Since Driscoll seems to have gotten most of the intellectual property that was associated with the former Mars Hill during its period of dissolution this isn't particularly surprising. Driscoll is working on the resurgence of The Resurgence, which is a reminder that I was going to read A Call to Resurgence before getting to Spirit-Filled Jesus.
https://theresurgence.com/
Whether this new The Resurgence will bring back his old materials about Oprah as a cult leader (possibly the more ironically themed post in light of the last years of Mars Hill and what has been written about his leadership style in the past), his response to the Ted Haggard controversy, his post on Adriana Lima as the naked virgin Catholic model, or on Jenna Jameson, remains to be seen. Possibly, those posts won't be part of the resurgence of The Resurgence. Whether Driscoll will bring back John Catanzaro's contributions to The Resurgence is also an open question. Whatever form the resurgent The Resurgence takes it will probably have to be refurbished.
Showing posts with label resurgence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resurgence. Show all posts
Thursday, May 09, 2019
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Sutton Turner discusses Mars Hill Global allocations in recent post, a small fraction of the money raised went overseas and a lot went to US church planting, revisiting how some money went to the now defunct Resurgence Training Center in light of a 2009 Driscoll sermon
emphases in red and/or bold are added
http://investyourgifts.com/dismissed-whats-next/
Posted by Sutton Turner on August 25, 2016
...
Mars Hill Global
Mars Hill Global began in 2009 to raise money from the global audience (those who listened via podcast) to help fund the mission of Mars Hill Church: “Making Disciples and Planting Churches.” Until late 2011, Mars Hill had not significantly funded international church planting but was heavily invested in US church planting. From 2009 to 2012, Mars Hill spent $8.6M in U.S. church planting and $170k outside of the U.S. [WtH, slightly less than 2% of expenditures went to church planting outside the US] but we'll get to a 2009 sermon that explains why this wouldn't be a surprise to potentially impatient readers]
When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.
When people started to question the distribution of funds given to Mars Hill Global, the church brought in ECFA and independent auditors, Clark Nuber. Both groups gave Mars Hill a clear opinion that the church had done nothing wrong. In spite of these findings, we felt led to send 3765 emails and 6000 letters to 100% of donors to Mars Hill Global from 2011 to 2014 to clarify their gift intent. Less than 40 families responded; Mars Hill Church sent an additional $40,000 to Ethiopia because donors requested their donations to Mars Hill Global be for Ethiopian church planting.
A full and total timeline from 2009 to 2014 with videos, blogs and other information is stored here.
From 2012 to 2014, Mars Hill Church spent $13.7M in church planting in the US and sent $545k to Ethiopia and India. [WtH--spent from an amount of ... ?] During its existence, Mars Hill Church invested over $23M in church planting in the US and around the world. [WtH--not necessarily the same thing as having done it through Mars Hill Global, given that Mars Hill began in 1996 and Global started in 2009] This amount is over and above the general and administrative costs of Mars Hill Church’s central operations and staffing. (47% of the funds given to Mars Hill Global from 2012-2014 were large donations from a small number of donors who specifically asked prior to giving for their donations to be counted in Global. Many of these donors did not attend one specific Mars Hill location and wanted their donations supporting all Mars Hill operations including U.S. and international church planting.)
[ WtH--so it reads like that 47% of the funds given to Global from 2012 were from a small number of donors who wanted their giving to be counted in/toward global. Though these donors did not attend one specific location they wanted their gifts supporting all operations, but this raises a question of whether or not that was unusual because the donors requested this or because under normal circumstances donors might have expected or requested their gifts to be restricted to the campus they were giving to Mars Hill through/from]
Many have asked for these numbers. There was I time when I was restricted from providing these numbers. Now, everyone has the Mars Hill Global information that I had when I resigned in September 2014 (Eph. 5:13).
Actual financials reports with line items would have been nice.
Back in the pre-Turner era of Mars Hill Driscoll described the aims of Mars Hill Global as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
http://download.marshill.se/files/2009/05/03/20090503_humble-pastors_sd_audio.mp3
[it's mistitled "Humble Pastor", it was originally listed as Prophets, Priests and Kings" and discussed earlier at Wenatchee The Hatchet. The 5-17-2009 sermon is a different sermon even though in the media library at the marshill.se site it will appear to be "Humble Pastors", too.]
Prophets, Priests and Kings
Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5
starting about 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term. [emphasis added]
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
Turner mentioned that more than $23 million was spent in church planting. That's telling us what it was more than. What we don't necessarily get is a number that would tell us how much went into The Resurgence Training Center (for anyone who even remembers what that was these days). So some of the money given into Mars Hill Global would have gone to the Resurgence Training Center. There are folks who are willing to say they went there and graduated from there but let's not forget the big E on the eye chart. Mark Driscoll had had a personal ambition to start a movement that started a Bible college. No matter how great the education was at Re:Train there's a hindsight we can have today through which we observe that this was part of the legacy Driscoll wanted to be able to look back on. It's also something to keep in mind as part of the basis for Global in its early stages. We don't need to be so focused on how much went to overseas that we forget that at its inception Global was never explicitly designed for overseas missions but for the global expansion of what we can now regard as the Mars Hill brand.
The amount of money given/designated to The Resurgence Training Center could get some clarification, since it, too, was part of the Mars Hill expansion included within the fundraising activities of Mars Hill Global.
And the thing to keep in mind, that commenter Nathan priddis mentioned recently at Phoenix Preacher, is that we should ask ourselves--even if "all" the money raised by Mars Hill Global went to overseas activity, who's to say that would have made the conditions in those regions in Africa or India better?
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=26619#comment-344282
In other words, let's not forget that even if all the monies that people gave that they thought were going to go from Mars Hill Global to Africa went there, what in the end would this have been except for the global expansion of the Mars Hill brand? Why would anyone in Africa need that? This is not to say people don't have any right or reason to be upset about all sorts of things Mars Hill Global. Turner gets that these things were worrisome to people, too. But Nathan priddis raised a point that doesn't seem to have come up among those who have been close to the Mars Hill side of things in online discussions (that I know of)--that we can't assume that all that Global money going to the missionary work Mars Hill had in mind would have been any good for people in Africa in the end.
http://investyourgifts.com/dismissed-whats-next/
Posted by Sutton Turner on August 25, 2016
...
Mars Hill Global
Mars Hill Global began in 2009 to raise money from the global audience (those who listened via podcast) to help fund the mission of Mars Hill Church: “Making Disciples and Planting Churches.” Until late 2011, Mars Hill had not significantly funded international church planting but was heavily invested in US church planting. From 2009 to 2012, Mars Hill spent $8.6M in U.S. church planting and $170k outside of the U.S. [WtH, slightly less than 2% of expenditures went to church planting outside the US] but we'll get to a 2009 sermon that explains why this wouldn't be a surprise to potentially impatient readers]
When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.
When people started to question the distribution of funds given to Mars Hill Global, the church brought in ECFA and independent auditors, Clark Nuber. Both groups gave Mars Hill a clear opinion that the church had done nothing wrong. In spite of these findings, we felt led to send 3765 emails and 6000 letters to 100% of donors to Mars Hill Global from 2011 to 2014 to clarify their gift intent. Less than 40 families responded; Mars Hill Church sent an additional $40,000 to Ethiopia because donors requested their donations to Mars Hill Global be for Ethiopian church planting.
A full and total timeline from 2009 to 2014 with videos, blogs and other information is stored here.
From 2012 to 2014, Mars Hill Church spent $13.7M in church planting in the US and sent $545k to Ethiopia and India. [WtH--spent from an amount of ... ?] During its existence, Mars Hill Church invested over $23M in church planting in the US and around the world. [WtH--not necessarily the same thing as having done it through Mars Hill Global, given that Mars Hill began in 1996 and Global started in 2009] This amount is over and above the general and administrative costs of Mars Hill Church’s central operations and staffing. (47% of the funds given to Mars Hill Global from 2012-2014 were large donations from a small number of donors who specifically asked prior to giving for their donations to be counted in Global. Many of these donors did not attend one specific Mars Hill location and wanted their donations supporting all Mars Hill operations including U.S. and international church planting.)
[ WtH--so it reads like that 47% of the funds given to Global from 2012 were from a small number of donors who wanted their giving to be counted in/toward global. Though these donors did not attend one specific location they wanted their gifts supporting all operations, but this raises a question of whether or not that was unusual because the donors requested this or because under normal circumstances donors might have expected or requested their gifts to be restricted to the campus they were giving to Mars Hill through/from]
Many have asked for these numbers. There was I time when I was restricted from providing these numbers. Now, everyone has the Mars Hill Global information that I had when I resigned in September 2014 (Eph. 5:13).
Actual financials reports with line items would have been nice.
Back in the pre-Turner era of Mars Hill Driscoll described the aims of Mars Hill Global as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
http://download.marshill.se/files/2009/05/03/20090503_humble-pastors_sd_audio.mp3
[it's mistitled "Humble Pastor", it was originally listed as Prophets, Priests and Kings" and discussed earlier at Wenatchee The Hatchet. The 5-17-2009 sermon is a different sermon even though in the media library at the marshill.se site it will appear to be "Humble Pastors", too.]
Prophets, Priests and Kings
Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5
starting about 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term. [emphasis added]
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
Turner mentioned that more than $23 million was spent in church planting. That's telling us what it was more than. What we don't necessarily get is a number that would tell us how much went into The Resurgence Training Center (for anyone who even remembers what that was these days). So some of the money given into Mars Hill Global would have gone to the Resurgence Training Center. There are folks who are willing to say they went there and graduated from there but let's not forget the big E on the eye chart. Mark Driscoll had had a personal ambition to start a movement that started a Bible college. No matter how great the education was at Re:Train there's a hindsight we can have today through which we observe that this was part of the legacy Driscoll wanted to be able to look back on. It's also something to keep in mind as part of the basis for Global in its early stages. We don't need to be so focused on how much went to overseas that we forget that at its inception Global was never explicitly designed for overseas missions but for the global expansion of what we can now regard as the Mars Hill brand.
The amount of money given/designated to The Resurgence Training Center could get some clarification, since it, too, was part of the Mars Hill expansion included within the fundraising activities of Mars Hill Global.
And the thing to keep in mind, that commenter Nathan priddis mentioned recently at Phoenix Preacher, is that we should ask ourselves--even if "all" the money raised by Mars Hill Global went to overseas activity, who's to say that would have made the conditions in those regions in Africa or India better?
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=26619#comment-344282
In other words, let's not forget that even if all the monies that people gave that they thought were going to go from Mars Hill Global to Africa went there, what in the end would this have been except for the global expansion of the Mars Hill brand? Why would anyone in Africa need that? This is not to say people don't have any right or reason to be upset about all sorts of things Mars Hill Global. Turner gets that these things were worrisome to people, too. But Nathan priddis raised a point that doesn't seem to have come up among those who have been close to the Mars Hill side of things in online discussions (that I know of)--that we can't assume that all that Global money going to the missionary work Mars Hill had in mind would have been any good for people in Africa in the end.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
a follow up on Resurgence as distinct from Resurgence Publishing Inc. Turner warned in March 2012 MH was in a financial mess, but by May 2012 Resurgence Publishing, Inc was set up and Mars Hill Music was announced as the new Christian music label gunning to take over Christian radio.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
...
For me personally, everything culminated at the end of 2006. Despite rapid growth, the church was not healthy and neither was I. My workload was simply overwhelming. I was preaching five times a Sunday, the senior leader in Mars Hill responsible to some degree for literally everything in the church, president of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network which had exploded, president of The Resurgence, an author writing books, a conference speaker traveling, a media representative doing interviews, a student attending graduate school, a father with five young children, and a husband to a wife whom I have adored since the first day I met her and needed my focus more than ever. [emphases added] I was working far too many hours and neglecting my own physical and spiritual well-being, and then I hit the proverbial wall. For many weeks I simply could not sleep more than two or three hours a night. I had been running off of adrenaline for so many years that my adrenal glands fatigued and the stress of my responsibilities caused me to be stuck “on” physically and unable to rest or sleep. After a few months I had black circles under my eyes, was seeing a fog, and was constantly beyond exhausted.
so by Mark Driscoll's account he was president of The Resurgence, whatever that was, during 2006. He was blogging a bit in 2006 at The Resurgence. There's tagged posts of some of the stuff he had to say about Jenna Jameson, Adriana Lima and ... there was kind of a pattern going there for a while. There was something about Oprah, of course, and something sorta tangentially associated with Ted Haggard that wasn't really about Haggard so much as Driscoll soap-boxing.. It became apparent that if given the opportunity to regard women in the modeling industry as industrious marketing representatives in the advertising industry (a la Suzy Parker) or as dumb women who can't spell the word "contradiction" that Driscoll chose the latter option. But since Resurgence web pages seem to have been assimilated into Resurgence Publishing Inc. assets ...
http://www.store.theresurgence.com/
http://theresurgence.com/
http://theresurgence.com/authors/douglas-Wilson
Thank you for visiting the theresurgence.com.
Mark Driscoll Ministries recently purchased The Resurgence and all of its assets in a public auction conducted by a law firm. We are excited to reestablish this site, but it will be some time before we are able to catalogue and determine what will happen with the content. In the meantime, if you would like the latest information on The Resurgence and Pastor Mark Driscoll please visit http://markdriscoll.org. The site contains his latest Bible teaching, speaking calendar, and an option to sign up for weekly updates via the newsletter. You can also follow @pastormark on twitter.
It would seem that while for a time there weren't robots.txt for a lot of the Resurgence links robots.txt may be back.
The Resurgence has not always necessarily meant Resurgence Publishing, Inc. There has never been a UBI registered number for The Resurgence, so functionally it was essentially a subsidiary of Mars Hill. Resugence Publishing, Inc. is now inactive.
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603207560
RESURGENCE PUBLISHING, INC.
UBI Number 603207560
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Profit
Active/Inactive Inactive
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 05/17/2012
Expiration Date 05/31/2015
Inactive Date 09/01/2015
Duration Perpetual
Agent Name CT CORPORATION SYSTEM
Address
505 UNION AVE SE STE 120
OLYMPIA WA 98501
President,Secretary,Treasurer,Chairman TURNER, JOHN 1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
It used to be the Resurgence had an online bookstore through which you could get books, some of them being books from the Re:Lit imprint that was mostly, if memory serves, published via Crossway.
For sake of review there was this Re:Lit line of books ...
Re:Lit Books by Crossway include
Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support by Brad House September 7 2011
Disciple by Bill Clem September 7, 2011
Note to Self by Joe Thorn
A Meal with Jesus by Tim Chester April 7, 2011
Redemption by Mike Wilkerson January 5, 2011
Rid of My Disgrace by Justin & Lindsey Holcomb January 5, 2011
Church Planter by Darrin Patrick August 12, 2010
Doctrine by Mark Driscoll September 1. 2011
Leaders Who Last by Dave Kraft February 3, 2010
Scandalous by D.A. Carson February 3, 2010
Religion Saves by Mark Driscoll June 5, 2009
Vintage Church by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears December 23, 2008
Death by Love by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears September 12, 2008
Total Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis August 21, 2008
Vintage Jesus by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears February 11, 2008
http://www.wtsbooks.com/the-resurgence-literature-series-re-joe-thorn-relit16
Turner recently stated:
...
In the lawsuit, Jacobsens/Kildeas state that I financially benefited from the sales of the Real Marriage This is completely false. As stated previously, my role of President of Resurgence Publishing began after the publishing of Real Marriage. Resurgence Publishing was not financially or contractually linked to the publishing of Real Marriage. Furthermore, I was not involved in the legal entity (On Mission, LLC) that did financially benefit from Real Marriage
Perhaps a more basic question could be asked, whether or not Real Marriage was made available in any way through the Resurgence online bookstore. This would have been the easiest thing in the world to establish if robots.txt weren't in place and precluding the possibility of using something as simple as The WayBack Machine to prove that the book Real Marriage was never sold through the Resurgence online bookstore. For instance ... that James sermon series study guide was available at the old Resurgence online store, not that this link will work now.
http://store.theresurgence.com/products/james-study-guide
But that's neither here nor there.
What's peculiar about the filing date of Resurgence Publishing, Inc is that it was May 2012. That's a couple of months after a memo Sutton Turner wrote that addressed the financial mess Mars Hill was said to be in in early 2012. One of the comments in that memo was that the ReLit thing was not sustainable.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
4. Mars Hill Music is not sustainable as currently operating.
5. ReLit is not sustainable as currently operating.
Whatever it was about Re:Lit that was not sustainable as currently operating is not clear. Since the Re:Lit line of books was done through Crossway it's not even clear how it could have been unsustainable for Mars Hill if Mars Hill wasn't even the party publishing the books. And if the Re:Lit line wasn't sustainable how was setting up Resurgence Publishing, Inc. going to make it sustainable? A libertarian might liken this situation to a government that decides that because the FBI failed to stop a catastrophe that a new department needs to be made to handle the situation, perhaps?
Whatever wasn't sustainable about the Re:Lit line of books that at one point had been published by Crossway, Resurgence Publishing, Inc. had a filing date of 5/17/2012. That's two months after that memo on the financial mess Mars Hill was in.
For that matter ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-history-of-mh-attempts-at-record_23.html
http://marshill.com/2012/05/02/were-starting-a-record-label-pastor-mark-interviews-jon-dunn
Head’s up: we’re starting a record label, and we’re gunning to take over Christian radio.
In May 2012 somebody announced Mars Hill was starting a music label and they were gunning to take over Christian radio. Whatever case was made for the Re:Lit line being unsustainable or the Mars Hill Music project being unsustainable.
One of the things Turner wrote in his March 17, 2012 memo was ...
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
19. Doing anything that is not Making Disciples, Training Leaders and Planting Churches is not
sustainable.
So how did the announcement of a nascent music label and the filing for Resurgence Publishing, Inc. fit into making disciples, training leaders and planting churches in a sustainable way if the Re:Lit line of books was already in some sense not sustainable in its then-current form? Given that the fiscal year for Mars Hill was in the summer, the announcement of Mars Hill's music label and the creation of Resurgence Publishing, Inc. was within the fiscal year 2012 about which Turner had written that anything that wasn't primary mission needed to go.
But it can sure seem, looking back on things from 2016, that some stuff got started or announced anyway that had very little to do with the basic operations of Mars Hill. Turner wrote in 2015 that when leaders make decisions you don't agree with you go along with it. It's not inconceivable that somebody at Mars Hill's upper echelons of leadership was committed enough to keeping a book publishing project alive and a music label alive by dint of having cast those as part of the foundational vision from the dawn of Mars Hill that some form of those projects was expected to be kept on a back burner even if the front burner situation had changed. Or that's an educated guess.
POSTSCRIPT
For those who may not remember, May 2012 was also when Dave Bruskas told MH people there had to be rough layoffs that were non-negotiable a few days after the Driscolls bought a house in Woodway.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/
so a bunch of people got cut loose in the first half of 2012 in the wake of Sutton Turner's March 2012 memo ... and yet Resurgence Publishing Inc. got started and Mark Driscoll was happy to announce the start of a Mars Hill music label?
Of course Mars Hill Music circa 2012 became Mars Hill partnering with Tooth & Nail in 2013, so the music label thing was a bust again. But it does keep us coming back to a question of why, if Turner was correct in noting how risky the financial situation was for Mars Hill by March 2012, the executive leadership was okay with announcing a music label in May 2012, the same month that Resurgence Publishing, Inc. got started, the same month people got laid off and that Mark Driscoll got a house in Woodway. It seems hard to find a greater gap between institutional dread and personal ... optimism within the history of Mars Hill. A person could be forgiven for wondering if in some moments somebody in the leadership culture had a vision that was completely divorced from fiscal reality.
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, March 31, 2016
From Mark Driscoll's A Call to Resurgence: "When a guy shrinks his church, leaves his church, and is no longer participating in any church, the last thing we should consider him is an expert on anything related to the church."
Fellow music nerds, this is where you cue up the sludgy guitars playing riffs in the Phrygian mode! Astonishingly this video is still up (as Bane would say, "For now").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdxPgNwGV4Y
1:35ish The average person doesn't do anything until they're really ticked off. You gotta get to a certain point where you're just frustrated, you're annoyed by it, it's gotten under your skin, you're a little sick of it, you can't do it anymore and something needs to change and then all of a sudden you move to action. That's the point of the book.
We're on our way to a church that was part of Christendom's civil religion. It was all about good works and not very much about good news . That church died and in God's grace we obtained it just a few years ago, and I want you to see tonight what happens after the funeral. There is, in fact, a future as where people who were not worshipping Jesus, tons of young people are meeting Him, and you're gonna meet some of them tonight.
That slow-motion shot of Driscoll walking up to the campus (if you watched the video) ... was which campus?
The former U-District campus, which Cross and Crown recently bought from Mars Hill, a deal sealed earlier this month.
So, there's still a church there with connections to Mars Hill. But there's an irony at work here in that the campus was the site in a promotional video for ...
A Call to Resurgence
Resurgence (November 5, 2013)
ISBN-10: 1414383622
ISBN-13: 978-1414383620
This used to be connected to Tyndale.
Copyright (c) 2013 by On Mission, LLC and Mark Driscoll.
Published in association with Yates & Yates, LLP
ISBN 978-1-4143-8362-0
ISBN 978-1-4143-8948-6
What's the irony, you ask?
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
Due to the ongoing existence of American civil religion, many evangelicals are oblivious to the fact that Christendom is dead and real Christianity is in serious decline. Those in the United States may have a general sense that Christianity is struggling in Europe, but many remain fairly optimistic about our "one nation under God." As long as we see Christmas trees on government property, as long as The Bible miniseries gets good ratings, and as long as we hear public figures talk about "faith", many believers naively assume that real Christianity is alive and well and respected by the majority of our people.
Brace yourself. It's an illusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdxPgNwGV4Y
1:35ish The average person doesn't do anything until they're really ticked off. You gotta get to a certain point where you're just frustrated, you're annoyed by it, it's gotten under your skin, you're a little sick of it, you can't do it anymore and something needs to change and then all of a sudden you move to action. That's the point of the book.
We're on our way to a church that was part of Christendom's civil religion. It was all about good works and not very much about good news . That church died and in God's grace we obtained it just a few years ago, and I want you to see tonight what happens after the funeral. There is, in fact, a future as where people who were not worshipping Jesus, tons of young people are meeting Him, and you're gonna meet some of them tonight.
That slow-motion shot of Driscoll walking up to the campus (if you watched the video) ... was which campus?
The former U-District campus, which Cross and Crown recently bought from Mars Hill, a deal sealed earlier this month.
So, there's still a church there with connections to Mars Hill. But there's an irony at work here in that the campus was the site in a promotional video for ...
A Call to Resurgence
Resurgence (November 5, 2013)
ISBN-10: 1414383622
ISBN-13: 978-1414383620
This used to be connected to Tyndale.
Copyright (c) 2013 by On Mission, LLC and Mark Driscoll.
Published in association with Yates & Yates, LLP
ISBN 978-1-4143-8362-0
ISBN 978-1-4143-8948-6
What's the irony, you ask?
A Call to Resurgence, page 192
Sure, Driscoll managed to lead in a way that ultimately shrunk Mars Hill; then he left Mars Hill; then Mars Hill announced formal dissolution and just a few weeks ago the corporation formerly known as Mars Hill Church died ... but Driscoll's still considered some kind of authority on things related to the church?
After all, he was talking with Perry Noble at a conference not so long ago.
There's something else ... ten years ago Mark Driscoll published a book in which it kind of seemed like he was almost celebrating the demise of what has been called Christendom. It meant a decline of merely nominalist Christianity and could be a sign that only those who were really committed would stay the course. Did anybody read ...
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
Because it seemed ten years ago Mark Driscoll was talking about how Christendom was dead and that meant there was room for the Emerging church movement to grow.
By the time of A Call to Resurgence Driscoll's tune had changed slightly.
A Call to Resurgence
page 12
page 12
Due to the ongoing existence of American civil religion, many evangelicals are oblivious to the fact that Christendom is dead and real Christianity is in serious decline. Those in the United States may have a general sense that Christianity is struggling in Europe, but many remain fairly optimistic about our "one nation under God." As long as we see Christmas trees on government property, as long as The Bible miniseries gets good ratings, and as long as we hear public figures talk about "faith", many believers naively assume that real Christianity is alive and well and respected by the majority of our people.
Brace yourself. It's an illusion.
Because absolutely nobody prior to 2013, not even Mark Driscoll himself, ever suggested that whatever Christendom might have been, was in decline?
And here we are in 2016 and there is no Mars Hill Church. Ten years ago the close of Confessions featured talk of how Mars Hill was reloading the squirt gun and was gonna charge the gates of Hell.
A Call to Resurgence, promoted to the soundtrack of sludgy Phrygian guitar riffs in a video where Mark Driscoll talked about Mars Hill amidst saying there WAS a future after the funeral ... well, where's Mars Hill?
That was just a couple of days before the one year anniversary of the publication of A Call to Resurgence.
If Perry Noble took Mark Driscoll's own axioms to be truly be axiomatic ... .
Monday, July 27, 2015
Driscolls announce pending move to Phoenix, recent auction at which MH assets were available for sale
http://markdriscoll.org/driscoll-family-update/
Grace and I were also honored that Pastor Brian Houston sat down to interview us, as he did with other ministry leaders, to show at the Hillsong conferences in Sydney and London. The link to that interview is here
Remember how back in 2012 when there was that interview the Driscolls had with Justin Brierley? Remember how Mark Driscoll complained his wife didn't get to say anything or get many questions asked of her? No? We can job your memory on that.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-driscolls-interview-with-justin.html
http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/12/a-blog-for-the-brits
January 12, 2012
There is reportedly an article coming out in a British Christian publication that features an interview with me. As is often the case, to stoke the fires of controversy, thereby increasing readership, which generates advertising revenue, a few quotes of mine have been taken completely out of context and sent into the Twittersphere. So, I thought I would put a bit of water on the fire by providing context.
...
I have a degree in communications from one of the top programs in the United States. So does my wife, Grace. We are used to reporters with agendas and selective editing of long interviews. Running into reporters with agendas and being selectively edited so that you are presented as someone that is perhaps not entirely accurate is the risk one takes when trying to get their message out through the media.
With the release of our book, Real Marriage, we have now done literally dozens of interviews with Christians and non-Christians. But the one that culminated in the forthcoming article was, in my opinion, the most disrespectful, adversarial, and subjective. As a result, we’ve since changed how we receive, process, and moderate media interviews.
The interview in question had nearly nothing to do with the book or its subject matter, which in my understanding was supposed to be the point of the interview. My wife, Grace, was almost entirely ignored in the interview, and I felt she was overall treated disrespectfully. The only questions asked were about any controversial thing I’ve ever said in the past 15 years with a host of questions that were adversarial and antagonistic. It felt like a personally offended critic had finally gotten his chance to exercise some authority over me.
Well for those who listened to all of the Brian Houston interview Grace Driscoll didn't say a whole ton of stuff. If anything a listener might wonder whether her role was, at times, come across as a kind of teleprompter or "amen" to Mark. This could have been an interview where she could have said a LOT but she didn't and it's not clear if that was because she just didn't have anything she particularly felt she wanted to say or whatever sentiments and thoughts she had were so utterly subordinate to her husband talking she didn't have an identity of her own.
Since it's possible the Houston interview has been replayed recently at another Hillsong event, Wenatchee The Hatchet has taken some time to cross reference the resignation narrative in that interview with the five other resignation narratives/statements now available. There's a series of posts with the following tag that goes through the details:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Houston%20interviews%20driscolls
The most recently tagged post should be this one:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-diachronic-survey-of-driscoll.html
There are six accounts of the resignation, basically, and while they add up to a coherent series of events, the galactic chasm between what Mark Driscoll spent 18 years saying from the pulpit about how to be a church member and Christian submitted to proper spiritual authority on the one hand, and how he and Grace Driscoll only this year claimed God said they could quit (which never came up as a reason for their departure in the 2014 statements) is troublesome.
Moving along ... literally ...
Auction? very recently? When? Where? Was the auction public? Because the first Wenatchee The Hatchet saw reference to said auction was from Mark Driscoll, founder of the corporation known as Mars Hill Fellowship aka Mars Hill.
Can Caleb Walters or Kerry Dodd confirm, possibly? So it was an independent auction that was very recent and one must surmise was not public. What's not 100% clear is if Mark Driscoll Ministries paid for the assets directly or by proxy. Anyone who might be willing and able to clarify things for the record is welcome to comment. Because if the auction was public, where was it publicly announced? The assets of the non-profit were put up for auction and how does Mark Driscoll Ministries have access to assets owned by a company for which Mark Driscoll was president? Couldn't somebody worry that this could have the appearance of being a little ... insider?
Anybody get an email from Mark Driscoll Ministries? The way the whole update is formulated it looks like it is itself the copy that may have been sent in the recently alluded to email, though that can't be a certainty. One can only guess that since the resources were gained after the independent auction conducted by an unnamed law firm that the email isn't like the Craig Gross scenario earlier this year Justin Dean ended up addressing. For more on that, go to this set of tagged posts.
So Mark Driscoll Ministries gained first access to the assets of The Resurgence ministries? Through an auction? Resurgence Publishing. Well, for those that remember this post.
set to expire at the end of May 2015, what's happening with the assets of Resurgence Publishing, Inc?
Another bit of note from the Driscoll update:
After meeting with many former church leaders for reconciliation and closure in Seattle, our family is in the midst of a new adventure as we have moved to the Phoenix area.
Which former church leaders? Lief? Jeff? James? Paul? Bent? Phil? Mike? Tim? The other Tim? Scott? The other Scott? If Mark Driscoll had reached out to former leaders then within a day or so one would hope to hear them confirm that actual meetings happened for the sake of Mark Driscoll's reputation. Those with whom Mark Driscoll says he's reconciled are welcome to come by and confirm that this happened. We're even allowing anonymous comments these days, though all comments go straight into moderation for the time being.
What's interesting is that the Driscolls have confirmed they are moving to the Phoenix area. Warren Throckmorton pondered whether this was the next move in May earlier this year.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/04/is-phoenix-next-for-mark-driscoll/
Looks like it has been confirmed, then, by none other than the Driscolls themselves. Is a church plant or a church role formulating? Are the Driscolls actually members of any church at all? Well ...
There are no concrete plans for ongoing local church ministry as of yet. This remains a calling and desire, but my plan is not to rush into anything. Instead, caring for each member of our family, seeking the wise counsel of pastors we are walking with, and building local relationships with Christian leaders to help build churches locally and globally is our focus. Beyond that, we will see how the Lord leads. If anything more develops we will let you know via this newsletter
The answer for the moment appears to be "no" across the board. There's no indication which church the Driscolls may land at. As Wenatchee has written a few times, were Mark Driscoll to simply be a rank and file tithing member who is not in any ministry capacity of any kind for at least five years, submitting to the kind of spiritual authority and discipline he spent decades telling others to abide by but hasn't himself, that's be great for him and probably also good for his family. If the recently linked-to site is correct that Driscoll's worth about $2.5 million and if Mark Driscoll Ministries in any way financially benefits from the liquidation of assets by the dissolving Mars Hill it's not clear why Mark Driscoll Ministries would particularly need money just yet. That the existence of Mark Driscoll Ministries reveals Driscoll has embraced the kind of eponymous approach to ministry he warned from the pulpit a decade ago was bad news is not so hot.
And with the promise of stuff in Ecclesiastes ...
Next Monday I’m also starting an online series about Ecclesiastes called “Meaningless Life?” My hope is to spend some months taking a road trip, verse by verse, together through this winding and confusing Book. This will include an informal audio podcast, blog based Bible commentary, and small group questions
If there's a book of the Bible Mark Driscoll has recycled material for almost as much as Song of Songs that book might be Ecclesiastes. He mentioned it as a series he preached in the early years of Mars Hill. He came back to it circa March to August 2005.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html
Driscoll used to warn that ye should be wary of guys who just keep recycling their old stuff. Well, if he recycles Ecclesiastes any more times he'll catch it up to Song of Songs for most re-used material within his public ministry.
But since he's going to hit Ecclesiastes (again), let Wenatchee The Hatchet commend to you, dear reader, a wonderfully readable and compelling commentary on Ecclesiastes by Martin Shields called The End of Wisdom. Shields makes a compelling case for why Qoholeth was probably not Solomon (at all) and that the Preacher was not "writing his way to repentance" as Driscoll spent the better part of a decade claiming.
Though defenses of the "traditional" view that Solomon was repenting have retained popularity Shields' observation that if Solomon were repenting you'd think there'd be any quotations of the Torah through that process. The one possible allusion to the Genesis creation accounts features a question expressing doubt whether the breath of man returns to God and the breath of animals returns to the earth. Shields proposes, reasonably, that even such implicit doubt about humanity bearing the divine image doesn't seem to fit a guy coming back to the righteous path and life of the mind. The polemics against the stupidity of raving prophets circa Ecclesiastes 5 also makes it seem tough to sustain the idea that Ecclesiastes is a diary of repentance.
Unless Mark Driscoll has gained some competence in handling wisdom literature revisiting Ecclesiastes without a drastically altered interpretive approach could be a disaster waiting to happen.
And then there's the thing that Driscoll warned us about, preachers who don't have anything new to say so they pull up stakes, move to somewhere new, and start recycling their material.
POSTSCRIPT
There's a reason that any actual meeting between Mark Driscoll and any former Mars Hill staff or pastors would preferably be confirmed by those third parties. The problem is that Mark Driscoll has shown that he went on record saying of himself and Grace "We were virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend." to Christianity Today and this in spite of the fact that in Real Marriage Mark and Grace Driscoll made it emphatically clear neither of them were virgins by the time they met each other and became sexually active together. That's just one for-instance in which Mark Driscoll directly and flatly contradicted his own testimony on his own marriage and sexual activity.
Then there's the other memorable time where he claimed in the Malachi series there was no kids' ministry at the start of Mars Hill because there were no kids, in spite of having said in his 2006 book he recruited Mike Gunn and Lief Moi to help him co-found what became Mars Hill because he regarded them as good dads.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/01/malachi-at-mars-hill-part-1-driscoll.html
http://marshill.com/media/malachi-living-for-a-legacy/where-is-my-honor
http://marshill.com/en/transcript/malachi-living-for-a-legacy/where-is-my-honor
http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/where-is-my-honor/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAtQlpQv9uc
The sermon was originally an hour and seven minutes, so don't expect to hear the part that's getting quoted here on the stream at Mark Driscoll Ministries. You need to get about 57 minutes into the unredacted audio of the original sermon for this.
MALACHI: LIVING FOR A LEGACY
WHERE IS MY HONOR?
about 57:27
Here’s where we’re at: Recently, 10,177 adults in attendance across Mars Hill. Fifteen churches, five states. We count people because people count. We count people because people count, and it’s not just numbers, it’s faces and names. There are also almost 2,500 kids, right? Can we say, “Praise God”? We like kids. When we started Mars Hill 17 years ago, there wasn’t even a children’s ministry—because there were no children. [emphasis added] People are coming in, getting saved, getting baptized, getting married, getting pregnant. Ideally, that’s the order, OK?
The pertinent quote gets said at about 01:00:35ish in the linked video.
Driscoll mentions pastors who cheat by recycling their greatest his about 44:00 in. He also mentions that pastors who use the preaching of others are cheating.
Confessions of a Reformission RevMark Driscoll, Zondervan
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:03-10-27016-2
page 54
... The church started as an idea I shared with Lief Moi and Mike Gunn. Lief is a descendant of Genghis Khan and his dad was a murderer, and Mike is a former football player. They proved to be invaluable, except for the occasional moments when they would stand toe-to-toe in a leadership meeting, threatening to beat the Holy Spirit out of each other. Both men were older than I and had years of ministry experience, and they were good fathers, loving husbands, and tough. [emphasis added]...
If Driscoll has shown himself unable to keep his own story straight about whether he was a virgin at the time he met Grace and whether or not co-founding pastors of Mars Hill had kids we really can make a point of requesting that whoever these people are Driscoll generically described reconciling with make a few clarifying statements for the record.
Grace and I were also honored that Pastor Brian Houston sat down to interview us, as he did with other ministry leaders, to show at the Hillsong conferences in Sydney and London. The link to that interview is here
Remember how back in 2012 when there was that interview the Driscolls had with Justin Brierley? Remember how Mark Driscoll complained his wife didn't get to say anything or get many questions asked of her? No? We can job your memory on that.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-driscolls-interview-with-justin.html
http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/12/a-blog-for-the-brits
January 12, 2012
There is reportedly an article coming out in a British Christian publication that features an interview with me. As is often the case, to stoke the fires of controversy, thereby increasing readership, which generates advertising revenue, a few quotes of mine have been taken completely out of context and sent into the Twittersphere. So, I thought I would put a bit of water on the fire by providing context.
...
I have a degree in communications from one of the top programs in the United States. So does my wife, Grace. We are used to reporters with agendas and selective editing of long interviews. Running into reporters with agendas and being selectively edited so that you are presented as someone that is perhaps not entirely accurate is the risk one takes when trying to get their message out through the media.
With the release of our book, Real Marriage, we have now done literally dozens of interviews with Christians and non-Christians. But the one that culminated in the forthcoming article was, in my opinion, the most disrespectful, adversarial, and subjective. As a result, we’ve since changed how we receive, process, and moderate media interviews.
The interview in question had nearly nothing to do with the book or its subject matter, which in my understanding was supposed to be the point of the interview. My wife, Grace, was almost entirely ignored in the interview, and I felt she was overall treated disrespectfully. The only questions asked were about any controversial thing I’ve ever said in the past 15 years with a host of questions that were adversarial and antagonistic. It felt like a personally offended critic had finally gotten his chance to exercise some authority over me.
Well for those who listened to all of the Brian Houston interview Grace Driscoll didn't say a whole ton of stuff. If anything a listener might wonder whether her role was, at times, come across as a kind of teleprompter or "amen" to Mark. This could have been an interview where she could have said a LOT but she didn't and it's not clear if that was because she just didn't have anything she particularly felt she wanted to say or whatever sentiments and thoughts she had were so utterly subordinate to her husband talking she didn't have an identity of her own.
Since it's possible the Houston interview has been replayed recently at another Hillsong event, Wenatchee The Hatchet has taken some time to cross reference the resignation narrative in that interview with the five other resignation narratives/statements now available. There's a series of posts with the following tag that goes through the details:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Houston%20interviews%20driscolls
The most recently tagged post should be this one:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-diachronic-survey-of-driscoll.html
There are six accounts of the resignation, basically, and while they add up to a coherent series of events, the galactic chasm between what Mark Driscoll spent 18 years saying from the pulpit about how to be a church member and Christian submitted to proper spiritual authority on the one hand, and how he and Grace Driscoll only this year claimed God said they could quit (which never came up as a reason for their departure in the 2014 statements) is troublesome.
Moving along ... literally ...
The Resurgence and our Move to Phoenix
The Mars Hill Church board also very recently approved the sale of the assets of The Resurgence ministries through an independent auction conducted by a law firm. Having now gained first access to these resources, it will be some time before we catalogue and decide what will happen with the content.
However, if you are newly receiving this email it is likely because you were part of The Resurgence mailing list. If you would like to receive ongoing updates from me, as well as free Bible teaching, you need to do nothing. If you would like to be removed from the mailing list you can do so by clicking the link at the bottom of this email and following the automated process.
After meeting with many former church leaders for reconciliation and closure in Seattle, our family is in the midst of a new adventure as we have moved to the Phoenix area.
Auction? very recently? When? Where? Was the auction public? Because the first Wenatchee The Hatchet saw reference to said auction was from Mark Driscoll, founder of the corporation known as Mars Hill Fellowship aka Mars Hill.
Can Caleb Walters or Kerry Dodd confirm, possibly? So it was an independent auction that was very recent and one must surmise was not public. What's not 100% clear is if Mark Driscoll Ministries paid for the assets directly or by proxy. Anyone who might be willing and able to clarify things for the record is welcome to comment. Because if the auction was public, where was it publicly announced? The assets of the non-profit were put up for auction and how does Mark Driscoll Ministries have access to assets owned by a company for which Mark Driscoll was president? Couldn't somebody worry that this could have the appearance of being a little ... insider?
Anybody get an email from Mark Driscoll Ministries? The way the whole update is formulated it looks like it is itself the copy that may have been sent in the recently alluded to email, though that can't be a certainty. One can only guess that since the resources were gained after the independent auction conducted by an unnamed law firm that the email isn't like the Craig Gross scenario earlier this year Justin Dean ended up addressing. For more on that, go to this set of tagged posts.
So Mark Driscoll Ministries gained first access to the assets of The Resurgence ministries? Through an auction? Resurgence Publishing. Well, for those that remember this post.
set to expire at the end of May 2015, what's happening with the assets of Resurgence Publishing, Inc?
Another bit of note from the Driscoll update:
After meeting with many former church leaders for reconciliation and closure in Seattle, our family is in the midst of a new adventure as we have moved to the Phoenix area.
Which former church leaders? Lief? Jeff? James? Paul? Bent? Phil? Mike? Tim? The other Tim? Scott? The other Scott? If Mark Driscoll had reached out to former leaders then within a day or so one would hope to hear them confirm that actual meetings happened for the sake of Mark Driscoll's reputation. Those with whom Mark Driscoll says he's reconciled are welcome to come by and confirm that this happened. We're even allowing anonymous comments these days, though all comments go straight into moderation for the time being.
What's interesting is that the Driscolls have confirmed they are moving to the Phoenix area. Warren Throckmorton pondered whether this was the next move in May earlier this year.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/04/is-phoenix-next-for-mark-driscoll/
Looks like it has been confirmed, then, by none other than the Driscolls themselves. Is a church plant or a church role formulating? Are the Driscolls actually members of any church at all? Well ...
There are no concrete plans for ongoing local church ministry as of yet. This remains a calling and desire, but my plan is not to rush into anything. Instead, caring for each member of our family, seeking the wise counsel of pastors we are walking with, and building local relationships with Christian leaders to help build churches locally and globally is our focus. Beyond that, we will see how the Lord leads. If anything more develops we will let you know via this newsletter
The answer for the moment appears to be "no" across the board. There's no indication which church the Driscolls may land at. As Wenatchee has written a few times, were Mark Driscoll to simply be a rank and file tithing member who is not in any ministry capacity of any kind for at least five years, submitting to the kind of spiritual authority and discipline he spent decades telling others to abide by but hasn't himself, that's be great for him and probably also good for his family. If the recently linked-to site is correct that Driscoll's worth about $2.5 million and if Mark Driscoll Ministries in any way financially benefits from the liquidation of assets by the dissolving Mars Hill it's not clear why Mark Driscoll Ministries would particularly need money just yet. That the existence of Mark Driscoll Ministries reveals Driscoll has embraced the kind of eponymous approach to ministry he warned from the pulpit a decade ago was bad news is not so hot.
And with the promise of stuff in Ecclesiastes ...
Next Monday I’m also starting an online series about Ecclesiastes called “Meaningless Life?” My hope is to spend some months taking a road trip, verse by verse, together through this winding and confusing Book. This will include an informal audio podcast, blog based Bible commentary, and small group questions
If there's a book of the Bible Mark Driscoll has recycled material for almost as much as Song of Songs that book might be Ecclesiastes. He mentioned it as a series he preached in the early years of Mars Hill. He came back to it circa March to August 2005.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html
Driscoll used to warn that ye should be wary of guys who just keep recycling their old stuff. Well, if he recycles Ecclesiastes any more times he'll catch it up to Song of Songs for most re-used material within his public ministry.
But since he's going to hit Ecclesiastes (again), let Wenatchee The Hatchet commend to you, dear reader, a wonderfully readable and compelling commentary on Ecclesiastes by Martin Shields called The End of Wisdom. Shields makes a compelling case for why Qoholeth was probably not Solomon (at all) and that the Preacher was not "writing his way to repentance" as Driscoll spent the better part of a decade claiming.
Though defenses of the "traditional" view that Solomon was repenting have retained popularity Shields' observation that if Solomon were repenting you'd think there'd be any quotations of the Torah through that process. The one possible allusion to the Genesis creation accounts features a question expressing doubt whether the breath of man returns to God and the breath of animals returns to the earth. Shields proposes, reasonably, that even such implicit doubt about humanity bearing the divine image doesn't seem to fit a guy coming back to the righteous path and life of the mind. The polemics against the stupidity of raving prophets circa Ecclesiastes 5 also makes it seem tough to sustain the idea that Ecclesiastes is a diary of repentance.
Unless Mark Driscoll has gained some competence in handling wisdom literature revisiting Ecclesiastes without a drastically altered interpretive approach could be a disaster waiting to happen.
And then there's the thing that Driscoll warned us about, preachers who don't have anything new to say so they pull up stakes, move to somewhere new, and start recycling their material.
POSTSCRIPT
There's a reason that any actual meeting between Mark Driscoll and any former Mars Hill staff or pastors would preferably be confirmed by those third parties. The problem is that Mark Driscoll has shown that he went on record saying of himself and Grace "We were virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend." to Christianity Today and this in spite of the fact that in Real Marriage Mark and Grace Driscoll made it emphatically clear neither of them were virgins by the time they met each other and became sexually active together. That's just one for-instance in which Mark Driscoll directly and flatly contradicted his own testimony on his own marriage and sexual activity.
Then there's the other memorable time where he claimed in the Malachi series there was no kids' ministry at the start of Mars Hill because there were no kids, in spite of having said in his 2006 book he recruited Mike Gunn and Lief Moi to help him co-found what became Mars Hill because he regarded them as good dads.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/01/malachi-at-mars-hill-part-1-driscoll.html
http://marshill.com/media/malachi-living-for-a-legacy/where-is-my-honor
http://marshill.com/en/transcript/malachi-living-for-a-legacy/where-is-my-honor
http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/where-is-my-honor/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAtQlpQv9uc
The sermon was originally an hour and seven minutes, so don't expect to hear the part that's getting quoted here on the stream at Mark Driscoll Ministries. You need to get about 57 minutes into the unredacted audio of the original sermon for this.
MALACHI: LIVING FOR A LEGACY
WHERE IS MY HONOR?
about 57:27
Here’s where we’re at: Recently, 10,177 adults in attendance across Mars Hill. Fifteen churches, five states. We count people because people count. We count people because people count, and it’s not just numbers, it’s faces and names. There are also almost 2,500 kids, right? Can we say, “Praise God”? We like kids. When we started Mars Hill 17 years ago, there wasn’t even a children’s ministry—because there were no children. [emphasis added] People are coming in, getting saved, getting baptized, getting married, getting pregnant. Ideally, that’s the order, OK?
The pertinent quote gets said at about 01:00:35ish in the linked video.
Driscoll mentions pastors who cheat by recycling their greatest his about 44:00 in. He also mentions that pastors who use the preaching of others are cheating.
Confessions of a Reformission RevMark Driscoll, Zondervan
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:03-10-27016-2
page 54
... The church started as an idea I shared with Lief Moi and Mike Gunn. Lief is a descendant of Genghis Khan and his dad was a murderer, and Mike is a former football player. They proved to be invaluable, except for the occasional moments when they would stand toe-to-toe in a leadership meeting, threatening to beat the Holy Spirit out of each other. Both men were older than I and had years of ministry experience, and they were good fathers, loving husbands, and tough. [emphasis added]...
If Driscoll has shown himself unable to keep his own story straight about whether he was a virgin at the time he met Grace and whether or not co-founding pastors of Mars Hill had kids we really can make a point of requesting that whoever these people are Driscoll generically described reconciling with make a few clarifying statements for the record.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Craig Ross provides account of the list buying, his understanding of Justin Dean's role, and where the names came from in connection to Mars Hill
http://www.craiggross.com/post/114475804871/i-dont-hate-mark-driscoll
You'll potentially just want to read the whole thing.
But of note ..., Craig Ross wrote the following:
...
We have known a lot of people from Mars Hill church (Seattle) over the years and even had Justin Dean do a project for us for about 30 days he worked with us. Justin Dean was the PR guy at Mars Hill for several years and ran point for Mark on a number of different projects. We interacted with Justin during the R13 conference and had stayed in touch from time to time. When Mars was shutting down, we contacted Justin about doing some more work with us and decided at the end of a 30 day project it was not a fit for us. I know he has continued to do work for Mark since leaving Mars.
At the end of last year, he let us know that Mars Hill was selling off the Resurgence website and all its assets. The going price was about 100k. We were not interested.
Last week, Justin emailed one of our staff and let us know that the email list from Resurgence was available for purchase for $1500 or $1350 with a coupon code I found at checkout.
...
Coming from him, we assumed this was a legit list of 90k emails from people involved with Resurgence. He told us he didn’t own the list or was not the one selling the list but we assumed it was solid since he was referring it to us and the site was public.
... and there's more but this is a bit early for Wenatchee to try to summarize things.
You'll potentially just want to read the whole thing.
But of note ..., Craig Ross wrote the following:
...
We have known a lot of people from Mars Hill church (Seattle) over the years and even had Justin Dean do a project for us for about 30 days he worked with us. Justin Dean was the PR guy at Mars Hill for several years and ran point for Mark on a number of different projects. We interacted with Justin during the R13 conference and had stayed in touch from time to time. When Mars was shutting down, we contacted Justin about doing some more work with us and decided at the end of a 30 day project it was not a fit for us. I know he has continued to do work for Mark since leaving Mars.
At the end of last year, he let us know that Mars Hill was selling off the Resurgence website and all its assets. The going price was about 100k. We were not interested.
Last week, Justin emailed one of our staff and let us know that the email list from Resurgence was available for purchase for $1500 or $1350 with a coupon code I found at checkout.
...
Coming from him, we assumed this was a legit list of 90k emails from people involved with Resurgence. He told us he didn’t own the list or was not the one selling the list but we assumed it was solid since he was referring it to us and the site was public.
... and there's more but this is a bit early for Wenatchee to try to summarize things.
Monday, March 23, 2015
question answered, Throckmorton reports a mass email from anti-porn ministry that bought Resurgence mailing list
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/03/23/mass-email-anti-porn-ministry-buys-mars-hill-church-resurgence-mailing-list/
Well, looks like the question has some of an answer. Throckmorton has published some spam that has been sent out lately. Of particular note is this:
On Monday, Mar 23, 2015 at 6:33 PM, Craig Gross <craig@xxxchurch.com>, wrote:
Hey Guys and Gals,
I sent you an email earlier. Just to be clear.
I apologize if my email caught you off guard. I bought an email list from http://www.churchleaderslist.com/.?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sendgrid.com&utm_medium=email Mark’s right hand guy at Mars Hill told us that this list was the Resurgence list.
Craig
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/03/23/mass-email-anti-porn-ministry-buys-mars-hill-church-resurgence-mailing-list/#ixzz3VGhn7QFk
Because as Wenatchee The Hatchet was musing earlier today, the donor/customer/client listings of Resurgence Publishing, Inc. might be one of the few assets the corporation would have to sell that somebody could use. And if Craig Gross was referring to Sutton Turner, well, Sutton Turner's the guy who directs/manages/owns/handles Resurgence Publishing Inc. With the company set to expire in late May selling off whatever actually viable assets might sell doesn't seem like a bad move.
Selling, buying or renting lists of names for donor cultivation or customer appeals is pretty common even in non-profit fundraising. It would be even more common in for-profit settings.
As Throckmorton has recently noted, the email list at the time Resurgence Publishing, Inc. went up for sale was approximately 60,000. That's not too shabby a sample size, in theory, but it would be understandable if all the people who just got spammed by Craig Gross and company were taken aback at getting a cold solicitation spam.
Well, folks, now you may have an opportunity to learn that list buying happens in ministries, too. List renting also happens--what that allows for is carpet-bombing a region with a solicitation to prospective donors. If people respond they get added to the donor data pool and if they don't they won't end up on the donor mailing lists for subsequent in-house solicitations. Without getting too detailed this is a field of work that Wenatchee The Hatchet knows a few things about. You won't be able to unsubscribe to the kind of spam Gross just sent recently because if it's a donor cultivation/prospect e-blast you might not even already be in the systems they have. But we'd need to know vastly more about the donor management systems of the organization to field that ... and it's the start of the work week.
Hey, at least Gross admitted he bought the list. And here Wenatchee The Hatchet was thinking maybe it was nice Sutton Turner didn't want any gifts or donations and isn't going to start a 501(c)3. Why bother if it turns out he's the one who sold the list of Resurgence donors/customers? Would Turner and/or Gross like to confirm if this was the case or clarify?
Well, looks like the question has some of an answer. Throckmorton has published some spam that has been sent out lately. Of particular note is this:
On Monday, Mar 23, 2015 at 6:33 PM, Craig Gross <craig@xxxchurch.com>, wrote:
Hey Guys and Gals,
I sent you an email earlier. Just to be clear.
I apologize if my email caught you off guard. I bought an email list from http://www.churchleaderslist.com/.?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sendgrid.com&utm_medium=email Mark’s right hand guy at Mars Hill told us that this list was the Resurgence list.
Craig
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/03/23/mass-email-anti-porn-ministry-buys-mars-hill-church-resurgence-mailing-list/#ixzz3VGhn7QFk
Because as Wenatchee The Hatchet was musing earlier today, the donor/customer/client listings of Resurgence Publishing, Inc. might be one of the few assets the corporation would have to sell that somebody could use. And if Craig Gross was referring to Sutton Turner, well, Sutton Turner's the guy who directs/manages/owns/handles Resurgence Publishing Inc. With the company set to expire in late May selling off whatever actually viable assets might sell doesn't seem like a bad move.
Selling, buying or renting lists of names for donor cultivation or customer appeals is pretty common even in non-profit fundraising. It would be even more common in for-profit settings.
As Throckmorton has recently noted, the email list at the time Resurgence Publishing, Inc. went up for sale was approximately 60,000. That's not too shabby a sample size, in theory, but it would be understandable if all the people who just got spammed by Craig Gross and company were taken aback at getting a cold solicitation spam.
Well, folks, now you may have an opportunity to learn that list buying happens in ministries, too. List renting also happens--what that allows for is carpet-bombing a region with a solicitation to prospective donors. If people respond they get added to the donor data pool and if they don't they won't end up on the donor mailing lists for subsequent in-house solicitations. Without getting too detailed this is a field of work that Wenatchee The Hatchet knows a few things about. You won't be able to unsubscribe to the kind of spam Gross just sent recently because if it's a donor cultivation/prospect e-blast you might not even already be in the systems they have. But we'd need to know vastly more about the donor management systems of the organization to field that ... and it's the start of the work week.
Hey, at least Gross admitted he bought the list. And here Wenatchee The Hatchet was thinking maybe it was nice Sutton Turner didn't want any gifts or donations and isn't going to start a 501(c)3. Why bother if it turns out he's the one who sold the list of Resurgence donors/customers? Would Turner and/or Gross like to confirm if this was the case or clarify?
set to expire at the end of May 2015, what's happening with the assets of Resurgence Publishing, Inc?
In the aftermath of Sutton Turner's resignation last year, Wenatchee The Hatchet posted a question as to who was going to manage Resurgence Publishing, Inc.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/repeating-earlier-question-as.html
and a little overview/review of the company
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/11/resurgence-publishing-for-profit-branch.html
... with some older coverage by Throckmorton about it being up for sale last year
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/23/have-100000-you-could-own-theresurgence-com/
and some brief acknowledgment of that coverage here ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/in-not-surprising-move-resurgence.html
and so, let's get to the details of when the corporation is set to expire.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603207560
RESURGENCE PUBLISHING, INC.
UBI Number 603207560
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Profit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 05/17/2012
Expiration Date 05/31/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name CT CORPORATION SYSTEM
Address
505 UNION AVE SE STE120
OLYMPIA WA 98501
Governing Persons
President,Secretary,Treasurer,Chairman
TURNER, JOHN
1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
The corporation is going to expire at the end of May this year and it's a for-profit corporation that specialized in publishing material. In the wake of the plagiarism scandal that cross 2013 and 2014 it remains to be seen how well Driscoll's books will sell and in many cases the copyrights were owned by the individual pastors as authors rather than by Resurgence Publishing Inc.
So if that was "generally" the case, what on earth would be an asset Resurgence could sell?
Customer and donor lists. It might be one of the few things they have that would be worth selling for all we do and don't know. But that ministries and publishers could benefit from data-mining whatever lists Resurgence had hardly seems like a controversial proposal. If renting or buying lists of donors (actual donors for other organizations or prospective donors based on carpet bombing every living taxpayer in a ZIP code) is common practice in higher end non-profits it would certainly be something that happens in the for-profit sector.
Selling the list is probably just a matter of time, might have even happened already. But the only way to know for sure would be if you suddenly started getting spammed by ministries or publishers you've never been contacted by before.
So there's some follow-up questions. If Resurgence Publishing, Inc. was up for sale did someone buy it? If so that data would have to have been mined by now for some kind of solicitation, or so it seems to Wenatchee The Hatchet. But let's step back a bit and ask if anyone knows whether or not the company has even been purchased yet if it was put on sale.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/repeating-earlier-question-as.html
and a little overview/review of the company
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/11/resurgence-publishing-for-profit-branch.html
... with some older coverage by Throckmorton about it being up for sale last year
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/23/have-100000-you-could-own-theresurgence-com/
and some brief acknowledgment of that coverage here ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/in-not-surprising-move-resurgence.html
and so, let's get to the details of when the corporation is set to expire.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603207560
RESURGENCE PUBLISHING, INC.
UBI Number 603207560
Category REG
Profit/Nonprofit Profit
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 05/17/2012
Expiration Date 05/31/2015
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
Registered Agent Information
Agent Name CT CORPORATION SYSTEM
Address
505 UNION AVE SE STE120
OLYMPIA WA 98501
Governing Persons
President,Secretary,Treasurer,Chairman
TURNER, JOHN
1411 NW 50TH ST
SEATTLE, WA 98107
The corporation is going to expire at the end of May this year and it's a for-profit corporation that specialized in publishing material. In the wake of the plagiarism scandal that cross 2013 and 2014 it remains to be seen how well Driscoll's books will sell and in many cases the copyrights were owned by the individual pastors as authors rather than by Resurgence Publishing Inc.
So if that was "generally" the case, what on earth would be an asset Resurgence could sell?
Customer and donor lists. It might be one of the few things they have that would be worth selling for all we do and don't know. But that ministries and publishers could benefit from data-mining whatever lists Resurgence had hardly seems like a controversial proposal. If renting or buying lists of donors (actual donors for other organizations or prospective donors based on carpet bombing every living taxpayer in a ZIP code) is common practice in higher end non-profits it would certainly be something that happens in the for-profit sector.
Selling the list is probably just a matter of time, might have even happened already. But the only way to know for sure would be if you suddenly started getting spammed by ministries or publishers you've never been contacted by before.
So there's some follow-up questions. If Resurgence Publishing, Inc. was up for sale did someone buy it? If so that data would have to have been mined by now for some kind of solicitation, or so it seems to Wenatchee The Hatchet. But let's step back a bit and ask if anyone knows whether or not the company has even been purchased yet if it was put on sale.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Vanderbloemen misses what Mark might have called the big E on the eye chart, the smaller controversies still had a center, the use of power and money to promote a brand rather than serve the church
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/12/19/ive-never-seen-anything-quite-like-this-chaotic-situation-that-led-to-famed-pastors-resignation-has-prominent-church-expert-issuing-a-major-warning/
...
Driscoll‘s recent resignation from the church he founded was followed by another shocking announcement: Mars Hill is dissolving by year’s end, with its 11 congregations becoming independent houses of worship.
And Vanderbloemen said that the stunning situation carries with it a plethora of lessons to be learned.
“Mark stepped down at his own choice, but it wasn’t without a lot of pressure,” he said. “Mark’s departure didn’t contain any of the normal elements of a scandal.”
There wasn’t an extramarital affair nor any other explosive singular event that contributed to his downfall, he argued, calling Driscoll a “brilliant communicator.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Vanderbloemen said, noting that Driscoll ended up leaving over a wide variety of smaller infractions and debates that were perpetuated on the Internet. “We have seen a lot of guys have to leave, but never from the death of a thousand cuts that happened online.”
He continued, “There was a weird sort of perfect storm of critics and disorganization.”
The problem with this lessons learned variation is that there kind of "was" one thing that could be identified as the start of the end, Real Marriage. The thing is complex enough a numbered list seems necessary to show just how far short of Mars Hill history Vanderbloemen has fallen in diagnosing the decline of Driscoll. It's true that a lot of little things showed up but there's this unnerving pattern of where all these smaller things have clustered, Real Marriage.
1.
This was the book for which a side company was created in 2011 years after Mark said he didn't have a side company. And yet here in a 2009 sermon we heard Driscoll say he hoped one of his books would "pop" so that he could just live off his royalties and not even draw any salary from Mars Hill. Did that ever happen? The side company was incorporated in Colorado for reasons that have never yet been explained.
So there's just the side company, for starters, but there were other problems.
2.
This was the book in which it was awkwardly obvious Grace Driscoll made use of phrases and concepts developed by Dan Allender, an author whom she publicly listed as one of her favorites circa 2000, without giving him so much as a single footnote's credit. While subsequent editions fixed the problem of mentioning Allender at all and including a footnote, there's been no explanation why this couldn't have been done for the first edition. Wenatchee The Hatchet understands that the Driscolls might feel less than eager to give thanks to Wenatchee The Hatchet for pointing out the failure to properly credit Allender's work the first time around.
And why does it matter that there weren't footnotes? Because Driscoll told Janet Mefferd "maybe I made a mistake" a few years after he'd boasted about his impressive long-term memory.
The problem wasn't just that there were questions of citation in the book (many), because while some of these look like they got fixed the problem is that they were ever there to begin with. Mark Driscoll and his editors had to have seriously dropped the ball for so many errors to just slip by, assuming for the sake of discussion that it wasn't planned. Even if we assume for sake of conversation Driscoll was somehow not a plagiarist the evidence spoke otherwise and the evidence was what editors and publishers let hit the market. Even if we assume Mark Driscoll never intentionally plagiarized the doubt this all could cast on the integrity and ethics of Thomas Nelson is a bit troubling.
3.
This was the book that was rigged a place on the NYT bestseller list.
So not only was this a book in which there were citation errors it turns out a company was basically hired to help facilitate the appropriate number of geographically diversified sales to ensure that this Driscoll book would land a #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list. Even though some remarkably restrained words were published in a memo asking whether this campaign to promote the book might raise questions about ethics at Mars Hill and potentially give outside critics a basis for criticism ... the campaign was undertaken anyway.
The implications of the Result Source side of things would be hard for an outsider to fully appreciate. There are questions to be dealt with as to how the individual and bulk orders could have been fulfilled. Throckmorton has touched on a website that could have taken care of the individual orders.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/22/realmarriagememo/
But the bulk orders, most likely given what little information has been available, could have been handled by the Mars Hill Military Mission, whose mission was simply distributing Mark Driscoll books. The mission was based in the Olympia campus and then moved and assimilated into Mars Hill Global some time in 2012. For a screencap variation go here. Seth Winterhalter should get some probing questions about what, if anything, MH Olympia and associated military mission may have known or done with respect to the Real Marriage promotion campaign.
In other words, for folks who don't have the full background here, the reason Result Source was a bit of a scandal was that in addition to rigging a bestseller list it looks more and more as though the resources and money of the church and its volunteer ministries may have been put to use to promote the book.
4.
This was the book whose existence and associated sermon became the campaign through which Mars Hill launched half a dozen plants or replants.
2012's book and sermon integrated campaign was also, incontestably, the first time in the history of Mars Hill that a sermon series was designed explicitly and extensively around not a book of the Bible but a book from Mark and Grace Driscoll. Maybe half a dozen campuses were launching or getting a relaunch and the sermon series uniting them all was Real Marriage. This was the unified campaign.
Even though Sutton Turner was concerned about the fiscal viability of launching half a dozen campuses while also promoting the book as a "world war three" process, it all happened anyway.
5.
This was the book whose narrative overturned nearly a decade's worth of the public narrative about Mark and Grace Driscoll's marriage as the story of Mars Hill. It also introduced statements by Mark Driscoll that he was bitter against his wife (Grace) over a lack of sex in a 2012 book and, if Mark's 2008 axioms about bitterness as a demonic foothold in 2008 were true, should cast doubt on Mark's spiritual health in the 1996-2007 period, to put it mildly.
The narrative of Real Marriage also jarred in its story of the vomit dream because that story was remarkably similar to a story from Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Not only did it seem to some longtime attenders of Mars Hill that Mark and Grace Driscoll were revealing their marriage was not so hot, this was being conveyed in a way that seemed to change the dating of a story that had previously been shared for the record.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/confessions-of-reformission-rev-2006.html
Now there's the obvious and necessary "so what?" So what if Mark and Grace Driscoll had a sorta meh marriage? Well, let's go get a quote from Pastor Tim Smith
http://theresurgence.com/2008/10/04/interview-with-tim-smith
3:40
TS
I didn't have as much of that community in Portland and I wanted to go be an intern at Microsoft because you could make 60k, and just do
tech support over there at the height of the boom over there.
MD
and you could wear flip-flops to work and--[TS starts speaking]
TS
Yeah, exactly. You could have BEER at work. And it seemed like a good plan at the time but the last thing I thought I would be when I came here was a pastor. I was not, I was not in good shape. My marriage was not in great shape. I had no idea what it meant to be a husband, biblically. There was a lot of hidden sin in my life. It was just a mess and I thought I knew what it meant to be a pastor because I'd been a church kid all my life. It wasn't anything--I just didn't want anything to do with it.
But really, really seeing Mars Hill; seeing how God had changed peoples lives, changed people that would never darken the door of most churches that I went to was completely transformational to me.
And moving into your house, it was that fateful summer you were trying to paint your house yourself, and so I was helping you paint and we were talking theology. And I thought I was a theological but I really didn't know jack. And so just starting to read, starting to think, having a ton of conversations with people that love Jesus but didn't necessarily grow up in the church and have the baggage like I had, was just a huge transformation for me.
Tim Smith's story isn't uncommon in the history and press of Mars Hill, a guy shows up with a Christian background of some kind but professes to not know anything about how to be a proper biblical husband to his wife and then comes to Mars Hill and is transformed by seeing all the transformation.
And for that, well, it becomes impossible to not discuss Mark Driscoll's challenge to men to be men without dredging up William Wallace II and "Pussified Nation" because it was during that, um, season, that Driscoll particularly hammered on the issue.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-historical-and-social-setting-for.html
IF it turned out amidst all that life-changing transformational community stuff Tim Smith described in the 2008 Resurgence interview with Driscoll was covering up a lot of bitterness that Mark Driscoll was harboring against his wife over a lack of sex then, well, that disparity between the public narrative and the private reality matters. It would matter even if we didn't consider the possibility that if Mark Driscoll were judged by the spiritual warfare axioms he's used on others he might have to explain why all that bitterness about a lack of sex didn't make him demonically influenced.
Those are the four basic reasons Real Marriage could be seen as a fulcrum in the history of Mars Hill. The cumulative concerns can be put this way, as more information about the nature of the book and its promotion came to light it began to seem to people who were part of Mars Hill that the Drisccolls sacrificed scholarly and organizational integrity and used the resources of Mars Hill Church to promote a slipshod product for the sake of Mark Driscoll's celebrity at the literal and figurative expense of the people of the church.
6.
The aftermath, in which mass layoffs occurred at MH in 2012 during the season in which the Driscolls bought a million-dollar house in Snohomish county
As if that weren't enough, season after season of layoffs built up in which Dave Bruskas could say "we need your help", telling MH leaders to not question layoffs in a message sent days after Mark and Grace Driscoll finalized the purchase of a million-dollar home in Woodway.
Believe it or not these are only the controversies that are in some way actually associated with just the book Real Marriage and the events surrounding its publication. We know from Mark Driscoll's own tweets that two finalists for publishers for the marriage book were considered as far back as December 2010.
In other words, if someone were to wonder whether Mars Hill was sold out to promote the brand of Driscoll this looks more and more like Real Marriage was the book for which the sell out was done. In light of statements from Dave Bruskas of late, it's also begun to sound as if Munson was inseparably involved in the 2011 process, too.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/16/mars-hill-church-executive-elder-dave-bruskas-on-mark-driscoll-nyts-best-seller-list-strange-fire-and-more/
You can't knock out a book with borrowed ideas and a lack of credits that is then rigged a spot on a bestseller list using church resources that earns royalties funneled into the kind of side company you said years before you didn't have and maybe even turn out to have bought a million-dollar home in secret and have this be a small thing.
Vanderbloemen may sincerely have no idea what was going on but as yet his opinion doesn't seem material beyond his promoting of his services and products. Folks get to do that, to be sure, but why he'd be quoted as having any familiarity with the Mars Hill situation in particular seems a puzzle. He's sort of right that what made the Driscoll resignation unusual is that it didn't involve a sex scandal or some "single" explosive event. But, in a way, it did, a prevailing and possibly seven-year long pattern in which Driscoll treated Mars Hill not as a community to be served but a piggy bank to be cultivated. After sermons in which he said you should use money and love people the wheeling and dealing to get the 2012 book to "pop" begins to paint a portrait behind the scenes of a man who may have begun to love money and to really, really use people.
If there were a way to try to sum up what happened it's that it looks like Mark Driscoll and his executive leaders made a sacrifices of the resources (and possibly even the legitimacy of the 501(c)3 status) of Mars Hill Church to raise Mark Driscoll's celebrity up to the "next level".
If Vanderbloemen hasn't figured that out then he has, to borrow an old phrase popular with Mark Driscoll, missed the big E on the eye chart. And it's starting to seem as though in the long run Mark Driscoll missed it, too.
POSTSCRIPT:
Vanderbloemen on corporate rotation in a church staff suggests, if anything, that Mark Driscoll was following those ideas. For everyone who remembers the revolving door of employment at Mars Hill, how many people got gutted from staff because the ministry had outgrown the giftings of the men and women who had founded some of those ministries?
...
Driscoll‘s recent resignation from the church he founded was followed by another shocking announcement: Mars Hill is dissolving by year’s end, with its 11 congregations becoming independent houses of worship.
And Vanderbloemen said that the stunning situation carries with it a plethora of lessons to be learned.
“Mark stepped down at his own choice, but it wasn’t without a lot of pressure,” he said. “Mark’s departure didn’t contain any of the normal elements of a scandal.”
There wasn’t an extramarital affair nor any other explosive singular event that contributed to his downfall, he argued, calling Driscoll a “brilliant communicator.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Vanderbloemen said, noting that Driscoll ended up leaving over a wide variety of smaller infractions and debates that were perpetuated on the Internet. “We have seen a lot of guys have to leave, but never from the death of a thousand cuts that happened online.”
He continued, “There was a weird sort of perfect storm of critics and disorganization.”
The problem with this lessons learned variation is that there kind of "was" one thing that could be identified as the start of the end, Real Marriage. The thing is complex enough a numbered list seems necessary to show just how far short of Mars Hill history Vanderbloemen has fallen in diagnosing the decline of Driscoll. It's true that a lot of little things showed up but there's this unnerving pattern of where all these smaller things have clustered, Real Marriage.
1.
This was the book for which a side company was created in 2011 years after Mark said he didn't have a side company. And yet here in a 2009 sermon we heard Driscoll say he hoped one of his books would "pop" so that he could just live off his royalties and not even draw any salary from Mars Hill. Did that ever happen? The side company was incorporated in Colorado for reasons that have never yet been explained.
So there's just the side company, for starters, but there were other problems.
2.
This was the book in which it was awkwardly obvious Grace Driscoll made use of phrases and concepts developed by Dan Allender, an author whom she publicly listed as one of her favorites circa 2000, without giving him so much as a single footnote's credit. While subsequent editions fixed the problem of mentioning Allender at all and including a footnote, there's been no explanation why this couldn't have been done for the first edition. Wenatchee The Hatchet understands that the Driscolls might feel less than eager to give thanks to Wenatchee The Hatchet for pointing out the failure to properly credit Allender's work the first time around.
And why does it matter that there weren't footnotes? Because Driscoll told Janet Mefferd "maybe I made a mistake" a few years after he'd boasted about his impressive long-term memory.
The problem wasn't just that there were questions of citation in the book (many), because while some of these look like they got fixed the problem is that they were ever there to begin with. Mark Driscoll and his editors had to have seriously dropped the ball for so many errors to just slip by, assuming for the sake of discussion that it wasn't planned. Even if we assume for sake of conversation Driscoll was somehow not a plagiarist the evidence spoke otherwise and the evidence was what editors and publishers let hit the market. Even if we assume Mark Driscoll never intentionally plagiarized the doubt this all could cast on the integrity and ethics of Thomas Nelson is a bit troubling.
3.
This was the book that was rigged a place on the NYT bestseller list.
So not only was this a book in which there were citation errors it turns out a company was basically hired to help facilitate the appropriate number of geographically diversified sales to ensure that this Driscoll book would land a #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list. Even though some remarkably restrained words were published in a memo asking whether this campaign to promote the book might raise questions about ethics at Mars Hill and potentially give outside critics a basis for criticism ... the campaign was undertaken anyway.
The implications of the Result Source side of things would be hard for an outsider to fully appreciate. There are questions to be dealt with as to how the individual and bulk orders could have been fulfilled. Throckmorton has touched on a website that could have taken care of the individual orders.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/22/realmarriagememo/
But the bulk orders, most likely given what little information has been available, could have been handled by the Mars Hill Military Mission, whose mission was simply distributing Mark Driscoll books. The mission was based in the Olympia campus and then moved and assimilated into Mars Hill Global some time in 2012. For a screencap variation go here. Seth Winterhalter should get some probing questions about what, if anything, MH Olympia and associated military mission may have known or done with respect to the Real Marriage promotion campaign.
In other words, for folks who don't have the full background here, the reason Result Source was a bit of a scandal was that in addition to rigging a bestseller list it looks more and more as though the resources and money of the church and its volunteer ministries may have been put to use to promote the book.
4.
This was the book whose existence and associated sermon became the campaign through which Mars Hill launched half a dozen plants or replants.
2012's book and sermon integrated campaign was also, incontestably, the first time in the history of Mars Hill that a sermon series was designed explicitly and extensively around not a book of the Bible but a book from Mark and Grace Driscoll. Maybe half a dozen campuses were launching or getting a relaunch and the sermon series uniting them all was Real Marriage. This was the unified campaign.
Even though Sutton Turner was concerned about the fiscal viability of launching half a dozen campuses while also promoting the book as a "world war three" process, it all happened anyway.
5.
This was the book whose narrative overturned nearly a decade's worth of the public narrative about Mark and Grace Driscoll's marriage as the story of Mars Hill. It also introduced statements by Mark Driscoll that he was bitter against his wife (Grace) over a lack of sex in a 2012 book and, if Mark's 2008 axioms about bitterness as a demonic foothold in 2008 were true, should cast doubt on Mark's spiritual health in the 1996-2007 period, to put it mildly.
The narrative of Real Marriage also jarred in its story of the vomit dream because that story was remarkably similar to a story from Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Not only did it seem to some longtime attenders of Mars Hill that Mark and Grace Driscoll were revealing their marriage was not so hot, this was being conveyed in a way that seemed to change the dating of a story that had previously been shared for the record.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/confessions-of-reformission-rev-2006.html
Now there's the obvious and necessary "so what?" So what if Mark and Grace Driscoll had a sorta meh marriage? Well, let's go get a quote from Pastor Tim Smith
http://theresurgence.com/2008/10/04/interview-with-tim-smith
3:40
TS
I didn't have as much of that community in Portland and I wanted to go be an intern at Microsoft because you could make 60k, and just do
tech support over there at the height of the boom over there.
MD
and you could wear flip-flops to work and--[TS starts speaking]
TS
Yeah, exactly. You could have BEER at work. And it seemed like a good plan at the time but the last thing I thought I would be when I came here was a pastor. I was not, I was not in good shape. My marriage was not in great shape. I had no idea what it meant to be a husband, biblically. There was a lot of hidden sin in my life. It was just a mess and I thought I knew what it meant to be a pastor because I'd been a church kid all my life. It wasn't anything--I just didn't want anything to do with it.
But really, really seeing Mars Hill; seeing how God had changed peoples lives, changed people that would never darken the door of most churches that I went to was completely transformational to me.
And moving into your house, it was that fateful summer you were trying to paint your house yourself, and so I was helping you paint and we were talking theology. And I thought I was a theological but I really didn't know jack. And so just starting to read, starting to think, having a ton of conversations with people that love Jesus but didn't necessarily grow up in the church and have the baggage like I had, was just a huge transformation for me.
Tim Smith's story isn't uncommon in the history and press of Mars Hill, a guy shows up with a Christian background of some kind but professes to not know anything about how to be a proper biblical husband to his wife and then comes to Mars Hill and is transformed by seeing all the transformation.
And for that, well, it becomes impossible to not discuss Mark Driscoll's challenge to men to be men without dredging up William Wallace II and "Pussified Nation" because it was during that, um, season, that Driscoll particularly hammered on the issue.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-historical-and-social-setting-for.html
IF it turned out amidst all that life-changing transformational community stuff Tim Smith described in the 2008 Resurgence interview with Driscoll was covering up a lot of bitterness that Mark Driscoll was harboring against his wife over a lack of sex then, well, that disparity between the public narrative and the private reality matters. It would matter even if we didn't consider the possibility that if Mark Driscoll were judged by the spiritual warfare axioms he's used on others he might have to explain why all that bitterness about a lack of sex didn't make him demonically influenced.
Those are the four basic reasons Real Marriage could be seen as a fulcrum in the history of Mars Hill. The cumulative concerns can be put this way, as more information about the nature of the book and its promotion came to light it began to seem to people who were part of Mars Hill that the Drisccolls sacrificed scholarly and organizational integrity and used the resources of Mars Hill Church to promote a slipshod product for the sake of Mark Driscoll's celebrity at the literal and figurative expense of the people of the church.
6.
The aftermath, in which mass layoffs occurred at MH in 2012 during the season in which the Driscolls bought a million-dollar house in Snohomish county
As if that weren't enough, season after season of layoffs built up in which Dave Bruskas could say "we need your help", telling MH leaders to not question layoffs in a message sent days after Mark and Grace Driscoll finalized the purchase of a million-dollar home in Woodway.
Believe it or not these are only the controversies that are in some way actually associated with just the book Real Marriage and the events surrounding its publication. We know from Mark Driscoll's own tweets that two finalists for publishers for the marriage book were considered as far back as December 2010.
In other words, if someone were to wonder whether Mars Hill was sold out to promote the brand of Driscoll this looks more and more like Real Marriage was the book for which the sell out was done. In light of statements from Dave Bruskas of late, it's also begun to sound as if Munson was inseparably involved in the 2011 process, too.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/16/mars-hill-church-executive-elder-dave-bruskas-on-mark-driscoll-nyts-best-seller-list-strange-fire-and-more/
You can't knock out a book with borrowed ideas and a lack of credits that is then rigged a spot on a bestseller list using church resources that earns royalties funneled into the kind of side company you said years before you didn't have and maybe even turn out to have bought a million-dollar home in secret and have this be a small thing.
Vanderbloemen may sincerely have no idea what was going on but as yet his opinion doesn't seem material beyond his promoting of his services and products. Folks get to do that, to be sure, but why he'd be quoted as having any familiarity with the Mars Hill situation in particular seems a puzzle. He's sort of right that what made the Driscoll resignation unusual is that it didn't involve a sex scandal or some "single" explosive event. But, in a way, it did, a prevailing and possibly seven-year long pattern in which Driscoll treated Mars Hill not as a community to be served but a piggy bank to be cultivated. After sermons in which he said you should use money and love people the wheeling and dealing to get the 2012 book to "pop" begins to paint a portrait behind the scenes of a man who may have begun to love money and to really, really use people.
If there were a way to try to sum up what happened it's that it looks like Mark Driscoll and his executive leaders made a sacrifices of the resources (and possibly even the legitimacy of the 501(c)3 status) of Mars Hill Church to raise Mark Driscoll's celebrity up to the "next level".
If Vanderbloemen hasn't figured that out then he has, to borrow an old phrase popular with Mark Driscoll, missed the big E on the eye chart. And it's starting to seem as though in the long run Mark Driscoll missed it, too.
POSTSCRIPT:
Vanderbloemen on corporate rotation in a church staff suggests, if anything, that Mark Driscoll was following those ideas. For everyone who remembers the revolving door of employment at Mars Hill, how many people got gutted from staff because the ministry had outgrown the giftings of the men and women who had founded some of those ministries?
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