Showing posts sorted by relevance for query albuquerque 2009. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query albuquerque 2009. Sort by date Show all posts
Friday, June 08, 2012
Mars Hill Albuquerque, moving beyond Washington state
http://marshill.com/2010/10/07/when-mars-hill-became-multi-campus-church-2006-present
October 10, 2007
by Pastor A. J. Hamilton
...
At the same time that Federal Way launched MHC, did something new and not entirely included in our grand plan for strategic expansion: We launched an out-of-state campus in New Mexico. MH Albuquerque celebrated its one-year anniversary on September 19 [emphasis added], one week after celebrating our joy in the Holy Spirit with 13 baptisms and nearly 30 testimonies across the three services located in the historic Lobo Theater on the old Route 66. The makeup of these campuses is diverse. Then, less than three weeks ago, the U-District campus because our biggest campus launch ever: In just two Sundays, they went from 350 to 800 attendees at two services, saw 30 baptisms, and had held two dance parties. They'll be at three services by the end of the month. It is difficult to recall all that Jesus has done in the last four years, events have transpired so quickly and seemingly on top of one another. What is clear in my mind how good God has been to us and continues to be.
Pastor AJ is in charge of operations at the Albuquerque campus, and has been on staff for almost a decade. He wrote for the blog last week about why God called MH to New Mexico for its first out-of-state campus.For more, check out a clip from Pastor Mark from the Trial series about multi-site church in 60 A.D
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012619231_marshill14m.html
Published Friday, August 13, 2010 at 10pm
By Janet I Tu
Seattle Times Staff reporter
Last year, the church opened its first out-of-state campus in Albuquerque, N.M. The pastor there — who was familiar to Mars Hill's leaders — already had started a church, but thought he could reach more people by partnering with Mars Hill.
It's all part of the church's hope to create 100 campuses, with 50,000 members, by 2019.
This campus caught blogger Mike DeLong by surprise, if I read this entry correctly.
http://halfabridge.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/mars-hill-albuquerque/
You can read all of Mike DeLong's posts about Mars Hill Albuquerque over at his blog.
This one is short and worth quoting, though.
http://halfabridge.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/a-quick-note-about-dave-bruskas/
a quick note about Dave Bruskas
August 16, 2011
Mike DeLong
Yes, Dave Bruskas, now-former pastor of City On A Hill (now Mars Hill Albuquerque) has apparently [link] left Mars Hill Albuquerque for a position in the Seattle area [link]. The transition was apparently an amicable one [link], although I have not seen an official announcement for those of us outside the Mars Hill Church circle of light, etc. We wish the Bruskas family all the best in their new situation.
http://marshill.com/albuquerque
Pastor A. J. Hamilton is now listed as lead pastor at the Albuquerque site.
The site also got a new home in November 2011
http://pastormark.tv/2011/11/26/whats-next-for-me
Sunday, December 11 – Mars Hill Albuquerque
I will preach at the grand opening of the new home of Mars Hill Church Albuquerque, which is under the leadership of Pastor A.J. Hamilton, who many years ago was my executive assistant. This is our fastest-growing church, with the highest percentage of conversions. I’m praying for at least 1,200 people on this Sunday.
Time: 9 a.m., 11:15 a.m., & 5 p.m.
Location: 4700 San Mateo Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109
For more on Mars Hill Albuquerque, see albuquerque.marshill.com.
Some reference to Albuquerque is made by Driscoll in the following entry:
http://pastormark.tv/2011/11/29/jesus-loves-church-mergers-and-so-should-you
by Pastor Mark Driscoll on November 29, 2011
Mars Hill Albuquerque
In 2009, Pastor Dave Bruskas, planter and lead pastor of City on a Hill in Albuquerque, New Mexico, began talks with us on merging the church he’d pastored for over 10 years with Mars Hill Church and becoming our first out of state church. [emphasis added]
At the time, City on a Hill was running over a 275 people, healthy, and doing good ministry in their city. There was lots of discussion as to whether the merger was the right move, but as Pastor Dave relates, “One question rose above all the others as most important: ‘Would more people meet Jesus if we went through with this?’ After months of deliberation, the leaders of both churches unanimously answered that question with a resounding ‘Yes!’”
The driving force behind the merger between Mars Hill Church and City on a Hill was one of shared mission. Our desire was to see as many people as possible in the city of Albuquerque meet Jesus, and we both felt strongly that this could be accomplished better together than apart.
God has been gracious to us. Today, Mars Hill Albuquerque has over 800 people meeting to worship together and serve their community each week. And we thank God that 250 people have met Jesus and been baptized at Mars Hill Albuquerque since the merger in 2009. Today, the church has outgrown its building and is officially replanting in a new larger building on December 11. Pastor Dave is now an executive elder at Mars Hill, the #2 ranking pastor in all of Mars Hill, and a tremendous gift to our church. [emphasis added]
Some description of the new location can be found here:
http://marshill.com/2011/12/08/big-mars-hill-albuquerque-replant-this-sunday
Early last year, the Albuquerque elders started seeking out a new location that could accommodate more growth, give more space for the children's area and ministries, and allow the church to become a regional hub in the Southwest for training and church planting. As the leaders began to look into the former Gold’s Gym near the corner of San Mateo and Montgomery, "perfect" was the only word that could be used. It was as if God built us a home decades ago that we are just now moving into. The new building will allow the Albuquerque church to seat over 550 people in the auditorium, including over 3,500 square feet in children’s space.
On February 7, 2012 Mark Driscoll wrote a letter to Acts 29 members and made the following announcement.
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/dear-acts-29-members/
February 7, 2012
...
The following are three changes that will take place on the A29 board.
1. The Board of Acts 29 will be myself, Pastor Matt Chandler, Pastor Darrin Patrick, and Pastor Dave Bruskas. Each man has been able to hand off their network to full-time staff, thereby freeing them up to go to the next level of leadership and help me work across all of Acts 29 and serve all of the networks that comprise the A29.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/no-vision-shift-after-mark-driscoll-leaves-acts-29-leadership-73047/
Christian Post
April 11, 2012
article by Alex Murashko, Christian Post Reporter
... Mars Hill Church Pastor Mark Driscoll announced that he was stepping down from the reins of Acts 29 late last month to make room for Chandler, the lead pastor at The Village Church in Highland Village in Texas. Driscoll remains on the organization's current three-member board which also includes The Journey's (St. Louis, Mo.) lead pastor, Darrin Patrick. The group's headquarters will move from Seattle to Dallas.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Throckmorton: Bruskas has recently sounded off on Strange Fire, Result Source and other stuff
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/16/mars-hill-church-executive-elder-dave-bruskas-on-mark-driscoll-nyts-best-seller-list-strange-fire-and-more/
There's a video and about 2:15 Bruskas described himself as having been part of a leadership culture that was "heavy handed and domineering". He also described these problems as still being within the community (though the audio is a bit muffled).
Throckmorton notes in the reent post Bruskas describes regretting participation in the Strange Fire stunt. That Bruskas was at the Strange Fire stunt Driscoll seemed to spearhead has been documented generously via social media and if you want a synopsis of that ... there's a post here:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html
Last Wenatchee can readily recall discussing things at much length in connection with Bruskas would have been ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
The time Bruskas told leaders "we need your help" facing down a layoff season days after Driscolls finalized buying a million-dollar home in Snohomish county.
Throckmorton's recent post adds some new elements to consider about what Bruskas may or may not have been in a position to know in 2011 when Real Marriage was getting drafted and RSI was being contacted.
For himself the three things he felt grieved about were the New York Times best-seller scam, the Strange Fire conference, and the performance driven culture of ministry.
Bruskas said he was a new executive elder in 2011 who was informed about the ResultSource contract by Jamie Munson in a car ride to work one morning. He asked if the approach had integrity and was financially feasible. Bruskas said Munson answered yes to both. After that, according to Bruskas, he didn’t ask any more questions.
Bruskas disclosed to friends that he was going to take the #2 position at Mars Hill in July 2011. That was about a month after Mark and Grace Driscoll and their agent Sealy Yates met at Thomas Nelson to discuss the ResultSource approach to scamming the best-seller list. This June 27, 2011 note from Sealy Yates to Kevin Small was included in a Mars Hill memo on the ResultSource-Real Marriage campaign.
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/16/mars-hill-church-executive-elder-dave-bruskas-on-mark-driscoll-nyts-best-seller-list-strange-fire-and-more/#ixzz3M7cQyLS9
Of particular note ...
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/12/Yates2SmallJun11.png
There's a partial correspondence Throckmorton quotes from regarding Jamie Munson interacting with the Mars Hill Board about Result Source. Throckmorton has lately asked who might have been on that board. Well, absolutely not Rick Melson, though Rick Melson had a role at Mars Hill.
Long ago before it was scrubbed from something like a LinkedIn Profile it was said of Melson that:
President/Campus Network Director
Resurgence/Mars Hill Church
January 2009– June 2010 (1 year 6 months)
And it couldn't have been Tim Beltz, who stopped being an executive leader in 2010.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/tim-beltz/76/960/7a8
Executive Pastor
Mars Hill Church
October 2007 – November 2010 (3 years 2 months)|Greater Seattle Area
So if Melson and Beltz were both gone by the middle of 2010 who was still on the executive team? The accounts about and by Sutton Turner about his joining executive leadership raise some questions about whether he ever intended to become an executive elder at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-narrative-question-when-i-came-to.html
Turner was brought on during a period in which Munson was still an executive elder and president. Driscoll was technically vice-president and while Turner was on the executive team he was not yet an elder. It was conceivable that during this time to ensure the bare minimum of three executive elders required at the time that Dave Bruskas may have been added, whether by invitation or self-nomination. Given the pattern of men who played roles in acquiring real estate landing prestigious jobs at Mars Hill Bruskas' possible role in getting City on a Hill in Albuquerque to Mars Hill in 2009 may or may not have been part of a possible pattern. Driscoll had expressed some interest from the pulpit in the New Mexico site being a hub for further interstate expansion in 2009.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search?q=albuquerque+2009
As preserved at the above post there's some indication that the summer of 2011 was when Bruskas transitioned out.
http://halfabridge.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/a-quick-note-about-dave-bruskas/
a quick note about Dave Bruskas
August 16, 2011
Mike DeLong
Yes, Dave Bruskas, now-former pastor of City On A Hill (now Mars Hill Albuquerque) has apparently [link] left Mars Hill Albuquerque for a position in the Seattle area [link]. The transition was apparently an amicable one [link], although I have not seen an official announcement for those of us outside the Mars Hill Church circle of light, etc. We wish the Bruskas family all the best in their new situation.
So summer of 2011 seems to match up across the board. With Turner on the executive team but not yet installed as an elder and with there having been just Munson and Driscoll as official executive elders it's not clear even to Wenatchee The Hatchet whether between November 2010 and August 2011 there were the bare minimum three executive elders required by the by-laws Jamie Munson drafted. Was Scott Thomas still in executive eldership in 2011, possibly? Wenatchee The Hatchet can't recall him being on the executive leadership side of things in MH in 2011, though he had a significant role in Acts 29.
The excerpt published by Throckmorton involving Yates and Small is interesting not just because it raises a question as to who the full roster of executive elders would have been in June 2011 when Rick Melson and Tim Beltz were both definitively out of executive eldership, leaving open the question of who the third executive elder required by the bylaws would have been if it wasn't Sutton Turner (yet). There might have been some executive elder in there for the third slot Wenatchee The Hatchet just forgot about.
And it all makes it seems as though RSI was more connected to Thomas Nelson and BOTH Driscolls than a reader might have previously imagined. "The Driscolls and I" leaves little doubt that Grace seemed to be involved, too. By "The Driscolls" it seems a reasonable guess to refer to just Mark and Grace Driscoll. One Rick Sprull is described as agreeing to work with Mars Hill and Result Source to make the campaign work.
There's a question lurking in the paragraph quoted by Throckmorton and it has to do with Jamie Munson. Since Munson was in 2011 still the legal president of Mars Hill based on the bylaws that were voted through in 2007 it would make sense that Munson would have necessarily played an active role in dealing with Result Source and in discussing the viability of using Result Source on a Driscoll book with boards at Mars Hill in 2011. And yet ... let's revisit something in a memo credited to Sutton Turner from March 17, 2012.
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
How was this "basically checked out" possible if in the midst of the summer of 2011 Munson has been described as talking with the Mars Hill board about the viability of the Result Source Inc deal? If by "checked out" the reference was to the ordinary operating processes of the corporation known as Mars Hill was there evidence? Or was "checked out" something that has to be modified by our increasing awareness that Munson played a role in the Result Source deal?
And if Thomas Nelson people were meeting with the Driscolls and with Kevin Small of Result Source then ... how much disavowal from the publisher holds up? If a paragraph of correspondence suggests Thomas Nelson people agreed to work with Result Source people then it doesn't seem to matter if it wasn't the idea of someone at Nelson if they at some point agreed to go along with the idea, does it?
And for those who don't recall, the book that came to be known as Real Marriage had been incubating since at least as far back as later 2010.
For those who didn't spot this, way back in January 2011 Driscoll tweeted the following:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110106073333/http://twitter.com/PastorMark
Talking w/Grace about our book. Big idea God has hit me with is that marriage is about being a best friend so that's my top goal for 2011
And even earlier:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101206061023/http://twitter.com/PastorMark
Grace & I are writing re sex & marriage is making progress. With the 2 publisher finalists in town. Title is unsettled - Your Best Wife Now?
So based on the late 2010 tweet the Driscolls had narrowed the publishers down to two finalists and Driscoll cracked a joke about a working title. Two finalists by December 6, 2010. According to the statement by the MH BoAA this year ...
https://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
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.
Of possible interest for the incubation of Real Marriage may be cross-referencing the Result Source collaboration with the financial instrument developed to purchase a million dollar home in Snohomish County.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20house%20and%20a%20contract
Let's review the chronology in its bare bones. It seems we've learned that BOTH Driscolls had to have known about the RSI deal by at least June 27 2011. By this time On Mission LLC had been incorporated in Colorado in January 2011. The financial instrument Future Hope Revocable Living Trust was created in February 2011 according to the deed of the house in Woodway purchased May 2012. So in December 2010 the two publisher finalists had been chosen. In January 2011 the side company to manage book royalties was incorporated in Colorado. In February 2011 the financial instrument that was used to buy the Woodway house got created. Some time in 2011 "outside counsel" advised RSI and by the end of 2011 the deal was inked. The rest was history.
At the moment what's not clear to Wenatchee The Hatchet is who the third executive elder from November 2010 to June 2011 would have been. If Bruskas was on board as an executive elder in August 2011 he wasn't on the executive team yet and yet there's no clear documentation as to who the necessary third executive elder would have been. We know Driscoll and Munson were there but perhaps alert readers can explain who the third executive elder at Mars Hill was from the months of November 2010 through July 2011 was? Even Wenatchee The Hatchet forgets stuff. If Bruskas became an executive elder some time in August 2011 then his connection to RSI and knowledge of it may have been minimal if it was Munson and/or Turner doing a lot of the meeting. But if Bruskas wasn't on the scene in the executive eldership yet in June 2011 and Sutton Turner was in the executive leader circle but not yet an elder there needed to be a third man.
There's a video and about 2:15 Bruskas described himself as having been part of a leadership culture that was "heavy handed and domineering". He also described these problems as still being within the community (though the audio is a bit muffled).
Throckmorton notes in the reent post Bruskas describes regretting participation in the Strange Fire stunt. That Bruskas was at the Strange Fire stunt Driscoll seemed to spearhead has been documented generously via social media and if you want a synopsis of that ... there's a post here:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html
Last Wenatchee can readily recall discussing things at much length in connection with Bruskas would have been ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
The time Bruskas told leaders "we need your help" facing down a layoff season days after Driscolls finalized buying a million-dollar home in Snohomish county.
Throckmorton's recent post adds some new elements to consider about what Bruskas may or may not have been in a position to know in 2011 when Real Marriage was getting drafted and RSI was being contacted.
For himself the three things he felt grieved about were the New York Times best-seller scam, the Strange Fire conference, and the performance driven culture of ministry.
Bruskas said he was a new executive elder in 2011 who was informed about the ResultSource contract by Jamie Munson in a car ride to work one morning. He asked if the approach had integrity and was financially feasible. Bruskas said Munson answered yes to both. After that, according to Bruskas, he didn’t ask any more questions.
Bruskas disclosed to friends that he was going to take the #2 position at Mars Hill in July 2011. That was about a month after Mark and Grace Driscoll and their agent Sealy Yates met at Thomas Nelson to discuss the ResultSource approach to scamming the best-seller list. This June 27, 2011 note from Sealy Yates to Kevin Small was included in a Mars Hill memo on the ResultSource-Real Marriage campaign.
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/16/mars-hill-church-executive-elder-dave-bruskas-on-mark-driscoll-nyts-best-seller-list-strange-fire-and-more/#ixzz3M7cQyLS9
Of particular note ...
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/12/Yates2SmallJun11.png
There's a partial correspondence Throckmorton quotes from regarding Jamie Munson interacting with the Mars Hill Board about Result Source. Throckmorton has lately asked who might have been on that board. Well, absolutely not Rick Melson, though Rick Melson had a role at Mars Hill.
Long ago before it was scrubbed from something like a LinkedIn Profile it was said of Melson that:
President/Campus Network Director
Resurgence/Mars Hill Church
January 2009– June 2010 (1 year 6 months)
And it couldn't have been Tim Beltz, who stopped being an executive leader in 2010.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/tim-beltz/76/960/7a8
Executive Pastor
Mars Hill Church
October 2007 – November 2010 (3 years 2 months)|Greater Seattle Area
So if Melson and Beltz were both gone by the middle of 2010 who was still on the executive team? The accounts about and by Sutton Turner about his joining executive leadership raise some questions about whether he ever intended to become an executive elder at Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-narrative-question-when-i-came-to.html
Turner was brought on during a period in which Munson was still an executive elder and president. Driscoll was technically vice-president and while Turner was on the executive team he was not yet an elder. It was conceivable that during this time to ensure the bare minimum of three executive elders required at the time that Dave Bruskas may have been added, whether by invitation or self-nomination. Given the pattern of men who played roles in acquiring real estate landing prestigious jobs at Mars Hill Bruskas' possible role in getting City on a Hill in Albuquerque to Mars Hill in 2009 may or may not have been part of a possible pattern. Driscoll had expressed some interest from the pulpit in the New Mexico site being a hub for further interstate expansion in 2009.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search?q=albuquerque+2009
As preserved at the above post there's some indication that the summer of 2011 was when Bruskas transitioned out.
http://halfabridge.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/a-quick-note-about-dave-bruskas/
a quick note about Dave Bruskas
August 16, 2011
Mike DeLong
Yes, Dave Bruskas, now-former pastor of City On A Hill (now Mars Hill Albuquerque) has apparently [link] left Mars Hill Albuquerque for a position in the Seattle area [link]. The transition was apparently an amicable one [link], although I have not seen an official announcement for those of us outside the Mars Hill Church circle of light, etc. We wish the Bruskas family all the best in their new situation.
So summer of 2011 seems to match up across the board. With Turner on the executive team but not yet installed as an elder and with there having been just Munson and Driscoll as official executive elders it's not clear even to Wenatchee The Hatchet whether between November 2010 and August 2011 there were the bare minimum three executive elders required by the by-laws Jamie Munson drafted. Was Scott Thomas still in executive eldership in 2011, possibly? Wenatchee The Hatchet can't recall him being on the executive leadership side of things in MH in 2011, though he had a significant role in Acts 29.
The excerpt published by Throckmorton involving Yates and Small is interesting not just because it raises a question as to who the full roster of executive elders would have been in June 2011 when Rick Melson and Tim Beltz were both definitively out of executive eldership, leaving open the question of who the third executive elder required by the bylaws would have been if it wasn't Sutton Turner (yet). There might have been some executive elder in there for the third slot Wenatchee The Hatchet just forgot about.
And it all makes it seems as though RSI was more connected to Thomas Nelson and BOTH Driscolls than a reader might have previously imagined. "The Driscolls and I" leaves little doubt that Grace seemed to be involved, too. By "The Driscolls" it seems a reasonable guess to refer to just Mark and Grace Driscoll. One Rick Sprull is described as agreeing to work with Mars Hill and Result Source to make the campaign work.
There's a question lurking in the paragraph quoted by Throckmorton and it has to do with Jamie Munson. Since Munson was in 2011 still the legal president of Mars Hill based on the bylaws that were voted through in 2007 it would make sense that Munson would have necessarily played an active role in dealing with Result Source and in discussing the viability of using Result Source on a Driscoll book with boards at Mars Hill in 2011. And yet ... let's revisit something in a memo credited to Sutton Turner from March 17, 2012.
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as
General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked
out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder.
Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff.
This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less
see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
How was this "basically checked out" possible if in the midst of the summer of 2011 Munson has been described as talking with the Mars Hill board about the viability of the Result Source Inc deal? If by "checked out" the reference was to the ordinary operating processes of the corporation known as Mars Hill was there evidence? Or was "checked out" something that has to be modified by our increasing awareness that Munson played a role in the Result Source deal?
And if Thomas Nelson people were meeting with the Driscolls and with Kevin Small of Result Source then ... how much disavowal from the publisher holds up? If a paragraph of correspondence suggests Thomas Nelson people agreed to work with Result Source people then it doesn't seem to matter if it wasn't the idea of someone at Nelson if they at some point agreed to go along with the idea, does it?
And for those who don't recall, the book that came to be known as Real Marriage had been incubating since at least as far back as later 2010.
For those who didn't spot this, way back in January 2011 Driscoll tweeted the following:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110106073333/http://twitter.com/PastorMark
Talking w/Grace about our book. Big idea God has hit me with is that marriage is about being a best friend so that's my top goal for 2011
And even earlier:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101206061023/http://twitter.com/PastorMark
Grace & I are writing re sex & marriage is making progress. With the 2 publisher finalists in town. Title is unsettled - Your Best Wife Now?
So based on the late 2010 tweet the Driscolls had narrowed the publishers down to two finalists and Driscoll cracked a joke about a working title. Two finalists by December 6, 2010. According to the statement by the MH BoAA this year ...
https://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
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.
Of possible interest for the incubation of Real Marriage may be cross-referencing the Result Source collaboration with the financial instrument developed to purchase a million dollar home in Snohomish County.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20house%20and%20a%20contract
Let's review the chronology in its bare bones. It seems we've learned that BOTH Driscolls had to have known about the RSI deal by at least June 27 2011. By this time On Mission LLC had been incorporated in Colorado in January 2011. The financial instrument Future Hope Revocable Living Trust was created in February 2011 according to the deed of the house in Woodway purchased May 2012. So in December 2010 the two publisher finalists had been chosen. In January 2011 the side company to manage book royalties was incorporated in Colorado. In February 2011 the financial instrument that was used to buy the Woodway house got created. Some time in 2011 "outside counsel" advised RSI and by the end of 2011 the deal was inked. The rest was history.
At the moment what's not clear to Wenatchee The Hatchet is who the third executive elder from November 2010 to June 2011 would have been. If Bruskas was on board as an executive elder in August 2011 he wasn't on the executive team yet and yet there's no clear documentation as to who the necessary third executive elder would have been. We know Driscoll and Munson were there but perhaps alert readers can explain who the third executive elder at Mars Hill was from the months of November 2010 through July 2011 was? Even Wenatchee The Hatchet forgets stuff. If Bruskas became an executive elder some time in August 2011 then his connection to RSI and knowledge of it may have been minimal if it was Munson and/or Turner doing a lot of the meeting. But if Bruskas wasn't on the scene in the executive eldership yet in June 2011 and Sutton Turner was in the executive leader circle but not yet an elder there needed to be a third man.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Internet Monk: Thom Rainer on Megachurches
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/thom-rainer-on-megachurch-trends
Rainer mentions seven trends, noted summarily as:
1. Further consolidation of people attending church in megachurches and other large churches
2. A significant increase in the number of megachurches in America
3. An increased interest in the long-term sustainability of the megachurch
(The ten largest U.S. churches in 1969 are not in the largest now, which raises the question of how sustainable the megachurch model is)
4. More youthful megachurch pastors
5. More multi-venue, multi-campus churches
6. A greater interest in groups (i.e. small groups, community groups, maybe throw in Redemption Groups since there's a push for that in some circles)
7. A greater interest in the source of growth of megachurches.
As has been suggested a time or two here at Wenatchee The Hatchet we may be in a time in which there are a few closet-case denominations. Mars Hill and Acts 29 may protest they are not a denomination but a movement of like-minded churches that span denominational and confessional boundaries. They are "Reformed" and "evangelical" and "missional" and "complementarian". You can even cite those words without quotes if you like.
But here's the thing to keep in mind, they can say over and over they don't function like a denomination but let's consider some reference cases.
http://pastormark.tv/2011/11/29/jesus-loves-church-mergers-and-so-should-you
Four of our churches, however, are a result of mergers.
Mars Hill Bellevue
In the mid-2000s, a Mars Hill elder planted church on the Eastside of the greater Seattle area called The Vine. This plant was led by a Mars Hill pastor at the time, Jesse Winkler. The Vine started with a small core group from Mars Hill and eventually grew to be somewhere between 100 to 200 people.
Many people from that area were still driving into Seattle to attend Mars Hill in Ballard, and the number of people grew so large that we decided to consider planting a church east of Seattle. We met with Winkler and asked him if he wanted to continue as an independent church with us planting another one far enough away from his church so as to not drain his people, or if he wanted to become a Mars Hill Church. He took some time to fast and pray, seeking God’s will, and was convinced God was asking him to partner with Mars Hill to lead one church made up of people from The Vine and Mars Hill. The Vine church became Mars Hill Eastside in 2008, which eventually became Mars Hill Bellevue.
After the merger, the church saw immediate growth, going from 200 people to over 500 people almost overnight. Some Sundays, men were asked to stand outside in the wet and cold of Seattle to listen via speaker because we couldn't fit everyone into the small funeral home in which the church met for the multiple services. Since then, there has been much fruit, as Mars Hill Downtown Bellevue just moved into a new building in the heart of Downtown Bellevue and is seeing over 2,000 people worship Jesus and serve the surrounding community, hundreds of which are a result of new Christians who met Jesus and were baptized at Mars Hill Bellevue.
Additionally, Mars Hill Bellevue, along with some other Acts 29 churches, helped fund Westview Church in San Diego, California, with Pastor Jesse spearheading that plant. And the church has sent a core group of a couple hundred over to our newest location, Mars Hill Sammamish (which I’ll talk about later in this post).
The Vine got big enough that it was noteworthy. It was a Mars Hill church plant. Let's not overlook the obvious here. When a Mars Hill pastor goes and plants a church, it does well, and it gets assimilated into Mars Hill at a formal level this is not a church merger in the sense that two distinct entities have merged. The community was re-assimilated back into the parent/originating entity. For folks curious as to where Jesse Winkler went after the assimilation happened Driscoll provided a link to where Winkler went. For sake of overview, it "looks" like a church merger but bringing the church plant of a Mars Hill pastor formally into the fold could be seen as formalizing a distinction that was not really a difference to begin with.
Now then there's ...
Mars Hill West Seattle
Mars Hill West Seattle was a result of conversations I had with Pastor Bill Clem, who now leads our Ballard church. Bill planted Doxa Fellowship in West Seattle after having served as the North American Director for Sonlife Ministries, a national discipleship ministry. The church was part of the Acts 29 network and running under 100 people when Bill and I began talking.
At the time, Bill’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, from which she eventually passed away. I called up Bill to offer support for the tough battle he and his wife were facing, and I also asked if he’d be open to letting us use Doxa’s building on Sunday mornings, as Doxa was only meeting on Sunday nights.
Eventually, as our church met in his building in the mornings, as we talked more and more, and as Bill’s wife faced a continuing and difficult battle with cancer, Doxa decided to merge with Mars Hill and become part of our church. We gave Bill many months off, paid him a full salary, and let him care for his dying wife and get a break from the exhausting work he’d undertaken in planting a church with an often bedridden wife. Her funeral was held in the church building that Pastor Bill had been given, and once he was ready, he started working for Mars Hill and is now our lead pastor at our biggest church, Mars Hill Ballard. Additionally, he has published the book Discipleship for us, and is the Northwest regional director for Acts 29.
The old church building we inherited needed a lot of work. So, the people of Mars Hill generously gave $1.8 million in one massive special offering to renovate it. It’s been a great transition over the last five years or so, with the church growing from less than 100 people to now well over 700 people coming together to worship Jesus and serve the West Seattle area, many of whom are new believers who’ve met Jesus and been baptized at Mars Hill West Seattle. Not only that, Mars Hill West Seattle has gone from being a church plant to planting churches, having planted Mars Hill Federal Way in 2009.
“As I look back in the rear view mirror,” says Pastor Bill, “I’d do it all over again. Because I see where we’re going and what [Doxa] was doing. That [Doxa] was following Jesus as [their] senior pastor.”
James Noriega gets no mention in this process. That might have been because by November 2011 Noriega had been fired. It was apparently also in late 2011 that the disciplinary case of Andrew was beginning to take shape but consult Matthew Paul Turner's blog for that story. It's simply a coincidence and not necessarily pertinent to Driscoll's plug for church mergers.
What is relevant is that former pastor James Noriega and Pastor Bill Clem played the role of getting Doxa to Mars Hill and were pastors at a church with real estate Driscoll had wanted for Mars Hill for ten years. Driscoll shared in "One Body Many Parts" he'd wanted the real estate that Doxa was sitting on for Mars Hill for a decade. He also mentioned a rent-free arrangement with CRISTA ministries that let Mars Hill use Schirmer Auditorium for free. Tim Beltz was Chief Operations Officer at CRISTA around the time that deal was brokered, though whether or not he was involved in the deal never has been discussed. Beltz did, however, get ordained as a pastor and executive elder at Mars Hill in October 2007 even though by the by-laws in place at the time he couldn't have been considered eligible to be an executive elder. But you can dig through the real estate and Mars Hill tagged posts for that.
Next ...
Mars Hill Albuquerque
In 2009, Pastor Dave Bruskas, planter and lead pastor of City on a Hill in Albuquerque, New Mexico, began talks with us on merging the church he’d pastored for over 10 years with Mars Hill Church and becoming our first out of state church.
At the time, City on a Hill was running over a 275 people, healthy, and doing good ministry in their city. There was lots of discussion as to whether the merger was the right move, but as Pastor Dave relates, “One question rose above all the others as most important: ‘Would more people meet Jesus if we went through with this?’ After months of deliberation, the leaders of both churches unanimously answered that question with a resounding ‘Yes!’”
The driving force behind the merger between Mars Hill Church and City on a Hill was one of shared mission. Our desire was to see as many people as possible in the city of Albuquerque meet Jesus, and we both felt strongly that this could be accomplished better together than apart.
God has been gracious to us. Today, Mars Hill Albuquerque has over 800 people meeting to worship together and serve their community each week. And we thank God that 250 people have met Jesus and been baptized at Mars Hill Albuquerque since the merger in 2009. Today, the church has outgrown its building and is officially replanting in a new larger building on December 11. Pastor Dave is now an executive elder at Mars Hill, the #2 ranking pastor in all of Mars Hill, and a tremendous gift to our church.
Do you wonder if perhaps by now there might be something Driscoll neglected to mention in this piece about City on a Hill? If you were to guess that the thing Driscoll didn't mention is that City on a hill was an Acts 29 church plant ...
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors
May 3, 2009
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors#downloads
about 4:30 into the sermon
City on a Hill is a church planted through the Acts 29 Network by Pastor Dave Bruskas. He's a great guy. Really great guy. Years ago he was actually on staff in the building our Lake City campus actually meets at. He has planted his church in Albuquerque. It's going really well. There are over 400 people. Great church. Doing very well. Bilingual, multiethnic, eldership. Really cool things happening. And they have agreed to partner with us. We praise God for that. We rejoice in that. So they have announced to their people officially today that they're becoming a Mars Hill campus.
And what this means is that we hope to establish them as a regional hub to plant campuses of Mars Hill and churches of Acts 29 all over the Southeast, including into Mexico. Some of their elders are bilingual and are able to minister across cultural contexts and we praise God for that. As well at least one of their primary leaders is part of a Native American nation, tribe, and has full rights to potentially even plant a church in that context so it opens up some wonderful opportunities that we praise God for.
Hmm ... so City on a Hill was an Acts 29 church plant and it was planted in 2009 and it was 400 people by May 3, 2009 based on what Driscoll indicated in his sermon and lo they decided to partner with Mars Hill and now Dave Bruskas is an executive elder. Tim Beltz was Chief Operations Officers for CRISTA Ministries during the years in which Mars Hill was given free access (in apparently all senses of the term "free" to go by what Driscoll said in "One Body, Many Parts") and then Beltz ends up an instant executive elder at Mars Hill in October 2007 having been attending the church since apparently about 2004.
So if City on a Hill was an Acts 29 church plant that started in 2009 and in 2009 was swiftly assimilated into the Mars Hill fold where Dave Bruskas ended up being an executive elder then the pattern with the church mergers Driscoll cited in November 2011 would seem to be that the boundary between an Acts 29 church plant and Mars Hill is very permeable if the real estate is at a hot location and the church could be considered a hub for further expansion. Fair enough ... but the pitch for how much Jesus loves church mergers might have come across as a bit more above board if Driscoll said, "We love assimilating Acts 29 church plants and Mars Hill church plants back into our organization as we expand and outsiders shouldn't have a problem with that."
So that gets us to Mars Hill Sammamish. Be warned a few of the links Driscoll uses have ended up dead. The campus blog archives and blogs were all taken down in early 2012. That might have been because of the massive amount of information about campus pastors and their wives and children and stepchildren. Maybe Mars Hill took all that stuff down out of a concern that if Andrew's story had gone public that identifying which pastor and stepdaughter/daughter he was dating would have only taken forty seconds to discover on-line. That would have been a legitimate concern. Too bad for Mars Hill all the information got blogged and tweeted and mentioned in sermons and in media coverage over the course of eight years anyway. Connecting the dots is simply a matter of a bit of time, patience and knowing how to use some rudimentary search tools. No, I'm not going to tell you who the people are. If you already know you already know and if you don't already know it isn't material to a discussion of how Mars Hill assimilated Acts 29 and Mars Hill church plants back into its umbrella.
But Sammamish is a bit different.
Mars Hill Sammamish
The newest church at Mars Hill is also the result of a merger between Evergreen Christian Fellowship in Sammamish, about 30 minutes east of Seattle, and Mars Hill. This is still breaking news, as it was announced just a few weeks ago and will be officially launched as Mars Hill Sammamish on January 15, 2012.
Evergreen Christian Fellowship (ECF) was a once larger church that was facing some financial difficulties as they had a newer building on over 10 acres on the plateau east of Bellevue, Washington. ECF was comprised about over 100 great, God-fearing, Bible-loving Christians who have a passion for the city of Sammamish and the surrounding area.
Facing some loses in leadership (they had no lead pastor) and some financial struggles, they reached out to us to see if a merger would be a possibility. It was a grace bomb that dropped out of nowhere for us. [don't bother following the link, it's dead and drops to the church calendar]
Through our talks, we decided to merge, as we share the same biblical convictions and both share a commitment to the same mission of seeing as many people as possible on the Sammamish Plateau meet Jesus.
“Our ministry and our mission and vision statements have been very similar, so that’s why we pursued Mars Hill,” says Guy Dalrymple, who chaired ECF’s transition team. [same dead link, same don't bother] “We had other options, but the core principles and the core doctrine between our two churches were very similar, and that’s what was really enthusiastic and that’s what drew us to Mars Hill.”
We’ve not even launched yet, but the response has been amazing. Last Sunday, we installed the first roughly 100 members of Mars Hill Sammamish and nearly all of them were the former members of ECF. I preached there live, and we had 1,100 people! The church does not even launch officially until January 15, 2012, but it’s rocketing off to an amazing start thanks in part to the hundreds of people from Mars Hill Bellevue who live nearby and moved over to Mars Hill Sammamish.
“This could have been a really sad story, a good church forced to shut its doors,” says Sam DeLay [tje same dead link], a Mars Hill leader who will serve on staff at the Sammamish location, “but God has redeemed that story. Together, we now have a great opportunity to serve this community for a long time.”
For a summary of the January 2012 opening of Mars Hill Sammamish go here.
For local coverage of how the decision was arrived at on the part of Evergreen Christian Fellowship go here and here. Short summary for people who don't follow links, ECF was a church plant from the 1990s that used land donated by Overlake Christian Church (yeah, that one for the locals for the rest the sex scandal won't be hard to research). ECF got halfway through projected building before basically running out of money. Needing some help they turned to Mars Hill Church which purchased the real estate (yeah ... expect this to get further discussion in a certain set of posts at this blog at some unspecified point in the future).
So in this case we've finally gotten to a church merger in which what was merged into Mars Hill was an actually (apparently) different church from an Acts 29 plant or a Mars Hill plant. As Driscoll described it, the thing came as a surprise (because it was an idea he didn't think of, possibly?).
It would appear that Ghioni and company at Evergreen Christian Fellowship had their own transition committee and had done a lot of the work in advance. If so then why wouldn't Mars Hill agree to a church merger where the legwork had been done in advance and they were approached as the favored candidate. All they may have had to do was just buy the property that ECF may have been half-way to purchasing anyway. If the land was donated by Overlake (a church that has not been in the greatest of shape since the sex scandal) it was going to be a genuinely beneficial deal for the parties involved, wouldn't it?
With so many campuses, though, Mars Hill can't consider itself a non-denominational church forever. Institutionally it's becoming more and more in functionality what it has already effectively been, a denomination. But for a guy like Driscoll who has spent years talking about how denominations are on the wane and with Mars Hill leaders preferring to speak of their thing as a "movement" rather than an institution Mars Hill may be a conspicuous case study in what may be described as a denominational closet case. The boundaries between Mars Hill and Acts 29 seem pretty permeable. This wouldn't just be the case because Jesse Winkler, Bill Clem and Dave Bruskas did church plants that were assimilated into Mars Hill.
It seems the boundaries between Mars Hill and Acts 29 churches are permeable on the basis of former Mars Hill pastor Scott Thomas landing a job at The Journey having served as president of Acts 29 and as executive elder at Mars Hill. Shuffling leaders within and across administrative roles and regional boundaries is one of those things that is characteristic of institutions, and of denominations with some long-standing. When Mars Hill Lake City got shut down a number of its leaders were shuffled over to Mars Hill Shoreline. When some blogger documented that James Noriega was no longer employed as a pastor by Mars Hill West Seattle Pastor Tim Beltz, within a week, was popping up over at Mars Hill Downtown.
Driscoll opted to field a rhetorical question, "Why the negativity?" He proposed that "merger" was simply an unappealing term. He went on to talk about "missional mergers" and mentions that Sammamish happened because of a financial struggle. West Seattle was because of personal loss on the part of Bill Clem (the way Driscoll phrased it you might have assumed Jeannie was already dead but she died a few years later--Clem was given a full salary and the option to not work for months at a time and in exchange would run the Ballard campus. Driscoll was able to get a piece of real estate he admitted he'd wanted for Mars Hill for ten years). City on a Hill was seen, by Driscoll's mention of it in a sermon in the 1 Peter series, as a great place to form a hub for regional expansion.
Driscoll's case that mergers are likely to increase because there are fewer younger people and these are less likely to be in church may have some merit if one's goal is ensuring the continuance of the megachurch paradigm. I'm still not convinced and in the case of a man and a ministry like Mark Driscoll the long-term legacy of a place like Mars Hill "could" be reaching countless for Jesus or the age of the internet and a cult of personality as a substitute for responsible biblical expository teaching or (to borrow Lutheran ideas) proper administration of the sacraments could make the regions in which Mars Hill has influence a new kind of burned-over district in which people want "gifted" speakers more than competent biblical scholars and the giddy rush of mass musical events becomes a substitute for what in Pentecostal circles might have been called "annointed" experience. Driscoll has said he's a charismatic with a seatbelt but the visions ... are best left undiscussed in this post.
So churches have taken a hit since the real estate bubble burst and the recession began. Driscoll has tried to present mergers as about Jesus and not about a larger church taking over a smaller church. That is a simplification but it's ironic for a guy like Driscoll to say we shouldn't simplify things. He's said that people who haven't liked how he preaches on Song of Songs must be downloading porno. What if the simplification that is accurate for Mars Hill may be that if a smaller church has grown quickly, shows promise of future growth, has a competent leader sitting on a piece of real estate that is valuable that partnering appeals to Mars Hill? That's not a gross simplification, even if a person "could" cynically read that as Mars Hill cherry-picking the most successful Acts 29 plants as a way to maximize its own growth and making the boundary between Mars Hill and Acts 29 unilaterally permeable in Mars Hill's favor.
But because they'll say so, they're not a denomination.
Rainer mentions seven trends, noted summarily as:
1. Further consolidation of people attending church in megachurches and other large churches
2. A significant increase in the number of megachurches in America
3. An increased interest in the long-term sustainability of the megachurch
(The ten largest U.S. churches in 1969 are not in the largest now, which raises the question of how sustainable the megachurch model is)
4. More youthful megachurch pastors
5. More multi-venue, multi-campus churches
6. A greater interest in groups (i.e. small groups, community groups, maybe throw in Redemption Groups since there's a push for that in some circles)
7. A greater interest in the source of growth of megachurches.
As has been suggested a time or two here at Wenatchee The Hatchet we may be in a time in which there are a few closet-case denominations. Mars Hill and Acts 29 may protest they are not a denomination but a movement of like-minded churches that span denominational and confessional boundaries. They are "Reformed" and "evangelical" and "missional" and "complementarian". You can even cite those words without quotes if you like.
But here's the thing to keep in mind, they can say over and over they don't function like a denomination but let's consider some reference cases.
http://pastormark.tv/2011/11/29/jesus-loves-church-mergers-and-so-should-you
Four of our churches, however, are a result of mergers.
Mars Hill Bellevue
In the mid-2000s, a Mars Hill elder planted church on the Eastside of the greater Seattle area called The Vine. This plant was led by a Mars Hill pastor at the time, Jesse Winkler. The Vine started with a small core group from Mars Hill and eventually grew to be somewhere between 100 to 200 people.
Many people from that area were still driving into Seattle to attend Mars Hill in Ballard, and the number of people grew so large that we decided to consider planting a church east of Seattle. We met with Winkler and asked him if he wanted to continue as an independent church with us planting another one far enough away from his church so as to not drain his people, or if he wanted to become a Mars Hill Church. He took some time to fast and pray, seeking God’s will, and was convinced God was asking him to partner with Mars Hill to lead one church made up of people from The Vine and Mars Hill. The Vine church became Mars Hill Eastside in 2008, which eventually became Mars Hill Bellevue.
After the merger, the church saw immediate growth, going from 200 people to over 500 people almost overnight. Some Sundays, men were asked to stand outside in the wet and cold of Seattle to listen via speaker because we couldn't fit everyone into the small funeral home in which the church met for the multiple services. Since then, there has been much fruit, as Mars Hill Downtown Bellevue just moved into a new building in the heart of Downtown Bellevue and is seeing over 2,000 people worship Jesus and serve the surrounding community, hundreds of which are a result of new Christians who met Jesus and were baptized at Mars Hill Bellevue.
Additionally, Mars Hill Bellevue, along with some other Acts 29 churches, helped fund Westview Church in San Diego, California, with Pastor Jesse spearheading that plant. And the church has sent a core group of a couple hundred over to our newest location, Mars Hill Sammamish (which I’ll talk about later in this post).
The Vine got big enough that it was noteworthy. It was a Mars Hill church plant. Let's not overlook the obvious here. When a Mars Hill pastor goes and plants a church, it does well, and it gets assimilated into Mars Hill at a formal level this is not a church merger in the sense that two distinct entities have merged. The community was re-assimilated back into the parent/originating entity. For folks curious as to where Jesse Winkler went after the assimilation happened Driscoll provided a link to where Winkler went. For sake of overview, it "looks" like a church merger but bringing the church plant of a Mars Hill pastor formally into the fold could be seen as formalizing a distinction that was not really a difference to begin with.
Now then there's ...
Mars Hill West Seattle
Mars Hill West Seattle was a result of conversations I had with Pastor Bill Clem, who now leads our Ballard church. Bill planted Doxa Fellowship in West Seattle after having served as the North American Director for Sonlife Ministries, a national discipleship ministry. The church was part of the Acts 29 network and running under 100 people when Bill and I began talking.
At the time, Bill’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, from which she eventually passed away. I called up Bill to offer support for the tough battle he and his wife were facing, and I also asked if he’d be open to letting us use Doxa’s building on Sunday mornings, as Doxa was only meeting on Sunday nights.
Eventually, as our church met in his building in the mornings, as we talked more and more, and as Bill’s wife faced a continuing and difficult battle with cancer, Doxa decided to merge with Mars Hill and become part of our church. We gave Bill many months off, paid him a full salary, and let him care for his dying wife and get a break from the exhausting work he’d undertaken in planting a church with an often bedridden wife. Her funeral was held in the church building that Pastor Bill had been given, and once he was ready, he started working for Mars Hill and is now our lead pastor at our biggest church, Mars Hill Ballard. Additionally, he has published the book Discipleship for us, and is the Northwest regional director for Acts 29.
The old church building we inherited needed a lot of work. So, the people of Mars Hill generously gave $1.8 million in one massive special offering to renovate it. It’s been a great transition over the last five years or so, with the church growing from less than 100 people to now well over 700 people coming together to worship Jesus and serve the West Seattle area, many of whom are new believers who’ve met Jesus and been baptized at Mars Hill West Seattle. Not only that, Mars Hill West Seattle has gone from being a church plant to planting churches, having planted Mars Hill Federal Way in 2009.
“As I look back in the rear view mirror,” says Pastor Bill, “I’d do it all over again. Because I see where we’re going and what [Doxa] was doing. That [Doxa] was following Jesus as [their] senior pastor.”
James Noriega gets no mention in this process. That might have been because by November 2011 Noriega had been fired. It was apparently also in late 2011 that the disciplinary case of Andrew was beginning to take shape but consult Matthew Paul Turner's blog for that story. It's simply a coincidence and not necessarily pertinent to Driscoll's plug for church mergers.
What is relevant is that former pastor James Noriega and Pastor Bill Clem played the role of getting Doxa to Mars Hill and were pastors at a church with real estate Driscoll had wanted for Mars Hill for ten years. Driscoll shared in "One Body Many Parts" he'd wanted the real estate that Doxa was sitting on for Mars Hill for a decade. He also mentioned a rent-free arrangement with CRISTA ministries that let Mars Hill use Schirmer Auditorium for free. Tim Beltz was Chief Operations Officer at CRISTA around the time that deal was brokered, though whether or not he was involved in the deal never has been discussed. Beltz did, however, get ordained as a pastor and executive elder at Mars Hill in October 2007 even though by the by-laws in place at the time he couldn't have been considered eligible to be an executive elder. But you can dig through the real estate and Mars Hill tagged posts for that.
Next ...
Mars Hill Albuquerque
In 2009, Pastor Dave Bruskas, planter and lead pastor of City on a Hill in Albuquerque, New Mexico, began talks with us on merging the church he’d pastored for over 10 years with Mars Hill Church and becoming our first out of state church.
At the time, City on a Hill was running over a 275 people, healthy, and doing good ministry in their city. There was lots of discussion as to whether the merger was the right move, but as Pastor Dave relates, “One question rose above all the others as most important: ‘Would more people meet Jesus if we went through with this?’ After months of deliberation, the leaders of both churches unanimously answered that question with a resounding ‘Yes!’”
The driving force behind the merger between Mars Hill Church and City on a Hill was one of shared mission. Our desire was to see as many people as possible in the city of Albuquerque meet Jesus, and we both felt strongly that this could be accomplished better together than apart.
God has been gracious to us. Today, Mars Hill Albuquerque has over 800 people meeting to worship together and serve their community each week. And we thank God that 250 people have met Jesus and been baptized at Mars Hill Albuquerque since the merger in 2009. Today, the church has outgrown its building and is officially replanting in a new larger building on December 11. Pastor Dave is now an executive elder at Mars Hill, the #2 ranking pastor in all of Mars Hill, and a tremendous gift to our church.
Do you wonder if perhaps by now there might be something Driscoll neglected to mention in this piece about City on a Hill? If you were to guess that the thing Driscoll didn't mention is that City on a hill was an Acts 29 church plant ...
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors
May 3, 2009
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors#downloads
about 4:30 into the sermon
City on a Hill is a church planted through the Acts 29 Network by Pastor Dave Bruskas. He's a great guy. Really great guy. Years ago he was actually on staff in the building our Lake City campus actually meets at. He has planted his church in Albuquerque. It's going really well. There are over 400 people. Great church. Doing very well. Bilingual, multiethnic, eldership. Really cool things happening. And they have agreed to partner with us. We praise God for that. We rejoice in that. So they have announced to their people officially today that they're becoming a Mars Hill campus.
And what this means is that we hope to establish them as a regional hub to plant campuses of Mars Hill and churches of Acts 29 all over the Southeast, including into Mexico. Some of their elders are bilingual and are able to minister across cultural contexts and we praise God for that. As well at least one of their primary leaders is part of a Native American nation, tribe, and has full rights to potentially even plant a church in that context so it opens up some wonderful opportunities that we praise God for.
Hmm ... so City on a Hill was an Acts 29 church plant and it was planted in 2009 and it was 400 people by May 3, 2009 based on what Driscoll indicated in his sermon and lo they decided to partner with Mars Hill and now Dave Bruskas is an executive elder. Tim Beltz was Chief Operations Officers for CRISTA Ministries during the years in which Mars Hill was given free access (in apparently all senses of the term "free" to go by what Driscoll said in "One Body, Many Parts") and then Beltz ends up an instant executive elder at Mars Hill in October 2007 having been attending the church since apparently about 2004.
So if City on a Hill was an Acts 29 church plant that started in 2009 and in 2009 was swiftly assimilated into the Mars Hill fold where Dave Bruskas ended up being an executive elder then the pattern with the church mergers Driscoll cited in November 2011 would seem to be that the boundary between an Acts 29 church plant and Mars Hill is very permeable if the real estate is at a hot location and the church could be considered a hub for further expansion. Fair enough ... but the pitch for how much Jesus loves church mergers might have come across as a bit more above board if Driscoll said, "We love assimilating Acts 29 church plants and Mars Hill church plants back into our organization as we expand and outsiders shouldn't have a problem with that."
So that gets us to Mars Hill Sammamish. Be warned a few of the links Driscoll uses have ended up dead. The campus blog archives and blogs were all taken down in early 2012. That might have been because of the massive amount of information about campus pastors and their wives and children and stepchildren. Maybe Mars Hill took all that stuff down out of a concern that if Andrew's story had gone public that identifying which pastor and stepdaughter/daughter he was dating would have only taken forty seconds to discover on-line. That would have been a legitimate concern. Too bad for Mars Hill all the information got blogged and tweeted and mentioned in sermons and in media coverage over the course of eight years anyway. Connecting the dots is simply a matter of a bit of time, patience and knowing how to use some rudimentary search tools. No, I'm not going to tell you who the people are. If you already know you already know and if you don't already know it isn't material to a discussion of how Mars Hill assimilated Acts 29 and Mars Hill church plants back into its umbrella.
But Sammamish is a bit different.
Mars Hill Sammamish
The newest church at Mars Hill is also the result of a merger between Evergreen Christian Fellowship in Sammamish, about 30 minutes east of Seattle, and Mars Hill. This is still breaking news, as it was announced just a few weeks ago and will be officially launched as Mars Hill Sammamish on January 15, 2012.
Evergreen Christian Fellowship (ECF) was a once larger church that was facing some financial difficulties as they had a newer building on over 10 acres on the plateau east of Bellevue, Washington. ECF was comprised about over 100 great, God-fearing, Bible-loving Christians who have a passion for the city of Sammamish and the surrounding area.
Facing some loses in leadership (they had no lead pastor) and some financial struggles, they reached out to us to see if a merger would be a possibility. It was a grace bomb that dropped out of nowhere for us. [don't bother following the link, it's dead and drops to the church calendar]
Through our talks, we decided to merge, as we share the same biblical convictions and both share a commitment to the same mission of seeing as many people as possible on the Sammamish Plateau meet Jesus.
“Our ministry and our mission and vision statements have been very similar, so that’s why we pursued Mars Hill,” says Guy Dalrymple, who chaired ECF’s transition team. [same dead link, same don't bother] “We had other options, but the core principles and the core doctrine between our two churches were very similar, and that’s what was really enthusiastic and that’s what drew us to Mars Hill.”
We’ve not even launched yet, but the response has been amazing. Last Sunday, we installed the first roughly 100 members of Mars Hill Sammamish and nearly all of them were the former members of ECF. I preached there live, and we had 1,100 people! The church does not even launch officially until January 15, 2012, but it’s rocketing off to an amazing start thanks in part to the hundreds of people from Mars Hill Bellevue who live nearby and moved over to Mars Hill Sammamish.
“This could have been a really sad story, a good church forced to shut its doors,” says Sam DeLay [tje same dead link], a Mars Hill leader who will serve on staff at the Sammamish location, “but God has redeemed that story. Together, we now have a great opportunity to serve this community for a long time.”
For a summary of the January 2012 opening of Mars Hill Sammamish go here.
For local coverage of how the decision was arrived at on the part of Evergreen Christian Fellowship go here and here. Short summary for people who don't follow links, ECF was a church plant from the 1990s that used land donated by Overlake Christian Church (yeah, that one for the locals for the rest the sex scandal won't be hard to research). ECF got halfway through projected building before basically running out of money. Needing some help they turned to Mars Hill Church which purchased the real estate (yeah ... expect this to get further discussion in a certain set of posts at this blog at some unspecified point in the future).
So in this case we've finally gotten to a church merger in which what was merged into Mars Hill was an actually (apparently) different church from an Acts 29 plant or a Mars Hill plant. As Driscoll described it, the thing came as a surprise (because it was an idea he didn't think of, possibly?).
It would appear that Ghioni and company at Evergreen Christian Fellowship had their own transition committee and had done a lot of the work in advance. If so then why wouldn't Mars Hill agree to a church merger where the legwork had been done in advance and they were approached as the favored candidate. All they may have had to do was just buy the property that ECF may have been half-way to purchasing anyway. If the land was donated by Overlake (a church that has not been in the greatest of shape since the sex scandal) it was going to be a genuinely beneficial deal for the parties involved, wouldn't it?
With so many campuses, though, Mars Hill can't consider itself a non-denominational church forever. Institutionally it's becoming more and more in functionality what it has already effectively been, a denomination. But for a guy like Driscoll who has spent years talking about how denominations are on the wane and with Mars Hill leaders preferring to speak of their thing as a "movement" rather than an institution Mars Hill may be a conspicuous case study in what may be described as a denominational closet case. The boundaries between Mars Hill and Acts 29 seem pretty permeable. This wouldn't just be the case because Jesse Winkler, Bill Clem and Dave Bruskas did church plants that were assimilated into Mars Hill.
It seems the boundaries between Mars Hill and Acts 29 churches are permeable on the basis of former Mars Hill pastor Scott Thomas landing a job at The Journey having served as president of Acts 29 and as executive elder at Mars Hill. Shuffling leaders within and across administrative roles and regional boundaries is one of those things that is characteristic of institutions, and of denominations with some long-standing. When Mars Hill Lake City got shut down a number of its leaders were shuffled over to Mars Hill Shoreline. When some blogger documented that James Noriega was no longer employed as a pastor by Mars Hill West Seattle Pastor Tim Beltz, within a week, was popping up over at Mars Hill Downtown.
Driscoll opted to field a rhetorical question, "Why the negativity?" He proposed that "merger" was simply an unappealing term. He went on to talk about "missional mergers" and mentions that Sammamish happened because of a financial struggle. West Seattle was because of personal loss on the part of Bill Clem (the way Driscoll phrased it you might have assumed Jeannie was already dead but she died a few years later--Clem was given a full salary and the option to not work for months at a time and in exchange would run the Ballard campus. Driscoll was able to get a piece of real estate he admitted he'd wanted for Mars Hill for ten years). City on a Hill was seen, by Driscoll's mention of it in a sermon in the 1 Peter series, as a great place to form a hub for regional expansion.
Driscoll's case that mergers are likely to increase because there are fewer younger people and these are less likely to be in church may have some merit if one's goal is ensuring the continuance of the megachurch paradigm. I'm still not convinced and in the case of a man and a ministry like Mark Driscoll the long-term legacy of a place like Mars Hill "could" be reaching countless for Jesus or the age of the internet and a cult of personality as a substitute for responsible biblical expository teaching or (to borrow Lutheran ideas) proper administration of the sacraments could make the regions in which Mars Hill has influence a new kind of burned-over district in which people want "gifted" speakers more than competent biblical scholars and the giddy rush of mass musical events becomes a substitute for what in Pentecostal circles might have been called "annointed" experience. Driscoll has said he's a charismatic with a seatbelt but the visions ... are best left undiscussed in this post.
So churches have taken a hit since the real estate bubble burst and the recession began. Driscoll has tried to present mergers as about Jesus and not about a larger church taking over a smaller church. That is a simplification but it's ironic for a guy like Driscoll to say we shouldn't simplify things. He's said that people who haven't liked how he preaches on Song of Songs must be downloading porno. What if the simplification that is accurate for Mars Hill may be that if a smaller church has grown quickly, shows promise of future growth, has a competent leader sitting on a piece of real estate that is valuable that partnering appeals to Mars Hill? That's not a gross simplification, even if a person "could" cynically read that as Mars Hill cherry-picking the most successful Acts 29 plants as a way to maximize its own growth and making the boundary between Mars Hill and Acts 29 unilaterally permeable in Mars Hill's favor.
But because they'll say so, they're not a denomination.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Sutton Turner discusses Mars Hill Global allocations in recent post, a small fraction of the money raised went overseas and a lot went to US church planting, revisiting how some money went to the now defunct Resurgence Training Center in light of a 2009 Driscoll sermon
emphases in red and/or bold are added
http://investyourgifts.com/dismissed-whats-next/
Posted by Sutton Turner on August 25, 2016
...
Mars Hill Global
Mars Hill Global began in 2009 to raise money from the global audience (those who listened via podcast) to help fund the mission of Mars Hill Church: “Making Disciples and Planting Churches.” Until late 2011, Mars Hill had not significantly funded international church planting but was heavily invested in US church planting. From 2009 to 2012, Mars Hill spent $8.6M in U.S. church planting and $170k outside of the U.S. [WtH, slightly less than 2% of expenditures went to church planting outside the US] but we'll get to a 2009 sermon that explains why this wouldn't be a surprise to potentially impatient readers]
When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.
When people started to question the distribution of funds given to Mars Hill Global, the church brought in ECFA and independent auditors, Clark Nuber. Both groups gave Mars Hill a clear opinion that the church had done nothing wrong. In spite of these findings, we felt led to send 3765 emails and 6000 letters to 100% of donors to Mars Hill Global from 2011 to 2014 to clarify their gift intent. Less than 40 families responded; Mars Hill Church sent an additional $40,000 to Ethiopia because donors requested their donations to Mars Hill Global be for Ethiopian church planting.
A full and total timeline from 2009 to 2014 with videos, blogs and other information is stored here.
From 2012 to 2014, Mars Hill Church spent $13.7M in church planting in the US and sent $545k to Ethiopia and India. [WtH--spent from an amount of ... ?] During its existence, Mars Hill Church invested over $23M in church planting in the US and around the world. [WtH--not necessarily the same thing as having done it through Mars Hill Global, given that Mars Hill began in 1996 and Global started in 2009] This amount is over and above the general and administrative costs of Mars Hill Church’s central operations and staffing. (47% of the funds given to Mars Hill Global from 2012-2014 were large donations from a small number of donors who specifically asked prior to giving for their donations to be counted in Global. Many of these donors did not attend one specific Mars Hill location and wanted their donations supporting all Mars Hill operations including U.S. and international church planting.)
[ WtH--so it reads like that 47% of the funds given to Global from 2012 were from a small number of donors who wanted their giving to be counted in/toward global. Though these donors did not attend one specific location they wanted their gifts supporting all operations, but this raises a question of whether or not that was unusual because the donors requested this or because under normal circumstances donors might have expected or requested their gifts to be restricted to the campus they were giving to Mars Hill through/from]
Many have asked for these numbers. There was I time when I was restricted from providing these numbers. Now, everyone has the Mars Hill Global information that I had when I resigned in September 2014 (Eph. 5:13).
Actual financials reports with line items would have been nice.
Back in the pre-Turner era of Mars Hill Driscoll described the aims of Mars Hill Global as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
http://download.marshill.se/files/2009/05/03/20090503_humble-pastors_sd_audio.mp3
[it's mistitled "Humble Pastor", it was originally listed as Prophets, Priests and Kings" and discussed earlier at Wenatchee The Hatchet. The 5-17-2009 sermon is a different sermon even though in the media library at the marshill.se site it will appear to be "Humble Pastors", too.]
Prophets, Priests and Kings
Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5
starting about 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term. [emphasis added]
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
Turner mentioned that more than $23 million was spent in church planting. That's telling us what it was more than. What we don't necessarily get is a number that would tell us how much went into The Resurgence Training Center (for anyone who even remembers what that was these days). So some of the money given into Mars Hill Global would have gone to the Resurgence Training Center. There are folks who are willing to say they went there and graduated from there but let's not forget the big E on the eye chart. Mark Driscoll had had a personal ambition to start a movement that started a Bible college. No matter how great the education was at Re:Train there's a hindsight we can have today through which we observe that this was part of the legacy Driscoll wanted to be able to look back on. It's also something to keep in mind as part of the basis for Global in its early stages. We don't need to be so focused on how much went to overseas that we forget that at its inception Global was never explicitly designed for overseas missions but for the global expansion of what we can now regard as the Mars Hill brand.
The amount of money given/designated to The Resurgence Training Center could get some clarification, since it, too, was part of the Mars Hill expansion included within the fundraising activities of Mars Hill Global.
And the thing to keep in mind, that commenter Nathan priddis mentioned recently at Phoenix Preacher, is that we should ask ourselves--even if "all" the money raised by Mars Hill Global went to overseas activity, who's to say that would have made the conditions in those regions in Africa or India better?
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=26619#comment-344282
In other words, let's not forget that even if all the monies that people gave that they thought were going to go from Mars Hill Global to Africa went there, what in the end would this have been except for the global expansion of the Mars Hill brand? Why would anyone in Africa need that? This is not to say people don't have any right or reason to be upset about all sorts of things Mars Hill Global. Turner gets that these things were worrisome to people, too. But Nathan priddis raised a point that doesn't seem to have come up among those who have been close to the Mars Hill side of things in online discussions (that I know of)--that we can't assume that all that Global money going to the missionary work Mars Hill had in mind would have been any good for people in Africa in the end.
http://investyourgifts.com/dismissed-whats-next/
Posted by Sutton Turner on August 25, 2016
...
Mars Hill Global
Mars Hill Global began in 2009 to raise money from the global audience (those who listened via podcast) to help fund the mission of Mars Hill Church: “Making Disciples and Planting Churches.” Until late 2011, Mars Hill had not significantly funded international church planting but was heavily invested in US church planting. From 2009 to 2012, Mars Hill spent $8.6M in U.S. church planting and $170k outside of the U.S. [WtH, slightly less than 2% of expenditures went to church planting outside the US] but we'll get to a 2009 sermon that explains why this wouldn't be a surprise to potentially impatient readers]
When I joined Mars Hill in 2011, I built relationships with the Kale Hewyott Church in Ethiopia to train church planters there. My passion for Ethiopia (which existed before I arrived at Mars Hill) began to dominate the message of Mars Hill Global. In hindsight, I see how many believed that the only reason Mars Hill Global existed was to fund Ethiopian church planting.
When people started to question the distribution of funds given to Mars Hill Global, the church brought in ECFA and independent auditors, Clark Nuber. Both groups gave Mars Hill a clear opinion that the church had done nothing wrong. In spite of these findings, we felt led to send 3765 emails and 6000 letters to 100% of donors to Mars Hill Global from 2011 to 2014 to clarify their gift intent. Less than 40 families responded; Mars Hill Church sent an additional $40,000 to Ethiopia because donors requested their donations to Mars Hill Global be for Ethiopian church planting.
A full and total timeline from 2009 to 2014 with videos, blogs and other information is stored here.
From 2012 to 2014, Mars Hill Church spent $13.7M in church planting in the US and sent $545k to Ethiopia and India. [WtH--spent from an amount of ... ?] During its existence, Mars Hill Church invested over $23M in church planting in the US and around the world. [WtH--not necessarily the same thing as having done it through Mars Hill Global, given that Mars Hill began in 1996 and Global started in 2009] This amount is over and above the general and administrative costs of Mars Hill Church’s central operations and staffing. (47% of the funds given to Mars Hill Global from 2012-2014 were large donations from a small number of donors who specifically asked prior to giving for their donations to be counted in Global. Many of these donors did not attend one specific Mars Hill location and wanted their donations supporting all Mars Hill operations including U.S. and international church planting.)
[ WtH--so it reads like that 47% of the funds given to Global from 2012 were from a small number of donors who wanted their giving to be counted in/toward global. Though these donors did not attend one specific location they wanted their gifts supporting all operations, but this raises a question of whether or not that was unusual because the donors requested this or because under normal circumstances donors might have expected or requested their gifts to be restricted to the campus they were giving to Mars Hill through/from]
Many have asked for these numbers. There was I time when I was restricted from providing these numbers. Now, everyone has the Mars Hill Global information that I had when I resigned in September 2014 (Eph. 5:13).
Actual financials reports with line items would have been nice.
Back in the pre-Turner era of Mars Hill Driscoll described the aims of Mars Hill Global as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/2009-mark-driscoll-sermon-sheds-some.html
http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads
http://download.marshill.se/files/2009/05/03/20090503_humble-pastors_sd_audio.mp3
[it's mistitled "Humble Pastor", it was originally listed as Prophets, Priests and Kings" and discussed earlier at Wenatchee The Hatchet. The 5-17-2009 sermon is a different sermon even though in the media library at the marshill.se site it will appear to be "Humble Pastors", too.]
Prophets, Priests and Kings
Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5
starting about 0:47
... I have announcements for you.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term. [emphasis added]
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
Turner mentioned that more than $23 million was spent in church planting. That's telling us what it was more than. What we don't necessarily get is a number that would tell us how much went into The Resurgence Training Center (for anyone who even remembers what that was these days). So some of the money given into Mars Hill Global would have gone to the Resurgence Training Center. There are folks who are willing to say they went there and graduated from there but let's not forget the big E on the eye chart. Mark Driscoll had had a personal ambition to start a movement that started a Bible college. No matter how great the education was at Re:Train there's a hindsight we can have today through which we observe that this was part of the legacy Driscoll wanted to be able to look back on. It's also something to keep in mind as part of the basis for Global in its early stages. We don't need to be so focused on how much went to overseas that we forget that at its inception Global was never explicitly designed for overseas missions but for the global expansion of what we can now regard as the Mars Hill brand.
The amount of money given/designated to The Resurgence Training Center could get some clarification, since it, too, was part of the Mars Hill expansion included within the fundraising activities of Mars Hill Global.
And the thing to keep in mind, that commenter Nathan priddis mentioned recently at Phoenix Preacher, is that we should ask ourselves--even if "all" the money raised by Mars Hill Global went to overseas activity, who's to say that would have made the conditions in those regions in Africa or India better?
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=26619#comment-344282
In other words, let's not forget that even if all the monies that people gave that they thought were going to go from Mars Hill Global to Africa went there, what in the end would this have been except for the global expansion of the Mars Hill brand? Why would anyone in Africa need that? This is not to say people don't have any right or reason to be upset about all sorts of things Mars Hill Global. Turner gets that these things were worrisome to people, too. But Nathan priddis raised a point that doesn't seem to have come up among those who have been close to the Mars Hill side of things in online discussions (that I know of)--that we can't assume that all that Global money going to the missionary work Mars Hill had in mind would have been any good for people in Africa in the end.
Friday, December 10, 2021
Warren Throckmorton notes Mark Driscoll now asking for 650k--revisiting Re:Sound and MH Global as precedents for whatever Driscoll's fundraising for, and noting a delicate irony in his lambasting the Meta turn of Facebook as a satanic counterfeit when his celebrity was founded on media leveraging
Recently
Warren Throckmorton noted that Mark Driscoll has asked for $200,000.00
and
yet more recently asked for $650,000.00
According
to the following the reasons for the fundraising ask are as follows:
Our goal is to raise $650,000
beyond our regular budget needs in the final month of 2021. We have a $150,000
matching fund that doubles your gift between now and year-end, and your
generous worship gift will help us with the following:
1. Upgrade our outdated
soundboard that is too small for our growing number of volunteer musicians
2. Add more lighting and
cameras so that we can improve the worship experience in the main room and also
capture the worship and baptisms (over 400 in 2021!) in audio and video format
to share online to minister to the more than 100 million people who are
receiving Bible teaching through Real Faith from Trinity Church
3. Reset our stage, audio
tuning, and audio treatment to best use our current main room for worship,
thereby allowing us to add additional future worship nights
4. Set up our new Trinity
Church worship studio with 3,200 square feet of office, meeting, songwriting,
recording, and practice space that is in addition to our current studio space
5. Add more worship interns and
part-time trainees we are developing as worship leaders
6. Purchase a mobile sound
system for the Versus worship team in Sonora, Mexico. This is a band of young
leaders, mainly pastor’s kids, who are holding outdoor and indoor worship
events in conjunction with a network of pastors we have supported for years.
They share the gospel of Jesus Christ with the next generation and need gear
for this ministry which they all volunteer in
7. Our epic final worship event
of the year with 4 services on December 23-24 with a choir, orchestra, and huge
party to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in Scottsdale and capture it all in
audio and video to send out online to the nations
Sunday, June 01, 2014
2009 Mark Driscoll sermon sheds some light on the earlier years of Mars Hill Global and its stated functions
While the sermon itself and the entire series of which it was a part have been removed a sermon that Wenatchee The Hatchet has referenced that was formerly available to the public has at least a little bit of information that may shed some light on the history of Mars Hill Global and what it was designed for for those who may be unfamiliar with it. Arguably the most opaque and unfamiliar aspect of the Mars Hill orbit for outsiders (or even, perhaps, insiders) Mars Hill Global has been getting more promotion and fundraising attention from Mars Hill in the last few years. Since the arrival of Sutton Turner the publicly shared face of Mars Hill Global seems to put some emphasis on the "global" part.
This sermon cited below was the one in which Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a company on the side to manage the royalties from book sales. It was also the sermon in which he publicly announced what has since become the standard delay between live preaching at one campus and playback at other campuses before the sermon was made available online for the general public. Never actually transcribed (highly unusual in the history of sermons preached by Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church) this sermon is something of a gold mine for announcements about significant projects at Mars Hill in the 2009 year.
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.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
At one point the Mars Hill Military Ministry was distinct from Mars Hill Global but it was absorbed into Mars Hill Global around April 2012 as previously documented by Wenatchee The Hatchet. Since this material that has been quoted here at WtH has been pulled by MHC you're going to have trouble finding primary source documentation.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-rsi-contract-with-mars-hill-and.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/14/military-mission
... Because of the enormous growth of this ministry, we are needing to make some changes that will allow us to keep up with the great number of orders that are flowing in. The Military Mission will now become part of our new Global Ministries department. Because distribution is a large part of what Mars Hill Military Mission does, this strategic move will allow us to send out more resources at a quicker, less expensive, and more efficient rate. We have also combined Global Ministries and Military Mission’s financial contributions to one account. This will not only simplify our accounting processes but it will enable our ministries to have more of a global impact. Those of you who are currently giving specifically to the Military Mission might ask “Will my donations still be funding the Military Mission?” Our answer would be, “Yes—and then some.”
Then again the Global Ministries department circa 2012 might actually have nothing to do with the Mars Hill Global Mark Driscoll seemed to describe in his 2009 sermon. But in April 2012 someone at Mars Hill Church explained that Global Ministries and Military Mission's financial contributions were combined into one account. This was said to simplify accounting processes and provide for the ministries to have more global impact. Which could make it seem to an outsider as though Mars Hill Church absorbed a ministry or two into Mars Hill Global something-or-other into a single account of some kind.
So the old sermon from the Trial sermon series in 2009 seems to have shed quite a bit of light on some things that have gotten some attention from other bloggers this year, whether Mars Hill Global or sermon editing and sermon broadcast delays online
This sermon cited below was the one in which Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a company on the side to manage the royalties from book sales. It was also the sermon in which he publicly announced what has since become the standard delay between live preaching at one campus and playback at other campuses before the sermon was made available online for the general public. Never actually transcribed (highly unusual in the history of sermons preached by Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church) this sermon is something of a gold mine for announcements about significant projects at Mars Hill in the 2009 year.
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.
First of all, kinda let you know what's going on at Mars Hill, Pastor Scott Thomas runs our Acts 29 church planting network along with Pastor Tar, Pastor Tyler Powell and that's going great. We give ten percent of our dollars [to] church planting. Acts 29 has 250 churches in the US, many, many, many more overseas. Our goal is to see over 1,000 churches planted within ten years. We're well on the way to that goal and that includes sending Pastor Jesse, who has been our campus pastor at Bellevue, to go plant in California. He's sensing that call on his life.
Pastor Mark (it's a different Pastor Mark), Pastor Mark up at the Shoreline campus, is going to go plant in Chicago, a new church, and Andrew Pack is planting in Seattle out of the Lake City campus. Some have asked, "Why start another church in Seattle?" Cuz we need a zillion and this will make two of them. We're well on our way to a zillion. We need lots of churches in Seattle and we praise God that Andrew and others want to plant churches. We're all for it.
Additionally, marshillglobal.com is an initiative led by your Lead Pastor Jamie Munson and here's where we're going: from seven campuses of Mars Hill to a hundred; from upwards of 10,000 people on any given Sunday to 50,000 in the next ten years. Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders and he's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed him for a long time to the glory of God from John Piper in Minneapolis, and he [Melson] is also running the Resurgence Training Center--it's a school that will open in the fall so that we can have a leadership engine to train more campus pastors, church planters and potential elders. We're seeking fifty students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise four million dollars above and beyond budget and Pastor Jamie has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermons and content every year. [We're] asking those people who enjoy all that we give away to give some small gifts to help fund this global expansion and initiative. Many have asked--it's cool, we've recently had checks as large as ten thousand dollars--saying, "We love you. We listen to a lot of things. Here, how can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We're going to invite you to give as well, above and beyond your general tithes and offerings. And, amazingly enough, a generous donor stepped forward and said "I'll do a million-dollar matching fund. For everyone who gives any amount I'll match that up to the first million dollars." So that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
marshillglobal.com, you can check in there to get updates on where we're going, what we're doing and how we are expanding. That includes our newest campus, Mars Hill Albuquerque. We officially announce it today. We're going to New Mexico. ...
At one point the Mars Hill Military Ministry was distinct from Mars Hill Global but it was absorbed into Mars Hill Global around April 2012 as previously documented by Wenatchee The Hatchet. Since this material that has been quoted here at WtH has been pulled by MHC you're going to have trouble finding primary source documentation.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-rsi-contract-with-mars-hill-and.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/14/military-mission
... Because of the enormous growth of this ministry, we are needing to make some changes that will allow us to keep up with the great number of orders that are flowing in. The Military Mission will now become part of our new Global Ministries department. Because distribution is a large part of what Mars Hill Military Mission does, this strategic move will allow us to send out more resources at a quicker, less expensive, and more efficient rate. We have also combined Global Ministries and Military Mission’s financial contributions to one account. This will not only simplify our accounting processes but it will enable our ministries to have more of a global impact. Those of you who are currently giving specifically to the Military Mission might ask “Will my donations still be funding the Military Mission?” Our answer would be, “Yes—and then some.”
Then again the Global Ministries department circa 2012 might actually have nothing to do with the Mars Hill Global Mark Driscoll seemed to describe in his 2009 sermon. But in April 2012 someone at Mars Hill Church explained that Global Ministries and Military Mission's financial contributions were combined into one account. This was said to simplify accounting processes and provide for the ministries to have more global impact. Which could make it seem to an outsider as though Mars Hill Church absorbed a ministry or two into Mars Hill Global something-or-other into a single account of some kind.
So the old sermon from the Trial sermon series in 2009 seems to have shed quite a bit of light on some things that have gotten some attention from other bloggers this year, whether Mars Hill Global or sermon editing and sermon broadcast delays online
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Mars Hill Church and Resurgence Training Center's Master in Missional Leadership, what happened?
http://www.christianpost.com/news/mars-hill-church-to-open-school-39256/
Back on June 18, 2009 the Christian Post announced that Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church planned to announce the launch of a new school.
Now all this stuff, for all of the purging Mars Hill has been doing in the last week, may only truly be visible by way of a visit to a cached site. But here's something from the ramp-up and launch phase.
http://theresurgence.com/2009/10/08/the-resurgence-training-center
Mars Hill Church has started a school to serve as the leadership development engine for our global vision. As of August, the inaugural year of The Resurgence Training Center (Re:Train) is well underway.
What is Re:Train?
The purpose of the school is to train missional leaders to lead churches to transform cultures for Jesus. Our goal as a church is to start 100 new campuses and 1,000 new churches (in partnership with Acts 29) by 2019. In order to achieve this vision, we need as many men—trained and equipped—to be pastors and leaders within the movement. Pastor Mark Driscoll began The Resurgence a few years ago as a website with lots of free theological resources for missional leaders and the broader church in general. Re:Train is a further extension of this idea, offering premier missional leadership training and education.
What sort of classes does Re:Train offer?
Currently, Re:Train students participate in a yearlong graduate program that culminates in a Master of Missional Leadership. Participants are divided into "cohorts" based on area of interest. Once a month, all 75 students spend a weekend under the teaching of a nationally recognized professor. These classes are taught by men including John Piper, Bruce Ware, Gregg Allison, Ed Stetzer, Sam Storms, and Mars Hill Church Pastors Mark Driscoll and Bill Clem [emphasis added]. Lord willing, beginning in the Fall of 2010, Re:Train will also offer university-style courses to equip the Mars Hill Church body in theology, biblical studies, missions, counseling, worship, biblical living, and other areas.
Who can attend Re:Train?
Re:Train participants come from all around the US and Canada. International students are expected next year, and our current student body includes a lot of Mars Hill leaders and members; we hope that many more will step up from within our community. Are you a future campus pastor? A future church planter? A faithful member who will be sent out as part of a core group to help start a new work? If you're interested in attending Re:Train in order to better prepare, we'll soon begin accepting applications for next year's graduate program (info at retrain.org).
This got a roll out in the Christian Post, a website, and there was even some discussion of the project from the pulpit. This is a sermon that never got a transcript and we've linked to it in the past when discussing how in 2009 Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a side company for book royalties at that point. Of course by 2011 he'd done a complete 180 degree turn on precisely that issue and set up On Mission LLC and eventually Lasting Legacy LLC and OMCRU Investments LLC. But the sermon that never got transcribed from the 1 & 2 Peter series is also interesting for the history it brings to light about the acquisition of Mars Hill Albuquerque and, particularly germane to the upcoming Mars Hill Schools project, a blast form the past on previous efforts to set up a seminary-style educational program.
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
02:00
... Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders. He's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed for a long time, to the glory of God, from John Piper in Minneapolis. And he is also running the Resurgence Training Center. It is 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 50 students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise $4 million above and beyond budget. And Pastor Jamie [Munson] has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermon and content every year. 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 recently got checks as large as $10,000--people are saying, "We love you. We've listened a lot of things. Here. How can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We 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. And so that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
So, uh, what exactly happened to the Resurgence Training Center and the Masters in Missional Leadership?
What exactly happened to Capstone Institute? There wasn't enough space for that and while Gary Shavey ran that it didn't last longer than a couple of years. The Resurgence Training Center seems to have been similarly short-lived but had the distinction of being a cause for which Mark Driscoll said from the pulpit needed giving of $4,000,000.0 above and beyond normal budget.
And is there a Masters of Missional Leadership available to be earned now or did this program functionally produce only one or "maybe" two academic years' worth of student activity?
Scott Thomas used to list having a Masters in Missional Leadership from the Re:Train program. Possibly doesn't list that lately. There have been people who have graduated from the program but since the program didn't seem to have any accreditation and was designed to raise up a new generation of MH and A29 leaders what was it, in the end?
It seems that as with music labels so it may have gone with a school. After a grand announcement that Mars Hill Church was starting a music label a year later Driscoll was excited to mention a partnership with Tooth & Nail. In 2009 there was Driscoll's announcement from the pulpit they were starting this Re:Train thing and the Christian Post covered it and now what's the big, exciting opportunity? Partnership with Corban University, Western Seminary, and the like. It's hard to shake the impression that Mars Hill Church has lacked the finances and infrastructural capability of getting several of the things Mark Driscoll envisioned since before the formal launch of Mars Hill Church up and running in a sustainable way.
There's too much testimony not just in Confessions of a Reformission Rev but also in God's Work, Our Witness to the effect that Driscoll had envisioned launching a record label and establishing a Bible institute since before Mars Hill was official for anyone to seriously believe the recent claim that MHC as it is now is not even close to what Driscoll originally imagined would or could happen. Given the speed and thoroughness with which Mars Hill Church has been obliterating content why don't they just take down the entirety of the God's Work, Our Witness material seeing as several key people in the film have since left Mars Hill Church and in a couple of cases have made public statements? In light of the Result Source contract controversy the end of God's Work, Our Witness, where Driscoll regales the viewer (probably envisioned as a contracted member of Mars Hill Church) about how much the church has historically stunk at giving let's bear in mind that was a 2011 fundraising film that was connected to the annual report for the fiscal year 2011. Now we have a clearer idea what some of those expenses entailed for which Driscoll gently chided the whole church on its need to be more generous.
For that matter over at this post we've discussed how during the 2012 period Mark Driscoll asked people to give more and more and in May bought a million-dollar house in Snohomish county and in June conceded that Mars Hill Church was running systemic deficits at every campus and a mass layoff had happened and it wasn't because anybody sinned but because Mars Hill Church had a financial model that was not sustainable for the long-term future. When Driscoll told the church "You're the money fairy." it seems to have been meant as some kind of gentle and humorous rebuke about the flock not getting that THEY are the money fairy that pays for stuff. That Driscoll bought a million-dollar house outside of the city of Seattle by itself is scarcely problematic, it seems weird, though, in light of his at times condescending words about how the people in the trenches seemed to imagine money would just show up.
And yet Driscoll has also had a history of claiming that Mars Hill Church is not a wealthy church. That post is, without doubt, the most viewed post in the history of this blog. Renting the city of Ephesus for a day to do some "epic" filming may not make a church exceptionally rich (Greece's economy has pretty much been in the toilet for a while now) but that Driscoll could casually toss off in a little forgettable sentence "We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day" was worth a post.
So where does all this sort of money go? What happened to the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll announced so confidently from the pulpit in 2009? For that matter what happened to the sermon and series in which the announcement about Re:Train was made go? If Mars Hill can't get its own homegrown attempts at music labels and Bible institutes to work then, well, they can at least assimilate the actually successful projects started by others. But if that's how these things have worked out in the history of Mars Hill then it makes the entire organization seem to have ... at the risk of putting this indelicately and as the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet, a basically parasitic relationship to the outside world.
If Capstone Institute fizzled and the Resurgence Training Center seems to be no more what's the reason Mars Hill Schools is going to work at all? The assimilation of functioning and self-sustaining entities so that "Mars Hill" can be put in front of some real estate and some academic programs is not exactly a stamp of success at this point. Driscoll's never issued a public apology for the Result Source contract or for the seven books featuring plagiarism and simply letting the press and bloggers erroneously believe that a leaked and nebulous open letter to Mars Hill members posted to The City count as if it were a public confession won't suffice.
That does not exactly instill confidence in Mark Driscoll as an academic or a pedagogue. If the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll so happily mentioned in 2009 was successful then wouldn't the bold-type big names have made more of a point of mentioning this thing in their CVs?
Stuff to consider as Mark Driscoll and company ask people to give big and make sacrifices for what may actually be the THIRD attempt at getting that Bible institute Mark wanted started in the wake of his movement going along.
Back on June 18, 2009 the Christian Post announced that Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church planned to announce the launch of a new school.
Now all this stuff, for all of the purging Mars Hill has been doing in the last week, may only truly be visible by way of a visit to a cached site. But here's something from the ramp-up and launch phase.
http://theresurgence.com/2009/10/08/the-resurgence-training-center
Mars Hill Church has started a school to serve as the leadership development engine for our global vision. As of August, the inaugural year of The Resurgence Training Center (Re:Train) is well underway.
What is Re:Train?
The purpose of the school is to train missional leaders to lead churches to transform cultures for Jesus. Our goal as a church is to start 100 new campuses and 1,000 new churches (in partnership with Acts 29) by 2019. In order to achieve this vision, we need as many men—trained and equipped—to be pastors and leaders within the movement. Pastor Mark Driscoll began The Resurgence a few years ago as a website with lots of free theological resources for missional leaders and the broader church in general. Re:Train is a further extension of this idea, offering premier missional leadership training and education.
What sort of classes does Re:Train offer?
Currently, Re:Train students participate in a yearlong graduate program that culminates in a Master of Missional Leadership. Participants are divided into "cohorts" based on area of interest. Once a month, all 75 students spend a weekend under the teaching of a nationally recognized professor. These classes are taught by men including John Piper, Bruce Ware, Gregg Allison, Ed Stetzer, Sam Storms, and Mars Hill Church Pastors Mark Driscoll and Bill Clem [emphasis added]. Lord willing, beginning in the Fall of 2010, Re:Train will also offer university-style courses to equip the Mars Hill Church body in theology, biblical studies, missions, counseling, worship, biblical living, and other areas.
Who can attend Re:Train?
Re:Train participants come from all around the US and Canada. International students are expected next year, and our current student body includes a lot of Mars Hill leaders and members; we hope that many more will step up from within our community. Are you a future campus pastor? A future church planter? A faithful member who will be sent out as part of a core group to help start a new work? If you're interested in attending Re:Train in order to better prepare, we'll soon begin accepting applications for next year's graduate program (info at retrain.org).
This got a roll out in the Christian Post, a website, and there was even some discussion of the project from the pulpit. This is a sermon that never got a transcript and we've linked to it in the past when discussing how in 2009 Mark Driscoll said he didn't have a side company for book royalties at that point. Of course by 2011 he'd done a complete 180 degree turn on precisely that issue and set up On Mission LLC and eventually Lasting Legacy LLC and OMCRU Investments LLC. But the sermon that never got transcribed from the 1 & 2 Peter series is also interesting for the history it brings to light about the acquisition of Mars Hill Albuquerque and, particularly germane to the upcoming Mars Hill Schools project, a blast form the past on previous efforts to set up a seminary-style educational program.
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
02:00
... Leading this is Pastor Rick Melson, one of our executive elders. He's a great guy. We stole him from John Piper in Minneapolis. I'll rephrase that, we borrowed for a long time, to the glory of God, from John Piper in Minneapolis. And he is also running the Resurgence Training Center. It is 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 50 students for the fall term.
For all of this we will need to raise $4 million above and beyond budget. And Pastor Jamie [Munson] has a really smart idea to take microgifts from a lot of our fans online. There's upwards of 20 million downloads of our sermon and content every year. 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 recently got checks as large as $10,000--people are saying, "We love you. We've listened a lot of things. Here. How can we help?" So we're going to open that opportunity up. We 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. And so that's the great kick-off. We praise God for that.
So, uh, what exactly happened to the Resurgence Training Center and the Masters in Missional Leadership?
What exactly happened to Capstone Institute? There wasn't enough space for that and while Gary Shavey ran that it didn't last longer than a couple of years. The Resurgence Training Center seems to have been similarly short-lived but had the distinction of being a cause for which Mark Driscoll said from the pulpit needed giving of $4,000,000.0 above and beyond normal budget.
And is there a Masters of Missional Leadership available to be earned now or did this program functionally produce only one or "maybe" two academic years' worth of student activity?
Scott Thomas used to list having a Masters in Missional Leadership from the Re:Train program. Possibly doesn't list that lately. There have been people who have graduated from the program but since the program didn't seem to have any accreditation and was designed to raise up a new generation of MH and A29 leaders what was it, in the end?
It seems that as with music labels so it may have gone with a school. After a grand announcement that Mars Hill Church was starting a music label a year later Driscoll was excited to mention a partnership with Tooth & Nail. In 2009 there was Driscoll's announcement from the pulpit they were starting this Re:Train thing and the Christian Post covered it and now what's the big, exciting opportunity? Partnership with Corban University, Western Seminary, and the like. It's hard to shake the impression that Mars Hill Church has lacked the finances and infrastructural capability of getting several of the things Mark Driscoll envisioned since before the formal launch of Mars Hill Church up and running in a sustainable way.
There's too much testimony not just in Confessions of a Reformission Rev but also in God's Work, Our Witness to the effect that Driscoll had envisioned launching a record label and establishing a Bible institute since before Mars Hill was official for anyone to seriously believe the recent claim that MHC as it is now is not even close to what Driscoll originally imagined would or could happen. Given the speed and thoroughness with which Mars Hill Church has been obliterating content why don't they just take down the entirety of the God's Work, Our Witness material seeing as several key people in the film have since left Mars Hill Church and in a couple of cases have made public statements? In light of the Result Source contract controversy the end of God's Work, Our Witness, where Driscoll regales the viewer (probably envisioned as a contracted member of Mars Hill Church) about how much the church has historically stunk at giving let's bear in mind that was a 2011 fundraising film that was connected to the annual report for the fiscal year 2011. Now we have a clearer idea what some of those expenses entailed for which Driscoll gently chided the whole church on its need to be more generous.
For that matter over at this post we've discussed how during the 2012 period Mark Driscoll asked people to give more and more and in May bought a million-dollar house in Snohomish county and in June conceded that Mars Hill Church was running systemic deficits at every campus and a mass layoff had happened and it wasn't because anybody sinned but because Mars Hill Church had a financial model that was not sustainable for the long-term future. When Driscoll told the church "You're the money fairy." it seems to have been meant as some kind of gentle and humorous rebuke about the flock not getting that THEY are the money fairy that pays for stuff. That Driscoll bought a million-dollar house outside of the city of Seattle by itself is scarcely problematic, it seems weird, though, in light of his at times condescending words about how the people in the trenches seemed to imagine money would just show up.
And yet Driscoll has also had a history of claiming that Mars Hill Church is not a wealthy church. That post is, without doubt, the most viewed post in the history of this blog. Renting the city of Ephesus for a day to do some "epic" filming may not make a church exceptionally rich (Greece's economy has pretty much been in the toilet for a while now) but that Driscoll could casually toss off in a little forgettable sentence "We even rented the city of Ephesus for a day" was worth a post.
So where does all this sort of money go? What happened to the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll announced so confidently from the pulpit in 2009? For that matter what happened to the sermon and series in which the announcement about Re:Train was made go? If Mars Hill can't get its own homegrown attempts at music labels and Bible institutes to work then, well, they can at least assimilate the actually successful projects started by others. But if that's how these things have worked out in the history of Mars Hill then it makes the entire organization seem to have ... at the risk of putting this indelicately and as the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet, a basically parasitic relationship to the outside world.
If Capstone Institute fizzled and the Resurgence Training Center seems to be no more what's the reason Mars Hill Schools is going to work at all? The assimilation of functioning and self-sustaining entities so that "Mars Hill" can be put in front of some real estate and some academic programs is not exactly a stamp of success at this point. Driscoll's never issued a public apology for the Result Source contract or for the seven books featuring plagiarism and simply letting the press and bloggers erroneously believe that a leaked and nebulous open letter to Mars Hill members posted to The City count as if it were a public confession won't suffice.
That does not exactly instill confidence in Mark Driscoll as an academic or a pedagogue. If the Resurgence Training Center that Driscoll so happily mentioned in 2009 was successful then wouldn't the bold-type big names have made more of a point of mentioning this thing in their CVs?
Stuff to consider as Mark Driscoll and company ask people to give big and make sacrifices for what may actually be the THIRD attempt at getting that Bible institute Mark wanted started in the wake of his movement going along.
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