-local or apostolic level of leadership. I've since been spending some good time with Pastor Robert Morris and Pastor Jimmy Evans who I love very much. They're serving on my board at our church as founding overseers but a lot of what the work is coming out of Gateway and networks like that is helping to reset governance for churches and I think governance is like a pot for a plant. If the plant's too small, excuse me, if the pot's too small, the plant gets rootbound and it can't grow.
05:05:03
And so if the governance is LARGE enough it gives enough room for the leadership and the Holy Spirit to grow something that's more fruitful. So I think, a lot of times, they want more fruit but they've got the wrong pot. And that's governance. And once you get the right pot you can have a more fruitful harvest.
05:06:18
So we've architected the governance quite differently. ...
and ...
05:08:17
So, governance is always two things. It's singular headship and plural leadership. And, and to me on the governance issue, so, the kingdom of God is, quite frankly, just a governance issue. We talk a lot about the kingdom of God. It's a governance issue. There's a king who establishes a kingdom and what God had in Heaven was a singular headship, plural leadership governance structure. The Father, Son and Spirit are the plural leaders. The Father is the singular head. And then Satan has a governance war in Heaven. He really wants to upend the governance and he wants to overthrow. He loses, gets cast down to earth. He immediately goes after Adam because Adam is the head of the human race. Jesus shows up. He goes after Jesus because Jesus is the head of the new covenant. He goes after Peter because Peter is the head of the disciples and so Jesus says "Satan has asked to sift you as wheat but I have prayed for you."
05:09:09
So there's ALWAYS a governance war, and the governance war is always the one that was lost by Satan in heaven being replayed out in churches, families, missions and networks. So, ultimately, governance is a demonic foothold and ultimately--you look it, too, like, the end of the book of Revelation ... 05:09:41 and the war in all of human history is "Who gets to sit on that throne?" That's really the governance war. And, you know, what I like to say as well, been doing some work on this theologically ... 05:09:55 I believe God has a
governance in two realms. I believe He has a spiritual family, not just of angelic beings but what the Bible call the heavenly hosts, the divine counsel, the sons of God and He works through them. And then He has a human family and He works through us.
...
On governance at Scottsdale
05:12:10
I said singular headship, plural leadership. But in that, as well, they run thrown down, not pew up. A lot of governance structures in churches are pew up. What do the people want? Let them vote. They will tell the leaders what to do. [interviewer says "Congregational governance"] Yeah. And if you get too big of a board you get a de facto congregational government. Because those families constitute such a large percentage of the population within the church. ...
Driscoll's got a line that culture is either pulling Hell up or inviting Heaven down.
Okay ... so when Mars Hill leaders decided that signing off on the Result Source contract was a good idea for promoting Real Marriage to a No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, a decision the that Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability described as not so much uncommon or illegal as "unwise", were the Mars Hill leaders, which included Mark Driscoll at that time, inviting Heaven down or pulling Hell up when they made that decision? It's one thing for Mark Driscoll to share the pithy zinger bromide as a bro among bros, it's another thing to consider the implications of a claim that either church culture is pulling Hell up or inviting Heaven down and asking some blunt questions about which of the two Mars Hill was doing with any given decision. It's possible there are wheat and tares in a field, after all.
What is apparently going on is that Mark Driscoll has come to regard the praiseworthy and innovative work on church governance and theories about leadership as being generated not in the neo-Calvinist scene but in something else, more the Robert Morris wing. Twenty years ago when his patronage base was more in the neo-Calvinist wing he was more neo-Calvinist and now? Now it seems to be more new apostolic ideas. For the number of us who were around Mars Hill twenty years ago and have chronicled that history it could look as though what this recent interview signals is that Mark Driscoll may have said he was a Calvinist and said he leaned toward elder governance but that there was a pragmatic element to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs2UoP79j8c&t=17937s
05:00:58
Mark Driscoll: For me I grew up in a marginal Jack Catholic, not an evangelical, home and got saved in college as a freshman reading the Bible. And I was in a church that was an evangelical-based Bible church, not a charismatic church or Pentecostal. Great, great, folks.
And I was at a men's retreat and God spoke to me audibly. He said I should marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches. Audible. I didn't even know God still DID that. So I go to my pastor and I'm like, "Does God still talk to people?" "Yeah, He does." I didn't know that. And so I submitted that word to the leadership in the church and said, you know, I'm a new Christian. I don't know if this is God or not. And they prayed and came back and said, "Well, this is God's word for you, this is God's will for you."
05:01:47
So at that time I married this girl Grace that I was in love with. We have now begin together more than thirty years and got five kids. And [i} got a communications degree in speech from one of the top five programs in the country and then we moved back to our home state, state of Washington. We were, I call it "The People's Republic of Seattle". That's where we set up shop [emphasis added] and so we were there and started a little Bible study for college kids that eventually really started to, more. A lot of people got saved and we started getting a LITTLE bit of media attention around that time. I was an expositional Bible teacher, teaching through books of the Bible kind of guy. But we started getting a lot of interest from the media because we were very young, very urban, very punk rock, very subculture--this is all kinda during the grunge era.
05:02:34
So a lot of young pastors started contacting ME asking, "What are you doing? How does this work?" I wasn't even in a denomination, network [or] tribe. I had no apostolic oversight, spiritual father. I'm just a guy with a bunch of punk rock kids ...
05:02:56
This was `96 we started. The first year we were under a hundred. Before it was all said and done these pastors started contacting me, young guys, "We wanna plant." So we started pushing them, assessing them, just trying to help them. It was very informal.
Before we move further along, I have to stop and point out that there's this geographic conundrum in the story. How ... how could Mark Driscoll go to college to get his degree in speech from a top-tier school and then move ... back to his home-state and joke about the "People's Republic of Seattle?" Look, I know western Washingtonians joke that eastern Washingtonians are "like" a different state but let's go look at this:
https://markdriscoll.org/about/#
Born in North Dakota in 1970, Mark Driscoll grew up the son of a union drywaller in south Seattle. After graduating from high school, he attended Washington State University on scholarship. He graduated from WSU with a Bachelor’s degree in Speech Communication from the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication. He later completed a Master’s degree in Exegetical Theology from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon.
Washington State University was founded in 1890 and has always been in the state
https://wsu.edu/about/facts/
You can't possibly move away from your home state to go to college by going from the Seattle area to Washington State University and then somehow move back ... you're merely traversing distances within one state. At the risk of highlighting the problem of this in a way that is informed by much older Mark Driscoll sermon style humor ... that's as impossible as trying to pass the same fart two different times. It's just not physically possible. He never made that joke that I'm aware of, I'm simply using an analogy. But I trust you get the point.
Now ... Driscoll said a few things about governance and I won't quote all of it. But I will quote some of it.
***
Answering a question about what he does differently in Scottsdale than Seattle
05:05:04
I think a big emerging issue for the church is governance. Because of all the legal liabilities that we got regarding marriage and gender and litigation. In addition, I think, the governance issue is really big because now as churches are going multisite that requires a more apostolic format of government. Any time you have trans-local and not just local leaders and so our first one did not have any sort of trans-local or apostolic level of leadership. I've since been spending some good time with Pastor Robert Morris and Pastor Jimmy Evans who I love very much. They're serving on my board at our church as founding overseers but a lot of what the work is coming out of Gateway and networks like that is helping to reset governance for churches and I think governance is like a pot for a plant. If the plant's too small, excuse me, if the pot's too small, the plant gets rootbound and it can't grow.
05:05:03
And so if the governance is LARGE enough it gives enough room for the leadership and the Holy Spirit to grow something that's more fruitful. So I think, a lot of times, they want more fruit but they've got the wrong pot. And that's governance. And once you get the right pot you can have a more fruitful harvest.
05:06:18
So we've architected the governance quite differently. ...
and ...
05:08:17
So, governance is always two things. It's singular headship and plural leadership. And, and to me on the governance issue, so, the kingdom of God is, quite frankly, just a governance issue. We talk a lot about the kingdom of God. It's a governance issue. There's a king who establishes a kingdom and what God had in Heaven was a singular headship, plural leadership governance structure. The Father, Son and Spirit are the plural leaders. The Father is the singular head. And then Satan has a governance war in Heaven. He really wants to upend the governance and he wants to overthrow. He loses, gets cast down to earth. He immediately goes after Adam because Adam is the head of the human race. Jesus shows up. He goes after Jesus because Jesus is the head of the new covenant. He goes after Peter because Peter is the head of the disciples and so Jesus says "Satan has asked to sift you as wheat but I have prayed for you."
05:09:09
So there's ALWAYS a governance war, and the governance war is always the one that was lost by Satan in heaven being replayed out in churches, families, missions and networks. So, ultimately, governance is a demonic foothold and ultimately--you look it, too, like, the end of the book of Revelation ... 05:09:41 and the war in all of human history is "Who gets to sit on that throne?" That's really the governance war. And, you know, what I like to say as well, been doing some work on this theologically ... 05:09:55 I believe God has a
governance in two realms. I believe He has a spiritual family, not just of angelic beings but what the Bible call the heavenly hosts, the divine counsel, the sons of God and He works through them. And then He has a human family and He works through us.
...
On governance at Scottsdale
05:12:10
I said singular headship, plural leadership. But in that, as well, they run thrown down, not pew up. A lot of governance structures in churches are pew up. What do the people want? Let them vote. They will tell the leaders what to do. [interviewer says "Congregational governance"] Yeah. And if you get too big of a board you get a de facto congregational government. Because those families constitute such a large percentage of the population within the church. ...
Driscoll's got a line that culture is either pulling Hell up or inviting Heaven down.
Okay ... so when Mars Hill leaders decided that signing off on the Result Source contract was a good idea for promoting Real Marriage to a No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, a decision the that Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability described as not so much uncommon or illegal as "unwise", were the Mars Hill leaders, which included Mark Driscoll at that time, inviting Heaven down or pulling Hell up when they made that decision? It's one thing for Mark Driscoll to share the pithy zinger bromide as a bro among bros, it's another thing to consider the implications of a claim that either church culture is pulling Hell up or inviting Heaven down and asking some blunt questions about which of the two Mars Hill was doing with any given decision. It's possible there are wheat and tares in a field, after all.
What is apparently going on is that Mark Driscoll has come to regard the praiseworthy and innovative work on church governance and theories about leadership as being generated not in the neo-Calvinist scene but in something else, more the Robert Morris wing. Twenty years ago when his patronage base was more in the neo-Calvinist wing he was more neo-Calvinist and now? Now it seems to be more new apostolic ideas. For the number of us who were around Mars Hill twenty years ago and have chronicled that history it could look as though what this recent interview signals is that Mark Driscoll may have said he was a Calvinist and said he leaned toward elder governance but that there was a pragmatic element to this.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
revisiting Turner's account of MH governance and its problems, it's hard to shake the impression that he bent over backwards to blame systems rather than the people that designed the systems in his 2015 posts
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-rico-never-served/
Mars Hill RICO – Never Served
Yesterday, my attorney filed a motion to dismiss the case that was pending against me. Even though the Jacobsens and Kildeas (Plaintiffs) and Brian Fahling (Plaintiff’s attorney) filed a 42-page document with the court and conducted TV interviews, they never served me with the lawsuit.So effectively, we don’t have an active lawsuit because under Washington law they have 90 days to file, which has since passed.
- The sole purpose of filing the lawsuit was to disparage my character. The Jacobsens, Kildeas, and Brian Fahling acted in bad faith and the case should be dismissed with prejudice as a result of this bad faith. In addition, attorney fees and sanctions in the amount of $4,240.00 should be assessed.
It was never clear whether or not the RICO was ever going to move forward and though a few commenters here and there suggested it might be something to talk about or get behind it's only been something to discuss here when something gets discussed. So since Turner's brought up a few things it's back on the set of topics to discuss.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/06/15/sutton-turner-files-motion-to-dismiss-rico-lawsuit-against-him-and-mark-driscoll/
Throckmorton has a post up today, at which Turner has made a comment. One of the things that might be worth mentioning is that in Turner's account of Mars Hill governance it seems he concluded substantial changes to governance needed to be made.
It may be worthwhile to revisit things Turner has written about the history of Mars Hill from 2015:
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource1/
Posted by Sutton Turner on
...
In April 2011, I joined Mars Hill as the General Manager and reported to the Executive Pastor. [emphasis added] I had enjoyed the teaching via podcast from overseas since 2007. My family and I looked forward to attending and serving in the church that we had enjoyed from afar, a church that loved Jesus and preached the gospel. I looked forward to using my gifts and experience to further the mission of Jesus through the local church.
When I arrived at Mars Hill, the financial books were a mess. During my first week, I asked the finance director to bring me the financials. He said he could provide me with September 2010 because they were about to close out the books for October. Financial reporting was six months behind. [emphasis added] I thought, “How do they know how they’re doing financially?!” The finance team handed me a bank statement. (If you are in finance or accounting, you just cringed as you read the last sentence.)
...
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.
....
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. [emphasis added] 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.
I knew if I left Mars Hill, the likelihood of decisions like ResultSource would only continue. Through prayer and confidence that Jesus had called my family and me to Mars Hill Church, I decided to stay and change the decision-making process so that decisions like ResultSource would not be made again.
A few brief thoughts. Turner explained that basically Mars Hill was a fiscal trainwreck when he arrived on the scene in 2011. Since nobody has contested the reliability of this account and quite a few people have corroborated the account we'll have to take it as the semi-official account of Mars Hill financials from 2011.
The other thing to observe is that by Turner's account he was the highest ranking employee in administration after his supervisor resigned. The highest profile resignation in later 2011 was former Mars Hill president Pastor Jamie Munson. Since robots.txt is still in effect after all this time, we'll have to settle for WtH's preservation of the material over here:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/wayback-machine-archive-of-jamie-munson.html
It would seem that although the Result Source contract that was signed had the intent of promoting a book by Mark and Grace Driscoll, it seems Mark Driscoll was not the highest-ranking employee in administration whose signature was required to make the deal a done deal. Turner seemed convinced in his 2015 statement that even if he had not signed the contract this would not have stopped ResultSource from having been used.
This has raised the question we asked back in 2015, who WOULD have signed it in Turner's absence? Turner's story simply raised again why that other person didn't sign it. Turner didn't address that, rather, he described how he decided to stay at Mars Hill and change the decision-making process so RSI would not be repeated.
Cumulatively this narrative could seem to throw Jamie Munson's reputation under the proverbial bus by way of explaining how Sutton Turner reasoned his way through to signing the Result Source contract. Munson was president of Mars Hill from 2007 to 2011, after all, so if Mars Hill governance came to be characterized by conflicts of interest systemic enough to merit a governance change
http://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
By Board of Advisors & Accountability
March 7, 2014
...
Changes to GovernanceFor many years Mars Hill Church was led by a board of Elders, most of whom were in a vocational relationship with the church and thus not able to provide optimal objectivity. To eliminate conflicts of interest and set the church’s future on the best possible model of governance [emphasis added], a Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) was established to set compensation, conduct performance reviews, approve the annual budget, and hold the newly formed Executive Elders accountable in all areas of local church leadership. This model is consistent with the best practices for governance established in the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability standards. Mars Hill Church joined and has been a member in good standing with the ECFA since September of 2012
It's tough to read that statement as saying something other than conceding that Mars Hill had a governance system from the 2007 to 2011 period that was characterized by insiders who were in the church culture who were not able to provide optimal objectivity. Further, you don't seek to eliminate conflicts of interest and set the church's future on the (course?) o fthe best possible model of governance if you think things were hunky dory. It's worth bearing in mind for those who read the whole timeline at Joyful Exiles that Meyer and Petry were terminated in connection to objections to the by-laws Munson reportedly drafted in 2007. If Munson drafted the 2007 bylaws (and that's not entirely clear since in a 2013 video Mark Driscoll said HE drafted those bylaws, apparently). So whether it was Jamie Munson or Mark Driscoll or some combination of the two seems less material than Sutton Turner's conclusion, apparently shared by the entire BoAA in 2014 (which did not include Munson by that point, obviously) that the MH governance as it existed by 2011 when he arrived was in need of dire revision.
What changes got made? Turner discussed that in his part 2.
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
... In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. [emphasis added] I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
...
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) [emphasis added] Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
..
When I looked at Mars Hill in the summer of 2011, many of its board members had limited large organization experience and that experience was solely at Mars Hill. Few had any business experience and some had no college education. [emphasis added] I do not comment on their background as a personal critique but to show that they needed outside help to enhance their experience and perspective.
This looks like smoke in mirrors in the end. Think about it this way, Turner said the problem was the decision-making process or the governance structure more than the individual decision-makers, if we've read this rightly. Okay ... well, who designed the governance? Depending on what accounts we consult it would seem from the cumulative documentation at the Joyful Exiles timeline, Jamie Munson was the prime mover/author of the bylaws that dealt with Mars Hill governance by the time Sutton Turner arrived. So if Munson was the primary architect behind a governance system that led to the flawed decision to contract with Result Source then Turner's potentially been too evasive as to who was responsible, even if indirectly in terms of the responsibility being that of whomever designed the procedural systems. Either Jamie Munson drafted the governance that led to what Turner considered to be a bad decision or Driscoll drafted the governance or Driscoll and Munson did so, but there's not a whole lot of room left to consider other parties at the moment. If Driscoll's "Stepping Up" video account is the authoritative one then none other than Mark Driscoll may have orchestrated the governance system that, by 2011, Turner concluded was problematic.
It's also difficult to escape the fact that by 2011 the majority of Jamie Munson's organizational experience was within Mars Hill. What's more, it's impossible to escape the fact that according to Mark Driscoll's account a decade ago in Confessions of a Reformission Rev, one of the most substantial moves to develop Mars Hill by way of purchasing what was once the 50th street corporate headquarters was Munson's idea. And since Munson's listed his formal education being graduating from Hellgate highschool
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiemunson
It would be hard to shake the impression that if we were to look at just one former Mars Hill leader who embodied the concerns Turner had about how the Mars Hill leadership culture was full of guys who had mainly intra-Mars Hill leadership experience and lacked formal collegiate education you can't get more obvious than Jamie Munson finding someone who fits "all of the above".
Back to Turner ...
But six months before the public spotlight, this new board of outside leaders, who were unassociated with the ResultSource decision, evaluated the proposal afterwards and made the right decision: it was a bad idea and it was wrong.
But in the end even one of the members of the BoAA concluded the BoAA itself was incapable of doing what it was intended to do, that would be Tripp. And as has been discussed at some length here elsewhere, one of the ironies of Turner's remodeled board was that it ended up being full of guys who had as much or more insider/advisory history within Mars Hill than perhaps even the board he'd replaced. But that's something to peruse at your leisure with help from blog posts tagged "boaa".
Part 3 ..
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource3/
Part 3 was where Turner vented some steam about Tripp's critique of the BoAA being incapable by its very nature to achieve what it was supposed to achieve. Turner mentioned something:
... Early on, Mars Hill chose a path that every pastor was also a governing elder, which worked when the church was smaller. At that time, Mars Hill’s governance required plurality, or unanimous agreement, of all elders on any decision (there were no clear directions on what decision required plurality). Those early leaders had not thought Mars Hill would reach 14,000 in attendance. As it grew by God’s grace, more pastors were needed to shepherd the flock. Those pastors were also governing elders, which meant at one point, decisions required unanimous consent of over 20 elders. This also gave veto power to any one elder.
The problem is that you can go to the old pre-2007 bylaws and compare them to the 2007-2011 bylaws there was no need for unanimous agreement, a simple majority was considered sufficient. The 2007-2011 bylaws consolidated more formal power to the executive elder group, which was free to acquire real estate and contract without necessarily having to bring in the rest of the elder board. Turner's account attempted to pin the blame on bad decisions on a governance system but he skipped past the part where the guys who, by various accounts, had the largest roles in re-architecting the governance of Mars Hill toward this bad end, were the guys who worked for, basically. Driscoll's old jokes about plotting world domination with the co-founding partners who founded Mars Hill may be taken as pure jest but it still suggests the possibility that Turner may have been amiss in presuming that the early leaders had not thought Mars Hill would reach 14,000 in attendance. Driscoll was vision-casting a movement that would start a publishing house, a bible college, a music label and a church planting network even before Mars Hill had 400 people. That's been documented amply by the 2011 film God's Work, Our Witness.
To be nice about it, it often seems as if Turner spent time in 2015 trying to explain the history of a church culture that he may not really understand. For some more on some difficulties in Turner's account vis a vis people who were at Mars Hill before he ever showed up ....
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/04/turners-resultsource-3-is-up-church.html
One of the things that's still funny to me is that Turner seemed to think it was somehow weird of Tripp to advise local elder governance for Mars Hill campuses ... as if Turner had never come across a Presbyterian who would think like a Presbyterian about church polity ... but I digress.
Now it may well be Turner believes the suit was filed solely to discredit him ... but it's hard not to remember that when he posted away in 2015 he looked to this writer like he was stopping just short of throwing Munson's reputation under the bus and impugning the competence of the entire governing culture of Mars Hill circa 2011. And the problem with expressing reservations about the degree to which Mars Hill seemed to be run by elders who were insulated insiders with no real-world experience managing large organizations or businesses is that the higher up the organizational chart we go the more impossible it is to avoid considering that Jamie Munson had a high school education and apparently no more and that, as Mark Driscoll said on the road a few times, he'd never been a formal member, exactly, of any church he hadn't started himself. And, of course, by Driscoll's 2013 account as preserved for us by Throckmorton, for instance, Mark Driscoll claimed he was the one who had to go back and rewrite the bylaws and constitution of Mars Hill for the sake of his marriage. So if that's true then, well, it'd be impossible for Turner to have written all that he has written about the shortcomings of Mars Hill governance without saying that Mark Driscoll's governmental design was ultimately the core problem.
But then if that's the case that'd be something we could agree on, wouldn't it?
POSTSCRIPT
One of the things that's worth further investigation, if possible, is the mention of Resurgence Publishing. The thing is ... there was some kind of Resurgence back in 2008.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/where-are-they-now-part-6c-driscoll.html
http://theresurgence.com/2008/10/04/interview-with-tim-smith
October 4, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll here from Mars Hill Church and President of The Resurgence with my good buddy, dear friend, and fellow elder at Mars Hill Tim Smith.
So there was a Resurgence of some sort, if not necessarily the publishing company (and there was the old defunct Resurgence Training Center, too). The thing worth noting is what Mark Driscoll said about himself, that he was President of the Resurgence in 2008, whatever it was, publishing company or now. So one of the questions we may want to ask and seek an answer for is whether that Resurgence circa 2008, whatever it was, has anything to do with Resurgence Publishing circa 2012.
POSTSCRIPT 2
06-16-2016
Having looked over the Washington State Secretary of State UBI search options, it turns out there was never a "Resurgence" UBI other than the publishing company, which strongly indicates a lot of what was known as The Resurgence was simply intra-Mars Hill differentiation, which will be the topic of a pending post.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
revisiting Mark Driscoll's 2007 remarks on the termination and trials of Meyer and Petry, cross referencing to Ellul on the "educational" role of show trials in totalitarian states and their value as propaganda
http://004f597.netsolhost.com/Vision/10%20Throw%20Them%20Off%20the%20Bus%201.mp3
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
October 1, 2007
... Too many guys spend too much time trying to move stiff-necked obstinate people. I am all about blessed subtraction. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and by God's grace it'll be a mountain by the time we're done. You either get on the bus or get run over by the bus (those are the options) but the bus ain't gonna stop. I'm just a, I'm just a guy who is like, "Look, we love ya but this is what we're doin'."
There's a few kind of people. There's people who get in the way of the bus. They gotta get run over. There are people who want to take turns driving the bus. They gotta get thrown off cuz they want to go somewhere else. There are people who will be on the bus (leaders and helpers and servants, they're awesome). There's also sometimes nice people who just sit on the bus and shut up. They're not helping or hurting. Just let `em ride along. You know what I'm saying? But don't look at the nice people who are just gonna sit on the bus and shut their mouth and think, "I need you to lead the mission." They're never going to. [emphasis added] At the most you'll give `em a job to do and they'll serve somewhere and help out in a minimal way. If someone can sit in a place that hasn't been on mission for a really long time they are by definition not a leader and so they're never going to lead. You need to gather a whole new core.
I'll tell you what, you don't just do this for church planting or replanting, you know what? I'm doing it right now. I'm doing it right now. We just took certain guys and rearranged the seats on the bus. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They're off the bus, under the bus. They were off mission so now they're unemployed. This will be the defining issue as to whether or not you succeed or fail.
The highlighted segment of the above presentation shows what a blunt taxonomy Driscoll had for those people who were on the bus. This would not be altogether surprising for those who read Confessions of a Reformission Rev, which featured Driscoll breaking down people into a taxonomy of utility by likening types of people to types of animals you might find at a barn or a zoo. It seemed slightly weird on first read in 2006; since 2007 this Driscollian capacity to enumerate categories of people as if they were animals or bus passengers can take on a more sinister element.
It seems necessary to quote at length Mark Driscoll's November 8, 2007 letter to members of Mars Hill where he addressed the two elders who were fired and put to trials, Bent Meyer and Paul Petry.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
from pages 4-5 of the 142 document
Sadly, it was during the bylaw rewriting process that two of our elders, who curiously were among the least administratively gifted for that task, chose to fight in a sinful manner in an effort to defend their power and retain legal control of the entire church. [emphasis added] This included legal maneuvering involving contacting our attorney, which was a violation of policy, one elder who is no longer with us disobeying clear orders from senior leaders about not sharing sensitive working data with church members until the elders had arrived at a decision, which has caused much dissension, and that same elder accusing Pastor Jamie Munson, who was the then new Lead Pastor of Mars Hill, of being a deceptive liar in an all-elder meeting with elder candidates present, despite having absolutely no evidence or grounds because it was a lie. This was heartbreaking for me since I have seen Pastor Jamie saved in our church, baptized in our church, married in our church, birth four children in our church, and rise up from an intern to the Lead Pastor in our church with great skill and humility that includes surrounding himself with godly gifted older men to complement his gifts.
To make matters worse, this former elder’s comments came after my more than one-hour lecture in that meeting based on a twenty-three-page document I gave the elders as a summary report about what I had learned from the other pastors I had met with in addition to months of researching Christian movements. I had just explained the cause of the pains we were experiencing as a leadership team as largely tied to our growing number of elders and campuses, as well as ways that my research indicated men commonly respond by sinfully seeking power, money, preference, control, and information as ways to exercise pride and fight for their interests
over the interests of the team, church, and mission of Jesus Christ.
The elder who sinned was followed up with following the meeting by a rebuke from a fellow Executive Elder, but repentance was not forthcoming. To make matters worse, some vocal church members ran to that elder’s defense without knowing the facts, made demands upon the elders, acted in a manner that was not unifying or helpful, and even took their grievances public on the Ask Anything comment portion of our main website for my forthcoming preaching series. Of course, this was done under anonymous names to protect their image in the eyes of fellow church members while maligning the elders publicly. Some church members even began accusing the other elders of grabbing power and not caring for the best interests of our people, which is nothing short of a lie and contradictory in every way to the entire process we were undertaking. [emphasis added] It broke my heart personally when amidst all of this, a member asked me on behalf of other members if the elders really loved our people. Now having given roughly half my life to planning for and leading Mars Hill Church, the questioning of my love and the love of our elders, some of whom even got saved in our church, for our people was devastating.
Today, I remain deeply grieved by and for one man, but am thrilled that what is best for Jesus and all of Mars Hill has been unanimously approved by our entire elder team because I do love Jesus and the people of Mars Hill. Furthermore, my physical, mental, and spiritual health are at the best levels in all of my life. Now having joy and working in my gifting I am beginning to see what a dark and bitter place I once was in and deeply grieve having lived there for so long without clearly seeing my need for life change. My wife and I are closer than ever and she is the greatest woman in the world for me. I delight in her, enjoy her, and praise God for the gift that she is. She recently brought me to tears by sweetly saying, “It’s nice to have you back,” as apparently I had been somewhat gone for many years. Our five children are wonderful blessings. I love being a daddy and am closer to my children with greater joy in them than ever. In short, I was not taking good care of myself and out of love for our church I was willing to kill myself to try and keep up with all that Jesus is doing. But, as always, Jesus has reminded me that He is our Senior Pastor and has godly other pastors whom I need to empower and trust while doing my job well for His glory, my joy, and your good.
The past year has been the most difficult of my entire life. It has been painful to see a few men whom I loved and trained as elders become sinful, proud, divisive, accusatory, mistrusting, power hungry, and unrepentant. It has, however, been absolutely amazing to see all but one of those men humble themselves and give up what is best for them to do what is best for Jesus and our entire church. In that I have seen the power of the gospel, and remain hopeful to eventually see it in the former elder who remains unrepentant but to whom my hand of reconciliation remains extended [emphasis added] along with a team of other elders assigned to pursue reconciliation if/when he is willing. Furthermore, sin in my own life has been exposed through this season and I have also benefited from learning to repent of such things as bitterness, unrighteous anger, control, and pride. As a result, I believe we have a pruned elder team that God intends to bear more fruit than ever. This team of battle-tested, humble, and repentant men is now both easy to enjoy and entrust.
One can only guess as to whether Mark Driscoll is all that serious about being open to reconciliation with Paul Petry since Joyful Exiles has been up since March 2012. It's been nearly four years, after all. Moving to Phoenix does not suggest that Driscoll remained all that hopeful in the end, assuming he was hopeful. The above quoted passage was from a letter sent to all Mars Hill members back in 2007 so a few thousand got to read it.
What Driscoll implied Meyer and Petry were guilty of doing was clinging to power and money and influence to try to retain control of the entire church. How on earth two of some twenty-four elders could have possibly done that seems impossible to find an actually rational explanation for.
On the other hand ... if we consider for the sake of the record the possibility that Mark Driscoll fits Ellul's practical definition of a propagandist there may be one theoretical explanation to at least consider.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
page 58
Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions. There are two salient aspects of this fact. First of all, the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy. But the accusations is never made haphazardly or groundlessly. The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has [emphasis added] and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation. He who sues concentration camps accuses his neighbor of doing so. He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. The accusations aimed at the other's intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser. But the public cannot see this because the revelation is interwoven with facts.
The mechanism used here is to slip from the facts, which would demand factual judgment, to moral terrain and to ethical judgment. [emphasis added]
Driscoll's October 2007 lecture in which he talked about a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus also featured a discourse on the kinds of people who ended up on the bus. Which ones needed to be run over, which ones needed to be thrown of, and which ones would be allowed to sit on the bus because they're nice people who just shut up and do what you might find for the to do could potentially be likened to something Ellul wrote about the propagandist.
page 24
... Thus the propagandist is never asked to be involved in what he is saying, for, if it becomes necessary he may be asked to say the exact opposite with similar conviction. He must, of course, believe in the cause he serves, but not in his particular argument. On the other hand, the propagandee hears the word spoken to him here and now and the argument presented to him in which he is asked to believe. He must take them to be human words, spontaneous and carried by conviction. Obviously, if the propagandist were left to himself, if it were only a matter of psychological action, he would end up by being taken in by his own trick, by believing it. He would then be the prisoner of his own formulas and would lose all effectiveness as a propagandist. What protects him from this is precisely the organization to which he belongs, which rigidly maintains a line. The propagandist thus becomes more and more the technician who treats his patients in various ways but keeps himself cold and aloof, selecting his words and actions for purely technical reasons. The patient is an object to be saved or sacrificed according to the necessities of the cause.
... In the very act of pretending to speak as a man to man, the propagandist is reaching the summit of his mendacity and falsifications, even when he is not conscious of it. [emphasis added]
Ellul described the propagandist as taking a strictly instrumental view of those with whom the propagandist would communicate. Once a subject has been identified as important to the future of the cause or the organization one could use charming or edifying words. Should a person turn out to be useless or considered dead weight then the propagandist might discard the person or berate them in private.
Let's remember that, famously, Meyer and Petry were not just fired but also subjected to trials. Ellul has a fascinating observation about the roles trials can play as propaganda.
pages 13-14
... Of course, a trial can be an admirable springboard of propaganda for the accused, who can spread his ideas in his defense and exert an influence by the way he suffers his punishment. This holds true in the democracies. But the situation is reversed where a totalitarian state makes propaganda. During a trial there, the judge is forced to demonstrate a lesson for the education of the public; verdicts are educational. ... [emphasis added]
It hardly gets more straightforward than that--in a totalitarian regime the function of a trial is educational, to let everyone else know what sorts of things could be said or done to garner a comparably miserable fate.
Ellul had a few words to say about a man who, swayed by propaganda, has done something wrong.
page 29
For action makes propaganda's effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda must believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direction indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action. ...
In the history of Mars Hill it could seem that a simple firing wasn't sufficient, a trial had to happen, even though in the same setting merely letting Meyer and Petry voluntarily resign rather than continue in eldership with the proposed by-laws was always an option. It just wasn't an acceptable option to somebody in executive leadership within Mars Hill for some reason and some guys had to be fired. Formally, that guy was Jamie Munson.
Ellul proposed that once a person complies with propaganda and has acted upon it the person feels obliged to double down on the action or else he might see what he has done as absurd or unjust, and ...
pages 29-30
... often he has committed an act reprehensible by traditional moral standards and has disturbed a certain order; he needs a justification for this to prove that it was just. Thus he is caught up in a movement that develops until it totally occupies the breadth of his conscience. Propaganda now masters him completely--and we must bear in mind that any propaganda that does not lead to this kind of participation is mere child's play.
A man who has been swayed by propaganda to do something terrible will double down on what he has done to live with himself. If he were to step back and reflect on what he actually did he'd find it appalling and he can't just do that in many cases. He'd have to persuade himself that he wasn't part of a kangaroo court but part of a thoroughly legitimate disciplinary process.
Seven years on ... a majority of the men who were pastors at Mars Hill during the terminations and trials recanted their decision and publicly apologized for their involvement in the trials and their respective verdicts.
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
...
Taken together, these statements from former pastors of Mars Hill suggests a possible interpretive avenue--Mark Driscoll's commentary about the Mars Hill bus suggested that those who wanted to take a turn driving needed to be thrown off and under the bus and that people who got in the way of the bus needed to be run over. This doesn't make sense as the way a church would behave, does it? But if we propose for sake of discussion that by the year 2007 Mars Hill had become multisite and centralized executive powers into a smaller executive team that it had become a propaganda machine then such an approach seems more explicable, if not more palatable or praiseworthy.
Let's also not forget the words of the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability from March 2014 when addressing governance:
http://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
By Board of Advisors & Accountability
March 7, 2014
...
For many years Mars Hill Church was led by a board of Elders, most of whom were in a vocational relationship with the church and thus not able to provide optimal objectivity. To eliminate conflicts of interest and set the church’s future on the best possible model of governance, a Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) was established [emphasis added] to set compensation, conduct performance reviews, approve the annual budget, and hold the newly formed Executive Elders accountable in all areas of local church leadership.
The BoAA itself said of the previous governance approach (which by then would have been the 2007 bylaws drafted by Jamie Munson and approved by the elders) was sufficiently characterized by conflicts of interest that a restructuring of Mars Hill governance seemed appropriate. For those who may not recall that in 2008 Mark Driscoll said appointing Jamie Munson president was the best thing he ever did because it eliminated conflicts of interest ... apparently by about 2011 some people felt that conflicts of interest had not, in fact, been eliminated.
If Driscoll were a propagandist then it could be suggested, at least in Ellul's approach, that what a propagandist would do would be to accuse others of what the propagandist intended to do. Would a person seek to consolidate and retain legal and financial control of an organization? Ellul would say the propagandist seeking to do this would accuse an opponent of trying to do this while asserting purity and innocence. Could a case be made that this was how 2007 played out within the history of Mars Hill? It seems like at least a potential, plausible possibility.
Sure, Ellul's observation about show trials as educational opportunities on the part of trial adjudicators in totalitarian regimes was initially a description of trials in nation states some of these precepts seem applicable in churches in the 21st century.
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
October 1, 2007
... Too many guys spend too much time trying to move stiff-necked obstinate people. I am all about blessed subtraction. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and by God's grace it'll be a mountain by the time we're done. You either get on the bus or get run over by the bus (those are the options) but the bus ain't gonna stop. I'm just a, I'm just a guy who is like, "Look, we love ya but this is what we're doin'."
There's a few kind of people. There's people who get in the way of the bus. They gotta get run over. There are people who want to take turns driving the bus. They gotta get thrown off cuz they want to go somewhere else. There are people who will be on the bus (leaders and helpers and servants, they're awesome). There's also sometimes nice people who just sit on the bus and shut up. They're not helping or hurting. Just let `em ride along. You know what I'm saying? But don't look at the nice people who are just gonna sit on the bus and shut their mouth and think, "I need you to lead the mission." They're never going to. [emphasis added] At the most you'll give `em a job to do and they'll serve somewhere and help out in a minimal way. If someone can sit in a place that hasn't been on mission for a really long time they are by definition not a leader and so they're never going to lead. You need to gather a whole new core.
I'll tell you what, you don't just do this for church planting or replanting, you know what? I'm doing it right now. I'm doing it right now. We just took certain guys and rearranged the seats on the bus. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They're off the bus, under the bus. They were off mission so now they're unemployed. This will be the defining issue as to whether or not you succeed or fail.
The highlighted segment of the above presentation shows what a blunt taxonomy Driscoll had for those people who were on the bus. This would not be altogether surprising for those who read Confessions of a Reformission Rev, which featured Driscoll breaking down people into a taxonomy of utility by likening types of people to types of animals you might find at a barn or a zoo. It seemed slightly weird on first read in 2006; since 2007 this Driscollian capacity to enumerate categories of people as if they were animals or bus passengers can take on a more sinister element.
It seems necessary to quote at length Mark Driscoll's November 8, 2007 letter to members of Mars Hill where he addressed the two elders who were fired and put to trials, Bent Meyer and Paul Petry.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
from pages 4-5 of the 142 document
Sadly, it was during the bylaw rewriting process that two of our elders, who curiously were among the least administratively gifted for that task, chose to fight in a sinful manner in an effort to defend their power and retain legal control of the entire church. [emphasis added] This included legal maneuvering involving contacting our attorney, which was a violation of policy, one elder who is no longer with us disobeying clear orders from senior leaders about not sharing sensitive working data with church members until the elders had arrived at a decision, which has caused much dissension, and that same elder accusing Pastor Jamie Munson, who was the then new Lead Pastor of Mars Hill, of being a deceptive liar in an all-elder meeting with elder candidates present, despite having absolutely no evidence or grounds because it was a lie. This was heartbreaking for me since I have seen Pastor Jamie saved in our church, baptized in our church, married in our church, birth four children in our church, and rise up from an intern to the Lead Pastor in our church with great skill and humility that includes surrounding himself with godly gifted older men to complement his gifts.
To make matters worse, this former elder’s comments came after my more than one-hour lecture in that meeting based on a twenty-three-page document I gave the elders as a summary report about what I had learned from the other pastors I had met with in addition to months of researching Christian movements. I had just explained the cause of the pains we were experiencing as a leadership team as largely tied to our growing number of elders and campuses, as well as ways that my research indicated men commonly respond by sinfully seeking power, money, preference, control, and information as ways to exercise pride and fight for their interests
over the interests of the team, church, and mission of Jesus Christ.
The elder who sinned was followed up with following the meeting by a rebuke from a fellow Executive Elder, but repentance was not forthcoming. To make matters worse, some vocal church members ran to that elder’s defense without knowing the facts, made demands upon the elders, acted in a manner that was not unifying or helpful, and even took their grievances public on the Ask Anything comment portion of our main website for my forthcoming preaching series. Of course, this was done under anonymous names to protect their image in the eyes of fellow church members while maligning the elders publicly. Some church members even began accusing the other elders of grabbing power and not caring for the best interests of our people, which is nothing short of a lie and contradictory in every way to the entire process we were undertaking. [emphasis added] It broke my heart personally when amidst all of this, a member asked me on behalf of other members if the elders really loved our people. Now having given roughly half my life to planning for and leading Mars Hill Church, the questioning of my love and the love of our elders, some of whom even got saved in our church, for our people was devastating.
Today, I remain deeply grieved by and for one man, but am thrilled that what is best for Jesus and all of Mars Hill has been unanimously approved by our entire elder team because I do love Jesus and the people of Mars Hill. Furthermore, my physical, mental, and spiritual health are at the best levels in all of my life. Now having joy and working in my gifting I am beginning to see what a dark and bitter place I once was in and deeply grieve having lived there for so long without clearly seeing my need for life change. My wife and I are closer than ever and she is the greatest woman in the world for me. I delight in her, enjoy her, and praise God for the gift that she is. She recently brought me to tears by sweetly saying, “It’s nice to have you back,” as apparently I had been somewhat gone for many years. Our five children are wonderful blessings. I love being a daddy and am closer to my children with greater joy in them than ever. In short, I was not taking good care of myself and out of love for our church I was willing to kill myself to try and keep up with all that Jesus is doing. But, as always, Jesus has reminded me that He is our Senior Pastor and has godly other pastors whom I need to empower and trust while doing my job well for His glory, my joy, and your good.
The past year has been the most difficult of my entire life. It has been painful to see a few men whom I loved and trained as elders become sinful, proud, divisive, accusatory, mistrusting, power hungry, and unrepentant. It has, however, been absolutely amazing to see all but one of those men humble themselves and give up what is best for them to do what is best for Jesus and our entire church. In that I have seen the power of the gospel, and remain hopeful to eventually see it in the former elder who remains unrepentant but to whom my hand of reconciliation remains extended [emphasis added] along with a team of other elders assigned to pursue reconciliation if/when he is willing. Furthermore, sin in my own life has been exposed through this season and I have also benefited from learning to repent of such things as bitterness, unrighteous anger, control, and pride. As a result, I believe we have a pruned elder team that God intends to bear more fruit than ever. This team of battle-tested, humble, and repentant men is now both easy to enjoy and entrust.
One can only guess as to whether Mark Driscoll is all that serious about being open to reconciliation with Paul Petry since Joyful Exiles has been up since March 2012. It's been nearly four years, after all. Moving to Phoenix does not suggest that Driscoll remained all that hopeful in the end, assuming he was hopeful. The above quoted passage was from a letter sent to all Mars Hill members back in 2007 so a few thousand got to read it.
What Driscoll implied Meyer and Petry were guilty of doing was clinging to power and money and influence to try to retain control of the entire church. How on earth two of some twenty-four elders could have possibly done that seems impossible to find an actually rational explanation for.
On the other hand ... if we consider for the sake of the record the possibility that Mark Driscoll fits Ellul's practical definition of a propagandist there may be one theoretical explanation to at least consider.
PROPAGANDA: THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
page 58
Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions. There are two salient aspects of this fact. First of all, the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy. But the accusations is never made haphazardly or groundlessly. The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has [emphasis added] and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation. He who sues concentration camps accuses his neighbor of doing so. He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. The accusations aimed at the other's intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser. But the public cannot see this because the revelation is interwoven with facts.
The mechanism used here is to slip from the facts, which would demand factual judgment, to moral terrain and to ethical judgment. [emphasis added]
Driscoll's October 2007 lecture in which he talked about a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus also featured a discourse on the kinds of people who ended up on the bus. Which ones needed to be run over, which ones needed to be thrown of, and which ones would be allowed to sit on the bus because they're nice people who just shut up and do what you might find for the to do could potentially be likened to something Ellul wrote about the propagandist.
page 24
... Thus the propagandist is never asked to be involved in what he is saying, for, if it becomes necessary he may be asked to say the exact opposite with similar conviction. He must, of course, believe in the cause he serves, but not in his particular argument. On the other hand, the propagandee hears the word spoken to him here and now and the argument presented to him in which he is asked to believe. He must take them to be human words, spontaneous and carried by conviction. Obviously, if the propagandist were left to himself, if it were only a matter of psychological action, he would end up by being taken in by his own trick, by believing it. He would then be the prisoner of his own formulas and would lose all effectiveness as a propagandist. What protects him from this is precisely the organization to which he belongs, which rigidly maintains a line. The propagandist thus becomes more and more the technician who treats his patients in various ways but keeps himself cold and aloof, selecting his words and actions for purely technical reasons. The patient is an object to be saved or sacrificed according to the necessities of the cause.
... In the very act of pretending to speak as a man to man, the propagandist is reaching the summit of his mendacity and falsifications, even when he is not conscious of it. [emphasis added]
Ellul described the propagandist as taking a strictly instrumental view of those with whom the propagandist would communicate. Once a subject has been identified as important to the future of the cause or the organization one could use charming or edifying words. Should a person turn out to be useless or considered dead weight then the propagandist might discard the person or berate them in private.
Let's remember that, famously, Meyer and Petry were not just fired but also subjected to trials. Ellul has a fascinating observation about the roles trials can play as propaganda.
pages 13-14
... Of course, a trial can be an admirable springboard of propaganda for the accused, who can spread his ideas in his defense and exert an influence by the way he suffers his punishment. This holds true in the democracies. But the situation is reversed where a totalitarian state makes propaganda. During a trial there, the judge is forced to demonstrate a lesson for the education of the public; verdicts are educational. ... [emphasis added]
It hardly gets more straightforward than that--in a totalitarian regime the function of a trial is educational, to let everyone else know what sorts of things could be said or done to garner a comparably miserable fate.
Ellul had a few words to say about a man who, swayed by propaganda, has done something wrong.
page 29
For action makes propaganda's effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda must believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direction indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action. ...
In the history of Mars Hill it could seem that a simple firing wasn't sufficient, a trial had to happen, even though in the same setting merely letting Meyer and Petry voluntarily resign rather than continue in eldership with the proposed by-laws was always an option. It just wasn't an acceptable option to somebody in executive leadership within Mars Hill for some reason and some guys had to be fired. Formally, that guy was Jamie Munson.
Ellul proposed that once a person complies with propaganda and has acted upon it the person feels obliged to double down on the action or else he might see what he has done as absurd or unjust, and ...
pages 29-30
... often he has committed an act reprehensible by traditional moral standards and has disturbed a certain order; he needs a justification for this to prove that it was just. Thus he is caught up in a movement that develops until it totally occupies the breadth of his conscience. Propaganda now masters him completely--and we must bear in mind that any propaganda that does not lead to this kind of participation is mere child's play.
A man who has been swayed by propaganda to do something terrible will double down on what he has done to live with himself. If he were to step back and reflect on what he actually did he'd find it appalling and he can't just do that in many cases. He'd have to persuade himself that he wasn't part of a kangaroo court but part of a thoroughly legitimate disciplinary process.
Seven years on ... a majority of the men who were pastors at Mars Hill during the terminations and trials recanted their decision and publicly apologized for their involvement in the trials and their respective verdicts.
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
...
On September 30th 2007, you were both terminated from your employment as pastors at Mars Hill Church. Your status as elders of the church was suspended, according to the church’s bylaws at the time, pending an investigation of your qualification for eldership. It’s hard to imagine just how disorienting and painful this experience must have been for you. That night, Bent, you called Mike Wilkerson, your direct supervisor, to let him know that you’d been terminated. Within hours, Paul, you emailed all of the elders to notify us of what had happened to you that night. We had the opportunity and the responsibility to intervene, to care, to listen to you, and to make sure that any harmful treatment against you was corrected. Instead, we allowed the process of your investigation and trial to continue unimpeded and we participated in it. By failing to intervene and by participating in that process without protest, we implied to the members of Mars Hill Church, to each other, and to you and your families that your termination was above reproach. We stood by as it happened, and that was wrong. [emphasis added]
We now believe that you were grievously sinned against in that termination. We believe that the termination meeting’s content and tone was abrupt, one sided, and threatening. ...
Taken together, these statements from former pastors of Mars Hill suggests a possible interpretive avenue--Mark Driscoll's commentary about the Mars Hill bus suggested that those who wanted to take a turn driving needed to be thrown off and under the bus and that people who got in the way of the bus needed to be run over. This doesn't make sense as the way a church would behave, does it? But if we propose for sake of discussion that by the year 2007 Mars Hill had become multisite and centralized executive powers into a smaller executive team that it had become a propaganda machine then such an approach seems more explicable, if not more palatable or praiseworthy.
Let's also not forget the words of the Mars Hill Board of Advisors and Accountability from March 2014 when addressing governance:
http://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
By Board of Advisors & Accountability
March 7, 2014
...
For many years Mars Hill Church was led by a board of Elders, most of whom were in a vocational relationship with the church and thus not able to provide optimal objectivity. To eliminate conflicts of interest and set the church’s future on the best possible model of governance, a Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) was established [emphasis added] to set compensation, conduct performance reviews, approve the annual budget, and hold the newly formed Executive Elders accountable in all areas of local church leadership.
The BoAA itself said of the previous governance approach (which by then would have been the 2007 bylaws drafted by Jamie Munson and approved by the elders) was sufficiently characterized by conflicts of interest that a restructuring of Mars Hill governance seemed appropriate. For those who may not recall that in 2008 Mark Driscoll said appointing Jamie Munson president was the best thing he ever did because it eliminated conflicts of interest ... apparently by about 2011 some people felt that conflicts of interest had not, in fact, been eliminated.
If Driscoll were a propagandist then it could be suggested, at least in Ellul's approach, that what a propagandist would do would be to accuse others of what the propagandist intended to do. Would a person seek to consolidate and retain legal and financial control of an organization? Ellul would say the propagandist seeking to do this would accuse an opponent of trying to do this while asserting purity and innocence. Could a case be made that this was how 2007 played out within the history of Mars Hill? It seems like at least a potential, plausible possibility.
Sure, Ellul's observation about show trials as educational opportunities on the part of trial adjudicators in totalitarian regimes was initially a description of trials in nation states some of these precepts seem applicable in churches in the 21st century.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Turner's ResultSource 3 "Church Governance: Local Elders or Outside Board?", about the BoAA, the roll call in later 2013, bringing guys who were connected to MH in the 07 re-org back on the BoAA
http://web.archive.org/web/20131127012315/http://marshill.com/2013/11/23/dr-paul-tripp-joins-mars-hill-s-board-of-advisors-and-accountability
...
Dr. Tripp joins the current Board members: Michael Van Skaik, Dr. James MacDonald, Dr. Larry Osborne, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas, and Sutton Turner. This Board of Advisors and Accountability was voted upon and installed by an overwhelmingly supportive vote from the entire eldership, with every single elder who voted doing so in approval
The Board of Advisors and Accountability including the executive elders seems like a fail in itself. Let's keep in mind that while Turner has pleaded ignorance as to who was approving of Result Source Bruskas may well have been an executive elder with Driscoll before Turner's arrival. The only material change in the executive pastor side was Turner's replacing Munson. As for the independent members.
James MacDonald should have been given at least some pause before admission on to the BoAA
If Turner's fear was that local elders would make bad decisions about things like Result Source, and if Turner was worried that local elders might be too insular, and Turner has recounted that he was aghast at the fiscal mess Mars Hill was in when he arrived in 2011, then how was adding MacDonald helpful in light of problems in MacDonald's neck of the woods?
http://theelephantsdebt.com/
...
By the close of 2010, Harvest’s balance sheet revealed that the church, while under the pastoral leadership of James MacDonald, had amassed approximately $65 million of debt, and in the midst of addressing the issues raised by this website, HBC Elders informed the congregation that the debt had been as high as $70 million. While this number in and of itself is shocking, what makes it worse is that some elders and much of the congregation had no knowledge of the extent of the debt. The rapid expansion of MacDonald’s ministry, for reasons of ego as much as concern for the Kingdom, was the cause for the sudden and surprising accumulation of debt. The point in raising the surprisingly accumulation of debt is not to question the current financial stability of the institution, but it is put forth as an example of the underlying character issues of MacDonald that many people are now expressing publicly
Let's not forget that James MacDonald was with Driscoll when he and both Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner crashed the Strange Fire conference
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html
and for folks who want the quick version--
https://twitter.com/austintduncan/status/391277631737323520/photo/1
Yep, if a majority of the BoAA were WITH DRISCOLL when he crashed the Strange Fire conference is it that much of a wonder Paul Tripp concluded the BoAA was simply not going to be capable of providing the kind of oversight and accountability the thing was supposed to provide on paper? If four of the seven were all part of the stunt what can you do?
Which gets us to Michael Van Skaik. Van Skaik hardly constitutes an "external" or "outsider" role.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
Michael Van Skaik was on the Compensation Committee circa early 2012. Was that the same Compensation Committee referenced in Turner's memo about Driscoll's compensation?
Van Skaik's role in Ministry Coaching International in the previous decade and Mars Hill's cooperation with MCI during the 2007 re-org makes it hard to buy the idea that Van Skaik was a disinterested party. He'd served for years as a Mars Hill pastor and resigned so as to be able to be on the BoAA, apparently, but that external/outsider status seems to have largely been on paper. Turner's complaint that the 2007 governance changes did not change the insularity/conformity dynamic could be attributable to the fact that even on the BoAA, the people who tended to end up on it look like they were longtime Driscoll buddies and people who had inside roles in the past.
Excepting Paul Tripp, but also excepting ...
Larry Osborne. Except that Larry Osborne was credited by Mark Driscoll in 2007 as the one to whom he turned for advice on how to architect Mars Hill as a multi-site network of campuses in 2007. So Turner's attempt to narrate the history of Mars Hill governance as stymied by localist concerns seems to fall apart if we bear in mind that by Mark Driscoll's account he sought Osborne's advice on how to best re-design Mars Hill to be a multi-site church. If Turner had known about that would he have been happy to have Larry Osborne on the BoAA? It could seem as though Osborne's contribution, whatever it was, to Driscoll's survey of how to re-org Mars Hill in 2007 ironically brought Osborne back in spite of Turner's belief that the governance of the past had gotten them into the problems of the present circa 2011.
It's begun to look more and more like Tripp was the one person who was on the BoAA at any point in its history who could have been considered an actually independent participant. The others either had a history of being inside the beltway or being personal friends with Driscoll. Turner may sincerely think the problem was the local leader thing was too insular but to go by the roster of the BoAA members that insularity was characteristic of the BoAA that was ostensibly going to remedy that insularity.
Let's not forget amidst all this that MacDonald and Driscoll also had that Elephant Room 2 thing with T. D. Jakes. Even if we grant that Jakes is a thorough Trinitarian Driscoll had earlier repudiated the word-faith teaching he considered Jakes to endorse and considered him a word-faith wingnut. MacDonald was not just part of the Strange Fire stunt but the Elephant Room 2 situation to boot. Turner's story seems shaky when we consider that the devil is in the details. If he designed the BoAA to overcome the weaknesses in the leadership culture of Mars Hill then having a majority of the BoAA joining Driscoll in crashing the Strange Fire conference seems like an epic failure.
As for the later additions of Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers, for Phelps, consider that Phelps advised Driscoll on the reverse-engineering your life stuff, and co-owns the copyright on it.
https://wbmason.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/reverse-engineering_your_life.pdf
Reverse-Engineering Your Life
© 2005 Mark Driscoll and Jon Phelps All rights reserved.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/jon-phelps-founder-full-sail-university.html
Rogers, well,
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-boe-members-part-6-pastor-matt.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/in-wake-of-closure-announcement-boaaboo.html
Rogers was part of a team that asserted Driscoll had apologized for accusations made against him about things from 14 years ago. Driscoll never apologized for the substance of WHAT he said using the pen name William Wallace II. If anything, there's been an essential continuity in theme and even tone (minus a few flowery analogies) on Driscoll's part in the last fifteen years.
About all that need be added to consider about this list of names would be to say ...
Michael Van Skaik Larry Osborne
Jon Phelps
Matt Rogers
It'll be interesting to see Turner explain the basis for that section. What's the purpose of stipulating that a contract between the Church and a member of the BOAA is not automatically voided or voidable simply because the member of the BoAA in question has a financial interest in the contract or transaction? And what has Mars Hill's Conflict of Interest Policy been?
If Turner really wanted Mars Hill to get a board that would have external accountability the closing BoAA seems to have been reduced to primarily a band of highly interested insiders. Van Skaik may have formally removed himself from Mars Hill but his history did not make him completely disinterested. Osborne had an advisory role in the 2007 re-org, by Driscoll's account. Rogers was willing to sound off against protesters around the time he was added to the BoAA. Phelps was listed as a member at the Ballard campus and had a history of being thought of as one of the higher-end donors inside the church. Unless there's some clarifying information not yet provided it's hard to think of a more insider "external" board.
And as we've seen of late, Sutton Turner and Justin Dean didn't have the most affirming things to say about Paul Tripp, who was arguably the one person who was almost indisputably a truly disinterested outsider with respect to the internal political history of Mars Hill.
It's not that Turner doesn't seem sure his account is reliable, he seems pretty sure of it, and it seems he's trying to convey what happened simply and clearly. The problem is that if he actually believes the idea that all the elders had to all agree and that's why the 2007 re-org had to happen he's been sold a pretty sloppy and even misleading account of things. It also seems as though the top-down central/external systems Turner tried to put in place amplified problems.
...
Dr. Tripp joins the current Board members: Michael Van Skaik, Dr. James MacDonald, Dr. Larry Osborne, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas, and Sutton Turner. This Board of Advisors and Accountability was voted upon and installed by an overwhelmingly supportive vote from the entire eldership, with every single elder who voted doing so in approval
The Board of Advisors and Accountability including the executive elders seems like a fail in itself. Let's keep in mind that while Turner has pleaded ignorance as to who was approving of Result Source Bruskas may well have been an executive elder with Driscoll before Turner's arrival. The only material change in the executive pastor side was Turner's replacing Munson. As for the independent members.
James MacDonald should have been given at least some pause before admission on to the BoAA
If Turner's fear was that local elders would make bad decisions about things like Result Source, and if Turner was worried that local elders might be too insular, and Turner has recounted that he was aghast at the fiscal mess Mars Hill was in when he arrived in 2011, then how was adding MacDonald helpful in light of problems in MacDonald's neck of the woods?
http://theelephantsdebt.com/
...
By the close of 2010, Harvest’s balance sheet revealed that the church, while under the pastoral leadership of James MacDonald, had amassed approximately $65 million of debt, and in the midst of addressing the issues raised by this website, HBC Elders informed the congregation that the debt had been as high as $70 million. While this number in and of itself is shocking, what makes it worse is that some elders and much of the congregation had no knowledge of the extent of the debt. The rapid expansion of MacDonald’s ministry, for reasons of ego as much as concern for the Kingdom, was the cause for the sudden and surprising accumulation of debt. The point in raising the surprisingly accumulation of debt is not to question the current financial stability of the institution, but it is put forth as an example of the underlying character issues of MacDonald that many people are now expressing publicly
Let's not forget that James MacDonald was with Driscoll when he and both Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner crashed the Strange Fire conference
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html
and for folks who want the quick version--
https://twitter.com/austintduncan/status/391277631737323520/photo/1
Yep, if a majority of the BoAA were WITH DRISCOLL when he crashed the Strange Fire conference is it that much of a wonder Paul Tripp concluded the BoAA was simply not going to be capable of providing the kind of oversight and accountability the thing was supposed to provide on paper? If four of the seven were all part of the stunt what can you do?
Which gets us to Michael Van Skaik. Van Skaik hardly constitutes an "external" or "outsider" role.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
Michael Van Skaik was on the Compensation Committee circa early 2012. Was that the same Compensation Committee referenced in Turner's memo about Driscoll's compensation?
Van Skaik's role in Ministry Coaching International in the previous decade and Mars Hill's cooperation with MCI during the 2007 re-org makes it hard to buy the idea that Van Skaik was a disinterested party. He'd served for years as a Mars Hill pastor and resigned so as to be able to be on the BoAA, apparently, but that external/outsider status seems to have largely been on paper. Turner's complaint that the 2007 governance changes did not change the insularity/conformity dynamic could be attributable to the fact that even on the BoAA, the people who tended to end up on it look like they were longtime Driscoll buddies and people who had inside roles in the past.
Excepting Paul Tripp, but also excepting ...
Larry Osborne. Except that Larry Osborne was credited by Mark Driscoll in 2007 as the one to whom he turned for advice on how to architect Mars Hill as a multi-site network of campuses in 2007. So Turner's attempt to narrate the history of Mars Hill governance as stymied by localist concerns seems to fall apart if we bear in mind that by Mark Driscoll's account he sought Osborne's advice on how to best re-design Mars Hill to be a multi-site church. If Turner had known about that would he have been happy to have Larry Osborne on the BoAA? It could seem as though Osborne's contribution, whatever it was, to Driscoll's survey of how to re-org Mars Hill in 2007 ironically brought Osborne back in spite of Turner's belief that the governance of the past had gotten them into the problems of the present circa 2011.
It's begun to look more and more like Tripp was the one person who was on the BoAA at any point in its history who could have been considered an actually independent participant. The others either had a history of being inside the beltway or being personal friends with Driscoll. Turner may sincerely think the problem was the local leader thing was too insular but to go by the roster of the BoAA members that insularity was characteristic of the BoAA that was ostensibly going to remedy that insularity.
Let's not forget amidst all this that MacDonald and Driscoll also had that Elephant Room 2 thing with T. D. Jakes. Even if we grant that Jakes is a thorough Trinitarian Driscoll had earlier repudiated the word-faith teaching he considered Jakes to endorse and considered him a word-faith wingnut. MacDonald was not just part of the Strange Fire stunt but the Elephant Room 2 situation to boot. Turner's story seems shaky when we consider that the devil is in the details. If he designed the BoAA to overcome the weaknesses in the leadership culture of Mars Hill then having a majority of the BoAA joining Driscoll in crashing the Strange Fire conference seems like an epic failure.
As for the later additions of Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers, for Phelps, consider that Phelps advised Driscoll on the reverse-engineering your life stuff, and co-owns the copyright on it.
https://wbmason.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/reverse-engineering_your_life.pdf
Reverse-Engineering Your Life
© 2005 Mark Driscoll and Jon Phelps All rights reserved.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/jon-phelps-founder-full-sail-university.html
Rogers, well,
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-boe-members-part-6-pastor-matt.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/in-wake-of-closure-announcement-boaaboo.html
Rogers was part of a team that asserted Driscoll had apologized for accusations made against him about things from 14 years ago. Driscoll never apologized for the substance of WHAT he said using the pen name William Wallace II. If anything, there's been an essential continuity in theme and even tone (minus a few flowery analogies) on Driscoll's part in the last fifteen years.
About all that need be added to consider about this list of names would be to say ...
Michael Van Skaik Larry Osborne
Jon Phelps
Matt Rogers
It'll be interesting to see Turner explain the basis for that section. What's the purpose of stipulating that a contract between the Church and a member of the BOAA is not automatically voided or voidable simply because the member of the BoAA in question has a financial interest in the contract or transaction? And what has Mars Hill's Conflict of Interest Policy been?
If Turner really wanted Mars Hill to get a board that would have external accountability the closing BoAA seems to have been reduced to primarily a band of highly interested insiders. Van Skaik may have formally removed himself from Mars Hill but his history did not make him completely disinterested. Osborne had an advisory role in the 2007 re-org, by Driscoll's account. Rogers was willing to sound off against protesters around the time he was added to the BoAA. Phelps was listed as a member at the Ballard campus and had a history of being thought of as one of the higher-end donors inside the church. Unless there's some clarifying information not yet provided it's hard to think of a more insider "external" board.
And as we've seen of late, Sutton Turner and Justin Dean didn't have the most affirming things to say about Paul Tripp, who was arguably the one person who was almost indisputably a truly disinterested outsider with respect to the internal political history of Mars Hill.
It's not that Turner doesn't seem sure his account is reliable, he seems pretty sure of it, and it seems he's trying to convey what happened simply and clearly. The problem is that if he actually believes the idea that all the elders had to all agree and that's why the 2007 re-org had to happen he's been sold a pretty sloppy and even misleading account of things. It also seems as though the top-down central/external systems Turner tried to put in place amplified problems.
a short thought on Turner's "Good Decisions Made by the Right People", a belated vindication of the concerns of Meyer and Petry about the 2007 bylaws?
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
If Sutton Turner has been sharing publicly this week how broken the governance and decision-making process at Mars Hill was in 2011 by the time he arrived ... couldn't that be construed as an indirect confirmation that the objections raised by former pastors Paul Petry and Bent Meyer about the problematic nature of the by-laws that were being pushed through in 2007 were justified?
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
If Sutton Turner has been sharing publicly this week how broken the governance and decision-making process at Mars Hill was in 2011 by the time he arrived ... couldn't that be construed as an indirect confirmation that the objections raised by former pastors Paul Petry and Bent Meyer about the problematic nature of the by-laws that were being pushed through in 2007 were justified?
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Sutton Turner post "Good Decisions Made By the Right People", the BoAA may have looked independent but it still contained insiders and someone credited with an advisory role in the 2007 re-org.
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
The board in place at Mars Hill in the summer of 2011 consisted of local elders who had been at Mars Hill for many years. They were inside the organization. I’m not sure what they discussed regarding ResultSource, but they needed outsiders who were experienced in big decision-making and who were outside of their context to help them. [emphasis added]
...
In November of 2011, I began to work on new by-laws that would put men on the board of directors that had large organization experience and a structure that would place these types of decisions in their hands. In Spring 2012, the full council of elders approved these new by-laws, and men were added to the board who had large company or ministry experience. This new group was called the Board of Accountability and Advisors (BOAA) and its members were approved by the full council of elders.
The make-up of the Board of Accountability and Advisors would be something to review.
The make-up of various boards within Mars Hill changed over time:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mh-governance-in-2013-and-in-2012.html
For instance, the board that would investigate charges in the event that any formal accusation were made against Mark Driscoll ... at one point looked like this:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-event-that-formal-charge-andor.html
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.”
That was the old early 2012 list and the list does not look much like a group of outsiders if you know their backgrounds.
Jamie Munson in particular, either drafted or helped drafted the governance system that Sutton Turner considered flawed.
Larry Osborne had an advisory role. See pages 164 and 165 of Confessions of a Reformission Rev for Driscoll's discussion of a lunch with Osborne about managing a church. A quote that stands out particularly now is the following:
CONFESSIONS OF A REFORMISSION REV
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan
copyright (c) 2006 by Mark Driscoll
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
page 167
Our strategic plan, which is sketched out in this chapter, won't be fully implemented until after this book is published. By that time, we will know if we had a good plan or if we messed everytiing up and reduced the church to a small group of people meeting in a phone booth and grumbling about the strategic plan. I am hesitant to end the book with these details because I have no guarantee that they will work.
Seeing as the corporation known as Mars Hill Church is in the midst of dissolving this year ... maybe the strategic plan didn't quite work out.
Eventually the BoAA was listed as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-board-of-advisors-and.html
Paul Tripp
Michael Van Skaik
James MacDonald
Larry Osborne
Mark Driscoll
Dave Bruskas
Sutton Turner
Tripp, famous, quit being on the BoAA. It's important to remind everyone that Osborne could not have been considered that disengaged, not if Mark Driscoll name-dropped him as the one who advised him on how to architect Mars Hill as multi-site back in the 2006-2007 re-org.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
Dear Mars Hill Church Members,
...
So, I began pursuing counsel from godly men outside the church that I respected. I spoke with Tim Keller about the difficulties of an urban church, John Piper about how to sustain longevity in the ministry, C. J. Mahaney about bitterness that had grown in me against some elders of Mars Hill and my need to grow in humility, D. A. Carson about how to best study so as to become an even better Bible teacher and writer, Gerry Breshears about how to best train other men for ministry to share the load, Pastor Larry Osborne about how to best architect a multi-campus church [emphasis added], and Pastors Craig Groeschel and Ed Young Jr. about how to lead a churh of thousands and possibly tens of thousands. On top of that, I pursued counsel from a Christian doctor regarding my health and what needed to change in my diet, exercise, and schedule. In short, I sought wise outside counsel regarding if I should stay at Mars Hill and make changes in my life and our church, or simply move on to another church and start over.
If Sutton Turner was convinced that the governance in place at his arrival in 2011 was deeply problematic how would adding the man Mark Driscoll credited with advising him on how best to artchitect a multi-campus church have helped the BoAA right the wrongs of the earlier regime?
Michael Van Skaik was a pastor at Mars Hill Bellevue and on the Compensation Committee. He also had a board role on Ministry Coaching International.
For those who may have read this old survey of what the Governance page used to say.
The Compensation Committee consists of at least three members of the Board of Elders chosen from among the nonpaid elders serving on the board. The members of the committee are appointed by the Board of Elders. Currently, the following elders serve on the Compensation Committee: Michael Van Skaik (Chairman), ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/05/one-of-jamie-munsons-grounds-for.html
The idea that Van Skaik could be construed as independent or non-insider counsel to Mars Hill seems particularly difficult to buy this late in the game. Ministry Coaching seemed to be (clarification welcome) something Mars Hill was connected to back during the period in which Meyer and Petry got fired. If Michael Van Skaik and Ministry Coaching International were being consulted in 2007 then that's another person who had a business interest of some kind, it seems, in Mars Hill. And that'd be fine far as it goes, perhaps, but if Turner's goal in formulating a Board of Accountability and Advisors was to get guys on there who were not trapped by the insider mentality of the Mars Hill governance and cultural system he encountered in 2011, well, there were quite possibly other options.
We'd need a full accounting of exactly who was on the BoAA during what years but the ending team was, if anything, a team that looked like it had people who were actually at Mars Hill
Getting back to Turner's recent post, he closes with the following, and it looks like after this there's another post on the way from him:
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
At our board meeting in August of 2013, I provided a detailed analysis and accounting of the ResultSource marketing plan. At this board meeting (six months before the signed ResultSource contract was leaked to the public), the new board agreed that this type of marketing strategy would never be used again. In fact, no other books that were published through Mars Hill used it. We, as board members, would certainly not always get it right. In fact, in the following months, we would even make mistakes around the public revelation of the ResultSource contract. (I desired for our first media response at that time to clearly communicate two things: my level of involvement in the decision and the BOAA’s decision to never repeat the practice. Unfortunately, this did not happen.) But six months before the public spotlight, this new board of outside leaders, who were unassociated with the ResultSource decision, evaluated the proposal afterwards and made the right decision: it was a bad idea and it was wrong.
Okay, so the BoAA decided Result Source should never get used again. That still makes it a stretch to sustain the "above reproach" record for Jamie Munson Mark Driscoll asserted when Munson resigned, doesn't it? And even if Mark Driscoll and company didn't use RSI again, let's not forget the iPad Mini promotional contest for Who Do You Think You Are?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/santa-driscoll-has-toys-for-you-maybe.html
It's debatable how outside the members of the BoAA were if it was anything like the line up presented to the public. Osborne's advisory role in the 2006-2007 re-org has been testified to by none other than Mark Driscoll himself. Michael Van Skaik's roles within Mars Hill would not have counted him as truly thinking like an outsider given the range of roles he had within the organization. Formally resigning so as to meet the technical requirements of membership as part of the BoAA doesn't mean that Van Skaik was indisputably thinking like someone who wasn't stepped in the governance culture Turner was trying to reform.
And since the corporation is dissolving this year it may be that whatever valiant efforts Sutton Turner put into righting the boat it's still gone done.
When part 3 goes up, as it seems there'll be a part 3, we can see what Turner has to say. Meanwhile, what he's shared about the fiscal and infrastructural health of Mars Hill in 2011 paints a pretty bleak portrait of an organization in financial disarray and with a leadership culture okay with gaming the NYT best-seller list. If Turner felt obliged to sign the contract in spite of his disagreement this suggests that all the past hype about him as the "king" with "kingly gifts" by Mars Hill to the public and to its members was mainly for show and that in the end someone else was really the king.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
... I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
In the end it seems as though whatever reforms in governance Turner hoped to implement, if Mark Driscoll's the one who changed the church all the way down, Turner could only accomplish so much.
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
The board in place at Mars Hill in the summer of 2011 consisted of local elders who had been at Mars Hill for many years. They were inside the organization. I’m not sure what they discussed regarding ResultSource, but they needed outsiders who were experienced in big decision-making and who were outside of their context to help them. [emphasis added]
...
In November of 2011, I began to work on new by-laws that would put men on the board of directors that had large organization experience and a structure that would place these types of decisions in their hands. In Spring 2012, the full council of elders approved these new by-laws, and men were added to the board who had large company or ministry experience. This new group was called the Board of Accountability and Advisors (BOAA) and its members were approved by the full council of elders.
The make-up of the Board of Accountability and Advisors would be something to review.
The make-up of various boards within Mars Hill changed over time:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mh-governance-in-2013-and-in-2012.html
For instance, the board that would investigate charges in the event that any formal accusation were made against Mark Driscoll ... at one point looked like this:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-event-that-formal-charge-andor.html
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.”
That was the old early 2012 list and the list does not look much like a group of outsiders if you know their backgrounds.
Jamie Munson in particular, either drafted or helped drafted the governance system that Sutton Turner considered flawed.
Larry Osborne had an advisory role. See pages 164 and 165 of Confessions of a Reformission Rev for Driscoll's discussion of a lunch with Osborne about managing a church. A quote that stands out particularly now is the following:
CONFESSIONS OF A REFORMISSION REV
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan
copyright (c) 2006 by Mark Driscoll
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
page 167
Our strategic plan, which is sketched out in this chapter, won't be fully implemented until after this book is published. By that time, we will know if we had a good plan or if we messed everytiing up and reduced the church to a small group of people meeting in a phone booth and grumbling about the strategic plan. I am hesitant to end the book with these details because I have no guarantee that they will work.
Seeing as the corporation known as Mars Hill Church is in the midst of dissolving this year ... maybe the strategic plan didn't quite work out.
Eventually the BoAA was listed as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-board-of-advisors-and.html
Paul Tripp
Michael Van Skaik
James MacDonald
Larry Osborne
Mark Driscoll
Dave Bruskas
Sutton Turner
Tripp, famous, quit being on the BoAA. It's important to remind everyone that Osborne could not have been considered that disengaged, not if Mark Driscoll name-dropped him as the one who advised him on how to architect Mars Hill as multi-site back in the 2006-2007 re-org.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
Dear Mars Hill Church Members,
...
So, I began pursuing counsel from godly men outside the church that I respected. I spoke with Tim Keller about the difficulties of an urban church, John Piper about how to sustain longevity in the ministry, C. J. Mahaney about bitterness that had grown in me against some elders of Mars Hill and my need to grow in humility, D. A. Carson about how to best study so as to become an even better Bible teacher and writer, Gerry Breshears about how to best train other men for ministry to share the load, Pastor Larry Osborne about how to best architect a multi-campus church [emphasis added], and Pastors Craig Groeschel and Ed Young Jr. about how to lead a churh of thousands and possibly tens of thousands. On top of that, I pursued counsel from a Christian doctor regarding my health and what needed to change in my diet, exercise, and schedule. In short, I sought wise outside counsel regarding if I should stay at Mars Hill and make changes in my life and our church, or simply move on to another church and start over.
If Sutton Turner was convinced that the governance in place at his arrival in 2011 was deeply problematic how would adding the man Mark Driscoll credited with advising him on how best to artchitect a multi-campus church have helped the BoAA right the wrongs of the earlier regime?
Michael Van Skaik was a pastor at Mars Hill Bellevue and on the Compensation Committee. He also had a board role on Ministry Coaching International.
For those who may have read this old survey of what the Governance page used to say.
The Compensation Committee consists of at least three members of the Board of Elders chosen from among the nonpaid elders serving on the board. The members of the committee are appointed by the Board of Elders. Currently, the following elders serve on the Compensation Committee: Michael Van Skaik (Chairman), ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/05/one-of-jamie-munsons-grounds-for.html
The idea that Van Skaik could be construed as independent or non-insider counsel to Mars Hill seems particularly difficult to buy this late in the game. Ministry Coaching seemed to be (clarification welcome) something Mars Hill was connected to back during the period in which Meyer and Petry got fired. If Michael Van Skaik and Ministry Coaching International were being consulted in 2007 then that's another person who had a business interest of some kind, it seems, in Mars Hill. And that'd be fine far as it goes, perhaps, but if Turner's goal in formulating a Board of Accountability and Advisors was to get guys on there who were not trapped by the insider mentality of the Mars Hill governance and cultural system he encountered in 2011, well, there were quite possibly other options.
We'd need a full accounting of exactly who was on the BoAA during what years but the ending team was, if anything, a team that looked like it had people who were actually at Mars Hill
Getting back to Turner's recent post, he closes with the following, and it looks like after this there's another post on the way from him:
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
At our board meeting in August of 2013, I provided a detailed analysis and accounting of the ResultSource marketing plan. At this board meeting (six months before the signed ResultSource contract was leaked to the public), the new board agreed that this type of marketing strategy would never be used again. In fact, no other books that were published through Mars Hill used it. We, as board members, would certainly not always get it right. In fact, in the following months, we would even make mistakes around the public revelation of the ResultSource contract. (I desired for our first media response at that time to clearly communicate two things: my level of involvement in the decision and the BOAA’s decision to never repeat the practice. Unfortunately, this did not happen.) But six months before the public spotlight, this new board of outside leaders, who were unassociated with the ResultSource decision, evaluated the proposal afterwards and made the right decision: it was a bad idea and it was wrong.
Okay, so the BoAA decided Result Source should never get used again. That still makes it a stretch to sustain the "above reproach" record for Jamie Munson Mark Driscoll asserted when Munson resigned, doesn't it? And even if Mark Driscoll and company didn't use RSI again, let's not forget the iPad Mini promotional contest for Who Do You Think You Are?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/santa-driscoll-has-toys-for-you-maybe.html
It's debatable how outside the members of the BoAA were if it was anything like the line up presented to the public. Osborne's advisory role in the 2006-2007 re-org has been testified to by none other than Mark Driscoll himself. Michael Van Skaik's roles within Mars Hill would not have counted him as truly thinking like an outsider given the range of roles he had within the organization. Formally resigning so as to meet the technical requirements of membership as part of the BoAA doesn't mean that Van Skaik was indisputably thinking like someone who wasn't stepped in the governance culture Turner was trying to reform.
And since the corporation is dissolving this year it may be that whatever valiant efforts Sutton Turner put into righting the boat it's still gone done.
When part 3 goes up, as it seems there'll be a part 3, we can see what Turner has to say. Meanwhile, what he's shared about the fiscal and infrastructural health of Mars Hill in 2011 paints a pretty bleak portrait of an organization in financial disarray and with a leadership culture okay with gaming the NYT best-seller list. If Turner felt obliged to sign the contract in spite of his disagreement this suggests that all the past hype about him as the "king" with "kingly gifts" by Mars Hill to the public and to its members was mainly for show and that in the end someone else was really the king.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
... I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
In the end it seems as though whatever reforms in governance Turner hoped to implement, if Mark Driscoll's the one who changed the church all the way down, Turner could only accomplish so much.
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