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

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 11:15 AM Jan 4th via HootSuite

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.

Throckmorton: Dave Bruskas on Mark Driscoll's resignation: “I Don’t Think That Was The Most Redemptive Outcome”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/15/dave-bruskas-mark-driscolls-resignation-not-the-most-redemptive-outcome/

As it's been reported Bruskas is rejoining the Albuquerque branch as it rebrands itself ...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/11/09/dave-bruskas-to-join-mars-hill-albuquerque-in-january/

And Albuquerque was the first non-Washington state site

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/06/mars-hill-albuquerque-moving-beyond.html

per Throckmorton's recent post, Bruskas is credited as saying the following:

Pastor Mark, I really would hope that our future would have been through the examination process that of a restored Pastor Mark leading his church to a healthy place but I’m sorry that that didn’t happen.  I know Jesus is going to work redemptively into the future but I think  that’s something we all wanted right? We always want the most redemptive  outcome, and I don’t think that was the most redemptive outcome but I trust that Jesus is going to do incredible things and I know that men come and go and church names change. Jesus loves His church and Jesus is absolutely about His mission and there comes a point in time where we say, ‘let’s put away the past and move forward because Jesus moves forward.’

Bruskas reported had an intermediary role in the wake of the 2012 Call for Reconciliation

https://marshill.com/2012/03/02/a-call-for-reconciliation

The degree to which men like Bruskas met with whomever filled out the Wufoo and discussed concerns about leadership back in 2012 could be the extent to which Bruskas could be considered either well-informed by or well-insulated against concerns that have been raised over the years about the direction of leadership taken by MH in general and by Mark Driscoll in particular. 

Atlantic Monthly: Why most financial whistle blowers go unheard

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/the-vast-majority-of-whistle-blowers-go-unheard/383705/?single_page=true

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that while other blogs known as watchblogs focused a lot on Mark Driscoll's stage antics and statements about gender and sex and sexuality, Wenatchee The Hatchet has spent a few years detailing the history of Mars Hill real estate acquisitions and expressing some doubts about the soundness of their fiscal policies.  Although some private attempts at contact got made by some in leadership at Mars Hill when the blog turned to these things other blogs and bloggers who opted to write about Mars Hill in general and Mark Driscoll in particular didn't seem to have much interest in the finances and real estate for a long, long time.

Why?  Who knows?  Wenatchee The Hatchet just kept at documenting things and exploring the history and asking some questions just in case anyone in the press, mainstream or otherwise, ever got the idea that there might actually be a story.  Call it compensating for the lack of activity in formal journalism, if you like.  The success, if any, of a whistle-blower's activities depends a great deal on luck rather than the size of the shock that goes with whatever may be revealed.

So what’s luck got to do with it? Well, if Fleischmann had read the research on whistle-blowing she would know that most whistle-blowers’ stories are simply not heard. In the vast majority of cases, people who speak out suffer in silence, alone and unheard. There is a way of drawing the attention of the public and the media. But it is an elusive one.

Successful whistle-blowers are not those with the most shocking truths, but rather they are the ones who happen to tap into a current trend. Their stories match up with what the media are excited about, what the public are angry about, or what the politicians can use for political capital at that particular time. Rather depressingly, therefore, the truth is a matter of trends.

While the Atlantic article discusses banks and finance, it may be applicable to coverage of religion.
There will never be an end to controversies and scandals and the ones that get some traction when whistle-blowers attempt to speak up may reaffirm what the author of Ecclesiastes gloomily reported, that the race is not to the swift, nor victory to the strong, nor riches to the wise but time and chance happen to them all.

a linkathon on the theme of how a single narrative can define or control a public discussion

For those who read the earlier links/posts in which Wenatchee The Hatchet discussed the nearly perennial concern about the loss of real masculinity in the church and an attendant concern that churches are losing men ...

it may be a matter of point of view, to quote an old Jedi. This linkathon will be a bit oblique.

After all ... depending on who you talk to it's working women who are starting to check out of church life because it doesn't speak to them unless they're already pigeon-holed into the "single", "wife", or "mother" categories and what some call the "applicatory" section of the sermon may devolve entirely into a set of anecdotes and practical applications of an interpretation of a text that would fit neatly and perfectly into "does not apply" to a listener.

As a middle-aged bachelor it's not as though Wenatchee The Hatchet couldn't say an "amen" if working women begin to get the idea that a lot of sermons aren't preached with them in mind.  Here's the first link, with a hat tip to Phoenix Preacher:

http://blog.tifwe.org/working-women-unplugging-from-church/

Now there's something about narrative and perspective in the news lately that thematically links to things Wenatchee The Hatchet has been writing about for years, which would, of course, be the history of Mars Hill.  Earlier this year Terry Teachout had an interesting quote from Eric Hoffer that seems worth reproducing here.

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2014/09/almanac-eric-hoffer-on-fear.html
“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms

When something traumatic happens to you at the hands of someone else one of the most powerful ways to disincentivize speaking about what has happened to you would be if the person who harmed you controls the narrative of how anyone might perceive what has happened to begin with.  This is,  to be artlessly direct, has been one of the reasons rape cases may never even be heard.  What the Rolling Star article and associated follow-up coverage has raised as a particularly difficult and thorny issue is the conundrum of narrative as a form of emotional appeal.

Over at Culture Crash, Scott Timberg has the simple title for a post, "Is First-Person Narrative Killing Discourse?"  The post, in turn, links along to the following interview with Meghan Daum.  Now Wenatchee The Hatchet has taken issue with a great pile of statements made about Mars Hill in Salon this year but they've made corrections and this interview was interesting. 


http://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/meghan_daum_on_rolling_stone_personal_essays_internet_culture_we%E2%80%99re_so_driven_by_the_idea_that_one_person%E2%80%99s_story_can_guide_an_entire_narrative/
...
Look what’s going on with this Rolling Stone situation [the story about the gang rape of a woman at the University of Virginia]. People are so shocked by it, but it was out for a week… It took about a week of shock for people to start looking into it… We’re so driven by the idea that one person’s story can guide an entire narrative. Sometimes it can. But in a big, reported piece like that, it can’t. It’s interesting to me that it took a week almost for people to move beyond this one person’s story. [emphasis added]
...

If you get too indulgent with your feelings… The reader needs to know that the writer is in charge; authority. So they have to be confident that you’re not going to say something that makes the reader cringe, or makes you feel sorry for the writer… It’s very much about control, deciding which details to reveal. It’s not visceral. If it just “poured out of me,” a lot of it should be cleared out. It should not just pour out.

Who gets it right? A lot of it goes back to Joan Didion. [WtH, oh yes!  Love Didion's non-fiction] She managed to use the “I” in a way that felt very intimate in the moment, but ultimately was distanced; she kept herself at arm’s length. She used that “I” narrator as a tool, to talk about other things. And that’s really what I want to do. Talking about Joan Didion’s influence on young essayists, especially women, is like talking about Joni Mitchell’s influence on songwriters… It’s in your ear, the rhythm, the syntax, the sound gets internalized. I found myself often ripping off Joan Didion in my early writing life.

[Didion’s "I"] is a character – a persona. You have to be a little more dramatic than you really are, more lively than you really are… It’s a persona that you are shaping… I always say, by the end of the piece or the book or whatever it is, the reader should feel that they know everything about the narrator – but not necessarily anything about the author. It’s really two different things.

It doesn't just so happen that Joan Didion's deliberate, detached, almost icy calm has been a significant influence on Wenatchee The Hatchet since college.  As a writer who believes that outrage has become the cheapest and most dangerous (yet most swiftly expressed) emotion on the internet an alternative to outrage can be careful consideration. 

Authors at Slate and Atlantic have been discussing the necessity of journalists to not just run with an emotionally powerful story without also doing some heavy fact-checking on a case by case basis.  This isn't a matter of not taking rape allegations seriously but of taking them seriously.  The fact that there are very few false rape allegations or that rape victims frequently are so traumatized by what has happened to them should be given to those who have read up on this while also not setting aside the responsibility to check things as carefully as possible. As Wenatchee The Hatchet has worked to demonstrate this year it's possible for reporters to have a general idea of what a story is connected to a religious organization even if many basic facts got butchered before publication.  But, again, the articles published by Salon and AlterNet did get corrected.  The trouble in these days is that articles may get corrected but the pace of a news cycle or a blogged response can be so swift that not everyone will read or acknowledge when corrections have been made.  A lot of traffic and click-bait can get going on by the time people figure out that things were not what they initially seemed to be.

Others have said this in one way or another but what happened in the last thirteen months in the history of Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll could be described as a total loss of control over the public narrative. Since the "public narrative" within the confines of Mars Hill history was frequently how influence and control were mediated in the wake of the 2007 re-org, terminations and trials, it's conceivable, if one wishes to explore Hoffer's aforementioned quote in the context of Mars Hill, to suggest that a means of inducing fear could be through controlling the narrative. 

By now Mark Driscoll's public narrative of his life and times has swerved from describing Mike Gunn and Lief Moi as good dads in a 2006 book to later 2013 where he claimed against his own testimony that there was no kids' ministry in the early days of Mars Hill because there were no kids.  In Real Marriage Mark Driscoll described how his formerly carefree and fun-loving girlfriend became his fearful and frigid wife and yet this would have implied almost by necessity that there was a baseline of positive sex for both against which the married sex life could be seen as bad, so whence Grace's view of sex as gross?  One possible interpretation of this transition could be that in the very process of avoiding premarital sex the Driscolls developed the hang-ups that made it nearly impossible to get back to where they were at as not necessarily hugely serious Christian fornicators.  Or ... it may be the larger narrative in Real Marriage itself has raised enough questions about the previous decade of Mark Driscoll's public account of his marriage that its overall credibility might potentially be open to question.

If a mainstream publication as well-established as Rolling Stone could turn out to have dropped the ball all the more could be said for the same mistake happening with any other publication and also for bloggers.  A journalistic enterprise, whether formal or informal, can never afford to rely on a silver bullet. 

To the extent to which Driscoll and his associates were able to define the narrative was the extent to which their leadership was consolidated and stable.  It might be a bit too broad to say that things began to fall apart when the narrative began to fall apart but it is probably not a completely inaccurate thing to say.  The narrative of Mars Hill as mediate by Mark (and occasionally Grace) Driscoll was crucial to defining and retaining the trajectory of the narrative for the community. 

With the 2008 spiritual warfare transcription project still only about halfway done there's a lot more work to do, but even this far into the session one can see that there's been a narrative.  Driscoll explained that the great threat to Mars Hill and churches in general was not from godless outsiders but from wolves within.  Time permitting we'll get back to the demon trial of part 3 and observe that paradoxically in individual counseling sessions the arc seems to be telling counselees what sins have been committed against them, occasionally by relatives but apparently by non-members.  What Tompkins once described as the "ad hominem narrative" can be more readily seen as taking shape as far back as late 2007 and early 2008.  Driscoll explicitly condemned doubts about the love of the executive leadership for the rank and file as a demonic lie and that condemnation set the tone for the narrative of MH within its leadership culture.  What also established the, er, pastoral tone, would be Driscoll's emphasis that too many of the pastors were basically going too easy on too many people that they really needed to bring the hammer down on.

As longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet probably already know, Wenatchee The Hatchet has not told anyone they have to or even "should" leave Mars Hill.  The invitation here has not been that people should leave Mars Hill (or its various reincorporating subsidiaries) but to reconsider the narrative and to consider the ways in which the narrative has changed and has been changed. 

Whether in reporting on what happened to Jackie or whether reporting on the history and events of Mars Hill we may be getting an opportunity to be chastened by relying too much on a single person's narrative.  Does this mean that narrative is only ever incorrect?  Well, no, of course not ... but it also doesn't mean that in terms of journalistic or historical enterprise that we can ever afford to take a single perspective/narrative completely at face value. 

If there has been something to consider for those who have opted to share their stories about their time at Mars Hill it would be this, that the story as the foundation for a polemical case has been foundational to Mars Hill.  There's a sense in which you don't and can't fight fire with fire, as the axiom has it.  The power of the personal narrative had a lot to do with Mark Driscoll's rise to prominence and the way he shaped the narrative of a community around his personal story may be worth examining not just for the general influence it had on the community collectively known as Mars Hill but also for the uniquely internet-based way that narrative began to cumulatively take shape. 

In some sense the internet age is the age of the comic book geek and by this we can mean the capacity to graph out and break down all the narrative and continuity shifts in a public narrative.  This is not easily done but it is more possible now than it was before.  It's possible to see how Mark Driscoll as modified and outright changed his own story of the history of Mars Hill and to reconsider how reliable the narrative has become.  But so long as people fixated on the comments about sex and gender rather than on the narrative itself people were, if anything, playing to Driscoll's strengths.  It took quoting Driscoll chapter and verse, so to speak, and seeing where the material may have really come from and how the narrative began to change in ways that tried to square a circle for things to shift.  It also seems more and more like things didn't really change until a possibly small but informed variety of people across the political and theological spectrums of left to right began to compare some notes on what the accepted narrative has been and whether or not everything added up.  Perhaps if there's a "lesson" here that we could actually learn it's that we need to listen to the people we don't agree with as much as we need to listen to the people we do agree with.  There is no doubt that another movement like Mars Hill, whether a secular or religious movement, will happen.  This is just how people are, but we may have an opportunity to understand the economic and sociological dynamics that led to this thing rising and falling and getting an attempt at a de-branded reboot. 

There was stuff incubating about the distinction between imperial and counter-imperial narratives within the biblical literature that could have become a new paragraph here but that's probably best left as an entirely different post.  This one has rambled enough.

another wee hiatus (obviously)

the warfare session is only about halfway transcribed, though the gist of it as a political manifesto on the part of Mark Driscoll doesn't seem hugely difficult to establish given what Driscoll said about doubts about the love of the executive eldership for the church being a demonic lie directly said. 

Still, the demon trial section hasn't been transcribed yet and the shift from "ordinary demonic" to "extraordinary demonic" has yet to get discussed and it bears some discussion if only to show how the two categories can functionally collapse in application.

And that Driscoll states categorically he believed even Christians could be demonized to some degree warrants discussion for the record. 

However, there's such a thing as having a social life and writing about other things.  There will be posts here and there but if the trajectory of the corporation dissolution stays on course (regardless of any potential/pending suits) 2014 may wrap up the stage of documenting the history of MH at the pace that has been established at this blog.  The blog was never planned to be a "watchblog" and it technically isn't one.  Here's looking forward to boring nearly everyone who doesn't play classical guitar with discussions on the evolution of sonata forms in early 19th century solo guitar literature some time in 2015.  And there's intended to be a blog series on the guitar sonatas of Ferdinand Rebay. 

And it's not as though WtH has planned to stop writing about animation, either.

But as you've probably seen this year if you're a regular reader, a lot of ... stuff ... has happened this year. WtH isn't one to attempt predictions without some substantial amount of evidence and tends to be cautious.  The only outright prediction WtH can recall making with respect to MH this year was calling that campuses would be shut down and then proposing which campus closures were most likely in light of reported financials. 

But, anyway, there's such a thing as having a social life and the warfare series is remarkably long. 

a truly abbreviated annual report from Mars Hill omits any mention of campus by campus giving breakdowns.

https://marshill.com/files/2014/12/04/2014AnnualReport_finalv.3.pdf

Not much by itself to observe here.  The lack of a campus by campus breakdown of donors and donation averages is possibly due to the corporation being dissolved and some people assuming those numbers aren't interesting (or maybe they're too interesting).

But some things Bill Clem said in the Leadership Journal article might be worth unpacking with some numbers compiled from FY reports.

 For instance in FY2012 the stats listed for Ballard and Bellevue were
                   avg weekly att          % MH att.     Ttl Gn Fund giving   # givers
Ballard       2824                          23%              $5,396,139.00           2892
Bellevue    1628                          13%               $3,446,671.00          1737

Compare that to FY2013
                   avg weekly att          % MH att.     Ttl Gn Fund giving   # givers
Ballard       1742                          14%              $3,424,129.00           1676
Bellevue     2284                          19%              $4,520,496.00           1762

Between FY2012 and FY2013 Mars Hill Ballard lost about 1,200 givers while Bellevue may have only seen a net increase of 25 donors but an increase in giving (that mere six figure seems like it must be inaccurate, though).  In terms of total general fund giving for the Ballard campus the span between FY2012 and FY2013 looks like it saw a drop of nearly 2 million!  The loss of about 1,200 donors might not have been entirely to the shift of live preaching from Ballard to Bellevue but the numbers do seem to back up the gist of what Clem explained as the dynamic of Mars Hill Central dictating what decisions could or couldn't be made based on fixed metrics. 

If you'd like to peruse a compilation of the campus by campus vital stats compiled from earlier fiscal year reports... then minimize all the calendar-based stuff on the right hand and read on after the break

Note the weekly loss per campus was presented in a June 2012 sermon by Driscoll in a "Financial Update".  It may be useful as a benchmark for then-systemic deficits that were being run until a re-org. 

Leadership Journal: The Painful Lessons of Mars Hill, with a few asides from Wenatchee The Hatchet--it looks like Bill Clem has finally said stuff for the record

The most notable points about this recent article would be who finally says anything at all for the record.  Of particular interest is Bill Clem, whose resignation was mentioned by Wenatchee The Hatchet almost two years ago.  Clem's role in the transition of Doxa to Mars Hill would be hard to overstate. Without Clem and James Noriega agreeing that giving Mars Hill the Doxa real estate was best for Jesus there wouldn't have been a West Seattle campus.  Clem was dealing with the inevitable death of his wife to ovarian cancer and Noriega was brought on as an elder at Doxa.  Doxa either did or did not just so happen to be sitting on a piece of real estate Mark Driscoll had wanted to launch Mars Hill at in 1996.  That didn't pan out but in 2006 when Driscoll approached Clem and Noriega about use of the real estate things got worked out.  One of the key events in the history of Mars Hill relative to its co-founders was that Bill Clem's star rose during a period when Lief Moi's star was on a steady decline. There's a tagged series of posts examining the last year or so of what could be ascertained about Moi's role in the church he co-founded.

Now, with all those things in mind ... there's a few things of interest from Clem in this article.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html?start=2

The principle held true when that corporate drive took hold of Mars Hill. Clem had planted a small church called "Doxa" in West Seattle, and shortly after receiving a large building as a gift, they merged with Mars Hill, becoming its first expansion campus.

"At the time, when they got me and my building, the concept of multi-site church structure was fairly infantile in its movement and structure," Clem says, "and we chose to start out heavily centralized.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html?start=3
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html?start=4

"'How do we get more money coming into Central?' became the main question," says Clem. He describes the basic Mars Hill budget strategy like this:
 A campus pastor sets his own budget for the year.

 He bases the number on a "per head" estimate for weekly giving.

 The goal is to keep increasing the per-head income.

"So, looking at my 'per-head' of $31, they wanted me to say, 'This year I think I can get this up to $35' and then set my budget accordingly," says Clem. "Then, if I didn't make that by the first quarter, Central would adjust.

"But look. If I make a budget based on just $4 more per person, with a congregation of more than 3,000 people, I'm talking about $12,000 per week [$624,000 annual]! And that number equals staff. So if I don't make it to the next level, I have to fire those people. And this is where some of the staffing volatility came from."

Before we get to something that is probably still available let's move a little further along in the piece.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html?start=5

"Here's an example of what happens, then: When Driscoll quit preaching at my Ballard campus and went to Bellevue, I immediately lost 1,000 people. At $10 per head, that's $10,000 per Sunday that went out the door. And yet my people who stayed continued to give to the same budget; they actually started to give more.

"But because my attendance dropped, Central says my budget needs to drop, and that means that I have to fire a youth pastor.

"People don't want to lose the youth pastor and start asking, 'How much more will it take to keep Mitch?' And I'm saying, 'No matter how much more you give, we can't use a penny. It just goes to Central.' And they start going, 'This is communism!'"

So why would a pastor—or congregant—keep playing this game?

This looks like an explanation of what was going on in the moment at which Clem decided to resign in early 2013.  But it also looks like a possible case study of a dynamic laid out over here.


https://marshill.com/stewardship
How is compensation set at Mars Hill?

Compensation is connected and linked to increased responsibilities that are directly related to the mission and vision of Mars Hill, which are given by supervisors and communicated between leadership and employees. Each position is assigned a staff level (staff, supervisor, manager, director, etc.) based on level of responsibility. The staff level determines the compensation range and vacation eligibility.

Compensation for being a staff member at one of our churches is based on the responsibility and number of people in weekend attendance. Three different independent studies are used to determine market rates for all staff positions. [emphasis added]

The independent members of the Board of Advisors and Accountability set executive elders’ compensation. Additionally, an independent compensation study is done for our executive elders by an external accounting firm.

In other words, regardless of how impregnable job security was at the very top, for pretty much everyone else everything hinged on how many butts you got in the seats at your campus on a Sunday basis.  Given how far back Mark Driscoll extolled reverse-engineering your life in five year plans Wenatchee The Hatchet was not the only person to have joked that this must have been modeled on the economic plans of the Politburo in the Soviet Union ... but it's begun to seem more and more as though analogies to Soviet financial and governmental theories seem less funny the more comes to light.

There's relatively little that seems necessary to comment on in the article for the moment except for ...

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html?start=6
Gerry Breshears let himself get described as a "past friend" of Mark Driscoll's?  That's an interesting detail. 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2014/december-online-only/painful-lessons-of-mars-hill.html?start=7

Throckmorton: Dave Bruskas/Mark Driscoll email MH elders in May 2012 said "we really need your help" in light of layoffs, days after the Driscolls bought their million-dollar home in Woodway

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/

Today Warren Throckmorton has published something old that is a must-read.  Wenatchee The Hatchet does not customarily frame an issue in those terms but the date of a missive from Dave Bruskas, described as sent from Bruskas to other MH leaders on The City, has a date on it that in itself makes it a must read for the history of Mars Hill. Whether this was the formal publication date of the content to The City or the date it was received via email is not necessarily important by itself.

We Really Need Your Help
From Pastor David Bruskas:
From Pastor Dave:

As the final days of putting together a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 are here, some Lead Pastors are wrestling with the reality of letting a few good people go at the local church level. And some of you have had recent conversations with your Lead Pastor regarding upcoming transitions that have been painful. I understand firsthand how hard it is to let a productive staff member go whom your church loves. I also know how hard it is for the people who have been served well to let staff go without a fight. So that makes Lead Pastors twice as vulnerable. They must face the disappointment of the departing staff member and the disappointment of the church. And much like I would expect any good leader to do, many Lead Pastors are fighting hard to keep staff and avoid cuts creatively and boldly. But we need to let go of that fight at this point. Here are a couple of reasons why.

First, we have, in reality, a single budget for all of our 14 churches. So this means for every cent in exceptions that once church receives above the $10 per adult compensation and ministry operation allotment, another church loses the same amount. So the only way for one church to win is for another church to lose. Second, the cost numbers per adult that Pastor Sutton and the Finance Team have given for targets aren’t arbitrary nor merely guidelines. They are hard targets that have been carefully researched and must be met. And if we don’t live within our means, we won’t just face the loss of future expansion opportunities, we will have to scale back our current ministry services significantly. And in the most dire circumstances, shut down a few of our churches. As of today, we are paying extra fees in financing the costs of existing buildings because of our unattractive financial condition to potential lenders. This must change for us even to be good stewards of what we already have. [emphasis added]

A couple of final thoughts. First, we know this isn’t your fault, but the result of past decisions and practices. And while we will provide you a new and helpful global narrative soon to communicate this really tough news to our members, to be critical of the past means that we have to say things publicly that might hurt good leaders with great intentions who served Mars Hill well. Some of whom are still faithfully serving along side us today. And that to us seems like a losing proposition. We also know that this process has had some starts and stops along with some conflicting information. Please forgive us for that. We are continually receiving new financial information that has caused some hiccups along the way.

Second, these are decisions the Executive Elders are making in unity. We have spent countless hours discussing together both the state of our finances and our present staffing model through face to face meetings, emails, texts and phone calls. We have worked through each of your staff rosters in an attitude of prayer thinking through every angle we could imagine to keep as many people as possible. [emphasis added] We grieve the fact that this cut is deep and results in letting go of some very good people who are performing well and helping the church. We have done the same thing with our central team reducing our costs 40%. It is super painful and we are very sympathetic towards you, your team and your church.

And more than anything, we hurt for those who have lost jobs. We would request that you abide by our spending targets per person. Please respect these decisions by not coming to us individually in the hope that they may be changed. Pastor Sutton and I are happy to clarify anything that is confusing. But we can’t devote any more time to hearing appeals.

We love you all very much and appreciate your devotion to Jesus and His church in this tough season. We do feel loved and supported by you and hope you feel the same from your Executive Elders.

From Pastor Mark:

These are tough seasons. Personally we love our staff. Pastorally we are concerned for our staff. Practically we grieve for our staff. Professionally we don’t have a choice but to reduce our staff. We simply have to live within our means. If we reduce staff now we can provide lead time for people to find an option while receiving severance. Had we not done this we would have had to reduce staff without severance this summer. We know this is hard but it is better than the alternative. The various leaders making these decisions across four states have prayed and labored over these tough calls. Your Exec Elders have cut first and deepest. Central is reduced 40% and working double time. We are vacating our offices reducing our staff and in contact nearly every hour every day pulling together and seeking Jesus’ wisdom. Your Executive Pastor Sutton is up at 4am everyday praying for our church. Now is a time for everyone to pray and love a lot. Lastly, without being improper we’ve frankly been through tougher times and deeper cuts before. After 15 years i can say this is not the worst storm we’ve weathered. We will get through it together by Gods grace. Trust me on this fact.


Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/06/dave-bruskas-and-mark-driscoll-to-mars-hill-church-elders-in-may-2012-we-really-need-your-help/#ixzz3L9UFjiT9
There is a great deal of Mars Hill history that has to be borne in mind in light of this communication quoted above.

In April 2012 Driscoll was broaching the question of "is your church interested in becoming part of Mars Hill?"
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/is-your-church-interested-in-becoming.html

If Mars Hill was privately in a financial strait dire enough that a large-scale layoff was being finessed in May 2012 what did Mark Driscoll think was a reason to write to the public as though wanting to assimilate into what may have been a less than fiscally stable Mars Hill was a good idea?  To be sure Chris Rosebrough has provided an explanation for how he thinks the church growth paradigm depends on leverageable debt to catalyze more growth ... but if we assume for sake of conversation the average church target of Driscoll wouldn't know this why would Driscoll have assumed it was reasonable to encourage churches to give their assets to Mars Hill if internally he was aware that Sutton Turner considered the financial situation of Mars Hill to be precarious?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/

Now people may understandably not recall that in April 2012 Sutton Turner had a post about how "we serve a king, not a sheikh"  The page is 404 gone now but Wenatchee The Hatchet preserved at least some of its content:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/04/sutton-turner-explains-we-serve-king.html
http://marshill.com/2012/04/13/we-serve-the-king-not-a-sheikh
Working for a church, my salary is no longer what it used to be, nor is my job. I’m analyzing $4.90 lattes and scrutinizing nearly every dollar that goes out the door to ensure that our staff stewards the church’s resources well. It gets tedious at times, but the little stuff matters to me, because it matters to Jesus.
We could plant hundreds of churches. We could see thousands more people meet Jesus. We could see cities transformed by the gospel. As a collective body of believers, God has given us the money we need. The question is, what will we do with it?

For those who don't recall what was getting tossed off but excited mention, March 2012 was around the time Driscoll mentioned "we even rented the city of Ephesus for a day".
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/03/mars-hill-rents-city-of-ephesus-for-day.html
http://pastormark.tv/2012/03/28/what-is-next-for-me

Sutton Turner did seem to say "we're in a big mess" back in March 2012. By May 2012 the campaign to get Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list had come and gone but not without doubts expressed internally about whether or not the campaign was going to benefit Driscoll in a way that might be bad for the welfare of Mars Hill Church as a whole.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/22/realmarriagememo/

So in light of all that, there's another detail about the unity of the Mars Hill executive elders. 

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/05/update-on-mars-hill-orange-county.html

All the elders at the executive level would have had to have known about the eviction situation at Orange County, correct? If Bruskas' missive was sent on or before May 25, 2012 that was about the time the eviction notice was inescapable for Orange County. 

https://marshill.com/files/2012/08/05/20120805_jesus-gave-us-communion_en_transcript.pdf
Part 7 of Jesus Loves His Church
Pastor Mark Driscoll
August 5,2012

... Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been.
In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
So by August 2012 Driscoll was saying they'd completed the greatest year they'd ever had.  That didn't quite add up (literally or figuratively) in light of the systemic deficits Driscoll had been explaining were part and parcel of the Mars Hill financial model in the preceeding months.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
But, somehow, against all financial realities, Driscoll interpreted the fiscal year as the best year in the history of Mars Hill.  What Dave Bruskas was explaining, apparently, behind the scenes in May 2012 was not a summation of how it was the best year ever for Mars Hill on the financial side.  And that was just before the eviction at Orange County became an unavoidable headline.

For a bit more reading from the time.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/07/martian-budgets-past-present-and-future.html

What is even more striking, if we bear in mind that Sutton Turner's memo on the financial mess of Mars Hill was as of March 17, 2012, is this, that Mark Driscoll was explaining on March  2012 to Mars Hill "we are not a wealthy church".  This was discussed on March 18, 2012 at Wenatchee The Hatchet.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/03/apparently-mark-driscoll-now-says-of.html

So we've got a Mars Hill in May 2012 that was about to face the Orange County eviction, had rigged a spot on the NYT best seller list for Mark and Grace Driscoll, and was internally getting word at the highest levels that the financial situation was bad.  Driscoll, in the wake of all this, opted to tell Mars Hill Church "we're not a wealthy church".

But, incredibly, that's not the whole story here.  We need to bear in mind that in 2012 Driscoll made somewhere in the zone of 500k and that it was advocated that Driscoll get a raise to 650k a year and also have a 200k housing allowance stay where it was. Driscoll cut (or let be cut) his salary to about 480k some time in FY2012, which was itself also presented as a reason to raise the compensation.  Details available in the memo published over here (for those who haven't already seen that):
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sutton-turner-memo-recommended-raise.html

Dave Bruskas' March 25, 2012 communication can't just be seen in light of the fiscal crisis of Mars Hill as a whole but needs to be seen in light of a specific real estate purchase, one that had been finalized just days earlier.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html

Now if you'd like to read more about the history of the acquisition of the house in light of the Real Marriage arrangements you can read the series of tagged posts on the matter over here. The permitting for renovating the house in Woodway started getting clearance some time in the summer of 2012.

The Driscolls had finalized the purchase of a roughly one-million dollar home in Woodway mere days before Dave Bruskas was telling leaders within Mars Hill "we really need your help".  So while at the executive level there was some awareness that Mars Hill was "in a big mess" over finances this was handled by what seems to have been a mass layoff and a temporary compensation cut for Driscoll that was leveraged as evidence for Driscoll to get paid even more and amidst all this in 2012 Mark and Grace Driscoll bought a million-dollar home in Snohomish county in a year in which Mark Driscoll was telling Mars Hill "we're not a wealthy church". 

American Atheist: Becky Garrison's "Money over Mission" an overview of the history of Mars Hill financial and governmental shifts

https://twitter.com/becky_garrison/status/541052528914202624

http://twitdoc.com/view.asp?id=166394&sid=3KE2&ext=PDF&lcl=Money-Over-Mission-at-Mars-Hill-Church.pdf&usr=Becky_Garrison&doc=249310966&key=key-J3mAvnqVOEgyRTGZQ17h

While having taken a bit of a break from blogging about MH here at Wenatchee The Hatchet, others have written a few things.  Becky Garrison has a piece published with American Atheist that does a review of the financial and governmental shifts that have taken place in the history of Mars Hill.

a linkathon on the themes of music and cartoons and expectations

Willa Paskin discusses pop culture obsessions and why it's usually not the most popular thing at a given moment. 

We may become obsessed more frequently than before, but our obsessions are narrower. Water-cooler subjects of decades past had far more reach than the water-cooler subjects of today. One hundred forty million people watched the miniseries Roots. Eighty-three million watched the conclusion of Dallas’s “Who Shot J.R.?” storyline. Thirty-five million people watched the first episode of Twin Peaks. Just 3.5 million people watched the finale of True Detective the night it aired. Fewer than 1 million people tuned in for the Season 1 premiere of Girls. Only 200 to 250 cronuts go on sale each day. The bar for what constitutes something “everyone” cares about is a lot lower than it once was.

Moving along to another quote from Paskin:

Having to “find” these objects is part of their appeal. You could adore Dallas, but with 83 million people watching it, you could not imagine that adoring Dallas was somehow particular to you, somehow a marker of your unusually good taste—your grandmother and your mother and your brother and Time magazine were nuts about it, too. But the things we obsess over now are things that we at least believe we have sussed out of the vast cultural morass. And if you have done the requisite cool-hunting to find these objects, then so has everyone else who loves them. Obsessions don’t just mark us as individuals with stellar taste; they signify our belonging to a particularly sophisticated cohort.

And that might single-handedly explain why over on places like Browbeat and TV Club over at Slate have round tables and blog posts about Archer rather than My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic or Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Why should Slate writers discuss cartoons that get watched by waves and waves of kids if they can talk about something kids probably shouldn't watch just yet?  Not that Wenatchee The Hatchet hasn't enjoyed all three shows, mind you, and things may well get written here about all three shows, but Slate ... ?  As Willa Paskin was saying ... .

As Archer goes ... this article attempts to frame the show in the history of Cartoon Network in general and Adult Swim in particular.

http://harpers.org/archive/2013/03/rakes-progress/
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/03/rakes-progress/2/
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/03/rakes-progress/3/
http://harpers.org/archive/2013/03/rakes-progress/4/
...
During his more than decade at Adult Swim, Reed wrote several episodes of Sealab 2021 taut enough to serve as models for aspiring screen- and comedy writers; more often, though, he was happy to bang a joke pretty damn hard with his own rake, and his oeuvre betrayed a writer too in love with confounding expectations, too eager to abandon his heroes and follow some secondary (more likely tertiary) character, one he knew viewers actively disliked — as if he were taunting the audience, as if the joke were really on you. Archer certainly employs a number of now de rigueur alt-comedy tropes: a fondness for delayed payoffs, punch lines that serve as trapdoors or springboards to other jokes, recurring in-jokes that reward dedicated viewers. But Reed has finally — or at least mostly — embraced a basic and unavoidable truth: No matter how funny you are as a writer, if you continually abandon characters and digress from a plot, you thin a story until it is vapor, leaving only the combustible cleverness and a match for your story’s self-immolation.

But to some degree an idea that could be overlooked in the evolution of animation in the United States as a subversive medium that could have gotten some mention was that cartoons have generally been seen as 1) for children and 2) for instilling a set of ethics or ethos.  Think of long-ago odes to Optimus Prime in Wired and "cold war moral clarity".  Using animated narratives and characters to subvert or question the kinds of cartoon moralism that cartoons have been expected or required to hand down to a presumed-prepubescent audience is part of the subversive fun.  A matter that could be potentially missed in the matter of subversion by one or two conservatives (and those who may not realize how much animation has changed in the US in the last thirty years) is that part of liking something "ironically" is not necessarily in the liking of a thing itself.  Over the years I have told people that I have always enjoyed animation, hoped to work in it (but realized I didn't have the eyes or steady hand for it), and that by contrast ... well let's consider what the opposite of kids' shows really is, "adult" entertainment? 

If anything the more time goes by the less certain it seems that the things children and adults ultimately hope for in life are as fundamentally different as some adults say. 

Watching, enjoying and analyzing cartoons has been fun, and it is fun.  One of the many things that makes it fun to write about cartoons is observing that in American culture the cartoon tends to be the medium through which grown-ups tell children stories that demonstrate or encourage those values that grown-ups most wish children to learn.  We can learn the most about what values are sacrosanct in various strata of American culture by looking at what characters and narratives are presented as "safe" for children to observe.  With the emergence of shows like The Simpsons, or Beavis & Butthead, or Aeon Flux, South Park, or any number of shows you could pick from Adult Swim, half of what is subversive about any of these shows is working in the medium of animation to begin with.  It shouldn't be in itself but American academia and cultural punditry is never likely to catch up to this particular reality about pop culture.  Why look down on cartoons as a medium if a cartoonish boiled-down narrative is what the grown-ups keep resorting to in the op-ed pages of political magazines?

OVer at NPR and The Atlantic there are a couple of interesting links about the changing measurments and metrics of what music gets listened to vs what companies can measure in terms of sales.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/11/25/366542943/commerce-vs-consumption-a-revolutionary-rethink-of-billboards-album-chart

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/?single_page=true

Radio stations, meanwhile, are pushing the boundaries of repetitiveness to new levels. According to a subsidiary of iHeartMedia, Top 40 stations last year played the 10 biggest songs almost twice as much as they did a decade ago. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” the most played song of 2013, aired 70 percent more than the most played song from 2003, “When I’m Gone,” by 3 Doors Down. Even the fifth-most-played song of 2013, “Ho Hey,” by the Lumineers, was on the radio 30 percent more than any song from 10 years prior.

Wenatchee The Hatchet was kind of busy in 2012 writing about Mars Hill and Batman cartoons and "Blurred Lines" was never on the radar.  What's interesting about that specific song is ...

Marvin Gaye’s family wins first round against Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams in ‘Blurred Lines’ lawsuit

To get back to the earlier Atlantic article:

And not only are we hearing the same hits with greater frequency, but the hits themselves sound increasingly alike. As labels have gotten more adept at recognizing what’s selling, they’ve been quicker than ever to invest in copycats. People I spoke with in the music industry told me they worried that the reliance on data was leading to a “clustering” of styles and genres, promoting a dispiriting sameness in pop music.

In 2012, the Spanish National Research Council released a report that delighted music cranks around the world. Pop, it seemed, was growing increasingly bland, loud, and predictable, recycling the same few chord progressions over and over. The study, which looked at 464,411 popular recordings around the world between 1955 and 2010, found that the most-played music of the new millennium demonstrates “less variety in pitch transitions” than that of any preceding decade. The researchers concluded that old songs could be made to sound “novel and fashionable” just by freshening up the instrumentation and increasing “the average loudness.”

I think that last thing is called "dynamic range compression" within the music world and it's the bane of many a new song!

As for songs and singing ... another bit from The Atlantic on why actresses sometimes opt to become folksingers. Reinventing yourself as a singer shifts the focus to your voice rather than your look and in an image-mindful milleu such as cinema the image can be an unforgiving medium. 

Maybe the reason so many people may harken to the pop and rock of old is not necessarily because it's all better so much as because rock/pop has developed its own canon and there's a sense in which if we're going to get stuck hearing the same four or five chords strummed rhythmically across the board we could try to go back to the songs that defined the clichés rather than repeat them.  You can listen to "Blurred Lines" if you want ... or you can listen to Marvin Gaye.

Norah Berlatsky, who's got a book on Wonder Woman that's coming out soon, writes about the futility of the school-ish advice to "find your voice" as a writer when, in the real world, nobody wants to buy YOUR voice so much as your ability to assimilate the voice of someone else.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/finding-your-voice-as-a-writer-overrated/382946/?single_page=true

As for some pending/ongoing projects. the transcription/analysis of the 2008 spiritual warfare session is taking some down-time.  One can only handle so many hours of circa 2008 Mark Driscoll talking at length about spiritual warfare.  There's musical stuff incubating for probably 2015 and stuff about cartoons that may also just have to wait until 2015.  But the blog's on a semi-hiatus for some of its ... "expected" topics. 

However, a nod in closing to Phoenix Preacher
http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=19955
6. If you choose to live in a theological echo chamber you have willfully chosen to only learn what you already know. 

In light of the self-congratulatory impulses left and right about Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill it seems necessary to point out that half a decade or more of the Pyromaniacs crew blathering on about Driscoll accomplished absolutely nothing in much the same way that the Salon/HuffPo crew went on for at least a decade to no effect at all.  What changed the game, if we have to call it a game, was that things happened and got discussed across the boundaries of the usual echo-chambers of the theological/political "left" and "right" respectively. 

Tim Challies publishes a post with a subtext that gets hinted at by D. G. Hart at Old Life and explicated by a Mad Hungarian

http://www.challies.com/articles/5-ugly-qualities-of-the-anti-elder

Summarily the bullet points are:

The anti-elder is a dictator.
The anti-elder is short-fused.
The anti-elder is an addict.
The anti-elder is a bully.
The anti-elder is greedy.

Over at Old Life ...
For a second or so Challies had me worried. Was he thinking (all) about me? But since blogging was not on his list, the editors of Old Life must qualify as godly elders.

and courtesy of the Mad Hungarian, the surmised subtext ...
http://oldlife.org/2014/12/anti-elder/#comment-186609
Typical eeeeeevanjellyfish dog-piling (does that qualify as a mixed metaphor?), once Driscoll has been exposed and is down and out it is now permissible to jump on the anti-Driscoll bandwagon. Where was this post a year ago? Two years ago? Three? you get the drift.

Challies post about Driscoll focused on “character” — and this post is written long the same lines as the earlier post from August — if you don’t have a biblical form of church government (ie Presbyterian) then you have to hope that your pastors have good character. We now know that Driscoll was playing the tyrant for years thanks to poor church government and his YRR celebrity buddies.

The entire CEO-pastor phenomenon is based on a low view of sin and a high view of popular personality. If one takes stock of the reality of our sinfulness and of the tendency of power to corrupt, then one would want a system whereby the pastor is really accountable and church members have a right not only to trial, but also to appeal.

If the subtext was Driscoll it's just a case of someone appropriating the term evanjellyfish turning out to be one.  Doug Wilson may only have been safe from Driscoll's downward spiral by dint of not being important enough to anyone beyond Idaho to have garnered the same kind of acclaim. 

a brief observation about the March 7, 2014 statement by the Mars Hill Board of Advisors & Accountability that presupposed conflict of interest as characteristic of MH governance

asdgasg

https://marshill.com/2014/03/07/a-note-from-our-board-of-advisors-accountability
Changes to Governance

For many years Mars Hill Church was led by a board of Elders, most of whom were in a vocational relationship with the church and thus not able to provide optimal objectivity. To eliminate conflicts of interest and set the church’s future on the best possible model of governance, a Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) was established [emphasis added] to set compensation, conduct performance reviews, approve the annual budget, and hold the newly formed Executive Elders accountable in all areas of local church leadership. This model is consistent with the best practices for governance established in the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability standards. Mars Hill Church joined and has been a member in good standing with the ECFA since September of 2012.

http://theresurgence.com/2008/04/07/question-and-answer-with-mark-driscoll-video
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/qa-with-mark-driscoll/
(starts at 00:31:52)
Q. How do you lead staff who are your best friends?Do you want the honest answer or should I punt?

... You can't. ... you can't.

I hate to tell you that. ... Deep down in your gut you know if you're best friends and someone works for you that changes the relationship. Right? Because you can fire them. Of course you want to be friends with your elders and the people you work with. I mean, we're a church. I mean you wanna, you NEED to love the people you work with. But one of the hardest things, and only the lead guy gets this. Nobody else on staff even understands what I'm talking about. When you're the lead guy you wear multiple hats. Say it's someone who works with you and they're a good friend. You wear the "Hey, we're buddies" hat. We're friends. We go on vacation. We hang out. We do
dinner. We're friends.

But you also wear the "I'm your boss" hat "You need to do your job or I might have to fire you" hat, and you also wear the "I'm your pastor. I love you, care for you, and I'm looking out for your well-being" hat. Those three hats are in absolute collision. Because how do you fire your friend and then pastor them through it? Right? I mean that is very complicated. I love you, you're fired, can I pray for you? That is a very .. what are we doing? I think if you're going to have your best friends working with you they need to be somewhere else on the team but not under you or the friendship really needs to change.

And what happens is when people are your friend ... I don't think that many do this intentionally but they want you to wear whatever hat is at their best interest at the time. So they didn't do their job, they're falling down on their responsibility, and you talk to them and say, "Look, you're not getting this done." They put on the "hey buddy. Yeah, I've been kinda sick lately and my wife and I are going through a hard time." and they want the friend hat on. And as a friend you're like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, dude." But then you put your boss hat back on and you're like "Yeah, but we pay you and we need you to get the job done."

And then they want you to put the friend hat back on and keep sympathizing.
And you're totally conflicted. ...

I have very good friends in this church. I have elders that are very dear friends, but when you have to do their performance review, when you have to decide what their wage is, when you have to decide whether they get promoted, demoted or terminated it's impossible to do that because you can't wear all three hats at the same time.

First guy I fired, he was a dear friend. A godly man, no moral or doctrinal sin whatsoever, he just wasn't keeping up with what we needed him to do. And it wasn't `cause he didn't try and wasn't working hard. And he had a wonderful wife and a great family and to this day I think the world of this guy.  And if my sons grew up to be like him, I'd be proud. And I'm not critical of this man at all.
But I remember sitting down at that first termination. First I put on the friend hat. I said, "I love you, I appreciate you. I value you." Then I put on the boss hat, "I'm gonna have to let you go. Here's why." And then I put on the pastor hat, "How are you feeling? How are you doing?" And he was really gracious with me and he said, "This is just the weirdest conversation I've ever had." And I said, "Me too, `cause I'm not sure what hat I'm supposed to wear."

Does that make any sense? The best thing is if you have a best friend maybe the best thing to do is not have them work with you.  Or if they do have them work under someone else. And to also pursue good friendships with people outside of your church. Some of my dearest friends today are not at Mars Hill, they're also pastors of other churches. Darrin Patrick is here, Vice-President of Acts 29. I love him. He's a brother. He's the guy I call. ... He's a pastor to me, you know?  Matt Chandler is here. I count as a friend. By God's Grace, C. J. Mahaney, I count as a friend. ...

Jamie Munson is head of the elder board. Jamie Munson is executive pastor. He is legal president of the organization. And for me, to be honest, it was the most freeing, liberating thing I could have dreamed of because now I don't have all that conflict of interest. I can be friends with someone but I don't have to fire them, do their performance review, and decide how much they get paid. It's just too conflicting for me."  [emphasis added]

So the question is never going to be "if" there were conflicts of interest in the history of the governance of Mars Hill because the BoAA and Mark Driscoll himself have simply conceded conflicts of interest existed in their own words.  The question is "what" those conflicts of interest actually were and whether or not the by-laws drafted and amended some time in later 2011 successfully dealt with whatever those conflicts of interest may have been. 

This may be all the more worth considering and investigating for those who are interested in this with the corporation formally dissolving at the end of this month.

a small vacation and a preview of hoped-for coming attractions.

While the spiritual warfare session Driscoll gave in 2008 is not fully transcribed or analyzed there's such a thing as taking breaks and the Thanksgiving holiday was, thankfully, such an occasion to take a break.  Longtime readers of the blog will probably even remember that analyzing and discussing and preserving the history of Mars Hill and the public ministry role of Mark Driscoll wasn't even originally intended to be the main focus of this blog.  It was intended to be more about animation and classical guitar music written by composers not-from-Spain.

Well, I managed to pick up the scores for all of the Ferdinand Rebay solo guitar sonatas and one of the new goals is to blog about them and, where possible, direct readers to existing recorded or filmed performances of the sonatas.  For those unfamiliar with previous blogging on Rebay's music, those posts aren't tagged yet but it won't take long to find search results for Ferdinand Rebay at the moment. 

Another little project that's incubating is getting to blogging about the grand sonatas of Matiegka.  Matiegka and Rebay have been favorites of WtH lately.  So while 2014 may remain the year of blogging about things more connected to Puget Sound in 2015 (or maybe, ideally, earlier) you should be seeing some blogging about Rebay and Matiegka.  There's also little write-ups pending on recordings of chamber music written for the guitar featuring other instruments like double bass, trumpet, viola, mandolin ... stuff like that.  Having explored the Martian landscape and history at some length and seeing as the corporation is dissolving anyway, maybe next year can get back to being about classical guitar music and cartoons. 

But that's likely next year.  The 2008 spiritual warfare transcription project is, believe it or not, only about halfway done and it gets freakier the further along it goes.

The thumbnail sketch for everyone who would put it in the TL:DR category--Mark Driscoll gave a session instructing leaders (and leaders only) on spiritual warfare. While it started off with the rather mundane observation that lots of Christians believe Satan and demons are real and that Satan is mentioned in the biblical texts a hash was generally made of the history of interpretation and HOW that conclusion was arrived at.  You'd be better off trudging through all the books of Jeffrey Burton Russell on the subject for a historian's overview.  But part 1 name-dropped Brookes and Gurnall and ...

Well, WtH has analyzed the session more as a political manifesto made by Driscoll in the wake of the controversial 2007 re-org and firings.  You could say that at least one element of the subtext of the session was that Driscoll was telling the leadership culture two things:

1) I have super-powers that let me know what the worst secrets of people are
2) doubting the executive eldership's love for the church is a demonic lie.

The double claim of super-powers with a fairly literal demonization of dissent against executive leadership could be taken as the beginning of what Steve Tompkins has called the "ad hominem narrative" in Mars Hill culture.  If you listen to the entirety of the 2008 warfare teaching event not just as an abstracted discussion of Mark's counseling approach, or a discussion of "demon trials", and also read it as a political statement then it's not that hard to see why so many in leadership would have come to a place of avoiding speaking up if they heard Mark go on at such length about being able to "read people's proverbial mail" and explicitly condemning questions about the executive leadership's love of the congregation as explicitly demonic and false. 

Anyway, Wenatchee The Hatchet hopes that all of you who celebrated Thanksgiving had a pleasant Thanksgiving.