We've discussed the conundrum of Sutton Turner having reported:
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
*Unfortunately, Mars Hill’s attorneys have requested that I not blog. I have removed some of the financial information as well as other non-financial information in response to their request.
When in the earlier statement they were:
http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on
For the past several weeks, I have been planning to discuss the lessons I have learned from events and mistakes at Mars Hill Church on my website. Earlier this week, I wrote three separate blogs regarding the ResultSource decision in 2011 at Mars Hill. Today, I planned to focus on Mars Hill Global. However, last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill’s former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week.
More recently, Turner seemed to indicate that attorneys in association with Mars Hill had recently invoked litigation. This comment quoted below does not seem to have referred to a reported pending suit against former MH legal officers, but against Turner individually.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/05/sutton-turner-talks-mars-hill-global-says-lawyers-asks-him-to-leave-out-financial-information/#comment-2011875134
Sutton Turner > Warren Throckmorton • 9 hours ago
The litigation threat was against me (personally), nothing outside. I honestly don't understand it. As I said before in my blog, if the church was still a church, I would not communicate about anything, however the church is dead and it is time to learn from my mistakes and my sin.
I wanted to publicly apologize to people that had been hurt by my sin and my mistakes, following my 1:1 meetings with people directly that I needed to reconcile with. I thought it was time to communicate the full story - in detail with $ - however "they" got wind (honestly, don't know how) of what I was doing and told me to stop, with a threat. If I get sued for doing what I have done, my wife and I are fine with it.
It would seem Turner has nothing to lose and everything to gain by sharing where the money was spent and when in terms of clearing the air. It's a shame that it took the process of the formal dissolution of the corporation to spur him to considering this option.
However, something that seems worth noting is that the lack of clarity about what Mars Hill Global did and didn't do came in during the Sutton Turner regime. Back when Munson was legal president, there didn't seem to be any lack of clarity about what Global did. Driscoll explained the 2009-era vision for Global in a sermon that did not get transcribed and that Wenatchee The Hatchet had to transcribe. It's worth revisiting to see what was being said on behalf of Global in those years.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
Whether or not it was former or current Mars Hill attorneys who have insisted that Turner not blog about Mars Hill has yet to be clarified but the statements made dealing with Mars Hill Global can be dealt with independent of questions as to which attorneys that were or weren't with Mars Hill got in some kind of touch with Turner.
Now we can get to the Turner era.
http://investyourgifts.com/mars-hill-global/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
Just a few observations about the following:
...
Global Focus
The vision and activities connected to the Global Fund must focus on reaching the worldwide church. As a person sits in front of his computer in Qatar, London, Cape Town, or Sydney, he does not care about Mars Hill planting in Everett. As an international citizen, however, he cares greatly about global evangelism, global missions, global causes for Jesus, global church-planting, etc. Though the sentiment is rare among Americans, people abroad feel a sense [of] belonging kinship with the global community.
Flagship Projects
of the money that comes into the Global Fund, designate a fixed percentage internally for highly visible, marketable projects such as mission trips, orphan care, support for pastors, and missionaries in the third world, etc (ten to fifteen strategic operations in locations where Mars Hill wants to be long term). This percentage should be flexible (not a "tithe"), and not communicated to the public. Support for Mars Hill Global would be support for Mars Hill Church in general, but the difference and the draw would be that a portion of Global gifts would also benefit projects that spread the gospel and serve the needs of people around the world.
Even if unintentional the gap between the global/Africa emphasis in soliciting funds and the reality of local use created a problem. The problem was, basically, that some people felt that if Mars Hill was going to solicit money the solicitation ought to have accented the majority of activity and expenditure.
asf
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/01/mars-hill-global-fund-help-the-helpless-or-use-the-helpless/
...
The purpose statement in the November 2011 memo below is almost identical to another November 2011 memo I posted in early May of this year which signaled a change of focus for Mars Hill Global.
[WtH the other memo can be found here]
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/GlobalFundMemo2011.png
BENEFITS
The Global Fund could be beneficial in a number of ways, besides the obvious gain of increased funding:
* For a relatively low cost (e.g. $10k/month), supporting a few missionaries and benevolence projects would serve to deflect criticism, increase goodwill, and create opportunities to influence and learn from other ministries
* Many small churches who may consider joining Mars Hill hesitate because they do not believe we support "missions." While we need to continue to challenge the assumptions underlying a claim, the Global Fund would serve as a simple, easy way to deflate such criticism and help lead change in those congregations
* The ability to communicate and interact with supporters of Mars Hill Global provides an avenue for promoting events, recruiting leaders, and developing Mars Hill core groups in strategic cities
IMPLEMENTATION
* EE sets specific guidelines on what Global Fund will financially support
* Possible suggestions: Church Planting, Orphan Care, and Widow Care in Developing Countries
* Specific targets will easily allow MHC to say "no" to the flood of request that will come.
* Launch MH Global 3 weeks before Easter 2012
* Website
* Video
* Testimonies of Jesus working in developing countries
* Call to give
* Monthly updates from all global fund projects.
What Turner and the others may not yet fully appreciate is that what can seem controversial about Global is that whatever good it did and whatever funds it raised, the nature of the memo highlights the benefits of Global for the brand of Mars Hill more than those whose needs would be met by Mars Hill's financial resources and activity.
There's an obvious point that could be easy to miss in the memo. You might not have spotted it but it's the Easter 2012 part. The November 2011 memos published by Turner explore Global as a "sleeping giant" but why would Turner and company have been interested in that?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
In the spring of 2012 Turner sent a memo indicating that Mars Hill, at the risk of putting things to simply, was teetering on the brink of financial ruin, pursuing a series of projects at the same time that were not financially sustainable. The multiple campus launches and relaunches, the promotion of Real Marriage, these things were taxing the resources. Turner seemed convinced giving was not what it could have been. Whether the church should have been renting the city of Ephesus for a day didn't come up but it might have been part of the concern, maybe.
The point is, let's suggest that given that by the spring of 2012 the memo linked to above suggests a panic mode about the fiscal competence of the Martian culture. Global looked like an untapped resource, "a sleeping giant" that would be beneficial to the church. Now in the spring of 2012 there were mass layoffs and adjustments. In spite of that Driscoll would go on to declare that FY2012 had been the best year ever.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
http://marshill.com/media/jesus-loves-his-church/jesus-gave-us-communion#transcript
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5, 2012
... And in that same spirit, we like to notify the church of how things are going. That includes monthly updates for all of Mars Hill. In one sense, we’re one church, in another sense, we’re fourteen local churches scattered across four different states, and pregnant with five more churches, hopefully to be birthed in about a year. And what we like to do is give a global update for how Mars Hill is doing, and then also allow the lead pastors of each local church to give a local update for how things are going at that particular location.
Our fiscal year, our budget year, runs from July through June, so we just finished our fiscal year, and those who are administratively gifted and allow us to steward the resources that God has given us, have put together a final year-end report, and I’m really excited to share it with you.
Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been. [emphasis added[
In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
...
Just off the top of my head, I know that Pastor Sutton Turner, your executive pastor, is negotiating deals for Mars Hill Everett, as they’ve outgrown their kid’s space, Mars Hill Downtown, as they’re at five services having outgrown their facility as well, in negotiations for Mars Hill Orange County, also in negotiations for Mars Hill Federal Way, also hoping, trusting, praying that we’ll be able to open Mars Hill Tacoma, Mars Hill Renton, Mars Hill Kirkland/Bothell-ish, and so lots of real estate negotiations in play, in addition to others that I’m sure that I’ve forgotten. But, just be in prayer for that, that we would have the space to see more people come to church and come to Jesus.
Driscoll had landed a best-selling author status (thanks to Result Source) and had scored a million dollar home in Snohomish county. His star was higher than it had ever been and he could afford to issue pre-emptive character attacks on Justin Brierley and rear-guard defenses of shaking hands with T. D. Jakes. 2012 was probably a "best year ever" for Mark Driscoll. But what about Mars Hill as a whole? What about the Orange County eviction? What about the more rank and file staff?
The situation behind the scenes in 2012 looked a bit different. There's the "we're in a big mess" memo, and then there's Dave Bruskas' communication from May 25, 2012.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/
...
We Really Need Your HelpFrom Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:
As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.
First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]
...
Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals
...
Internally layoffs were happening in the first half of 2012 that Bruskas said could not and should not be appealed. The financial situation of Mars Hill was bad enough that potential lends would consider Mars Hill an unattractive candidate for future financing. In June 2012 Driscoll mentioned that Mars Hill had been operating on a financial model that wasn't good for its long-term future. You won't find that in the sermon if you go to download it at Mark Driscoll Ministries, because it's been cut out.
While Bruskas was internally urging laid off staff to not make appeals and Driscoll had bought a roughly million-dollar home in Snohomish county, and in June 2012 mentioned a tough "season" by August 2012 he was declaring in his sermons that 2012 had been the greatest year ever for Mars Hill.
Then ... by 2013 Driscoll was talking about how Mars Hill managed to avoid slipping over a fiscal cliff.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-mars-hill-managed-to-avoid-slipping.html
With Mars Hill at times seeming to be teetering on the edge of fiscal cliffs every other year, it's "possible" the leadership was so focused on finding some way to keep the corporation solvent it was not nearly as careful as it could have and should have been about the nature of what Mars Hill Global was. It's not necessary to propose all out intent to deceive if we connect all the dots, if Mars Hill was as fiscally incompetent as Sutton Turner's 2015 narrative indicates, a failure to grasp the gravity of the fiscal situation could fuel a subsequent lack of proper concern for how to convey what Global had become.
Or, of course, it is also possible to propose that the way Global was promoted was too slippery and evasive, too. These are not mutually exclusive explanations being proposed. Wenatchee leans more toward the sloppy incompetence theory as to what went wrong with Global. What does seem to be the case, given the evidence and narratives at hand, was that the controversial lack of clarity about Mars Hill Global didn't come up until the Turner era. Whatever Turner's general story of the fiscal incompetence of late Munson-era leadership on Mars Hill financials (and one can only wonder how long Munson's going to let that stand as the new public narrative about his era of leadership), it can be said in Munson's defense that there seemed to have been nothing at all about Mars Hill Global during his tenure that could become any basis for controversy.
Showing posts with label year end reports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label year end reports. Show all posts
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Saturday, December 06, 2014
Throckmorton: Dave Bruskas/Mark Driscoll email MH elders in May 2012 said "we really need your help" in light of layoffs, days after the Driscolls bought their million-dollar home in Woodway
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/
Today Warren Throckmorton has published something old that is a must-read. Wenatchee The Hatchet does not customarily frame an issue in those terms but the date of a missive from Dave Bruskas, described as sent from Bruskas to other MH leaders on The City, has a date on it that in itself makes it a must read for the history of Mars Hill. Whether this was the formal publication date of the content to The City or the date it was received via email is not necessarily important by itself.
We Really Need Your Help
From Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:
As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.
First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]
A couple of final thoughts. First, we know this isn’t your fault, but the result of past decisions and practices. And while we will provide you a new and helpful global narrative soon to communicate this really tough news to our members, to be critical of the past means that we have to say things publicly that might hurt good leaders with great intentions who served Mars Hill well. Some of whom are still faithfully serving along side us today. And that to us seems like a losing proposition. We also know that this process has had some starts and stops along with some conflicting information. Please forgive us for that. We are continually receiving new financial information that has caused some hiccups along the way.
Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.
And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals.
We love you all very much and appreciate your devotion to Jesus and His church in this tough season. We do feel loved and supported by you and hope you feel the same from your Executive Elders.
From Pastor Mark:
These are tough seasons. Personally we love our staff. Pastorally we are concerned for our staff. Practically we grieve for our staff. Professionally we don’t have a choice but to reduce our staff. We simply have to live within our means. If we reduce staff now we can provide lead time for people to find an option while receiving severance. Had we not done this we would have had to reduce staff without severance this summer. We know this is hard but it is better than the alternative. The various leaders making these decisions across four states have prayed and labored over these tough calls. Your Exec Elders have cut first and deepest. Central is reduced 40% and working double time. We are vacating our offices reducing our staff and in contact nearly every hour every day pulling together and seeking Jesus’ wisdom. Your Executive Pastor Sutton is up at 4am everyday praying for our church. Now is a time for everyone to pray and love a lot. Lastly, without being improper we’ve frankly been through tougher times and deeper cuts before. After 15 years i can say this is not the worst storm we’ve weathered. We will get through it together by Gods grace. Trust me on this fact.
Read more: 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/#ixzz3L9UFjiT9
There is a great deal of Mars Hill history that has to be borne in mind in light of this communication quoted above.
In April 2012 Driscoll was broaching the question of "is your church interested in becoming part of Mars Hill?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/is-your-church-interested-in-becoming.html
If Mars Hill was privately in a financial strait dire enough that a large-scale layoff was being finessed in May 2012 what did Mark Driscoll think was a reason to write to the public as though wanting to assimilate into what may have been a less than fiscally stable Mars Hill was a good idea? To be sure Chris Rosebrough has provided an explanation for how he thinks the church growth paradigm depends on leverageable debt to catalyze more growth ... but if we assume for sake of conversation the average church target of Driscoll wouldn't know this why would Driscoll have assumed it was reasonable to encourage churches to give their assets to Mars Hill if internally he was aware that Sutton Turner considered the financial situation of Mars Hill to be precarious?
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/
Now people may understandably not recall that in April 2012 Sutton Turner had a post about how "we serve a king, not a sheikh" The page is 404 gone now but Wenatchee The Hatchet preserved at least some of its content:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/sutton-turner-explains-we-serve-king.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/13/we-serve-the-king-not-a-sheikh
Working for a church, my salary is no longer what it used to be, nor is my job. I’m analyzing $4.90 lattes and scrutinizing nearly every dollar that goes out the door to ensure that our staff stewards the church’s resources well. It gets tedious at times, but the little stuff matters to me, because it matters to Jesus.
We could plant hundreds of churches. We could see thousands more people meet Jesus. We could see cities transformed by the gospel. As a collective body of believers, God has given us the money we need. The question is, what will we do with it?
For those who don't recall what was getting tossed off but excited mention, March 2012 was around the time Driscoll mentioned "we even rented the city of Ephesus for a day".
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/mars-hill-rents-city-of-ephesus-for-day.html
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me
Sutton Turner did seem to say "we're in a big mess" back in March 2012. By May 2012 the campaign to get Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list had come and gone but not without doubts expressed internally about whether or not the campaign was going to benefit Driscoll in a way that might be bad for the welfare of Mars Hill Church as a whole.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/22/realmarriagememo/
So in light of all that, there's another detail about the unity of the Mars Hill executive elders.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/05/update-on-mars-hill-orange-county.html
All the elders at the executive level would have had to have known about the eviction situation at Orange County, correct? If Bruskas' missive was sent on or before May 25, 2012 that was about the time the eviction notice was inescapable for Orange County.
https://marshill.com/files/2012/08/05/20120805_jesus-gave-us-communion_en_transcript.pdf
Part 7 of Jesus Loves His Church
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5,2012
... Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been.
In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
So by August 2012 Driscoll was saying they'd completed the greatest year they'd ever had. That didn't quite add up (literally or figuratively) in light of the systemic deficits Driscoll had been explaining were part and parcel of the Mars Hill financial model in the preceeding months.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
But, somehow, against all financial realities, Driscoll interpreted the fiscal year as the best year in the history of Mars Hill. What Dave Bruskas was explaining, apparently, behind the scenes in May 2012 was not a summation of how it was the best year ever for Mars Hill on the financial side. And that was just before the eviction at Orange County became an unavoidable headline.
For a bit more reading from the time.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/07/martian-budgets-past-present-and-future.html
What is even more striking, if we bear in mind that Sutton Turner's memo on the financial mess of Mars Hill was as of March 17, 2012, is this, that Mark Driscoll was explaining on March 2012 to Mars Hill "we are not a wealthy church". This was discussed on March 18, 2012 at Wenatchee The Hatchet.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/03/apparently-mark-driscoll-now-says-of.html
So we've got a Mars Hill in May 2012 that was about to face the Orange County eviction, had rigged a spot on the NYT best seller list for Mark and Grace Driscoll, and was internally getting word at the highest levels that the financial situation was bad. Driscoll, in the wake of all this, opted to tell Mars Hill Church "we're not a wealthy church".
But, incredibly, that's not the whole story here. We need to bear in mind that in 2012 Driscoll made somewhere in the zone of 500k and that it was advocated that Driscoll get a raise to 650k a year and also have a 200k housing allowance stay where it was. Driscoll cut (or let be cut) his salary to about 480k some time in FY2012, which was itself also presented as a reason to raise the compensation. Details available in the memo published over here (for those who haven't already seen that):
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sutton-turner-memo-recommended-raise.html
Dave Bruskas' March 25, 2012 communication can't just be seen in light of the fiscal crisis of Mars Hill as a whole but needs to be seen in light of a specific real estate purchase, one that had been finalized just days earlier.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
Now if you'd like to read more about the history of the acquisition of the house in light of the Real Marriage arrangements you can read the series of tagged posts on the matter over here. The permitting for renovating the house in Woodway started getting clearance some time in the summer of 2012.
The Driscolls had finalized the purchase of a roughly one-million dollar home in Woodway mere days before Dave Bruskas was telling leaders within Mars Hill "we really need your help". So while at the executive level there was some awareness that Mars Hill was "in a big mess" over finances this was handled by what seems to have been a mass layoff and a temporary compensation cut for Driscoll that was leveraged as evidence for Driscoll to get paid even more and amidst all this in 2012 Mark and Grace Driscoll bought a million-dollar home in Snohomish county in a year in which Mark Driscoll was telling Mars Hill "we're not a wealthy church".
Today Warren Throckmorton has published something old that is a must-read. Wenatchee The Hatchet does not customarily frame an issue in those terms but the date of a missive from Dave Bruskas, described as sent from Bruskas to other MH leaders on The City, has a date on it that in itself makes it a must read for the history of Mars Hill. Whether this was the formal publication date of the content to The City or the date it was received via email is not necessarily important by itself.
We Really Need Your Help
From Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:
As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.
First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]
A couple of final thoughts. First, we know this isn’t your fault, but the result of past decisions and practices. And while we will provide you a new and helpful global narrative soon to communicate this really tough news to our members, to be critical of the past means that we have to say things publicly that might hurt good leaders with great intentions who served Mars Hill well. Some of whom are still faithfully serving along side us today. And that to us seems like a losing proposition. We also know that this process has had some starts and stops along with some conflicting information. Please forgive us for that. We are continually receiving new financial information that has caused some hiccups along the way.
Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.
And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals.
We love you all very much and appreciate your devotion to Jesus and His church in this tough season. We do feel loved and supported by you and hope you feel the same from your Executive Elders.
From Pastor Mark:
These are tough seasons. Personally we love our staff. Pastorally we are concerned for our staff. Practically we grieve for our staff. Professionally we don’t have a choice but to reduce our staff. We simply have to live within our means. If we reduce staff now we can provide lead time for people to find an option while receiving severance. Had we not done this we would have had to reduce staff without severance this summer. We know this is hard but it is better than the alternative. The various leaders making these decisions across four states have prayed and labored over these tough calls. Your Exec Elders have cut first and deepest. Central is reduced 40% and working double time. We are vacating our offices reducing our staff and in contact nearly every hour every day pulling together and seeking Jesus’ wisdom. Your Executive Pastor Sutton is up at 4am everyday praying for our church. Now is a time for everyone to pray and love a lot. Lastly, without being improper we’ve frankly been through tougher times and deeper cuts before. After 15 years i can say this is not the worst storm we’ve weathered. We will get through it together by Gods grace. Trust me on this fact.
Read more: 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/#ixzz3L9UFjiT9
There is a great deal of Mars Hill history that has to be borne in mind in light of this communication quoted above.
In April 2012 Driscoll was broaching the question of "is your church interested in becoming part of Mars Hill?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/is-your-church-interested-in-becoming.html
If Mars Hill was privately in a financial strait dire enough that a large-scale layoff was being finessed in May 2012 what did Mark Driscoll think was a reason to write to the public as though wanting to assimilate into what may have been a less than fiscally stable Mars Hill was a good idea? To be sure Chris Rosebrough has provided an explanation for how he thinks the church growth paradigm depends on leverageable debt to catalyze more growth ... but if we assume for sake of conversation the average church target of Driscoll wouldn't know this why would Driscoll have assumed it was reasonable to encourage churches to give their assets to Mars Hill if internally he was aware that Sutton Turner considered the financial situation of Mars Hill to be precarious?
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/
Now people may understandably not recall that in April 2012 Sutton Turner had a post about how "we serve a king, not a sheikh" The page is 404 gone now but Wenatchee The Hatchet preserved at least some of its content:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/sutton-turner-explains-we-serve-king.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/13/we-serve-the-king-not-a-sheikh
Working for a church, my salary is no longer what it used to be, nor is my job. I’m analyzing $4.90 lattes and scrutinizing nearly every dollar that goes out the door to ensure that our staff stewards the church’s resources well. It gets tedious at times, but the little stuff matters to me, because it matters to Jesus.
We could plant hundreds of churches. We could see thousands more people meet Jesus. We could see cities transformed by the gospel. As a collective body of believers, God has given us the money we need. The question is, what will we do with it?
For those who don't recall what was getting tossed off but excited mention, March 2012 was around the time Driscoll mentioned "we even rented the city of Ephesus for a day".
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/mars-hill-rents-city-of-ephesus-for-day.html
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me
Sutton Turner did seem to say "we're in a big mess" back in March 2012. By May 2012 the campaign to get Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list had come and gone but not without doubts expressed internally about whether or not the campaign was going to benefit Driscoll in a way that might be bad for the welfare of Mars Hill Church as a whole.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/22/realmarriagememo/
So in light of all that, there's another detail about the unity of the Mars Hill executive elders.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/05/update-on-mars-hill-orange-county.html
All the elders at the executive level would have had to have known about the eviction situation at Orange County, correct? If Bruskas' missive was sent on or before May 25, 2012 that was about the time the eviction notice was inescapable for Orange County.
https://marshill.com/files/2012/08/05/20120805_jesus-gave-us-communion_en_transcript.pdf
Part 7 of Jesus Loves His Church
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5,2012
... Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been.
In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
So by August 2012 Driscoll was saying they'd completed the greatest year they'd ever had. That didn't quite add up (literally or figuratively) in light of the systemic deficits Driscoll had been explaining were part and parcel of the Mars Hill financial model in the preceeding months.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
But, somehow, against all financial realities, Driscoll interpreted the fiscal year as the best year in the history of Mars Hill. What Dave Bruskas was explaining, apparently, behind the scenes in May 2012 was not a summation of how it was the best year ever for Mars Hill on the financial side. And that was just before the eviction at Orange County became an unavoidable headline.
For a bit more reading from the time.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/07/martian-budgets-past-present-and-future.html
What is even more striking, if we bear in mind that Sutton Turner's memo on the financial mess of Mars Hill was as of March 17, 2012, is this, that Mark Driscoll was explaining on March 2012 to Mars Hill "we are not a wealthy church". This was discussed on March 18, 2012 at Wenatchee The Hatchet.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/03/apparently-mark-driscoll-now-says-of.html
So we've got a Mars Hill in May 2012 that was about to face the Orange County eviction, had rigged a spot on the NYT best seller list for Mark and Grace Driscoll, and was internally getting word at the highest levels that the financial situation was bad. Driscoll, in the wake of all this, opted to tell Mars Hill Church "we're not a wealthy church".
But, incredibly, that's not the whole story here. We need to bear in mind that in 2012 Driscoll made somewhere in the zone of 500k and that it was advocated that Driscoll get a raise to 650k a year and also have a 200k housing allowance stay where it was. Driscoll cut (or let be cut) his salary to about 480k some time in FY2012, which was itself also presented as a reason to raise the compensation. Details available in the memo published over here (for those who haven't already seen that):
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sutton-turner-memo-recommended-raise.html
Dave Bruskas' March 25, 2012 communication can't just be seen in light of the fiscal crisis of Mars Hill as a whole but needs to be seen in light of a specific real estate purchase, one that had been finalized just days earlier.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The Driscolls had finalized the purchase of a roughly one-million dollar home in Woodway mere days before Dave Bruskas was telling leaders within Mars Hill "we really need your help". So while at the executive level there was some awareness that Mars Hill was "in a big mess" over finances this was handled by what seems to have been a mass layoff and a temporary compensation cut for Driscoll that was leveraged as evidence for Driscoll to get paid even more and amidst all this in 2012 Mark and Grace Driscoll bought a million-dollar home in Snohomish county in a year in which Mark Driscoll was telling Mars Hill "we're not a wealthy church".
Thursday, June 19, 2014
end of fiscal year approaching for Mars Hill, probably nothing to be particularly concerned about
Warren Throckmorton has recently posted an email that is said to be making the rounds. Quoting just some of the message attributed to Sutton Turner ... :
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/06/18/mars-hill-solicitation-signs-of-struggle-or-just-a-normal-emergency/
,,, From 2007 to 2011, I was a podcaster like many of you. My family and I would download Pastor Mark's sermons weekly and Jesus used them to grow our family in godliness. As I think back, I don't know if I ever received a communication from Mars Hill asking me to financially give back to the church that blessed my family and me week in and week out. That's why I'm writing this quick email. The financial picture of Mars Hill for the rest of the year depends largely on how we finish this year. Right now we're making plan as for what we can do -- and what we can't do -- next year.
Thankfully you and I believe in a God who is in control of everything. But you and I still have a role to play. In the near future I'll be asking if you can make a special gift to Mars Hill to help the church end the fiscal year strong.
Your gift to Mars Hill means that Pastor Mark's sermons are recorded and streamed for free, to anyone in the world who wants to learn more about Jesus and love more like Jesus loves. ...
It's not as though Mars Hill never solicited micro-gifts from online podcast listeners but it would make sense why Turner might never have been contacted given that he wasn't necessarily staying in the US at the time MHC was soliciting gifts.
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
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.
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.
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.
So Mars Hill has solicited donations from their online audiences over the years. And why not? Turner just may never have been on the list.
Although Throckmorton and others have wondered if MHC is not doing well financially the numbers reported in the last two fiscal years suggest that while the number of people who give nothing is potentially the highest it has been since the earliest days of Mars Hill the number of high end and mid-tier donors giving has increased and the revenue seems to have gone up. Unless something truly catastrophic has happened (and to go by the public statements and activities of Mars Hill the lead pastor Mark Driscoll being shown to have plagiarized in at least seven of his published books and had one of those books bought a place on the NYT bestseller list apparently doesn't count as catastrophic) Mars Hill probably doesn't really want for money.
While Munson was formally president he publicly endorsed the idea of growing even when it's not necessarily a good idea but Turner seems to be more fiscally restrained. Or at least that's been suggested out and about and it seems probable.
Although by June 2012 Driscoll announced that MHC had run into another difficult season and that a lot of people had to be laid off because of shortcomings in the financial model, these things were said to be fixed by switching from an annual budget to a weekly budget.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The cycle of falling short by at least a little here and there sort of continued, though.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mark-driscoll-appeals-to-mars-hill.html
Then again, falling short of budget and laying a few people off became normal enough around Ballard that it's hard to describe that as anything close to emergency mode, though some bloggers and commenters might be tempted to see things that way.
But then it could be that in 2012 when there was a lean season there were different kinds of expenses. It may have been FY2012 was when MHC entered an agreement with Result Source to buy a place for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list. There was also a brief, tossed off comment from Driscoll about something else that had happened, apparently some time in 2012.
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me
After Easter, We’ll launch a new sermon series called the Seven, looking at Revelation 1–3 and the seven churches to which John writes in those chapters. Most of the series was filmed live on location in Turkey—and it’s epic. We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day.
So how much did it cost to rent the city of Ephesus for a day? Between buying a spot for Real Marriage on the NYT best seller list and renting the city of Ephesus for a day for some epic film-making what did that cost? Those may be the kinds of expenses that have been dialed back by a new and more fiscally cautious Mars Hill, perhaps?
Back then Driscoll was sharing how MH had historically stunk at giving. But that seems a bit unfair. The church could, on the spur of the moment, donate about eleven tons of food to a regional food pantry when asked. The change in policy that was set up in 2012 would eventually get described by Mark Driscoll as Mars Hill avoiding its own fiscal cliff. Curiously, about a month later Driscoll was apparently sharing with Mars Hill this idea that "we're not a wealthy church" as though 30+ million dollars was poor. Compared to an oil company, sure, but how many not-wealthy churches have even one Red camera, let alone have a pastor sharing in a tossed off line how they even rented the city of Ephesus for a day. It's not that they can't spend money on stuff like that, of course, it's that spending money on renting cities overseas while legal officers and pastors hemorrhage out of the leadership culture might send mixed signals. The first half of 2012 was also when the Driscolls moved out of the city of Seattle and out of King County into a million-dollar home in Snohomish county. Whatever tight season was afoot at Mars Hill in the first half of 2012 that lean season did not necessarily apply to the Driscolls. And if it had turned out that Real Marriage didn't have any plagiarism in it and if its spot at the top of the NYT bestseller list hadn't been bought then congratulations on an honest success would be in order, truly. Unfortunately ... well ...
Anyway, by June 2012 Driscoll had shared how things were changing and by the end of FY2013 it was another "best year ever" but this time it was Sutton Turner rather than Mark Driscoll sharing the news that:
We’re in the best financial health in the history of Mars Hill Church, with ample finance staff, policies, and contingency to ensure good stewardship.
So the idea that now, of all times, Mars Hill might in any way be short on funds seems improbable, unless something really terrible has transpired in the last year but to go by Mars Hill's public statements and activity there's not much sign that anything bad in the way of finances would even be reasonable to infer. You don't hire a capital development manager if you 1) think there's no money out there and 2) you think you can't possibly get some of it. Sure, the International Paper Building didn't turn out to be quite as God's will as originally advertised by Thomas Hurst but maybe the elders of Mars Hill just misheard what Jesus was allegedly telling them.
Mars Hill is probably doing fine, based on what they've shared publicly. IF there is any concern about money being in short supply this would more likely be because of the massive capital expansion projects of finding a new corporate headquarters home in Bellevue and taking a second-or-third shot at starting a school that would necessitate more funds. Considering the whimper with which the Resurgence Training Center seems to have ended after no more than a sort of two year academic year it remains to be seen whether investing in Mars Hill Schools as either a student or as an investor is necessarily a great move. A school started with some association with his church planting community was something Driscoll envisioned back in the earlier days of the church.
The mere possibility that in the earliest days of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll DIDN'T have a vision of starting a Bible college or seminary of some kind is so easily contested by so many years of public testimony from Driscoll himself that it was the subject of a blog post.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
But then these days a majority of Driscoll preaching and teaching is actually no longer available at the Mars Hill website. So if you're giving to the cause there's possibly half or more of the formerly available materials that are no longer available.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html
For that matter, Driscoll's relatively recent attempt to cast himself as being a fatherly type doesn't quite account for how recently he's leaned on anger as part of his homiletic style. It's not as though proposing that most people don't even do anything until they get ticked off wasn't part of the roll out for A Call to Resurgence. 2009's "How dare you!?" wasn't really that long ago. That was back when Driscoll was sharing publicly from the pulpit that he didn't have a side company for book royalties and wouldn't have one. Then in 2011 that changed. Driscoll's never been a stranger to controversy but in the last year at least some of the controversy has touched upon the fact that if you just look at what he publicly said about pastors and publishing and God boxes then and compared all of that to how he has spoken and written and behaved in the now that the 2014 Mark Driscoll can come across as though he's the kind of person 2004 Mark Driscoll warned everyone at Mars Hill Fellowship to be wary of.
But so far all of that does not suggest that people aren't giving faithfully to the mission of Mars Hill Church or that there's any reason the financial situation in FY2014 should prove to be poorer than previous fiscal years. Of course ... it's conceivable that maybe behind the scenes there are significant concerns but let's just assume for the sake of discussion that that would actually come to light in some documentable form. The average attendance DID go down from FY2012 to FY2013 and more and more people in the last few years who have called MH home aren't giving anything at all ... but it's tough to infer from that a real financial crisis because it's common for a minority of hugely dedicated people to keep an organization like MH fiscally floating.
To date there have been grand visions of starting a music label that sort of turned into a partnership with Tooth & Nail. There have been grand visions of a Resurgence Training Center that's turned into Mars Hill Schools, a partnership with Western Seminary and Corban University. And along the way there was sort of a good-for-Bellevue thing. So far Mars Hill has a track record of trying to build something in Mark's vision-casting plan from the early years from scratch that seems to fizzle and fade to then later get replaced by Mars Hill partnering with or somewhat assimilating an already functioning iteration of the basic concept a year or two or three later. After all ... it's not like re:sound is easy to spot these days. And the Capstone Institute ... it sort of doesn't exist any longer, either. Not that music labels and Bible schools are bad ideas, just that Mars Hill has been trying to get these two particular elements of Driscoll's early vision-casting plan off the ground off and on for at least a decade, give or take a particular project. Arguably Mars Hill is too young a religious movement to really have the infrastructural competence and capital to pull these things off in the homegrown/home-brewed DIY fashion so assimilating the moderate successes of others may be the most reasonable approach for them. And it's not like the Pacific Northwest has been famous for a distinctly evangelical seminary so that's actually, to a fellow evangelical, a theoretically very laudable goal.
It's just that after seven books have been shown to have citation errors and a number of egregious factual errors ... Driscoll and Mars Hill have not quite shown themselves the ideal peeps to be spearheading these projects on behalf of evangelicalism in the Pacific Northwest ... strictly in the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet.
But ... if a person is going to give to the cause then finding out how much it actually cost to rent the city of Ephesus might be interesting. MHC has said that the Result Source contract cost significantly less than the $210,000 reported by World Magazine but has yet to provide the evidence for why this would be the case and what the real number would be. As the vision of global expansion and funding for that expansion continues the numbers get bigger along with the ambitions. That's not necessarily a bad thing ... but it's worth thinking about how many iterations of the record label and Bible college have been cast off and forgotten about as if they never existed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll seem to have gone through in the last ten years before cutting a check for yet another attempt at something that has been aimed for since the earliest days of Mars Hill Fellowship. Maybe the third or fourth time will be the charm, though. Who knows?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/06/18/mars-hill-solicitation-signs-of-struggle-or-just-a-normal-emergency/
,,, From 2007 to 2011, I was a podcaster like many of you. My family and I would download Pastor Mark's sermons weekly and Jesus used them to grow our family in godliness. As I think back, I don't know if I ever received a communication from Mars Hill asking me to financially give back to the church that blessed my family and me week in and week out. That's why I'm writing this quick email. The financial picture of Mars Hill for the rest of the year depends largely on how we finish this year. Right now we're making plan as for what we can do -- and what we can't do -- next year.
Thankfully you and I believe in a God who is in control of everything. But you and I still have a role to play. In the near future I'll be asking if you can make a special gift to Mars Hill to help the church end the fiscal year strong.
Your gift to Mars Hill means that Pastor Mark's sermons are recorded and streamed for free, to anyone in the world who wants to learn more about Jesus and love more like Jesus loves. ...
It's not as though Mars Hill never solicited micro-gifts from online podcast listeners but it would make sense why Turner might never have been contacted given that he wasn't necessarily staying in the US at the time MHC was soliciting gifts.
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
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.
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.
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.
So Mars Hill has solicited donations from their online audiences over the years. And why not? Turner just may never have been on the list.
Although Throckmorton and others have wondered if MHC is not doing well financially the numbers reported in the last two fiscal years suggest that while the number of people who give nothing is potentially the highest it has been since the earliest days of Mars Hill the number of high end and mid-tier donors giving has increased and the revenue seems to have gone up. Unless something truly catastrophic has happened (and to go by the public statements and activities of Mars Hill the lead pastor Mark Driscoll being shown to have plagiarized in at least seven of his published books and had one of those books bought a place on the NYT bestseller list apparently doesn't count as catastrophic) Mars Hill probably doesn't really want for money.
While Munson was formally president he publicly endorsed the idea of growing even when it's not necessarily a good idea but Turner seems to be more fiscally restrained. Or at least that's been suggested out and about and it seems probable.
Although by June 2012 Driscoll announced that MHC had run into another difficult season and that a lot of people had to be laid off because of shortcomings in the financial model, these things were said to be fixed by switching from an annual budget to a weekly budget.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The cycle of falling short by at least a little here and there sort of continued, though.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mark-driscoll-appeals-to-mars-hill.html
Then again, falling short of budget and laying a few people off became normal enough around Ballard that it's hard to describe that as anything close to emergency mode, though some bloggers and commenters might be tempted to see things that way.
But then it could be that in 2012 when there was a lean season there were different kinds of expenses. It may have been FY2012 was when MHC entered an agreement with Result Source to buy a place for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list. There was also a brief, tossed off comment from Driscoll about something else that had happened, apparently some time in 2012.
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me
After Easter, We’ll launch a new sermon series called the Seven, looking at Revelation 1–3 and the seven churches to which John writes in those chapters. Most of the series was filmed live on location in Turkey—and it’s epic. We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day.
So how much did it cost to rent the city of Ephesus for a day? Between buying a spot for Real Marriage on the NYT best seller list and renting the city of Ephesus for a day for some epic film-making what did that cost? Those may be the kinds of expenses that have been dialed back by a new and more fiscally cautious Mars Hill, perhaps?
Back then Driscoll was sharing how MH had historically stunk at giving. But that seems a bit unfair. The church could, on the spur of the moment, donate about eleven tons of food to a regional food pantry when asked. The change in policy that was set up in 2012 would eventually get described by Mark Driscoll as Mars Hill avoiding its own fiscal cliff. Curiously, about a month later Driscoll was apparently sharing with Mars Hill this idea that "we're not a wealthy church" as though 30+ million dollars was poor. Compared to an oil company, sure, but how many not-wealthy churches have even one Red camera, let alone have a pastor sharing in a tossed off line how they even rented the city of Ephesus for a day. It's not that they can't spend money on stuff like that, of course, it's that spending money on renting cities overseas while legal officers and pastors hemorrhage out of the leadership culture might send mixed signals. The first half of 2012 was also when the Driscolls moved out of the city of Seattle and out of King County into a million-dollar home in Snohomish county. Whatever tight season was afoot at Mars Hill in the first half of 2012 that lean season did not necessarily apply to the Driscolls. And if it had turned out that Real Marriage didn't have any plagiarism in it and if its spot at the top of the NYT bestseller list hadn't been bought then congratulations on an honest success would be in order, truly. Unfortunately ... well ...
Anyway, by June 2012 Driscoll had shared how things were changing and by the end of FY2013 it was another "best year ever" but this time it was Sutton Turner rather than Mark Driscoll sharing the news that:
We’re in the best financial health in the history of Mars Hill Church, with ample finance staff, policies, and contingency to ensure good stewardship.
So the idea that now, of all times, Mars Hill might in any way be short on funds seems improbable, unless something really terrible has transpired in the last year but to go by Mars Hill's public statements and activity there's not much sign that anything bad in the way of finances would even be reasonable to infer. You don't hire a capital development manager if you 1) think there's no money out there and 2) you think you can't possibly get some of it. Sure, the International Paper Building didn't turn out to be quite as God's will as originally advertised by Thomas Hurst but maybe the elders of Mars Hill just misheard what Jesus was allegedly telling them.
Mars Hill is probably doing fine, based on what they've shared publicly. IF there is any concern about money being in short supply this would more likely be because of the massive capital expansion projects of finding a new corporate headquarters home in Bellevue and taking a second-or-third shot at starting a school that would necessitate more funds. Considering the whimper with which the Resurgence Training Center seems to have ended after no more than a sort of two year academic year it remains to be seen whether investing in Mars Hill Schools as either a student or as an investor is necessarily a great move. A school started with some association with his church planting community was something Driscoll envisioned back in the earlier days of the church.
The mere possibility that in the earliest days of Mars Hill Mark Driscoll DIDN'T have a vision of starting a Bible college or seminary of some kind is so easily contested by so many years of public testimony from Driscoll himself that it was the subject of a blog post.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/warren-throckmorton-mark-driscoll.html
But then these days a majority of Driscoll preaching and teaching is actually no longer available at the Mars Hill website. So if you're giving to the cause there's possibly half or more of the formerly available materials that are no longer available.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html
For that matter, Driscoll's relatively recent attempt to cast himself as being a fatherly type doesn't quite account for how recently he's leaned on anger as part of his homiletic style. It's not as though proposing that most people don't even do anything until they get ticked off wasn't part of the roll out for A Call to Resurgence. 2009's "How dare you!?" wasn't really that long ago. That was back when Driscoll was sharing publicly from the pulpit that he didn't have a side company for book royalties and wouldn't have one. Then in 2011 that changed. Driscoll's never been a stranger to controversy but in the last year at least some of the controversy has touched upon the fact that if you just look at what he publicly said about pastors and publishing and God boxes then and compared all of that to how he has spoken and written and behaved in the now that the 2014 Mark Driscoll can come across as though he's the kind of person 2004 Mark Driscoll warned everyone at Mars Hill Fellowship to be wary of.
But so far all of that does not suggest that people aren't giving faithfully to the mission of Mars Hill Church or that there's any reason the financial situation in FY2014 should prove to be poorer than previous fiscal years. Of course ... it's conceivable that maybe behind the scenes there are significant concerns but let's just assume for the sake of discussion that that would actually come to light in some documentable form. The average attendance DID go down from FY2012 to FY2013 and more and more people in the last few years who have called MH home aren't giving anything at all ... but it's tough to infer from that a real financial crisis because it's common for a minority of hugely dedicated people to keep an organization like MH fiscally floating.
To date there have been grand visions of starting a music label that sort of turned into a partnership with Tooth & Nail. There have been grand visions of a Resurgence Training Center that's turned into Mars Hill Schools, a partnership with Western Seminary and Corban University. And along the way there was sort of a good-for-Bellevue thing. So far Mars Hill has a track record of trying to build something in Mark's vision-casting plan from the early years from scratch that seems to fizzle and fade to then later get replaced by Mars Hill partnering with or somewhat assimilating an already functioning iteration of the basic concept a year or two or three later. After all ... it's not like re:sound is easy to spot these days. And the Capstone Institute ... it sort of doesn't exist any longer, either. Not that music labels and Bible schools are bad ideas, just that Mars Hill has been trying to get these two particular elements of Driscoll's early vision-casting plan off the ground off and on for at least a decade, give or take a particular project. Arguably Mars Hill is too young a religious movement to really have the infrastructural competence and capital to pull these things off in the homegrown/home-brewed DIY fashion so assimilating the moderate successes of others may be the most reasonable approach for them. And it's not like the Pacific Northwest has been famous for a distinctly evangelical seminary so that's actually, to a fellow evangelical, a theoretically very laudable goal.
It's just that after seven books have been shown to have citation errors and a number of egregious factual errors ... Driscoll and Mars Hill have not quite shown themselves the ideal peeps to be spearheading these projects on behalf of evangelicalism in the Pacific Northwest ... strictly in the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet.
But ... if a person is going to give to the cause then finding out how much it actually cost to rent the city of Ephesus might be interesting. MHC has said that the Result Source contract cost significantly less than the $210,000 reported by World Magazine but has yet to provide the evidence for why this would be the case and what the real number would be. As the vision of global expansion and funding for that expansion continues the numbers get bigger along with the ambitions. That's not necessarily a bad thing ... but it's worth thinking about how many iterations of the record label and Bible college have been cast off and forgotten about as if they never existed Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll seem to have gone through in the last ten years before cutting a check for yet another attempt at something that has been aimed for since the earliest days of Mars Hill Fellowship. Maybe the third or fourth time will be the charm, though. Who knows?
Sunday, May 11, 2014
The 2011 film/sermon series God's Work, Our Witness as a context for the MH/RSI deal regarding Real Marriage
http://marshill.com/media/gods-work-our-witness/gods-work-our-witness
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_god-is-faithful_sd_audio.mp3
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_god-is-faithful_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_tv_sd_progressive.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_tv_hd_progressive.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_en_transcript.pdf
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_es_transcript.pdf
God's Work, Our Witness
Pastor Mark Driscoll
December 04, 2011
01:04:28ish
...
All right, here’s the bottom line. The sun’s going down. I’ve been out all day. I want to go home and kiss Grace and eat dinner with the kids. Mars Hill has often really just, quite frankly, stunk at giving, and I think the last thing to be saved is a person’s wallet. And so I’m just going to tell you that most of the people in the church need to be giving a whole lot more.
Some of you are being generous. I’m not talking to you. For those people, we’ll have a separate conference for you in a phone booth.
For everybody else, the sad, cold, hard truth is about 24 percent of people at Mars Hill this year have given nothing. In addition, another 41 percent have given $500 or less. So that’s 65-ish percent of Mars Hill, two-thirds of Mars Hill’s twelve thousand people who are giving nothing or nearly nothing.
And I get it. I get, “Hey, what about the single moms? Hey, what about the college kid who’s, you know, eating Top Ramen? Hey, what about the kids that just got saved? Hey, what about the guys that are non-Christians?” Great, understood. Sixty-five percent? That doesn’t count. There can’t be 65 percent of people that are unemployed or in dire circumstances. We’re not asking people to give what we are demanding them to give. We’re asking them to give what God convicts them to give.
And I want you to ask this question of yourself. At the end of the year, how much do you anticipate that God wants you to give? We’re at that place now where it is going to take everyone being very generous to open up an opportunity to welcome nine thousand more people, all the new churches, seats, opportunities.
So is it about the money? Yes, it’s about spending the money to reach people for Jesus. Everything costs something. And we think that if you love Jesus and you believe people are going to hell, you should give at least as much money to that as toilet paper, and many of you aren’t.
Bottom line: you can do better. We love you and we trust in the grace of God. You will be more generous. ...
Others have blogged about this fundraising film in the past but have not written about it with the information provided this year through the coverage of World Magazine. Warren Cole Smith broke a news story in March that confirmed that Mars Hill Church and Result Source Inc signed a contract that would ensure a place for Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list.
http://www.worldmag.com/2014/03/unreal_sales_for_driscoll_s_real_marriage
"Mars Hill would not say whether the funds for the purchase of these books, which would total approximately $123,600 for the individual sales and $93,100 for the bulk sales, came from church funds"
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/RSIMHCContract.png
Contract dated October 13, 2011
That's old news and it's also old news that in later 2011 Jamie Munson stepped down from being Lead Pastor. During this transitional period Mars Hill Church distributed the fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness in mailings enjoining contracted members to continue to give to the church. Mark Driscoll's closing statements, quoted extensively above, declared that Mars Hill has generally stunk at giving. It is not clear how many people inside Mars Hill Church (formerly listed as Mars Hill Fellowship) knew about the Result Source contract but it seems important to bear in mind that John Sutton Turner signed the contract that was dated October 13, 2011 and this was obviously a month or so before God's Work, Our Witness began to be a sermon series at MHC.
When the news of the MH/RSI contract broke the Mars Hill Board of Advisor's and Accountability issued a response.
http://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
By: Board of Advisors & Accountability
Posted: Mar 07, 2014
...
Result Source
In 2011, outside counsel advised our marketing team to use Result Source to market the Real Marriage book and attain placement on the New York Times Bestseller list. While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.
To correct a statement in a recent article, Pastor Sutton Turner was the General Manager, not the Executive Pastor or Executive Elder as reported, at the time he signed with the referenced agreement with Result Source. In the time since this campaign we have established a new Executive Elder team, new Board of Advisors and Accountability, as well as a new marketing team.
...
The BOAA stands unreservedly behind Pastors Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas as the Executive Elders of Mars Hill Church. We deeply appreciate their endurance through false accusation, their submission to authority, and their humility where regrettable decisions from the past have come to light. We are thankful to God for His grace, which is evident in all that he allows for our good and his glory. We are confident that God is preparing Pastor Mark and the ministry of Mars Hill Church for a great harvest of souls in the days ahead.
In a letter apparently addressed to Mars Hill Church, apparently on March 14, 2014 or close to it, Mark Driscoll reportedly wrote the following regarding ResultSource:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/03/14/mark-driscoll-addresses-mars-hill-church-about-best-seller-issue-church-discord/
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/MHCletterMD.png
...
First, a marketing company called ResultSource was used in conjunction with the book Real Marriage, whichw as released in January 2012. My understanding of the ResultSource marketing strategy was to maximize book sales, so that we could reach more people with the message and help grow our church. In retrospect, I no longer see it that way. Instead, I now see it as manipulating a book sales reporting system, which is wrong. I am sorry that I used this strategy, and will never use it again. I have also asked my publisher to not use the "#1 New York Times bestseller" status in future publications, and am working to remove this from past publications as well
What Driscoll did not address were the allegations and evidence presented toward the claim that Mark Driscoll plagiarized the work of others. While in an on-air interview with Janet Mefferd Mark Driscoll said he might have made a mistake and that a mistake was not a sin the steady changes being made to Driscoll publications documented by Warren Throckmorton seem to suggest that the case that Mark Driscoll actually used the materials of other authors without proper or adequate citation spanned about half a dozen books, books that have been getting revised in the last few months in the wake of Janet Mefferd's on-air allegations.
What is worth noting is that in addition to Mark and Grace Driscoll's book Real Marriage not adequately citing or acknowledging the work of Dan Allender and others in the first printing; in addition to the controversy that came to light regarding the fact that Mars Hill Church contracted with ResultSource to land a #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list for Real Marriage, there is the additional context of Mark Driscoll, from the pulpit and in the 2011 fundraising film, was telling Mars Hill members that they frankly stunk at giving and could do better. The full context of this filmed rebuke seems to be that Mark Driscoll was scolding the congregation for their lack of financial generosity months after MHC and RSI inked a deal to rig a #1 NYT bestseller spot for a book that seems to made use of Dan Allender's work without giving him any credit. Newer editions of Real Marriage have remedied this but only, it seems, after the double whammy controversy regarding alleged plagiarism on the part of Mark Driscoll and of the contract to rig a place on the NYT bestseller list for the book.
And on top of all that, during the months of securing that place with help from ResultSource, Driscoll was regaling the congregation about their lack of adequate generosity toward the cause. In 2011 at the time of the film's release Driscoll mentioned that 24% of Mars Hill attenders gave nothing.
What's interesting is that according to the FY2012 annual report that was made available to the public in FY2012 the number of attenders/members who gave nothing was 23.9%. For FY2013 the number that gave $0 was listed as 35.1%. Go to the following link for documentation of those numbers.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/01/mars-hill-church-comparing-fy2012.html
There's time yet to find out what FY2014 has brought for MHC and what may yet be reported but since 2012 MHC seems to have been in numeric decline in average attendance and the percentage of those who gave absolutely nothing yet attended Mars Hill seems to have jumped ten percentage points since the late 2011 rebuke via film from Pastor Mark Driscoll.
Mark Driscoll rebuking the congregation during the late 2011 season in which executive leadership at Mars Hill had signed a contract with ResultSource to buy a place for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list when the book made use of Dan Allender's work without giving credit to him seems ... ironic. Driscoll was rebuking a flock for not giving generously enough during a season in which Sutton Turner had just earlier signed a contract to rig a place on the NYT bestseller list for a book that seems to have plagiarized Dan Allender's work. It seems more than just a teensy bit hypocritical for a megachurch pastor to scold his congregants about not giving generously enough to the cause if the cause turned out to include manipulating book sales to get a book that seems to have had plagiarism in it on to the NYT bestseller list.
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_god-is-faithful_sd_audio.mp3
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_god-is-faithful_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_tv_sd_progressive.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_tv_hd_progressive.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_en_transcript.pdf
http://download.marshill.com/files/2011/12/04/20111204_gods-work-our-witness_es_transcript.pdf
God's Work, Our Witness
Pastor Mark Driscoll
December 04, 2011
01:04:28ish
...
All right, here’s the bottom line. The sun’s going down. I’ve been out all day. I want to go home and kiss Grace and eat dinner with the kids. Mars Hill has often really just, quite frankly, stunk at giving, and I think the last thing to be saved is a person’s wallet. And so I’m just going to tell you that most of the people in the church need to be giving a whole lot more.
Some of you are being generous. I’m not talking to you. For those people, we’ll have a separate conference for you in a phone booth.
For everybody else, the sad, cold, hard truth is about 24 percent of people at Mars Hill this year have given nothing. In addition, another 41 percent have given $500 or less. So that’s 65-ish percent of Mars Hill, two-thirds of Mars Hill’s twelve thousand people who are giving nothing or nearly nothing.
And I get it. I get, “Hey, what about the single moms? Hey, what about the college kid who’s, you know, eating Top Ramen? Hey, what about the kids that just got saved? Hey, what about the guys that are non-Christians?” Great, understood. Sixty-five percent? That doesn’t count. There can’t be 65 percent of people that are unemployed or in dire circumstances. We’re not asking people to give what we are demanding them to give. We’re asking them to give what God convicts them to give.
And I want you to ask this question of yourself. At the end of the year, how much do you anticipate that God wants you to give? We’re at that place now where it is going to take everyone being very generous to open up an opportunity to welcome nine thousand more people, all the new churches, seats, opportunities.
So is it about the money? Yes, it’s about spending the money to reach people for Jesus. Everything costs something. And we think that if you love Jesus and you believe people are going to hell, you should give at least as much money to that as toilet paper, and many of you aren’t.
Bottom line: you can do better. We love you and we trust in the grace of God. You will be more generous. ...
Others have blogged about this fundraising film in the past but have not written about it with the information provided this year through the coverage of World Magazine. Warren Cole Smith broke a news story in March that confirmed that Mars Hill Church and Result Source Inc signed a contract that would ensure a place for Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list.
http://www.worldmag.com/2014/03/unreal_sales_for_driscoll_s_real_marriage
"Mars Hill would not say whether the funds for the purchase of these books, which would total approximately $123,600 for the individual sales and $93,100 for the bulk sales, came from church funds"
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/RSIMHCContract.png
Contract dated October 13, 2011
That's old news and it's also old news that in later 2011 Jamie Munson stepped down from being Lead Pastor. During this transitional period Mars Hill Church distributed the fundraising film God's Work, Our Witness in mailings enjoining contracted members to continue to give to the church. Mark Driscoll's closing statements, quoted extensively above, declared that Mars Hill has generally stunk at giving. It is not clear how many people inside Mars Hill Church (formerly listed as Mars Hill Fellowship) knew about the Result Source contract but it seems important to bear in mind that John Sutton Turner signed the contract that was dated October 13, 2011 and this was obviously a month or so before God's Work, Our Witness began to be a sermon series at MHC.
When the news of the MH/RSI contract broke the Mars Hill Board of Advisor's and Accountability issued a response.
http://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
By: Board of Advisors & Accountability
Posted: Mar 07, 2014
...
Result Source
In 2011, outside counsel advised our marketing team to use Result Source to market the Real Marriage book and attain placement on the New York Times Bestseller list. While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.
To correct a statement in a recent article, Pastor Sutton Turner was the General Manager, not the Executive Pastor or Executive Elder as reported, at the time he signed with the referenced agreement with Result Source. In the time since this campaign we have established a new Executive Elder team, new Board of Advisors and Accountability, as well as a new marketing team.
...
The BOAA stands unreservedly behind Pastors Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas as the Executive Elders of Mars Hill Church. We deeply appreciate their endurance through false accusation, their submission to authority, and their humility where regrettable decisions from the past have come to light. We are thankful to God for His grace, which is evident in all that he allows for our good and his glory. We are confident that God is preparing Pastor Mark and the ministry of Mars Hill Church for a great harvest of souls in the days ahead.
In a letter apparently addressed to Mars Hill Church, apparently on March 14, 2014 or close to it, Mark Driscoll reportedly wrote the following regarding ResultSource:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/03/14/mark-driscoll-addresses-mars-hill-church-about-best-seller-issue-church-discord/
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/MHCletterMD.png
...
First, a marketing company called ResultSource was used in conjunction with the book Real Marriage, whichw as released in January 2012. My understanding of the ResultSource marketing strategy was to maximize book sales, so that we could reach more people with the message and help grow our church. In retrospect, I no longer see it that way. Instead, I now see it as manipulating a book sales reporting system, which is wrong. I am sorry that I used this strategy, and will never use it again. I have also asked my publisher to not use the "#1 New York Times bestseller" status in future publications, and am working to remove this from past publications as well
What Driscoll did not address were the allegations and evidence presented toward the claim that Mark Driscoll plagiarized the work of others. While in an on-air interview with Janet Mefferd Mark Driscoll said he might have made a mistake and that a mistake was not a sin the steady changes being made to Driscoll publications documented by Warren Throckmorton seem to suggest that the case that Mark Driscoll actually used the materials of other authors without proper or adequate citation spanned about half a dozen books, books that have been getting revised in the last few months in the wake of Janet Mefferd's on-air allegations.
What is worth noting is that in addition to Mark and Grace Driscoll's book Real Marriage not adequately citing or acknowledging the work of Dan Allender and others in the first printing; in addition to the controversy that came to light regarding the fact that Mars Hill Church contracted with ResultSource to land a #1 spot on the NYT bestseller list for Real Marriage, there is the additional context of Mark Driscoll, from the pulpit and in the 2011 fundraising film, was telling Mars Hill members that they frankly stunk at giving and could do better. The full context of this filmed rebuke seems to be that Mark Driscoll was scolding the congregation for their lack of financial generosity months after MHC and RSI inked a deal to rig a #1 NYT bestseller spot for a book that seems to made use of Dan Allender's work without giving him any credit. Newer editions of Real Marriage have remedied this but only, it seems, after the double whammy controversy regarding alleged plagiarism on the part of Mark Driscoll and of the contract to rig a place on the NYT bestseller list for the book.
And on top of all that, during the months of securing that place with help from ResultSource, Driscoll was regaling the congregation about their lack of adequate generosity toward the cause. In 2011 at the time of the film's release Driscoll mentioned that 24% of Mars Hill attenders gave nothing.
What's interesting is that according to the FY2012 annual report that was made available to the public in FY2012 the number of attenders/members who gave nothing was 23.9%. For FY2013 the number that gave $0 was listed as 35.1%. Go to the following link for documentation of those numbers.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/01/mars-hill-church-comparing-fy2012.html
There's time yet to find out what FY2014 has brought for MHC and what may yet be reported but since 2012 MHC seems to have been in numeric decline in average attendance and the percentage of those who gave absolutely nothing yet attended Mars Hill seems to have jumped ten percentage points since the late 2011 rebuke via film from Pastor Mark Driscoll.
Mark Driscoll rebuking the congregation during the late 2011 season in which executive leadership at Mars Hill had signed a contract with ResultSource to buy a place for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list when the book made use of Dan Allender's work without giving credit to him seems ... ironic. Driscoll was rebuking a flock for not giving generously enough during a season in which Sutton Turner had just earlier signed a contract to rig a place on the NYT bestseller list for a book that seems to have plagiarized Dan Allender's work. It seems more than just a teensy bit hypocritical for a megachurch pastor to scold his congregants about not giving generously enough to the cause if the cause turned out to include manipulating book sales to get a book that seems to have had plagiarism in it on to the NYT bestseller list.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Mars Hill Church, comparing the FY2012 figures to the Fy2013 figures
For those who haven't already seen the FY2012 report go over here.
UPDATE 1-12-2014
Thanks (again) to Winston for pointing out where the FY2013 report is available. Wenatchee's not going to claim to have the best eyes around. :)
For those who haven't seen the FY2013 report, well, you may be sort of out of luck if you want to see it with your own eyes.
[UPDATE 1-12-2014, thanks to commenter Winston we've been directed to a page that presents the report for FY2013. It looks a bit different than the version WtH saw earlier but this appears to be mainly in color and other elements of layout rather than in statistics]
http://marshill.com/annual-report-2013
http://marshill.com/files/2013/12/18/MHC_Annual_Report_2013_o_web.pdf
[UPDATE 1-12-2014, thanks to commenter Winston we've been directed to a page that presents the report for FY2013. It looks a bit different than the version WtH saw earlier but this appears to be mainly in color and other elements of layout rather than in statistics]
http://marshill.com/annual-report-2013
http://marshill.com/files/2013/12/18/MHC_Annual_Report_2013_o_web.pdf
Let's just start with some basics. Anyone who's read citations from the Fy2012 report may remember this number:
(go ahead click on this puppy to see how big it really is)
As in the stated number of the average weekly attendance at Mars Hill Church.
Each dot represented one person and the blue dots represented newcomers, 2,796 in all.
Then there were the following figures for baptisms, total members, and kids each week.
Now in a pdf made available at some website affiliated with Mars Hill Church back in December 2013 a report was made available that features these numbers for FY2013.
(that 12,329 number isn't quite so big in real life, either, on the report)
Check out the average weekly attendance listed in what appears to be a FY2013 MHC annual report, that's 12,329 average. While 1,337 members were added the grand total number of members of Mars HIll Church only increased by a total of a net total of 60 members between FY2012 and FY2013. Curious. If your organization has a net gain of formal members of a mere sixty after getting more than 1,200 newbies that's obviously not very awesome net growth.
Let's consider the giving trends as they break out by campus. For FY2012 we got this:
The FY2012 web page was made not as a pdf but as a mass of constituent parts, which makes it hard to download the whole thing as a simple unified pdf-style whole but makes it hugely easy to consult constituent parts to compare the report to something else such as the corresponding data from the FY2013 report which says ...
A little footnote here on the percentages before we proceed, check out the Fy2012 pie chart:
Compared to FY2012's listing the percentage of people who gave $0 went from 23.9% to 35.1%. Interesting. [WtH at 11:53pm---comparing this percentage of 0 donors to previous annual reports it also looks like possibly the highest ratio of non-givers at MHC in the last five fiscal years]
The number of people who gave between $1-$499 went from 42.9% to 29.5%. It looks like they're losing the bottom of the pyramid in terms of lowest-level donors but that Mars Hill Church is gaining in the mid-tier and major donor categories. But no organization can rely entirely on the top-tier for long. You have to mobilize your base-level, low-end donors. It's not safe to assume that some kind of Pareto principle means you can effectively ignore your base. Let's not forgot if the numbers presented in the MHC FY2013 report hold up a whopping 64.6 percent of donors to Mars Hill in FY2013 either gave nothing at all or gave no more than $1-$499 for the fiscal year. Since the report doesn't quite clarify if this is a reference to cumulative giving (which it has been in reports past) or averages there's possible wiggle room for additional information. Anyway, enough commentary on the aggregates. Some campus shifts in giving are worth looking at.
Now here is where the numbers get interesting as a manifestation of shifts. Certain shifts are so obvious they almost don't seem to be worth mentioning. Let's mention them anyway. Obviously moving live preaching from Mars Hill Ballard to Mars Hill Bellevue could explain a significant drop in the giving patterns at Ballard and this would be likely even if Bill Clem hadn't resigned from being a pastor at Mars Hill Church at the start of 2013. Ballard, all told, looks like it had a nearly 2 million dollar drop in total giving per fiscal year to the general giving fund. The actual difference is $1,972,010.00.
Compared to FY2012's listing the percentage of people who gave $0 went from 23.9% to 35.1%. Interesting. [WtH at 11:53pm---comparing this percentage of 0 donors to previous annual reports it also looks like possibly the highest ratio of non-givers at MHC in the last five fiscal years]
The number of people who gave between $1-$499 went from 42.9% to 29.5%. It looks like they're losing the bottom of the pyramid in terms of lowest-level donors but that Mars Hill Church is gaining in the mid-tier and major donor categories. But no organization can rely entirely on the top-tier for long. You have to mobilize your base-level, low-end donors. It's not safe to assume that some kind of Pareto principle means you can effectively ignore your base. Let's not forgot if the numbers presented in the MHC FY2013 report hold up a whopping 64.6 percent of donors to Mars Hill in FY2013 either gave nothing at all or gave no more than $1-$499 for the fiscal year. Since the report doesn't quite clarify if this is a reference to cumulative giving (which it has been in reports past) or averages there's possible wiggle room for additional information. Anyway, enough commentary on the aggregates. Some campus shifts in giving are worth looking at.
Now here is where the numbers get interesting as a manifestation of shifts. Certain shifts are so obvious they almost don't seem to be worth mentioning. Let's mention them anyway. Obviously moving live preaching from Mars Hill Ballard to Mars Hill Bellevue could explain a significant drop in the giving patterns at Ballard and this would be likely even if Bill Clem hadn't resigned from being a pastor at Mars Hill Church at the start of 2013. Ballard, all told, looks like it had a nearly 2 million dollar drop in total giving per fiscal year to the general giving fund. The actual difference is $1,972,010.00.
Ballard wasn't the only campus to experience a drop in cumulative giving to the general fund. Mars Hill Downtown's giving from FY2012 to FY2013 dropped by $94,687.00, and that could be explicable, perhaps, by the departure of not only the lead pastor Tim Gaydos but also of Tim Beltz and Will Little. While A. J. Hamilton was the interim lead pastor for a time he became the lead pastor at Downtown until he was recently replaced as lead pastor by someone else Wenatchee's never heard of before.
The Shoreline campus seemed to experience a drop from FY2012 to FY2013 that looks about like $5,462, a relatively negligible drop as things go. But it's important to bear in mind that when Driscoll did his financial updates on Mars Hill around May and June 2012 Shoreline was running the biggest systemic deficit. Even a small drop in giving could be a huge problem for a campus if it has continued to run the largest systemic deficit in the entire organization on a campus-by-campus basis.
More significant as a formal drop are the $87,911 drop at Mars Hill University District, and the $31,037 drop at Mars Hill West Seattle took place between FY2012 and FY2013. These sort of look like campuses where transitions of employment may have happened but that in itself couldn't explain anything. Willie Wilson vanished from leadership at Rainier Valley and giving has gone up.
Less easily spotted would be changes in which average giving declined. For instance, Mars Hill Federal Way experienced a drop in average giving per donor but a pending church plant or two might possibly explain that. Bubba Jennings is still slated to plant Mars Hill Tacoma, right? That could explain everything right there. Even though giving in total has gone up the average might have gone down because of where the resources are going. After all general giving fund wouldn't be the same as restricted giving or giving to expansion projects.
It's no surprise the biggest spike in growth has been Mars Hill Bellevue. Where Mark is the money will obviously follow. Plus anyone with any length of experience in observing fundraising in the Puget Sound area can tell you that if you want the bigger money you have to turn your attention to Bellevue and the east side anyway.
Now for those who aren't completely bored already here's a compilation of figures from the FY2013 report that was available last month and the still available Financial Disclosure agreement on FY2012 that you may still be able to find. Along the way some numbers from FY2011 have been consulted.
| ABBREVIATED BALANCE SHEET RESULTS | |||
| 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | |
| ASSETS | |||
| cash & cash equivalents | $ 5,165,170.00 | $ 3,369,472.00 | $ 5,341,040.00 |
| accounts receivable | $ - | $ 30,302.00 | $ 192,323.00 |
| inventory and other current assets | $ 81,041.00 | $ 203,685.00 | $ 515,751.00 |
| lease deposits and other assets | $ 118,011.00 | $ 136,718.00 | $ 180,269.00 |
| property and equipment | $ 27,099,676.00 | $ 28,650,133.00 | $ 28,663,705.00 |
| deferred loan costs, net | $ 41,642.00 | $ 37,273.00 | $ 34,531.00 |
| LIABILITIES | |||
| current liabilities | $ 3,070,910.00 | $ 1,931,392.00 | $ 2,097,035.00 |
| long-term liabilities | $ 13,121,525.00 | $ 13,285,248.00 | $ 12,146,688.00 |
| total liabilities | $ 16,192,435.00 | $ 15,216,640.00 | $ 14,243,723.00 |
| NET ASSETS | |||
| unrestricted | $ 16,387,843.00 | $ 17,364,950.00 | $ 19,959,873.00 |
| temporarily restricted | $ 126,946.00 | $ 118,993.00 | $ 724,023.00 |
| total net assets | $ 16,514,789.00 | $ 17,483,943.00 | $ 20,683,896.00 |
There are more things that could be written but for now these numbers will suffice. Wenatchee The Hatchet has covered Mars Hill adapting to numeric decline in the past. If we compare the 13,173 to the 12,329 a cumulative drop in average attendance of 844 isn't even really all that bad. Sure, the net growth of 60 members despite adding 1,337 members doesn't seem encouraging but as noted recently, Sutton Turner happily informed Mars Hill that giving is very high and above and beyond what was asked for. While certain campuses had losses in numbers and revenue that was going to happen with the resignations that happened in 2013 and with live preaching moving to Bellevue. As it stands Mars Hill would not have bothered looking for a Capital Development Manager if they didn't feel confident about giving. Whether or not the capital campaign projects being planned for 2014 on out are smarter ideas than the capital campaign project of 2004-2005 is open for some debate once we find out what those things are.
So even though the Fy2013 report was given and then taken away in terms of internet accessiblity Wenatchee The Hatchet did get ahold of it, or so it seems. And the numbers are interesting. Driscoll shared in the summer of 2012 that Mars Hill had hit a rough season financially. In early 2013 he shared how Mars Hill avoided its own fiscal cliff and how Mars Hill was not a wealthy church. But this does not keep nearly every fiscal year from seeming to be the best year ever when it comes time for annual reports, which have seemed to come later and later after the end of each fiscal year and most recently seems to have taken shape in the form of a report you probably can't even find and download any longer. Well, maybe there's going to be a FY2013 financial dislosure statement that will be available some time in 2014. We'll see.
So even though the Fy2013 report was given and then taken away in terms of internet accessiblity Wenatchee The Hatchet did get ahold of it, or so it seems. And the numbers are interesting. Driscoll shared in the summer of 2012 that Mars Hill had hit a rough season financially. In early 2013 he shared how Mars Hill avoided its own fiscal cliff and how Mars Hill was not a wealthy church. But this does not keep nearly every fiscal year from seeming to be the best year ever when it comes time for annual reports, which have seemed to come later and later after the end of each fiscal year and most recently seems to have taken shape in the form of a report you probably can't even find and download any longer. Well, maybe there's going to be a FY2013 financial dislosure statement that will be available some time in 2014. We'll see.
UPDATE 1-12-2014
Thanks (again) to Winston for pointing out where the FY2013 report is available. Wenatchee's not going to claim to have the best eyes around. :)
Sutton Turner bids farewell to 2013 and hello to 2014.
A new year and a new announcement comes along:
Mars Hill | New Discussion Topic
Interesting that Sutton Turner completely conflates the generosity of Mars Hill members and attenders with God Himself coming through. Interesting conflation there and not particularly surprising as in the last four to five years there's been sort of a surreal trend in which Mars Hill leadership progressively conflates what God wants with whatever the MH elders have decided would be good for Mars Hill. Meanwhile, who's got an update on the Sound Transit real estate Mars Hill's wanted to own?
Anyway, per Sutton Turner's missive, the full report is a link to this page
http://marshill.com/2013/12/27/goodbye-2013-hello-2014-mars-hill-year-end-update
But this falls considerably short of a FY2013 report. Just compare that "full report" on FY2013 to this page for the FY2012 report. The FY2013 was available for a while but good luck finding it. It's like the page got moved or dropped. And no, this doesn't count, as it's a more detailed break-out of the material mentioned in the FY2012 report page.
More importantly, the "full report" was presented before the above-quoted passage Turner wrote in which he stated that Mars Hill received $2,991,852 above budget by December 31, 2013. That information simply wasn't available on December 27, 2013 when the most recently mentioned link above hit the internet.
Since Wenatchee The Hatchet has a copy sitting around of the Fy2013 report some observations about the Fy2011-Fy2013 will show up. Perhaps in the meantime an updated FY2013 from MHC will be available.
Mars Hill | New Discussion Topic
From Pastor Sutton Turner:
Mars Hill Family,
Happy New Year! What a year 2013 was! It was great—and more importantly, our God was great (Psalm 147:5)! He was—and will continue to be—faithful, trustworthy, and generous to us. He is the reason that Mars Hill exists. His name and renown are the desire of our hearts (Isa. 26:8).
Five Official Church Plant Launches
We have much to look forward to and prepare for in 2014—a year we are praying to be our most evangelistic year ever. This Sunday, we will officially launch five new church plants into their new homes. They have been working tirelessly to make these homes ready for this important day, when they open their doors wide to people in the community, who will see the gospel of grace in the person of Christ clearly for the first time—or maybe the 501st time—and repent, be saved, and be baptized.
[picture not particularly necessary]
Easter 2014
Christmas Eve was an incredible night. We were able to celebrate Jesus’ birthday with over 9,549 people at our live services. And 5,226 people watched online from Tuesday through Friday of that week. We are now looking forward to Easter 2014, an amazing day of celebration and victory! It will be a day when believers can remember their Savior and non-believers can meet their Savior. Both are important; both are necessary. Mars Hill, we are praying for 25,000 people to attend our live services, and 50,000 to watch online. It’s all about Jesus—he’s alive, he saves, and people need to hear that.
Jesus Festival
In August, we have the Jesus Festival—an outdoor event in Seattle that will boldly proclaim the name of Jesus and clearly announce the good news of grace. We are praying for a work of the Spirit that would lead many, many people to Jesus that day.
Mars Hill Schools
We also have Mars Hill Schools launching in the fall, as we host Corban University and Western Theological Seminary at Mars Hill Bellevue. We want to see many students of God’s Word become fully trained and equipped for the work of the ministry—no matter what that looks like for their individual calling. We are truly honored to be part of such a significant endeavor in people’s lives.
He Provides
We are praying for Jesus to do so much more than we can ask, or even think or imagine in 2014 (Eph. 3:20). It’s because of faithful and generous family members that all these things are possible. Through his people, Jesus provides all that we need in order to accomplish all that he has for us.
In the final weeks of 2013, we were asking God to provide $2 million above and beyond our normal tithes and offerings in order to accomplish these exciting endeavors in 2014. Guess what, Mars Hill? HE DID IT! We received $2,991,852 above our budget by December 31! In addition, during December and January, $300,000 was given to the Endowment Fund for Church Planting, which will help us plant more churches in 2014 and, Lord willing, for generations to come.
Thank You
Thank you, Jesus. And thank you so much for partnering with us as we seek to fulfill the mission of Jesus at Mars Hill Church. You are an invaluable part of what he does here. He is doing innumerable things among our Mars Hill family members and in our cities. We praise and honor him for all that he does through and for us, but . . .
Jesus himself is our inexpressible gift (2 Cor. 9:15). Thank you, Mars Hill, for making it all about him.
Here’s a full report of what Jesus did at Mars Hill Church in 2013.
Because of him,
Pastor Sutton
Executive Elder & Executive Pastor
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| View this topic on The City » |
Interesting that Sutton Turner completely conflates the generosity of Mars Hill members and attenders with God Himself coming through. Interesting conflation there and not particularly surprising as in the last four to five years there's been sort of a surreal trend in which Mars Hill leadership progressively conflates what God wants with whatever the MH elders have decided would be good for Mars Hill. Meanwhile, who's got an update on the Sound Transit real estate Mars Hill's wanted to own?
Anyway, per Sutton Turner's missive, the full report is a link to this page
http://marshill.com/2013/12/27/goodbye-2013-hello-2014-mars-hill-year-end-update
But this falls considerably short of a FY2013 report. Just compare that "full report" on FY2013 to this page for the FY2012 report. The FY2013 was available for a while but good luck finding it. It's like the page got moved or dropped. And no, this doesn't count, as it's a more detailed break-out of the material mentioned in the FY2012 report page.
More importantly, the "full report" was presented before the above-quoted passage Turner wrote in which he stated that Mars Hill received $2,991,852 above budget by December 31, 2013. That information simply wasn't available on December 27, 2013 when the most recently mentioned link above hit the internet.
Since Wenatchee The Hatchet has a copy sitting around of the Fy2013 report some observations about the Fy2011-Fy2013 will show up. Perhaps in the meantime an updated FY2013 from MHC will be available.
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