Wednesday, April 22, 2015
a Mystery Science Theater 3000 generation
http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2015/04/almost-close-enough-for-jazz.html
the restaurant review that Anton Ego reads aloud (in the deliciously haughty voice of Peter O’Toole) at the end of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. Ego is too often mistaken for an Addison DeWitt-type critic-killer, but in truth he is an aesthete of the highest possible seriousness who is all too aware of his own inability to create and thus profoundly respectful of those who, possessing that power, use it to the fullest. It is inexpressibly moving to hear him confess without self-pity that “the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so,” and more moving still when he praises Remy and Colette for having cooked “an extraordinary meal…that rocked me to my core.”
Anton Ego is, by film's end, revealed to not be the adversary at all. Skinner is the real adversary, while Ego, whose pitiless criticism of the things he finds sub-par is dreaded, turns out to champion the greatness of Remy's work even at the expense of his own career. Ego is, in other words, the critic who regards criticism as its own art form but a necessarily dependent and subsidiary art form. Artists and art critics don't live each without the other. Those who would make history cannot long make do without any historians.
What's also worth revisiting is that the food Remy and Colette prepare for Ego is "a peasant dish". If Remy's culinary art is beset by no false modesty it is also presented as having no pretense. The peasant dish, if well-made, is no inherently or in any way lower than the formally fine cuisine.
It can seem as though my generation has been one that grew up watching Mystery Science Theater 3000. We have a culture in which making fun of badly made movies is a niche market. It could still in all seriousness (if with a little tongue-in-cheek) be said that the efforts that went into making movies so terrible they ended up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 were greater than the effort it took to make fun of the film. The show's creators must no doubt understand this and so, you could say a distinction is made between a group of possibly over-ambitious types throwing together a rickety film that doesn't hold up and a massive Hollywood-funded stinker. To whom much has been given much will be expected.
Looking back on about fifteen years of Mars Hill, it's hard to shake the sense that for those of us in the middle-aged end of things, we're a Mystery Science Theater 3000 generation. We may have optimistically thought we could do better, and chuckled or laughed at the failures of previous generations (as it seems every generation is doomed to do) and then decades later, we'd best confess with Elijah:
1 Kings 19:4
while he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. "I have had enough, LORD," he said. "Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors."
We are no better than our fathers. It may be most dangerous for us if we imagine that we are, no, are certain that we are better than our ancestors. After all, it was those who assured themselves they would not make the mistakes their ancestors made that someone challenged.
Matthew 23: 29-32 NIV
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
Elijah's confession was better than the denials of the Pharisees. It is better to say "I have sinned against the Lord" than to say "Maybe I made a mistake".
Sometimes it feels as though those of us who called Mars Hill home are a Mystery Science Theater 3000 generation, we had no problem making fun of the venerable and at least workable traditions of church leaders and theologians who came before us, all the while foolishly ignorant of how our best efforts were simply reinventing wheels. We had Mark Driscoll sounding off against childrens' ministry in 2001 only to have Jamie Munson formulate an accusation against Paul Petry that he was critical of kids' ministry in 2007. How in just a few short years what Driscoll publicly made fun of became a ministry of the kind Driscoll said wouldn't happen at Mars Hill, a ministry that Petry was terminated for expressing criticism about.
Driscoll said he wouldn't start a side company for books in 2009 and then set one up in 2011. Driscoll preached from the pulpit about how it was bad for a ministry to have a man's name as the domain name, after it had turned out he'd already registered one with his name in it years earlier. Driscoll has by turns and years come to embody everything he once preached against.
And those of us who called Mars Hill home, for however long, bankrolled that transformation.
We are no better than those we once made fun of. We might even be significantly worse.
After having made fun of others we have become the punchline ourselves. So many years of preaching about living for a legacy and that legacy is crumbling, its survival uncertain. If anything survives it will be no credit to the one who said he founded it, even if ostensibly for Jesus' fame.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-proposal-for-consideration-mark.html
http://download.marshill.com/files/2006/06/18/20060618_resisting-idols-like-jesus_en_transcript.pdf.
RESISTING IDOLS LIKE JESUS
Part 22 of 1st Corinthians
Pastor Mark Driscoll | 1 Corinthians 10:1-14 | June 18, 2006
...
Here’s the tricky part: Figuring out what your idols are. Let me give you an example. Let’s say for example, you define for yourself a little Hell. For you, Hell is being poor. For you, your definition of Hell is being ugly. For you, your definition of Hell is being fat. For you, your definition of Hell is being unloved. For you, your definition of Hell is being unappreciated. That fear of that Hell then compels you to choose for yourself a false savior god to save you from that Hell. And then you worship that false savior god in an effort to save yourself from your self-described Hell. So, some of you are single. Many of you are unmarried. For you, Hell is being unmarried and your savior will be a spouse. And so you keep looking for someone to worship, to give yourself to so that they will save you. For some of you, you are lonely and your Hell is loneliness, and so you choose for yourself a savior, a friend, a group of friends or a pet because you’ve tried the friends and they’re not dependable. And you worship that pet. You worship that friend. You worship that group of friends. You will do anything for them because they are your functional savior, saving you from your Hell. That is, by definition, idolatry. It is having created people and created things in the place of the creator God for ultimate allegiance, value and worth.
So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get incredibly personal. This will get painfully uncomfortable if I do my job well. I’m going to ask you some probing questions. We’re going to try to get to the root of your idols and mine and I am guilty. I was sitting at breakfast this morning. My wife said, “So what is your idol?” I was like, “Hey, I’m eating breakfast! Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about that.” I’m the pastor. I preach. I don’t get preached at. Eating bacon. Don’t ruin it. You know, it’s going good., And I told her, I said, “Honey, I think for me, my idol is victory.” Man, I am an old jock. More old than jock, lately, but I – I’m a guy who is highly competitive. Every year, I want the church to grow. I want my knowledge to grow. I want my influence to grow. I want our staff to grow. I want our church plants to grow. I want everything – because I want to win. I don’t want to just be where I’m at. I don’t want anything to be where it’s at. And so for me it is success and drivenness and it is productivity and it is victory that drives me constantly. I – that’s my own little idol and it works well in a church because no one would ever yell at you for being a Christian who produces results. So I found the perfect place to hide. [emphasis added]
And I was thinking about it this week. What if the church stopped growing? What if we shrunk? What if everything fell apart? What if half the staff left? Would I still worship Jesus or would I be a total despairing mess? I don’t know. By God’s grace, I won’t have to find out, but you never know. So we’re going to look for your idols, too. Some questions. Think about it. Be honest with me. What are you most afraid of? What is your greatest fear? See, that probably tells you what your idol is. Sometimes your idol is the thing that you’re scared of not having, not being, not doing. What are you scared of? You scared that you’ll be alone? Are you scared that no one will ever love you? Are you scared that you will be found out that you’re not all that smart? Are you scared that you’ll be stuck in the same dead-end job forever? What are you afraid of?
It seems more likely Driscoll's idol is legacy, because even when the legacy is bad, there was usually some kind of victory connected to it, at least for a while. Driscoll asked if he would still worship Jesus if the church stopped growing; if it shrunk; if everything fell apart; if half the staff left. All that has more or less transpired and the question is not really whether or not Mark Driscoll is going to talk about Jesus, it's whether or not he has the courage to talk about Jesus in a way that doesn't put him in front of seas of people. Can he be that Christian guy working the joe job driving the bread delivery truck? Can he be a man who no longer has any earthly legacy in this world beyond his wife and children? If he can't live that kind of life then perhaps legacy is his idol. If he flinches at the thought that the campuses that were once Mars Hill may yet survive and go on without any need to mention that he ever had anything to do with them then that might be an indication that legacy is an idol.
But legacy was arguably the idol we all had when we signed on. Every generation must face down the temptation that it can single-handedly change the world. We all will in some small way but we don't want it to be small. It's not necessarily wrong to work toward leaving a positive legacy behind you, but if you are seeking that legacy for you and not also, or better said more, for the benefit of your neighbor, then the legacy you seek is just for you. It's possible to pursue a legacy selfishly, after all.
Those of us who have called Mars Hill home may want to say "We're not perfect" but "we're not perfect" isn't really confession enough, is it? We are no better than the ancestors we at one time made fun of.
Some people may lately insist that nobody starting Mars Hill imagined it would reach 10,00.
Nonsense.
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2006 by Mark Driscoll
Zondervan
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10: 0-310-27016-2
CHAPTER ONE: Jesus, Our Offering was $137 and I Want to Use it to Buy Bullets
0-45 people
from pages 53-54
So in an effort to clarify our mission, I wrote down on paper the first of what would eventually be many strategic plans. I shot for the moon rather foolishly and decided that our church that was not big enough to fill a bus would plant multiple churches, run a concert venue, start a Bible institute, write books, host conferences, and change the city for Jesus. I started handing out these goals printed on boring white paper without any graphics, colors, or cool fonts, naively assuming that it would all happen eventually just because it was what Jesus wanted.
To get leaders in place for world domination, I also spent time trying to articulate the vision in my head to good men who would be qualified to rise up as fellow elders-pastors. So, as Jesus did, I spent time in prayer asking the Father which of his sons should be trained for leadership.
And now where is Mars Hill? Dissolving, selling off its real estate. Apparently somebody sold an email list they weren't legally authorized to sell and that nobody can use. So now it looks like the contact information of Mars Hill associates was basically just given away.
If Mars Hill has had an idol it is legacy. In Christ we are remembered even if we die anonymously and are dumped in unmarked mass graves.
I used to be part of Mars Hill. I used to believe in its potential to be a positive influence in the community. I used to be confident I would always be there for as long as I lived. Slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly, I began to have doubts. The first doubts were in many ways about myself and then about the kind of community we were. It seems we have been a generation that has made fun of others while not realizing that in the grand sweep of history we ourselves are no better. As Anton Ego put it, the bitter truth we critics must face is that the common piece of junk took more effort and thought than our review that designated it. It would be tempting and easy to imagine that is something to be said about "critics" but it should not go unmentioned that historically many a "critic" was also a practitioner of the same art.
It has only been in an age like ours in which a man like Driscoll could rise up and pontificate about the real way to pastor churches and preach the Bible having never been a member of a church he hadn't personally founded. That, dear reader, may as well be the position of "a critic", the one who has been willing to say things about the labors of others without having proven himself able to accomplish the same things himself. There could be more to be said about "the critic" in purely pejorative terms but not all criticism is given or to be received as merely pejorative. Criticism is a vital part of the arts and we cannot go through life without being able to both receive and give criticism. It does not have to be thought of as only destructive.
But there are times when we may need to look around and realize that we have become punchlines, that having made fun of others we have ourselves become the joke.
Turner's ResultSource 3 "Church Governance: Local Elders or Outside Board?", about the BoAA, the roll call in later 2013, bringing guys who were connected to MH in the 07 re-org back on the BoAA
http://web.archive.org/web/20131127012315/http://marshill.com/2013/11/23/dr-paul-tripp-joins-mars-hill-s-board-of-advisors-and-accountability
...
Dr. Tripp joins the current Board members: Michael Van Skaik, Dr. James MacDonald, Dr. Larry Osborne, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas, and Sutton Turner. This Board of Advisors and Accountability was voted upon and installed by an overwhelmingly supportive vote from the entire eldership, with every single elder who voted doing so in approval
The Board of Advisors and Accountability including the executive elders seems like a fail in itself. Let's keep in mind that while Turner has pleaded ignorance as to who was approving of Result Source Bruskas may well have been an executive elder with Driscoll before Turner's arrival. The only material change in the executive pastor side was Turner's replacing Munson. As for the independent members.
James MacDonald should have been given at least some pause before admission on to the BoAA
If Turner's fear was that local elders would make bad decisions about things like Result Source, and if Turner was worried that local elders might be too insular, and Turner has recounted that he was aghast at the fiscal mess Mars Hill was in when he arrived in 2011, then how was adding MacDonald helpful in light of problems in MacDonald's neck of the woods?
http://theelephantsdebt.com/
...
By the close of 2010, Harvest’s balance sheet revealed that the church, while under the pastoral leadership of James MacDonald, had amassed approximately $65 million of debt, and in the midst of addressing the issues raised by this website, HBC Elders informed the congregation that the debt had been as high as $70 million. While this number in and of itself is shocking, what makes it worse is that some elders and much of the congregation had no knowledge of the extent of the debt. The rapid expansion of MacDonald’s ministry, for reasons of ego as much as concern for the Kingdom, was the cause for the sudden and surprising accumulation of debt. The point in raising the surprisingly accumulation of debt is not to question the current financial stability of the institution, but it is put forth as an example of the underlying character issues of MacDonald that many people are now expressing publicly
Let's not forget that James MacDonald was with Driscoll when he and both Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner crashed the Strange Fire conference
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html
and for folks who want the quick version--
https://twitter.com/austintduncan/status/391277631737323520/photo/1
Yep, if a majority of the BoAA were WITH DRISCOLL when he crashed the Strange Fire conference is it that much of a wonder Paul Tripp concluded the BoAA was simply not going to be capable of providing the kind of oversight and accountability the thing was supposed to provide on paper? If four of the seven were all part of the stunt what can you do?
Which gets us to Michael Van Skaik. Van Skaik hardly constitutes an "external" or "outsider" role.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
Michael Van Skaik was on the Compensation Committee circa early 2012. Was that the same Compensation Committee referenced in Turner's memo about Driscoll's compensation?
Van Skaik's role in Ministry Coaching International in the previous decade and Mars Hill's cooperation with MCI during the 2007 re-org makes it hard to buy the idea that Van Skaik was a disinterested party. He'd served for years as a Mars Hill pastor and resigned so as to be able to be on the BoAA, apparently, but that external/outsider status seems to have largely been on paper. Turner's complaint that the 2007 governance changes did not change the insularity/conformity dynamic could be attributable to the fact that even on the BoAA, the people who tended to end up on it look like they were longtime Driscoll buddies and people who had inside roles in the past.
Excepting Paul Tripp, but also excepting ...
Larry Osborne. Except that Larry Osborne was credited by Mark Driscoll in 2007 as the one to whom he turned for advice on how to architect Mars Hill as a multi-site network of campuses in 2007. So Turner's attempt to narrate the history of Mars Hill governance as stymied by localist concerns seems to fall apart if we bear in mind that by Mark Driscoll's account he sought Osborne's advice on how to best re-design Mars Hill to be a multi-site church. If Turner had known about that would he have been happy to have Larry Osborne on the BoAA? It could seem as though Osborne's contribution, whatever it was, to Driscoll's survey of how to re-org Mars Hill in 2007 ironically brought Osborne back in spite of Turner's belief that the governance of the past had gotten them into the problems of the present circa 2011.
It's begun to look more and more like Tripp was the one person who was on the BoAA at any point in its history who could have been considered an actually independent participant. The others either had a history of being inside the beltway or being personal friends with Driscoll. Turner may sincerely think the problem was the local leader thing was too insular but to go by the roster of the BoAA members that insularity was characteristic of the BoAA that was ostensibly going to remedy that insularity.
Let's not forget amidst all this that MacDonald and Driscoll also had that Elephant Room 2 thing with T. D. Jakes. Even if we grant that Jakes is a thorough Trinitarian Driscoll had earlier repudiated the word-faith teaching he considered Jakes to endorse and considered him a word-faith wingnut. MacDonald was not just part of the Strange Fire stunt but the Elephant Room 2 situation to boot. Turner's story seems shaky when we consider that the devil is in the details. If he designed the BoAA to overcome the weaknesses in the leadership culture of Mars Hill then having a majority of the BoAA joining Driscoll in crashing the Strange Fire conference seems like an epic failure.
As for the later additions of Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers, for Phelps, consider that Phelps advised Driscoll on the reverse-engineering your life stuff, and co-owns the copyright on it.
https://wbmason.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/reverse-engineering_your_life.pdf
Reverse-Engineering Your Life
© 2005 Mark Driscoll and Jon Phelps All rights reserved.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/jon-phelps-founder-full-sail-university.html
Rogers, well,
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-boe-members-part-6-pastor-matt.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/in-wake-of-closure-announcement-boaaboo.html
Rogers was part of a team that asserted Driscoll had apologized for accusations made against him about things from 14 years ago. Driscoll never apologized for the substance of WHAT he said using the pen name William Wallace II. If anything, there's been an essential continuity in theme and even tone (minus a few flowery analogies) on Driscoll's part in the last fifteen years.
About all that need be added to consider about this list of names would be to say ...
Michael Van Skaik Larry Osborne
Jon Phelps
Matt Rogers
It'll be interesting to see Turner explain the basis for that section. What's the purpose of stipulating that a contract between the Church and a member of the BOAA is not automatically voided or voidable simply because the member of the BoAA in question has a financial interest in the contract or transaction? And what has Mars Hill's Conflict of Interest Policy been?
If Turner really wanted Mars Hill to get a board that would have external accountability the closing BoAA seems to have been reduced to primarily a band of highly interested insiders. Van Skaik may have formally removed himself from Mars Hill but his history did not make him completely disinterested. Osborne had an advisory role in the 2007 re-org, by Driscoll's account. Rogers was willing to sound off against protesters around the time he was added to the BoAA. Phelps was listed as a member at the Ballard campus and had a history of being thought of as one of the higher-end donors inside the church. Unless there's some clarifying information not yet provided it's hard to think of a more insider "external" board.
And as we've seen of late, Sutton Turner and Justin Dean didn't have the most affirming things to say about Paul Tripp, who was arguably the one person who was almost indisputably a truly disinterested outsider with respect to the internal political history of Mars Hill.
It's not that Turner doesn't seem sure his account is reliable, he seems pretty sure of it, and it seems he's trying to convey what happened simply and clearly. The problem is that if he actually believes the idea that all the elders had to all agree and that's why the 2007 re-org had to happen he's been sold a pretty sloppy and even misleading account of things. It also seems as though the top-down central/external systems Turner tried to put in place amplified problems.
...
Dr. Tripp joins the current Board members: Michael Van Skaik, Dr. James MacDonald, Dr. Larry Osborne, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas, and Sutton Turner. This Board of Advisors and Accountability was voted upon and installed by an overwhelmingly supportive vote from the entire eldership, with every single elder who voted doing so in approval
The Board of Advisors and Accountability including the executive elders seems like a fail in itself. Let's keep in mind that while Turner has pleaded ignorance as to who was approving of Result Source Bruskas may well have been an executive elder with Driscoll before Turner's arrival. The only material change in the executive pastor side was Turner's replacing Munson. As for the independent members.
James MacDonald should have been given at least some pause before admission on to the BoAA
If Turner's fear was that local elders would make bad decisions about things like Result Source, and if Turner was worried that local elders might be too insular, and Turner has recounted that he was aghast at the fiscal mess Mars Hill was in when he arrived in 2011, then how was adding MacDonald helpful in light of problems in MacDonald's neck of the woods?
http://theelephantsdebt.com/
...
By the close of 2010, Harvest’s balance sheet revealed that the church, while under the pastoral leadership of James MacDonald, had amassed approximately $65 million of debt, and in the midst of addressing the issues raised by this website, HBC Elders informed the congregation that the debt had been as high as $70 million. While this number in and of itself is shocking, what makes it worse is that some elders and much of the congregation had no knowledge of the extent of the debt. The rapid expansion of MacDonald’s ministry, for reasons of ego as much as concern for the Kingdom, was the cause for the sudden and surprising accumulation of debt. The point in raising the surprisingly accumulation of debt is not to question the current financial stability of the institution, but it is put forth as an example of the underlying character issues of MacDonald that many people are now expressing publicly
Let's not forget that James MacDonald was with Driscoll when he and both Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner crashed the Strange Fire conference
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/revisiting-time-where-mark-driscoll.html
and for folks who want the quick version--
https://twitter.com/austintduncan/status/391277631737323520/photo/1
Yep, if a majority of the BoAA were WITH DRISCOLL when he crashed the Strange Fire conference is it that much of a wonder Paul Tripp concluded the BoAA was simply not going to be capable of providing the kind of oversight and accountability the thing was supposed to provide on paper? If four of the seven were all part of the stunt what can you do?
Which gets us to Michael Van Skaik. Van Skaik hardly constitutes an "external" or "outsider" role.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
Michael Van Skaik was on the Compensation Committee circa early 2012. Was that the same Compensation Committee referenced in Turner's memo about Driscoll's compensation?
Van Skaik's role in Ministry Coaching International in the previous decade and Mars Hill's cooperation with MCI during the 2007 re-org makes it hard to buy the idea that Van Skaik was a disinterested party. He'd served for years as a Mars Hill pastor and resigned so as to be able to be on the BoAA, apparently, but that external/outsider status seems to have largely been on paper. Turner's complaint that the 2007 governance changes did not change the insularity/conformity dynamic could be attributable to the fact that even on the BoAA, the people who tended to end up on it look like they were longtime Driscoll buddies and people who had inside roles in the past.
Excepting Paul Tripp, but also excepting ...
Larry Osborne. Except that Larry Osborne was credited by Mark Driscoll in 2007 as the one to whom he turned for advice on how to architect Mars Hill as a multi-site network of campuses in 2007. So Turner's attempt to narrate the history of Mars Hill governance as stymied by localist concerns seems to fall apart if we bear in mind that by Mark Driscoll's account he sought Osborne's advice on how to best re-design Mars Hill to be a multi-site church. If Turner had known about that would he have been happy to have Larry Osborne on the BoAA? It could seem as though Osborne's contribution, whatever it was, to Driscoll's survey of how to re-org Mars Hill in 2007 ironically brought Osborne back in spite of Turner's belief that the governance of the past had gotten them into the problems of the present circa 2011.
It's begun to look more and more like Tripp was the one person who was on the BoAA at any point in its history who could have been considered an actually independent participant. The others either had a history of being inside the beltway or being personal friends with Driscoll. Turner may sincerely think the problem was the local leader thing was too insular but to go by the roster of the BoAA members that insularity was characteristic of the BoAA that was ostensibly going to remedy that insularity.
Let's not forget amidst all this that MacDonald and Driscoll also had that Elephant Room 2 thing with T. D. Jakes. Even if we grant that Jakes is a thorough Trinitarian Driscoll had earlier repudiated the word-faith teaching he considered Jakes to endorse and considered him a word-faith wingnut. MacDonald was not just part of the Strange Fire stunt but the Elephant Room 2 situation to boot. Turner's story seems shaky when we consider that the devil is in the details. If he designed the BoAA to overcome the weaknesses in the leadership culture of Mars Hill then having a majority of the BoAA joining Driscoll in crashing the Strange Fire conference seems like an epic failure.
As for the later additions of Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers, for Phelps, consider that Phelps advised Driscoll on the reverse-engineering your life stuff, and co-owns the copyright on it.
https://wbmason.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/reverse-engineering_your_life.pdf
Reverse-Engineering Your Life
© 2005 Mark Driscoll and Jon Phelps All rights reserved.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/jon-phelps-founder-full-sail-university.html
Rogers, well,
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-boe-members-part-6-pastor-matt.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/in-wake-of-closure-announcement-boaaboo.html
Rogers was part of a team that asserted Driscoll had apologized for accusations made against him about things from 14 years ago. Driscoll never apologized for the substance of WHAT he said using the pen name William Wallace II. If anything, there's been an essential continuity in theme and even tone (minus a few flowery analogies) on Driscoll's part in the last fifteen years.
About all that need be added to consider about this list of names would be to say ...
Michael Van Skaik Larry Osborne
Jon Phelps
Matt Rogers
It'll be interesting to see Turner explain the basis for that section. What's the purpose of stipulating that a contract between the Church and a member of the BOAA is not automatically voided or voidable simply because the member of the BoAA in question has a financial interest in the contract or transaction? And what has Mars Hill's Conflict of Interest Policy been?
If Turner really wanted Mars Hill to get a board that would have external accountability the closing BoAA seems to have been reduced to primarily a band of highly interested insiders. Van Skaik may have formally removed himself from Mars Hill but his history did not make him completely disinterested. Osborne had an advisory role in the 2007 re-org, by Driscoll's account. Rogers was willing to sound off against protesters around the time he was added to the BoAA. Phelps was listed as a member at the Ballard campus and had a history of being thought of as one of the higher-end donors inside the church. Unless there's some clarifying information not yet provided it's hard to think of a more insider "external" board.
And as we've seen of late, Sutton Turner and Justin Dean didn't have the most affirming things to say about Paul Tripp, who was arguably the one person who was almost indisputably a truly disinterested outsider with respect to the internal political history of Mars Hill.
It's not that Turner doesn't seem sure his account is reliable, he seems pretty sure of it, and it seems he's trying to convey what happened simply and clearly. The problem is that if he actually believes the idea that all the elders had to all agree and that's why the 2007 re-org had to happen he's been sold a pretty sloppy and even misleading account of things. It also seems as though the top-down central/external systems Turner tried to put in place amplified problems.
Turner's ResultSource 3 is up, "Church Governance: Local Elders or Outside Board?", open with a false dichotomy and proceed to a narrative of governance that was disproven in 2012?
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource3/
After part 2 mentioned that there was a BoAA created that would solve the problems of governance and decision-making, Turner's part 3 opens with the following:
Church Governance: Local Elders or Outside Board?
ResultSource Part 3
That's a frankly inauspicious beginning that intimates a false dichotomy, as though a church could have governance that depends strictly on internal/local elders or on an outside board for accountability and wisdom. Had Mars Hill had a thorough grounding in both external as well as internal accountability both in structural and relational terms there might still be a Mars Hill Church that isn't a dissolving corporate entity as of this year.
TURNER REAFFIRMS BEING IN THE DARK ABOUT RESULTSOURCE APPROVAL
Turner begins be recapitulating the narrative so far.
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed. The decision was done and in the past by the close of 2011, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
How he didn't know who approved the plan is a puzzle because if he didn't know then it seems he must have been a remarkably ignorant General Manager for Mars Hill. Given the level of Martian incompetence he seems to telegraph throughout his story, it's possible that decisions were made without his being permitted in the loop. Given that Sutton Turner himself seems to have distributed a memo to the Board of Advisors & Accountability regarding Driscoll's proposed compensation that specified that nobody beyond the top brass even needed to know about the issue, it's not entirely implausible that Turner was kept in the dark as to who greenlit sticking with Result Source.
For that memo ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sutton-turner-memo-recommended-raise.html
... As of this summer [year supplemental], I have personally taken over entering the executive payroll. Outside of the Compensation Committee, there is no one withaccess to any of this information (including my assistant) for all three Mars Hill Church executive elders. I am the only person, besides the Compensation Committee, that needs to know about Pastor Mark's compensation.
So if Sutton Turner was deemed to not be in the "need to know" scene about Result Source before Munson's resignation it's possible Turner was kept in the dark. It would seem from the wording of the compensation memo Turner had made a point of keeping executive compensation secret from even his own assistant and the rest of the organization. Proprietary information is what it is.
But the question of whether or not Turner actually fixed the problems he describes seems open to interpretation and debate. If Turner developed a new board process he'd have necessarily had to remove the old system. This might have been what the MH BoAA cryptically described as a massive series of layoffs or terminations somewhere around the time Turner joined the team.
Anybody remember this?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search?q=statement+from+the+BoAA
...
Former StaffIn a 2 year period ending in the fall of 2013, Mars Hill Church endured significant turnover of key staff members that made many wonderful contributions to the development of Mars Hill Church during their tenure. A number of these staff transitions were acrimonious. Pastor Mark and the other executive Elders own their part in any discord that could have been avoided with a better process or a more patient interaction.
During the Spring of 2013 the BOAA mandated that a thorough review be conducted with all former staff from that period, soliciting their feedback so that no needed lessons for a healthier future would be neglected. In the summer of 2013 the BOAA reviewed that report, and needed corrections to policy and detrimental management patterns had been made. A former staff elder, Dave Kraft, whose disagreements with Mars Hill policies have recently been made public, had previously communicated with the BOAA numerous times that he was satisfied with the steps we have taken to address his concerns.
The BOAA supports the policy of requiring staff to commit their signatures to a mutual agreement, such as a separation agreement, that private matters of the church learned during a season of employment not be divulged outside the organization. We have seen this practice as wise for stewarding the resources entrusted to the church while engaging in common human resources practices.
FIXING THE BAD GOVERNANCE BY MAKING A BOAA WITH ABSENTEE MEMBERS
So it would appear, collectively, the portrait we get from the BoAA and from Turner's own account of things was that in 2011 he arrived at a Mars Hill on the brink of financial ruin with incompetent staff and no clear sense of fiscal controls even though publicly Driscoll had only great things to say about Jamie Munson, who had been legal president of Mars Hill since 2007, when Munson and/or Driscoll drafted bylaws that made Munson president.
Turner recounts a general narrative that had currency back in the 2007-2008 period.
Back in 2007, Mars Hill had migrated away from plurality of elders in its formal governance structure, but the strains of plurality still remained within the church culture. Every man who became a pastor, whether paid or volunteer, went through the “eldership” process to ensure the character qualifications of 1 Peter 5
and 1 Timothy 3 were met in the man’s life and home. Although the by-laws clearly stated otherwise, many church members assumed those pastors were directly involved in the governance of the church, even in 2014. Some of the pastors in 2014 felt that all 60 pastors should still be governing elders and all 60 pastors should operate in plurality on all decisions.
What had happened was that Munson/Driscoll had shrunk the minimum size of the executive branch and functionally expanded its powers and removed the necessity of notifying the Full Council of pending real estate purchases, as best Wenatchee can recall. It centralized more power into the executive branch, and placed no upper limit on what any pastors could decide to do with rank and file members with respect to church discipline.
But if anyone from Mars Hill attempts to say that "all" the elders had to agree on everything for anything to get done that's patently false, as any consultation of the pre-2007 bylaws would easily establish. This isn't to say the story Sutton Turner has shared is one he somehow thinks may not be true. His sincerity is not necessarily in doubt, what's in doubt is the reliability of the narrative if the narrative claims that everybody had to agree on everything for anything to get done. At a formal level that's bullocks. At an informal level, though, it could be suggested that lockstep uniformity was expected to a degree that made the leadership culture think it was "necessary and inevitable" to fire Paul Petry and Bent Meyer for being 2 of 24 guys who didn't approve of the bylaws being proposed in 2007.
So that far Turner's idea that the formal governance obviated unanimity is only accurate if we take it that unanimity was NEVER NECESSARY at a formal level. But lockstep conformity was apparently expected to the point that Jamie Munson's first major act as Lead Pastor, besides drafting the by-laws that made him president, was to fire Petry and Meyer or at least formulate the grounds for immediate termination. Given what Sutton Turner seems to be strongly implying this week, Jamie Munson's parting gift before resigning from Mars Hill presidency was approving of Result Source. It's simply not possible for the legal president of the organization to have never been involved in that process, and Throckmorton has reported enough information to establish that Munson did have some kind of role.
So we've established Turner believed things needed to change and that the problem was the locals were trying to rule and didn't have the wisdom. He also indicates that he created an external board. It's just that there's this puzzle here in his having said that. Let's notice what he says about Paul Tripp's participation on the BoAA
Turner moves along to say this:
During my tenure, many people criticized the culture of Mars Hill and lack of accountability. The most stinging came from Dr. Paul Tripp who actually served on the Board of Advisors and Accountability for eight months when past mistakes and sins began to crater in on Mars Hill. Few people know that Dr. Tripp never physically attended a board meeting during that time. In fact, he had never met all of the board members in person. Furthermore, the points he attempted to make were never made in a board meeting or to all of the board members. Dr. Tripp resigned because he wanted the board to go back to local elders. He wanted local elders to govern each of the fifteen churches across five states. Many of the mistakes, sins, and problems that created the culture occurred under a local elder-led board—including the ResultSource decision. There is a tipping point where a church or organization outgrows its current governance. I’m not certain when it happened, but for Mars Hill, the local elder governance had reached the tipping point well before the summer of 2011.
First, we'll want to take a little detour to a comment from Justin Dean
http://www.i4j.org/2015/i4j-live-march-5-learnings-of-a-mars-hill-pr-guy-with-justin-dean/
Justin Dean · Top Commenter · Buford, Georgia
Hi Frank,
We didn't get everything right but I do think our critics, a few in particular, were responsible for starting a snowball effect of events, all under the guise of doing gods work. These aren't honest people we were dealing with.
Paul Tripps comments shocked me because he was barely involved at MH, never showed up for any meetings and only talked on the phone with our board a couple times. He has no context to say those things and I believe his words and actions were very self serving. What he described is not at all how it was at Mars Hill, not that he would know. I'd love to hear from Paul how he justifies what he did.
Reply · · March 6 at 6:57am
This strikes a very different tone from the one taken announcing Tripp was joining the Board of Advisors and Accountability back in 2013.
http://web.archive.org/web/20131127012315/http://marshill.com/2013/11/23/dr-paul-tripp-joins-mars-hill-s-board-of-advisors-and-accountability
Dr. Paul Tripp joins Mars Hill’s Board of Advisors and Accountability
By: Mars Hill Church
Posted: Nov 23, 2013
... In recent years, the Board of Advisors and Accountability has been an incredible source of wise counsel for which we are very grateful. We are so excited to announce that we have now added our friend Dr. Paul Tripp who has accepted our invitation to join our Board of Advisors and Accountability! He is a great brother and partner in ministry. He preached at Mars Hill last the summer for our Best Sermon Ever series and brought the Word with power. Dr. Tripp has been teaching at Mars Hill for many years in various capacities, and we also greatly appreciate his writing ministry especially, Dangerous Calling.
In regards to his acceptance, Dr. Tripp says, “I have a deep respect and admiration for churches that preach a courageous and liberating gospel into the brokenness of the culture around them. Mars Hill is one of these churches and I am glad to use my gifts and experience to assist it in its gospel mission.”
Dr. Tripp joins the current Board members: Michael Van Skaik, Dr. James MacDonald, Dr. Larry Osborne, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas, and Sutton Turner. This Board of Advisors and Accountability was voted upon and installed by an overwhelmingly supportive vote from the entire eldership, with every single elder who voted doing so in approval.
So in 2013 Tripp was described as a "friend", who was a great brother and a partner in ministry, who had even been teaching at Mars Hill for many years in various ways. But this year? The guy is now described as disconnected from the community and as having not shown up for meetings.
Turner and Dean make much of how Tripp never showed up, as though this were a notable absence. But based on the bylaws Turner drafted how often were the members of the BoAA actually expected to meet?
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/MHC-BYLAWS-1.pdf
At least twice a year, it turns out, and we don't know if it was ever more than twice a year or not just yet. Take a gander at Section 7.9 and you'll see the quorum was a simple majority and that so long as a majority of the independent members of the BoAA were present they didn't necessarily have to all be there. Saying Tripp wasn't around doesn't attempt to explain WHY he might not have been around. Maybe Tripp didn't show up because if there were only two meetings a year and he wasn't able to set aside time to attend the meetings the rest of the crew were authorized to meet without him. We don't know for sure and if Dr. Tripp is inclined to share his side of things that could clarify the matter. That Turner took pains to say Tripp was not involved belies the idea that an external board was going to be effective. If anything Turner's complaint about Tripp seems to reinforce Tripp's complaint about the external accountability potential of the BoAA itself, which he seems to have considered something close to zero.
Turner insists:
Dr. Tripp resigned because he wanted the board to go back to local elders. He wanted local elders to govern each of the fifteen churches across five states. Many of the mistakes, sins, and problems that created the culture occurred under a local elder-led board—including the ResultSource decision. There is a tipping point where a church or organization outgrows its current governance. I’m not certain when it happened, but for Mars Hill, the local elder governance had reached the tipping point well before the summer of 2011.
Now this does seem to be a new statement, that Tripp resigned because he wanted the board to go back to local elders, and that Tripp wanted local elders to govern each of the fifteen churches across five states, apparently as autonomous church entities. Turner seems to find this problematic. Turner blames most of the trouble in the culture on the local elder leadership. But how can Turner blame the local elders for the ResultSource decision if he opened up saying he didn't know who approved RSI or how it was determined Mars Hill would use it. Turner can't have it both ways here, can he? Either he didn't know how RSI was settled upon or he can blame the local elder board for choosing Result Source but he can't do both. Given how many times he has insisted upon his ignorance it is to his ignorance we shall have to incline our ears, unless he's willing to revise his statement and say he actually knew who approved RSI.
But Turner seems ignorant of the fact that the pre-2007 bylaws got published at Joyful Exiles by Paul Petry and the problem of local elder governance was that there wasn't any, functionally. More power had been consolidated into the smaller elder team and even Sutton Turner has acknowledged this fact. So how could local elder at a campus-by-campus level have been the cause of the trouble? Turner hasn't explained this yet, though there are intimations that fiscal incompetence played some role. But this gets back to why and how Tim Beltz stopped being an executive elder. The Generous series trumpeted the effectiveness of Beltz' financial acumen as a way to keep Mars Hill leaders from doing prison ministry from the inside, didn't it?
But what if Paul Tripp's suggestion was that all the local churches should be governed as autonomous churches with their own governance and this as part of a network of churches in which elders could govern? That's not the most earth-shaking proposal to come from someone who's a pastor at a Presbyterian church. In fact that's pretty much what we'd expect! Maybe Paul Tripp was advising Mars Hill to stop trying to model itself as a single church on a franchise platform and turn into an actual nascent denomination that considered the fiscal and infrastructural dynamics that would allow for autonomous church activity. Just an idea there.
It's fascinating that after trumpeting the greatness of Tripp as an addition to the BoAA in later 2013 Sutton Turner and Justin Dean rushed to dismiss Paul Tripp's role in the BoAA whose existence Sutton Turner has described as his innovation. Well, hasn't Turner testified against the effectiveness of the board if he's complained about Tripp's role on it? And hasn't this confirmed Tripp's concerns that the BoAA simply could not do what was expected of it? The more Sutton Turner and Justin Dean try to belittle Tripp's ideas and role on the BoAA he was recruited to by Mars Hill the more they seem to confirm that Tripp's publicly stated concerns have some merit.
We haven't even gotten to the roll call for the BoAA in later 2013. If Turner wanted an external board with guys who would not necessarily have an insider interest in the church there's a lot of explaining left to do.
After part 2 mentioned that there was a BoAA created that would solve the problems of governance and decision-making, Turner's part 3 opens with the following:
Church Governance: Local Elders or Outside Board?
ResultSource Part 3
That's a frankly inauspicious beginning that intimates a false dichotomy, as though a church could have governance that depends strictly on internal/local elders or on an outside board for accountability and wisdom. Had Mars Hill had a thorough grounding in both external as well as internal accountability both in structural and relational terms there might still be a Mars Hill Church that isn't a dissolving corporate entity as of this year.
TURNER REAFFIRMS BEING IN THE DARK ABOUT RESULTSOURCE APPROVAL
Turner begins be recapitulating the narrative so far.
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed. The decision was done and in the past by the close of 2011, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
How he didn't know who approved the plan is a puzzle because if he didn't know then it seems he must have been a remarkably ignorant General Manager for Mars Hill. Given the level of Martian incompetence he seems to telegraph throughout his story, it's possible that decisions were made without his being permitted in the loop. Given that Sutton Turner himself seems to have distributed a memo to the Board of Advisors & Accountability regarding Driscoll's proposed compensation that specified that nobody beyond the top brass even needed to know about the issue, it's not entirely implausible that Turner was kept in the dark as to who greenlit sticking with Result Source.
For that memo ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sutton-turner-memo-recommended-raise.html
... As of this summer [year supplemental], I have personally taken over entering the executive payroll. Outside of the Compensation Committee, there is no one withaccess to any of this information (including my assistant) for all three Mars Hill Church executive elders. I am the only person, besides the Compensation Committee, that needs to know about Pastor Mark's compensation.
So if Sutton Turner was deemed to not be in the "need to know" scene about Result Source before Munson's resignation it's possible Turner was kept in the dark. It would seem from the wording of the compensation memo Turner had made a point of keeping executive compensation secret from even his own assistant and the rest of the organization. Proprietary information is what it is.
But the question of whether or not Turner actually fixed the problems he describes seems open to interpretation and debate. If Turner developed a new board process he'd have necessarily had to remove the old system. This might have been what the MH BoAA cryptically described as a massive series of layoffs or terminations somewhere around the time Turner joined the team.
Anybody remember this?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search?q=statement+from+the+BoAA
...
Former StaffIn a 2 year period ending in the fall of 2013, Mars Hill Church endured significant turnover of key staff members that made many wonderful contributions to the development of Mars Hill Church during their tenure. A number of these staff transitions were acrimonious. Pastor Mark and the other executive Elders own their part in any discord that could have been avoided with a better process or a more patient interaction.
During the Spring of 2013 the BOAA mandated that a thorough review be conducted with all former staff from that period, soliciting their feedback so that no needed lessons for a healthier future would be neglected. In the summer of 2013 the BOAA reviewed that report, and needed corrections to policy and detrimental management patterns had been made. A former staff elder, Dave Kraft, whose disagreements with Mars Hill policies have recently been made public, had previously communicated with the BOAA numerous times that he was satisfied with the steps we have taken to address his concerns.
The BOAA supports the policy of requiring staff to commit their signatures to a mutual agreement, such as a separation agreement, that private matters of the church learned during a season of employment not be divulged outside the organization. We have seen this practice as wise for stewarding the resources entrusted to the church while engaging in common human resources practices.
FIXING THE BAD GOVERNANCE BY MAKING A BOAA WITH ABSENTEE MEMBERS
So it would appear, collectively, the portrait we get from the BoAA and from Turner's own account of things was that in 2011 he arrived at a Mars Hill on the brink of financial ruin with incompetent staff and no clear sense of fiscal controls even though publicly Driscoll had only great things to say about Jamie Munson, who had been legal president of Mars Hill since 2007, when Munson and/or Driscoll drafted bylaws that made Munson president.
Turner recounts a general narrative that had currency back in the 2007-2008 period.
Back in 2007, Mars Hill had migrated away from plurality of elders in its formal governance structure, but the strains of plurality still remained within the church culture. Every man who became a pastor, whether paid or volunteer, went through the “eldership” process to ensure the character qualifications of 1 Peter 5
and 1 Timothy 3 were met in the man’s life and home. Although the by-laws clearly stated otherwise, many church members assumed those pastors were directly involved in the governance of the church, even in 2014. Some of the pastors in 2014 felt that all 60 pastors should still be governing elders and all 60 pastors should operate in plurality on all decisions.What had happened was that Munson/Driscoll had shrunk the minimum size of the executive branch and functionally expanded its powers and removed the necessity of notifying the Full Council of pending real estate purchases, as best Wenatchee can recall. It centralized more power into the executive branch, and placed no upper limit on what any pastors could decide to do with rank and file members with respect to church discipline.
But if anyone from Mars Hill attempts to say that "all" the elders had to agree on everything for anything to get done that's patently false, as any consultation of the pre-2007 bylaws would easily establish. This isn't to say the story Sutton Turner has shared is one he somehow thinks may not be true. His sincerity is not necessarily in doubt, what's in doubt is the reliability of the narrative if the narrative claims that everybody had to agree on everything for anything to get done. At a formal level that's bullocks. At an informal level, though, it could be suggested that lockstep uniformity was expected to a degree that made the leadership culture think it was "necessary and inevitable" to fire Paul Petry and Bent Meyer for being 2 of 24 guys who didn't approve of the bylaws being proposed in 2007.
So that far Turner's idea that the formal governance obviated unanimity is only accurate if we take it that unanimity was NEVER NECESSARY at a formal level. But lockstep conformity was apparently expected to the point that Jamie Munson's first major act as Lead Pastor, besides drafting the by-laws that made him president, was to fire Petry and Meyer or at least formulate the grounds for immediate termination. Given what Sutton Turner seems to be strongly implying this week, Jamie Munson's parting gift before resigning from Mars Hill presidency was approving of Result Source. It's simply not possible for the legal president of the organization to have never been involved in that process, and Throckmorton has reported enough information to establish that Munson did have some kind of role.
So we've established Turner believed things needed to change and that the problem was the locals were trying to rule and didn't have the wisdom. He also indicates that he created an external board. It's just that there's this puzzle here in his having said that. Let's notice what he says about Paul Tripp's participation on the BoAA
Turner moves along to say this:
During my tenure, many people criticized the culture of Mars Hill and lack of accountability. The most stinging came from Dr. Paul Tripp who actually served on the Board of Advisors and Accountability for eight months when past mistakes and sins began to crater in on Mars Hill. Few people know that Dr. Tripp never physically attended a board meeting during that time. In fact, he had never met all of the board members in person. Furthermore, the points he attempted to make were never made in a board meeting or to all of the board members. Dr. Tripp resigned because he wanted the board to go back to local elders. He wanted local elders to govern each of the fifteen churches across five states. Many of the mistakes, sins, and problems that created the culture occurred under a local elder-led board—including the ResultSource decision. There is a tipping point where a church or organization outgrows its current governance. I’m not certain when it happened, but for Mars Hill, the local elder governance had reached the tipping point well before the summer of 2011.
First, we'll want to take a little detour to a comment from Justin Dean
http://www.i4j.org/2015/i4j-live-march-5-learnings-of-a-mars-hill-pr-guy-with-justin-dean/
Justin Dean · Top Commenter · Buford, Georgia
Hi Frank,
We didn't get everything right but I do think our critics, a few in particular, were responsible for starting a snowball effect of events, all under the guise of doing gods work. These aren't honest people we were dealing with.
Paul Tripps comments shocked me because he was barely involved at MH, never showed up for any meetings and only talked on the phone with our board a couple times. He has no context to say those things and I believe his words and actions were very self serving. What he described is not at all how it was at Mars Hill, not that he would know. I'd love to hear from Paul how he justifies what he did.
Reply · · March 6 at 6:57am
This strikes a very different tone from the one taken announcing Tripp was joining the Board of Advisors and Accountability back in 2013.
http://web.archive.org/web/20131127012315/http://marshill.com/2013/11/23/dr-paul-tripp-joins-mars-hill-s-board-of-advisors-and-accountability
Dr. Paul Tripp joins Mars Hill’s Board of Advisors and Accountability
... In recent years, the Board of Advisors and Accountability has been an incredible source of wise counsel for which we are very grateful. We are so excited to announce that we have now added our friend Dr. Paul Tripp who has accepted our invitation to join our Board of Advisors and Accountability! He is a great brother and partner in ministry. He preached at Mars Hill last the summer for our Best Sermon Ever series and brought the Word with power. Dr. Tripp has been teaching at Mars Hill for many years in various capacities, and we also greatly appreciate his writing ministry especially, Dangerous Calling.
In regards to his acceptance, Dr. Tripp says, “I have a deep respect and admiration for churches that preach a courageous and liberating gospel into the brokenness of the culture around them. Mars Hill is one of these churches and I am glad to use my gifts and experience to assist it in its gospel mission.”
Dr. Tripp joins the current Board members: Michael Van Skaik, Dr. James MacDonald, Dr. Larry Osborne, Mark Driscoll, Dave Bruskas, and Sutton Turner. This Board of Advisors and Accountability was voted upon and installed by an overwhelmingly supportive vote from the entire eldership, with every single elder who voted doing so in approval.
So in 2013 Tripp was described as a "friend", who was a great brother and a partner in ministry, who had even been teaching at Mars Hill for many years in various ways. But this year? The guy is now described as disconnected from the community and as having not shown up for meetings.
Turner and Dean make much of how Tripp never showed up, as though this were a notable absence. But based on the bylaws Turner drafted how often were the members of the BoAA actually expected to meet?
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/03/MHC-BYLAWS-1.pdf
At least twice a year, it turns out, and we don't know if it was ever more than twice a year or not just yet. Take a gander at Section 7.9 and you'll see the quorum was a simple majority and that so long as a majority of the independent members of the BoAA were present they didn't necessarily have to all be there. Saying Tripp wasn't around doesn't attempt to explain WHY he might not have been around. Maybe Tripp didn't show up because if there were only two meetings a year and he wasn't able to set aside time to attend the meetings the rest of the crew were authorized to meet without him. We don't know for sure and if Dr. Tripp is inclined to share his side of things that could clarify the matter. That Turner took pains to say Tripp was not involved belies the idea that an external board was going to be effective. If anything Turner's complaint about Tripp seems to reinforce Tripp's complaint about the external accountability potential of the BoAA itself, which he seems to have considered something close to zero.
Turner insists:
Dr. Tripp resigned because he wanted the board to go back to local elders. He wanted local elders to govern each of the fifteen churches across five states. Many of the mistakes, sins, and problems that created the culture occurred under a local elder-led board—including the ResultSource decision. There is a tipping point where a church or organization outgrows its current governance. I’m not certain when it happened, but for Mars Hill, the local elder governance had reached the tipping point well before the summer of 2011.
Now this does seem to be a new statement, that Tripp resigned because he wanted the board to go back to local elders, and that Tripp wanted local elders to govern each of the fifteen churches across five states, apparently as autonomous church entities. Turner seems to find this problematic. Turner blames most of the trouble in the culture on the local elder leadership. But how can Turner blame the local elders for the ResultSource decision if he opened up saying he didn't know who approved RSI or how it was determined Mars Hill would use it. Turner can't have it both ways here, can he? Either he didn't know how RSI was settled upon or he can blame the local elder board for choosing Result Source but he can't do both. Given how many times he has insisted upon his ignorance it is to his ignorance we shall have to incline our ears, unless he's willing to revise his statement and say he actually knew who approved RSI.
But Turner seems ignorant of the fact that the pre-2007 bylaws got published at Joyful Exiles by Paul Petry and the problem of local elder governance was that there wasn't any, functionally. More power had been consolidated into the smaller elder team and even Sutton Turner has acknowledged this fact. So how could local elder at a campus-by-campus level have been the cause of the trouble? Turner hasn't explained this yet, though there are intimations that fiscal incompetence played some role. But this gets back to why and how Tim Beltz stopped being an executive elder. The Generous series trumpeted the effectiveness of Beltz' financial acumen as a way to keep Mars Hill leaders from doing prison ministry from the inside, didn't it?
But what if Paul Tripp's suggestion was that all the local churches should be governed as autonomous churches with their own governance and this as part of a network of churches in which elders could govern? That's not the most earth-shaking proposal to come from someone who's a pastor at a Presbyterian church. In fact that's pretty much what we'd expect! Maybe Paul Tripp was advising Mars Hill to stop trying to model itself as a single church on a franchise platform and turn into an actual nascent denomination that considered the fiscal and infrastructural dynamics that would allow for autonomous church activity. Just an idea there.
It's fascinating that after trumpeting the greatness of Tripp as an addition to the BoAA in later 2013 Sutton Turner and Justin Dean rushed to dismiss Paul Tripp's role in the BoAA whose existence Sutton Turner has described as his innovation. Well, hasn't Turner testified against the effectiveness of the board if he's complained about Tripp's role on it? And hasn't this confirmed Tripp's concerns that the BoAA simply could not do what was expected of it? The more Sutton Turner and Justin Dean try to belittle Tripp's ideas and role on the BoAA he was recruited to by Mars Hill the more they seem to confirm that Tripp's publicly stated concerns have some merit.
We haven't even gotten to the roll call for the BoAA in later 2013. If Turner wanted an external board with guys who would not necessarily have an insider interest in the church there's a lot of explaining left to do.
for old time's sake, revisiting Mark Driscoll's "Do You Trust Your Pilot?"
Back on October 22, 2012 Mark Driscoll published "Do You Trust Your Pilot?" Let's revisit this meditation in light of Driscoll's resignation from eldership at Mars Hill that arrived a mere two years later.
http://resurgencecdn.com/resurgence/2012/10/22/do-you-trust-your-pilot
Do you trust your pilot?
Mark Driscoll » Church Church Leadership Wisdom
Can you remember a time when you were flying in a plane and it made a sudden turn that made you feel scared, helpless, and wondering if you could trust the pilots to get you to your destination safely? Do you remember feeling out of control, as someone else was in charge and your fate was in their hands?
Working for an organization, including a church or ministry, is kind of like a plane in flight. The senior leaders are up front getting data from private channels and have a perspective out the windshield that no one else has. Most people on the proverbial plane are going about their lives without considering the competency of the pilots' leading, until there is a hard turn and they feel it.
A commercial pilot in our church explained these turns as “bank angles” where one wing stoops down. He said that the response of the passengers directly correlates to the degree of the turn. For example:
25–30 degrees: 1.1–1.2 g-force on the body, most people won't feel a thing.
45 degrees: 1.5 g-force, people start to feel it.
60 degrees: 2-2.5 g-force, people really feel it and start to freak out.
70–80 degrees: Around 5 g-force, people start getting tunnel vision as the blood rushes out of their eyes.
Ideally, an organization makes as many 25–30 degree turns as possible. If so, there can be ongoing changes and course corrections without people freaking out and panicking, running through the proverbial cabin. But, sometimes a really hard turn simply has to be made. Those on the plane usually don’t understand why, because they neither have the data nor see the reality that's confronting the pilots flying the plane. Those on the plane have five basic options on how they will respond when the organizational plane makes a hard-banked angle turn:
1. Jump out of the plane
Stand up, freak out, make a scene, grab a parachute, and jump out of the plane with your résumé in hand hoping to land a job somewhere else. If you are really freaked out and negative, you can try and take as many passengers with you as possible, which is in your mind some kind of heroic act.
Couldn't it be said that Mark Driscoll himself jumped out of the plane, grabbed a parachute, and has a resume in hand with consideration of what he may do elsewhere? What happens if the pilot jumps out of the plane? Can you trust the pilot then?
2. Panic
Just absolutely melt down. Get anxious, sweaty, angry, cry, cause a big fuss, get everyone worked into a frenzy, pretend you know what is going on, stress yourself out, and just fall apart.
Sounds like "The Rebel's Guide to Joy in Anxiety" where Driscoll described himself being like this.
3. Storm the cabin
Decide that you know what is really going on and that you are a better pilot, try and get some other passengers to agree with you, form a team, and try to storm the cabin and take over the plane with you as the new captain, saving everyone from the fiery doom you are certain is imminent.
4. Trash the pilots after the plane arrives at its destination safely
Assume the worst, that the pilots are incompetent, uncaring, unloving, drunks, dangerous, thrill seekers, asleep at the wheel, etc. This can be mumbling quietly to those around you, talking loudly to make a scene, confronting the pilots on your way out, cussing someone out at the service desk, writing a nasty letter to headquarters, or posting your critiques online in a flame-throwing exercise.
5. Trust the pilots
Assume that they have way more data and training than you. Assume they see stuff out of their window you don’t see out of yours. Assume they did the right thing, even if you are wearing your drink, your luggage came flying out of the overhead bin, and you need to buy new underwear to replace the ones you were wearing. Just maybe the pilots saved your life and spared you from a less disruptive turn that would have ended in a fiery crash you never saw coming.
It all comes down to trust. If you don’t trust your pilots, then you will jump, panic, storm, or trash.
Who is most likely to trust the pilots? Frequent fliers, those who have been on board long enough to have survived hard banked turns before. And former pilots who have themselves sat in the cockpit of an organization and had to make the same kind of tough decisions.
Who is least likely to trust the pilots? First-time fliers, those who are new to leadership and/or new to the organization and subsequently lack the experience to simply buckle up and ride it out. Also fans of flying who have studied flight and/or visited the cockpit to peer over the pilots' shoulder enough to maintain an illusion that they know how to fly and could do a better job themselves, even though they have no hours in the pilots' chair.
Pray for your pilot(s) and to the Pilot
Yes, a smooth flight is always ideal. But, since the occasional smooth flight remains smooth until the plane explodes into a mountain, some occasional turbulence through uncomfortable and terrifying airspace is a much better option. So, pray for your pilot(s) and to the Pilot whose sovereign hand is ultimately on the wheel.
Seeing as Driscoll gave himself his own pilot's license by ordaining himself, and given that he jumped out of a plane that seems to have momentarily crashed into the sea in a year of dissolution, the question of whether or not to trust the pilot, if the pilot is Mark Driscoll, would seem in many ways settled. He voluntarily quit being a pastor, so he's not even a licensed pilot anymore these days, is he? If the plane that is Mars Hill survives the landing it won't be because of anything Mark Driscoll did as its pilot.
http://resurgencecdn.com/resurgence/2012/10/22/do-you-trust-your-pilot
Do you trust your pilot?
Mark Driscoll » Church Church Leadership Wisdom
Can you remember a time when you were flying in a plane and it made a sudden turn that made you feel scared, helpless, and wondering if you could trust the pilots to get you to your destination safely? Do you remember feeling out of control, as someone else was in charge and your fate was in their hands?
Working for an organization, including a church or ministry, is kind of like a plane in flight. The senior leaders are up front getting data from private channels and have a perspective out the windshield that no one else has. Most people on the proverbial plane are going about their lives without considering the competency of the pilots' leading, until there is a hard turn and they feel it.
A commercial pilot in our church explained these turns as “bank angles” where one wing stoops down. He said that the response of the passengers directly correlates to the degree of the turn. For example:
25–30 degrees: 1.1–1.2 g-force on the body, most people won't feel a thing.
45 degrees: 1.5 g-force, people start to feel it.
60 degrees: 2-2.5 g-force, people really feel it and start to freak out.
70–80 degrees: Around 5 g-force, people start getting tunnel vision as the blood rushes out of their eyes.
Ideally, an organization makes as many 25–30 degree turns as possible. If so, there can be ongoing changes and course corrections without people freaking out and panicking, running through the proverbial cabin. But, sometimes a really hard turn simply has to be made. Those on the plane usually don’t understand why, because they neither have the data nor see the reality that's confronting the pilots flying the plane. Those on the plane have five basic options on how they will respond when the organizational plane makes a hard-banked angle turn:
1. Jump out of the plane
Stand up, freak out, make a scene, grab a parachute, and jump out of the plane with your résumé in hand hoping to land a job somewhere else. If you are really freaked out and negative, you can try and take as many passengers with you as possible, which is in your mind some kind of heroic act.
Couldn't it be said that Mark Driscoll himself jumped out of the plane, grabbed a parachute, and has a resume in hand with consideration of what he may do elsewhere? What happens if the pilot jumps out of the plane? Can you trust the pilot then?
2. Panic
Just absolutely melt down. Get anxious, sweaty, angry, cry, cause a big fuss, get everyone worked into a frenzy, pretend you know what is going on, stress yourself out, and just fall apart.
Sounds like "The Rebel's Guide to Joy in Anxiety" where Driscoll described himself being like this.
3. Storm the cabin
Decide that you know what is really going on and that you are a better pilot, try and get some other passengers to agree with you, form a team, and try to storm the cabin and take over the plane with you as the new captain, saving everyone from the fiery doom you are certain is imminent.
4. Trash the pilots after the plane arrives at its destination safely
Assume the worst, that the pilots are incompetent, uncaring, unloving, drunks, dangerous, thrill seekers, asleep at the wheel, etc. This can be mumbling quietly to those around you, talking loudly to make a scene, confronting the pilots on your way out, cussing someone out at the service desk, writing a nasty letter to headquarters, or posting your critiques online in a flame-throwing exercise.
5. Trust the pilots
Assume that they have way more data and training than you. Assume they see stuff out of their window you don’t see out of yours. Assume they did the right thing, even if you are wearing your drink, your luggage came flying out of the overhead bin, and you need to buy new underwear to replace the ones you were wearing. Just maybe the pilots saved your life and spared you from a less disruptive turn that would have ended in a fiery crash you never saw coming.
It all comes down to trust. If you don’t trust your pilots, then you will jump, panic, storm, or trash.
Who is most likely to trust the pilots? Frequent fliers, those who have been on board long enough to have survived hard banked turns before. And former pilots who have themselves sat in the cockpit of an organization and had to make the same kind of tough decisions.
Who is least likely to trust the pilots? First-time fliers, those who are new to leadership and/or new to the organization and subsequently lack the experience to simply buckle up and ride it out. Also fans of flying who have studied flight and/or visited the cockpit to peer over the pilots' shoulder enough to maintain an illusion that they know how to fly and could do a better job themselves, even though they have no hours in the pilots' chair.
Pray for your pilot(s) and to the Pilot
Yes, a smooth flight is always ideal. But, since the occasional smooth flight remains smooth until the plane explodes into a mountain, some occasional turbulence through uncomfortable and terrifying airspace is a much better option. So, pray for your pilot(s) and to the Pilot whose sovereign hand is ultimately on the wheel.
Seeing as Driscoll gave himself his own pilot's license by ordaining himself, and given that he jumped out of a plane that seems to have momentarily crashed into the sea in a year of dissolution, the question of whether or not to trust the pilot, if the pilot is Mark Driscoll, would seem in many ways settled. He voluntarily quit being a pastor, so he's not even a licensed pilot anymore these days, is he? If the plane that is Mars Hill survives the landing it won't be because of anything Mark Driscoll did as its pilot.
a short thought on Turner's "Good Decisions Made by the Right People", a belated vindication of the concerns of Meyer and Petry about the 2007 bylaws?
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
If Sutton Turner has been sharing publicly this week how broken the governance and decision-making process at Mars Hill was in 2011 by the time he arrived ... couldn't that be construed as an indirect confirmation that the objections raised by former pastors Paul Petry and Bent Meyer about the problematic nature of the by-laws that were being pushed through in 2007 were justified?
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
If Sutton Turner has been sharing publicly this week how broken the governance and decision-making process at Mars Hill was in 2011 by the time he arrived ... couldn't that be construed as an indirect confirmation that the objections raised by former pastors Paul Petry and Bent Meyer about the problematic nature of the by-laws that were being pushed through in 2007 were justified?
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Sutton Turner post "Good Decisions Made By the Right People", the BoAA may have looked independent but it still contained insiders and someone credited with an advisory role in the 2007 re-org.
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
The board in place at Mars Hill in the summer of 2011 consisted of local elders who had been at Mars Hill for many years. They were inside the organization. I’m not sure what they discussed regarding ResultSource, but they needed outsiders who were experienced in big decision-making and who were outside of their context to help them. [emphasis added]
...
In November of 2011, I began to work on new by-laws that would put men on the board of directors that had large organization experience and a structure that would place these types of decisions in their hands. In Spring 2012, the full council of elders approved these new by-laws, and men were added to the board who had large company or ministry experience. This new group was called the Board of Accountability and Advisors (BOAA) and its members were approved by the full council of elders.
The make-up of the Board of Accountability and Advisors would be something to review.
The make-up of various boards within Mars Hill changed over time:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mh-governance-in-2013-and-in-2012.html
For instance, the board that would investigate charges in the event that any formal accusation were made against Mark Driscoll ... at one point looked like this:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-event-that-formal-charge-andor.html
In the event that a formal charge and/or accusation is made against Pastor Mark that, if investigated and found to be true, would disqualify him from his position as an elder in Mars Hill Church, a group of five men consisting of both elders within Mars Hill Church and Christian leaders outside of Mars Hill Church, will investigate the charge or accusation and determine if it is true. This group currently consists of Jamie Munson, Dave Bruskas, James MacDonald, Darrin Patrick, and Larry Osborne. If the charge or accusation is found to be true, this group can rebuke Pastor Mark or, if warranted, remove him as an elder at Mars Hill Church. If Pastor Mark is removed as an elder, he automatically ceases to serve on the Board of Elders, on the Executive Elder Team, and as president of Mars Hill Church.”
That was the old early 2012 list and the list does not look much like a group of outsiders if you know their backgrounds.
Jamie Munson in particular, either drafted or helped drafted the governance system that Sutton Turner considered flawed.
Larry Osborne had an advisory role. See pages 164 and 165 of Confessions of a Reformission Rev for Driscoll's discussion of a lunch with Osborne about managing a church. A quote that stands out particularly now is the following:
CONFESSIONS OF A REFORMISSION REV
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan
copyright (c) 2006 by Mark Driscoll
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
page 167
Our strategic plan, which is sketched out in this chapter, won't be fully implemented until after this book is published. By that time, we will know if we had a good plan or if we messed everytiing up and reduced the church to a small group of people meeting in a phone booth and grumbling about the strategic plan. I am hesitant to end the book with these details because I have no guarantee that they will work.
Seeing as the corporation known as Mars Hill Church is in the midst of dissolving this year ... maybe the strategic plan didn't quite work out.
Eventually the BoAA was listed as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-board-of-advisors-and.html
Paul Tripp
Michael Van Skaik
James MacDonald
Larry Osborne
Mark Driscoll
Dave Bruskas
Sutton Turner
Tripp, famous, quit being on the BoAA. It's important to remind everyone that Osborne could not have been considered that disengaged, not if Mark Driscoll name-dropped him as the one who advised him on how to architect Mars Hill as multi-site back in the 2006-2007 re-org.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
Dear Mars Hill Church Members,
...
So, I began pursuing counsel from godly men outside the church that I respected. I spoke with Tim Keller about the difficulties of an urban church, John Piper about how to sustain longevity in the ministry, C. J. Mahaney about bitterness that had grown in me against some elders of Mars Hill and my need to grow in humility, D. A. Carson about how to best study so as to become an even better Bible teacher and writer, Gerry Breshears about how to best train other men for ministry to share the load, Pastor Larry Osborne about how to best architect a multi-campus church [emphasis added], and Pastors Craig Groeschel and Ed Young Jr. about how to lead a churh of thousands and possibly tens of thousands. On top of that, I pursued counsel from a Christian doctor regarding my health and what needed to change in my diet, exercise, and schedule. In short, I sought wise outside counsel regarding if I should stay at Mars Hill and make changes in my life and our church, or simply move on to another church and start over.
If Sutton Turner was convinced that the governance in place at his arrival in 2011 was deeply problematic how would adding the man Mark Driscoll credited with advising him on how best to artchitect a multi-campus church have helped the BoAA right the wrongs of the earlier regime?
Michael Van Skaik was a pastor at Mars Hill Bellevue and on the Compensation Committee. He also had a board role on Ministry Coaching International.
For those who may have read this old survey of what the Governance page used to say.
The Compensation Committee consists of at least three members of the Board of Elders chosen from among the nonpaid elders serving on the board. The members of the committee are appointed by the Board of Elders. Currently, the following elders serve on the Compensation Committee: Michael Van Skaik (Chairman), ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/05/one-of-jamie-munsons-grounds-for.html
The idea that Van Skaik could be construed as independent or non-insider counsel to Mars Hill seems particularly difficult to buy this late in the game. Ministry Coaching seemed to be (clarification welcome) something Mars Hill was connected to back during the period in which Meyer and Petry got fired. If Michael Van Skaik and Ministry Coaching International were being consulted in 2007 then that's another person who had a business interest of some kind, it seems, in Mars Hill. And that'd be fine far as it goes, perhaps, but if Turner's goal in formulating a Board of Accountability and Advisors was to get guys on there who were not trapped by the insider mentality of the Mars Hill governance and cultural system he encountered in 2011, well, there were quite possibly other options.
We'd need a full accounting of exactly who was on the BoAA during what years but the ending team was, if anything, a team that looked like it had people who were actually at Mars Hill
Getting back to Turner's recent post, he closes with the following, and it looks like after this there's another post on the way from him:
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
At our board meeting in August of 2013, I provided a detailed analysis and accounting of the ResultSource marketing plan. At this board meeting (six months before the signed ResultSource contract was leaked to the public), the new board agreed that this type of marketing strategy would never be used again. In fact, no other books that were published through Mars Hill used it. We, as board members, would certainly not always get it right. In fact, in the following months, we would even make mistakes around the public revelation of the ResultSource contract. (I desired for our first media response at that time to clearly communicate two things: my level of involvement in the decision and the BOAA’s decision to never repeat the practice. Unfortunately, this did not happen.) But six months before the public spotlight, this new board of outside leaders, who were unassociated with the ResultSource decision, evaluated the proposal afterwards and made the right decision: it was a bad idea and it was wrong.
Okay, so the BoAA decided Result Source should never get used again. That still makes it a stretch to sustain the "above reproach" record for Jamie Munson Mark Driscoll asserted when Munson resigned, doesn't it? And even if Mark Driscoll and company didn't use RSI again, let's not forget the iPad Mini promotional contest for Who Do You Think You Are?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/santa-driscoll-has-toys-for-you-maybe.html
It's debatable how outside the members of the BoAA were if it was anything like the line up presented to the public. Osborne's advisory role in the 2006-2007 re-org has been testified to by none other than Mark Driscoll himself. Michael Van Skaik's roles within Mars Hill would not have counted him as truly thinking like an outsider given the range of roles he had within the organization. Formally resigning so as to meet the technical requirements of membership as part of the BoAA doesn't mean that Van Skaik was indisputably thinking like someone who wasn't stepped in the governance culture Turner was trying to reform.
And since the corporation is dissolving this year it may be that whatever valiant efforts Sutton Turner put into righting the boat it's still gone done.
When part 3 goes up, as it seems there'll be a part 3, we can see what Turner has to say. Meanwhile, what he's shared about the fiscal and infrastructural health of Mars Hill in 2011 paints a pretty bleak portrait of an organization in financial disarray and with a leadership culture okay with gaming the NYT best-seller list. If Turner felt obliged to sign the contract in spite of his disagreement this suggests that all the past hype about him as the "king" with "kingly gifts" by Mars Hill to the public and to its members was mainly for show and that in the end someone else was really the king.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
... I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
In the end it seems as though whatever reforms in governance Turner hoped to implement, if Mark Driscoll's the one who changed the church all the way down, Turner could only accomplish so much.
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
The board in place at Mars Hill in the summer of 2011 consisted of local elders who had been at Mars Hill for many years. They were inside the organization. I’m not sure what they discussed regarding ResultSource, but they needed outsiders who were experienced in big decision-making and who were outside of their context to help them. [emphasis added]
...
In November of 2011, I began to work on new by-laws that would put men on the board of directors that had large organization experience and a structure that would place these types of decisions in their hands. In Spring 2012, the full council of elders approved these new by-laws, and men were added to the board who had large company or ministry experience. This new group was called the Board of Accountability and Advisors (BOAA) and its members were approved by the full council of elders.
The make-up of the Board of Accountability and Advisors would be something to review.
The make-up of various boards within Mars Hill changed over time:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mh-governance-in-2013-and-in-2012.html
For instance, the board that would investigate charges in the event that any formal accusation were made against Mark Driscoll ... at one point looked like this:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-event-that-formal-charge-andor.html
In the event that a formal charge and/or accusation is made against Pastor Mark that, if investigated and found to be true, would disqualify him from his position as an elder in Mars Hill Church, a group of five men consisting of both elders within Mars Hill Church and Christian leaders outside of Mars Hill Church, will investigate the charge or accusation and determine if it is true. This group currently consists of Jamie Munson, Dave Bruskas, James MacDonald, Darrin Patrick, and Larry Osborne. If the charge or accusation is found to be true, this group can rebuke Pastor Mark or, if warranted, remove him as an elder at Mars Hill Church. If Pastor Mark is removed as an elder, he automatically ceases to serve on the Board of Elders, on the Executive Elder Team, and as president of Mars Hill Church.”
That was the old early 2012 list and the list does not look much like a group of outsiders if you know their backgrounds.
Jamie Munson in particular, either drafted or helped drafted the governance system that Sutton Turner considered flawed.
Larry Osborne had an advisory role. See pages 164 and 165 of Confessions of a Reformission Rev for Driscoll's discussion of a lunch with Osborne about managing a church. A quote that stands out particularly now is the following:
CONFESSIONS OF A REFORMISSION REV
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan
copyright (c) 2006 by Mark Driscoll
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
page 167
Our strategic plan, which is sketched out in this chapter, won't be fully implemented until after this book is published. By that time, we will know if we had a good plan or if we messed everytiing up and reduced the church to a small group of people meeting in a phone booth and grumbling about the strategic plan. I am hesitant to end the book with these details because I have no guarantee that they will work.
Seeing as the corporation known as Mars Hill Church is in the midst of dissolving this year ... maybe the strategic plan didn't quite work out.
Eventually the BoAA was listed as follows:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-board-of-advisors-and.html
Paul Tripp
Michael Van Skaik
James MacDonald
Larry Osborne
Mark Driscoll
Dave Bruskas
Sutton Turner
Tripp, famous, quit being on the BoAA. It's important to remind everyone that Osborne could not have been considered that disengaged, not if Mark Driscoll name-dropped him as the one who advised him on how to architect Mars Hill as multi-site back in the 2006-2007 re-org.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
A letter from Pastor Mark Driscoll
November 8, 2007
Dear Mars Hill Church Members,
...
So, I began pursuing counsel from godly men outside the church that I respected. I spoke with Tim Keller about the difficulties of an urban church, John Piper about how to sustain longevity in the ministry, C. J. Mahaney about bitterness that had grown in me against some elders of Mars Hill and my need to grow in humility, D. A. Carson about how to best study so as to become an even better Bible teacher and writer, Gerry Breshears about how to best train other men for ministry to share the load, Pastor Larry Osborne about how to best architect a multi-campus church [emphasis added], and Pastors Craig Groeschel and Ed Young Jr. about how to lead a churh of thousands and possibly tens of thousands. On top of that, I pursued counsel from a Christian doctor regarding my health and what needed to change in my diet, exercise, and schedule. In short, I sought wise outside counsel regarding if I should stay at Mars Hill and make changes in my life and our church, or simply move on to another church and start over.
If Sutton Turner was convinced that the governance in place at his arrival in 2011 was deeply problematic how would adding the man Mark Driscoll credited with advising him on how best to artchitect a multi-campus church have helped the BoAA right the wrongs of the earlier regime?
Michael Van Skaik was a pastor at Mars Hill Bellevue and on the Compensation Committee. He also had a board role on Ministry Coaching International.
For those who may have read this old survey of what the Governance page used to say.
The Compensation Committee consists of at least three members of the Board of Elders chosen from among the nonpaid elders serving on the board. The members of the committee are appointed by the Board of Elders. Currently, the following elders serve on the Compensation Committee: Michael Van Skaik (Chairman), ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/pajama-pages-on-mh-boaa-bit-of.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/05/one-of-jamie-munsons-grounds-for.html
The idea that Van Skaik could be construed as independent or non-insider counsel to Mars Hill seems particularly difficult to buy this late in the game. Ministry Coaching seemed to be (clarification welcome) something Mars Hill was connected to back during the period in which Meyer and Petry got fired. If Michael Van Skaik and Ministry Coaching International were being consulted in 2007 then that's another person who had a business interest of some kind, it seems, in Mars Hill. And that'd be fine far as it goes, perhaps, but if Turner's goal in formulating a Board of Accountability and Advisors was to get guys on there who were not trapped by the insider mentality of the Mars Hill governance and cultural system he encountered in 2011, well, there were quite possibly other options.
We'd need a full accounting of exactly who was on the BoAA during what years but the ending team was, if anything, a team that looked like it had people who were actually at Mars Hill
Getting back to Turner's recent post, he closes with the following, and it looks like after this there's another post on the way from him:
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
At our board meeting in August of 2013, I provided a detailed analysis and accounting of the ResultSource marketing plan. At this board meeting (six months before the signed ResultSource contract was leaked to the public), the new board agreed that this type of marketing strategy would never be used again. In fact, no other books that were published through Mars Hill used it. We, as board members, would certainly not always get it right. In fact, in the following months, we would even make mistakes around the public revelation of the ResultSource contract. (I desired for our first media response at that time to clearly communicate two things: my level of involvement in the decision and the BOAA’s decision to never repeat the practice. Unfortunately, this did not happen.) But six months before the public spotlight, this new board of outside leaders, who were unassociated with the ResultSource decision, evaluated the proposal afterwards and made the right decision: it was a bad idea and it was wrong.
Okay, so the BoAA decided Result Source should never get used again. That still makes it a stretch to sustain the "above reproach" record for Jamie Munson Mark Driscoll asserted when Munson resigned, doesn't it? And even if Mark Driscoll and company didn't use RSI again, let's not forget the iPad Mini promotional contest for Who Do You Think You Are?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/santa-driscoll-has-toys-for-you-maybe.html
It's debatable how outside the members of the BoAA were if it was anything like the line up presented to the public. Osborne's advisory role in the 2006-2007 re-org has been testified to by none other than Mark Driscoll himself. Michael Van Skaik's roles within Mars Hill would not have counted him as truly thinking like an outsider given the range of roles he had within the organization. Formally resigning so as to meet the technical requirements of membership as part of the BoAA doesn't mean that Van Skaik was indisputably thinking like someone who wasn't stepped in the governance culture Turner was trying to reform.
And since the corporation is dissolving this year it may be that whatever valiant efforts Sutton Turner put into righting the boat it's still gone done.
When part 3 goes up, as it seems there'll be a part 3, we can see what Turner has to say. Meanwhile, what he's shared about the fiscal and infrastructural health of Mars Hill in 2011 paints a pretty bleak portrait of an organization in financial disarray and with a leadership culture okay with gaming the NYT best-seller list. If Turner felt obliged to sign the contract in spite of his disagreement this suggests that all the past hype about him as the "king" with "kingly gifts" by Mars Hill to the public and to its members was mainly for show and that in the end someone else was really the king.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
... I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
In the end it seems as though whatever reforms in governance Turner hoped to implement, if Mark Driscoll's the one who changed the church all the way down, Turner could only accomplish so much.
Sutton Turner post "Good Decisions Made By the Right People", Turner's account revisits the question of who formulated the governance he considered badly in need of a fix
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
A Board to Match the Organization
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. [emphasis added] Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
We've discussed a couple of the Board of Director members who may or may not have been part of the BoD in 2011 by the time Sutton Turner arrived.
Turner has been emphatic that the core problem that led to the unwise decision that was using Result Source to promote the Driscolls' book Real Marriage stemmed from governance. Well, for the sake of conversation, let's assume that's true. Who formulated the flawed governance structure? There are two distinct but not necessarily conflicting or competing narratives that have been made available regarding this topic.
The first is available by way of Joyful Exiles, Paul Petry's site that includes a mountain of documents and correspondence pertaining to his termination and trial. We can see the formal accusations made by Jamie Munson, rather, the grounds for immediate termination:
The second narrative is as follows, from a video that seemed to get posted in earlier 2013.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
transcript of Mark Driscoll statement in a video called "Stepping Up", discussed over at Warren
Throckmorton's blog:
I don’t know what the most courageous thing I’ve ever done is. I know the one thing that was one of the hardest was, the church was growing, it had exploded, it had grown to, I think, maybe six thousand. So it made it one of the largest, fastest growing churches in America in one of the least churched cities, and in a conversation one night it was just up in our bedroom on a couch we were visiting, Grace and I were talking about past relationships and just kind of a casual conversation and we’d been together at that point for maybe seventeen, eighteen years or something. [WtH, i.e. either 2005 or 2006] I mean we’d been together a while between dating and marriage. And she just explained to me a few occasions where she had been sexually assaulted, raped, and abused [prior to my meeting her, (WT's transcript differs from what is presented here and this is punctuation that WtH believes makes more sense of Driscoll's actual words)]. I just broke and I just started weeping, thinking that I had not known that about my wife, and she just said it matter of factly, like she was just reading the script of someone else’s life. And there was no emotion in her, and I could tell she didn’t even really understand what she had just explained. That sort of led to a season of me really getting to know her, and her getting to know her past, and us getting to know Jesus in a deeper way.
It was around that time I could just tell that she’s gonna need me available more.
Emotionally present more, we just had our 5th child. So the timing’s not great. We just decided to go multi-site in video, cause we had outgrown our location and everybody’s looking and all the critics are around and is this gonna make it? A couple of things combined at that season as well, overwork and stress and everything else. I fatigued my adrenal glands, I was in a bad place health-wise, was not sleeping. It was a pretty dark time for me, and I told Grace, “For me to recover, for you to recover, for us to build our friendship, I feel like we’re kind of at that watershed moment where our marriage is gonna get better or it’s gonna get colder, and you’ve really opened yourself up and I need to love and serve you better and pursue you more.”
I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
I told Grace, I said “I’m going to give it one year, and if it doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to quit, because you’re more important to me than ministry, and I feel like if I quit right now, the church will probably die, and there’s all these thousands of people that met Jesus.” I said “So we’re either going to change it or I’m going to quit, but we’re not going to do this forever and you’re my priority,” and that led to everything that I feared, quite frankly. [emphasis added]
It was really brutal, and I couldn’t tell the story at the time of and here’s why- because Grace is really hurting, and I love her, and I’m broken, and we need to pull back and make some course corrections because it’s Grace’s story to tell, and she wasn’t ready at that point to tell that story, and I had no right to tell that story for her.
And so everybody got to speculate for years what the motive was, “oh he’s power hungry, he’s controlling, he wants to take over, he doesn’t love people, you know he’s just a bully.” And no, it’s actually he’s broken and his wife is hurting and the church is gonna probably literally kill him or put him in the hospital and his wife needs him right now, so he’s gotta make some adjustments. So, you know, by the grace of God, we weathered that storm.
That's a lot of text but it is best to keep it all there. The second narrative is that it was Mark Driscoll who rewrote the constitution and the bylaws for the benefit of working on his marriage. There are a couple of basic questions as to what was going on there. Why would Driscoll have needed to rewrite the constitution of Mars Hill in order to spend more time with Grace? It's not like Grace was a charter member of the corporation, was she? If someone were to find the articles of incorporation and the earliest by-laws that could be something that could be established, perhaps, but otherwise the whole idea of rebuilding the governance of Mars Hill from the ground up so Mark Driscoll could spend more time with Grace seems strange. But, if true, then it means that whatever Jamie Munson was doing with the by-laws could have been with supervision from Mark Driscoll.
And whether it was Jamie Munson acting on his own or under direction from Mark Driscoll, or whether it was Mark Driscoll personally rewriting the constitution and the by-laws with Jamie Munson being formally credited with that during the termination and trial process, it's pretty hard to escape the fact that Mark Driscoll and Jamie Munson seem to have the credit or blame for the governance system that Sutton Turner has lately described as flawed. The governance was flawed inasmuch as it permitted the Mars Hill leadership culture to endorse Result Source as a way to promote Real Marriage on the one hand, and on the other it may have had something to do with the shambolic state of financial reporting when Sutton Turner arrived at Mars Hill.
Turner's summary of Mars Hill financials and governance seems dire enough that it seems to cast some doubt on something Mark Driscoll was emphatic about the year Jamie Munson resigned.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/wayback-machine-archive-of-jamie-munson.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130925181152/http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
By: Mars Hill Blog
Posted: Sep 06, 2011
Important Letters from Pastors Jamie Munson and Mark Driscoll
[from Mark Driscoll's letter]
...
I want to make it emphatically clear: there is no disqualifying sin or error of any kind in Pastor Jamie’s life. This is in no way connected to anything negative. He is, by God’s grace, "above reproach," as he always has been. [emphasis added]
...
To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king."
Yet if under Munson's tenure the church was teetering toward the edge of some kind of fiscal cliff and was greenlighting rigging the New York Times best-seller list for the advancement of a Driscoll book how was that supposed to be "above reproach"?
Turner has described the replacement board as fixing the problems of the earlier board but that merits another post.
For this post we'll end with Mark Driscoll in 2008 explaining why putting Jamie Munson in charge of everything was the best move he'd made.
Back in 2008 when Mark Driscoll talked about making Jamie head of Mars Hill he described it as the best decision he ever made for a memorable reason:
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
2.28.2008
"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."
Putting Jamie Munson as head of the elder board and legal president liberated Driscoll from all that conflict of interest. Curious phrase there, and it seemed from Driscoll's wording he was implying that conflict of interest was the normal managerial plight for him. Well, whatever improvements Driscoll may have thought would accrue from the governance changes of 2006-2007, it seems by the time Sutton Turner arrived in 2011 he considered the governance in place problematic enough to need an overhaul.
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
A Board to Match the Organization
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. [emphasis added] Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
We've discussed a couple of the Board of Director members who may or may not have been part of the BoD in 2011 by the time Sutton Turner arrived.
Turner has been emphatic that the core problem that led to the unwise decision that was using Result Source to promote the Driscolls' book Real Marriage stemmed from governance. Well, for the sake of conversation, let's assume that's true. Who formulated the flawed governance structure? There are two distinct but not necessarily conflicting or competing narratives that have been made available regarding this topic.
The first is available by way of Joyful Exiles, Paul Petry's site that includes a mountain of documents and correspondence pertaining to his termination and trial. We can see the formal accusations made by Jamie Munson, rather, the grounds for immediate termination:
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
from Pastor Jamie Munson to the elders of Mars Hill Church on September 30, 2007
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
For those familiar with the mountain of documents at Joyful Exiles, the consensus from Mars Hill leadership was that Jamie Munson was drafting a new set of by-laws that Paul Petry and Bent Meyer had objections to. They were soon terminated and both went through trials. from Pastor Jamie Munson to the elders of Mars Hill Church on September 30, 2007
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
The second narrative is as follows, from a video that seemed to get posted in earlier 2013.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
transcript of Mark Driscoll statement in a video called "Stepping Up", discussed over at Warren
Throckmorton's blog:
I don’t know what the most courageous thing I’ve ever done is. I know the one thing that was one of the hardest was, the church was growing, it had exploded, it had grown to, I think, maybe six thousand. So it made it one of the largest, fastest growing churches in America in one of the least churched cities, and in a conversation one night it was just up in our bedroom on a couch we were visiting, Grace and I were talking about past relationships and just kind of a casual conversation and we’d been together at that point for maybe seventeen, eighteen years or something. [WtH, i.e. either 2005 or 2006] I mean we’d been together a while between dating and marriage. And she just explained to me a few occasions where she had been sexually assaulted, raped, and abused [prior to my meeting her, (WT's transcript differs from what is presented here and this is punctuation that WtH believes makes more sense of Driscoll's actual words)]. I just broke and I just started weeping, thinking that I had not known that about my wife, and she just said it matter of factly, like she was just reading the script of someone else’s life. And there was no emotion in her, and I could tell she didn’t even really understand what she had just explained. That sort of led to a season of me really getting to know her, and her getting to know her past, and us getting to know Jesus in a deeper way.
It was around that time I could just tell that she’s gonna need me available more.
Emotionally present more, we just had our 5th child. So the timing’s not great. We just decided to go multi-site in video, cause we had outgrown our location and everybody’s looking and all the critics are around and is this gonna make it? A couple of things combined at that season as well, overwork and stress and everything else. I fatigued my adrenal glands, I was in a bad place health-wise, was not sleeping. It was a pretty dark time for me, and I told Grace, “For me to recover, for you to recover, for us to build our friendship, I feel like we’re kind of at that watershed moment where our marriage is gonna get better or it’s gonna get colder, and you’ve really opened yourself up and I need to love and serve you better and pursue you more.”
I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
I told Grace, I said “I’m going to give it one year, and if it doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to quit, because you’re more important to me than ministry, and I feel like if I quit right now, the church will probably die, and there’s all these thousands of people that met Jesus.” I said “So we’re either going to change it or I’m going to quit, but we’re not going to do this forever and you’re my priority,” and that led to everything that I feared, quite frankly. [emphasis added]
It was really brutal, and I couldn’t tell the story at the time of and here’s why- because Grace is really hurting, and I love her, and I’m broken, and we need to pull back and make some course corrections because it’s Grace’s story to tell, and she wasn’t ready at that point to tell that story, and I had no right to tell that story for her.
And so everybody got to speculate for years what the motive was, “oh he’s power hungry, he’s controlling, he wants to take over, he doesn’t love people, you know he’s just a bully.” And no, it’s actually he’s broken and his wife is hurting and the church is gonna probably literally kill him or put him in the hospital and his wife needs him right now, so he’s gotta make some adjustments. So, you know, by the grace of God, we weathered that storm.
That's a lot of text but it is best to keep it all there. The second narrative is that it was Mark Driscoll who rewrote the constitution and the bylaws for the benefit of working on his marriage. There are a couple of basic questions as to what was going on there. Why would Driscoll have needed to rewrite the constitution of Mars Hill in order to spend more time with Grace? It's not like Grace was a charter member of the corporation, was she? If someone were to find the articles of incorporation and the earliest by-laws that could be something that could be established, perhaps, but otherwise the whole idea of rebuilding the governance of Mars Hill from the ground up so Mark Driscoll could spend more time with Grace seems strange. But, if true, then it means that whatever Jamie Munson was doing with the by-laws could have been with supervision from Mark Driscoll.
And whether it was Jamie Munson acting on his own or under direction from Mark Driscoll, or whether it was Mark Driscoll personally rewriting the constitution and the by-laws with Jamie Munson being formally credited with that during the termination and trial process, it's pretty hard to escape the fact that Mark Driscoll and Jamie Munson seem to have the credit or blame for the governance system that Sutton Turner has lately described as flawed. The governance was flawed inasmuch as it permitted the Mars Hill leadership culture to endorse Result Source as a way to promote Real Marriage on the one hand, and on the other it may have had something to do with the shambolic state of financial reporting when Sutton Turner arrived at Mars Hill.
Turner's summary of Mars Hill financials and governance seems dire enough that it seems to cast some doubt on something Mark Driscoll was emphatic about the year Jamie Munson resigned.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/wayback-machine-archive-of-jamie-munson.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130925181152/http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
By: Mars Hill Blog
Posted: Sep 06, 2011
Important Letters from Pastors Jamie Munson and Mark Driscoll
[from Mark Driscoll's letter]
...
I want to make it emphatically clear: there is no disqualifying sin or error of any kind in Pastor Jamie’s life. This is in no way connected to anything negative. He is, by God’s grace, "above reproach," as he always has been. [emphasis added]
...
To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king."
Yet if under Munson's tenure the church was teetering toward the edge of some kind of fiscal cliff and was greenlighting rigging the New York Times best-seller list for the advancement of a Driscoll book how was that supposed to be "above reproach"?
Turner has described the replacement board as fixing the problems of the earlier board but that merits another post.
For this post we'll end with Mark Driscoll in 2008 explaining why putting Jamie Munson in charge of everything was the best move he'd made.
Back in 2008 when Mark Driscoll talked about making Jamie head of Mars Hill he described it as the best decision he ever made for a memorable reason:
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
2.28.2008
"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."
Putting Jamie Munson as head of the elder board and legal president liberated Driscoll from all that conflict of interest. Curious phrase there, and it seemed from Driscoll's wording he was implying that conflict of interest was the normal managerial plight for him. Well, whatever improvements Driscoll may have thought would accrue from the governance changes of 2006-2007, it seems by the time Sutton Turner arrived in 2011 he considered the governance in place problematic enough to need an overhaul.
setting the stage for Sutton Turner post "Good Decisions Made By the Right People",
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource1/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 20, 2015
In April 2011, I joined Mars Hill as the General Manager and reported to the Executive Pastor. I had enjoyed the teaching via podcast from overseas since 2007. My family and I looked forward to attending and serving in the church that we had enjoyed from afar, a church that loved Jesus and preached the gospel. I looked forward to using my gifts and experience to further the mission of Jesus through the local church.
... I was notified that my advice was not taken and the plan to use ResultSource was approved. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions was broken and it needed to be fixed.
It's worth noting that if Sutton Turner had been listening via podcast to Mark Driscoll's sermons then he may well have heard "The Rebel's Guide to Joy in Humility"
http://marshill.com/media/rebels-guide-to-joy/the-rebels-guide-to-joy-in-humility
... The last one is James. He was running a drug and alcohol treatment center, I think for the Union Gospel Mission. He was an elder at Doxa Church in West Seattle. He and Pastor Bill were there and I approached them and said, “I think we should partner together,” and turned that building into Mars Hill West Seattle. I don’t know what the building’s worth – $4 million, whatever. He said, “Well what’s the deal?” I said, “Give us the building, resign as elders, work through the membership process, work through the eldership process. I guarantee you nothing – no power, no job, no eldership. If you meet the qualifications and the men vote you in, we’ll make you an elder, but I guarantee you no job. Nothing. If you believe it’s right for Jesus, give us the building, resign, give up all power of authority, give up your position. Walk away from it all for the cause of Jesus.”
He said, “Okay, I think it’s best for Jesus.” He resigned, voted to hand us the building and the people. Humbly went through the eldership process. After he finished the membership process, oversees our drug and alcohol addiction recovery. We just voted him onto the Board of Directors. Why? Because God opposes the proud and he gives grace to the humble.
This would have been a reference on the part of Mark Driscoll to James Noriega being part of the Board of Directors and Noriega may have been on the board in mid-2011. He was no longer listed as a pastor in any capacity by about September or October 2011, though the reason for this absence has never been explained yet. As General Manager it seems difficult to imagine that Sutton Turner wouldn't have been able to figure out who was on the old Board of Directors. If Turner had been listening to Driscoll sermons since 2007, however, he would have heard Mark Driscoll reference not only James Noriega as having gained a role on the old BoD, but Tim Beltz, too.
http://marshill.com/media/rebels-guide-to-joy/the-rebels-guide-to-joy-in-humility#transcript
Beltz' departure from executive eldership remains shrouded in mystery. There's some more details on what Beltz did to implement financial controls to keep MH solvent over at this blog post:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/httpwww.html
Beltz' role as a consultant prior to his executive eldership and his role in conveying the end of Lief Moi's time as a Mars Hill pastor is covered at some length in the following set of tagged posts:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/moi
Turner would understandably have not had total access to that kind of background. But what Turner probably would have been able to see were the by-laws from 2007 that were probably the ones in place when he arrived.
The 2007 by-laws drafted by Munson (and/or Mark Driscoll, another topic in itself), appointed the lead pastor as president of the organization. Since the Lead Pastor was Jamie Munson, Sutton Turner's observation about the problems in the governance that led the church to the brink of financial failure and rubber-stamped Result Source indicate that Turner found the fiscal competence and the general approach to stewardship on the part of Mars Hill leadership doubtful.
That was just ResultSource 1, now we finally get to ResultSource2.
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 20, 2015
In April 2011, I joined Mars Hill as the General Manager and reported to the Executive Pastor. I had enjoyed the teaching via podcast from overseas since 2007. My family and I looked forward to attending and serving in the church that we had enjoyed from afar, a church that loved Jesus and preached the gospel. I looked forward to using my gifts and experience to further the mission of Jesus through the local church.
... I was notified that my advice was not taken and the plan to use ResultSource was approved. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions was broken and it needed to be fixed.
It's worth noting that if Sutton Turner had been listening via podcast to Mark Driscoll's sermons then he may well have heard "The Rebel's Guide to Joy in Humility"
http://marshill.com/media/rebels-guide-to-joy/the-rebels-guide-to-joy-in-humility
Mark Driscoll on November 4, 2007
... The last one is James. He was running a drug and alcohol treatment center, I think for the Union Gospel Mission. He was an elder at Doxa Church in West Seattle. He and Pastor Bill were there and I approached them and said, “I think we should partner together,” and turned that building into Mars Hill West Seattle. I don’t know what the building’s worth – $4 million, whatever. He said, “Well what’s the deal?” I said, “Give us the building, resign as elders, work through the membership process, work through the eldership process. I guarantee you nothing – no power, no job, no eldership. If you meet the qualifications and the men vote you in, we’ll make you an elder, but I guarantee you no job. Nothing. If you believe it’s right for Jesus, give us the building, resign, give up all power of authority, give up your position. Walk away from it all for the cause of Jesus.”
He said, “Okay, I think it’s best for Jesus.” He resigned, voted to hand us the building and the people. Humbly went through the eldership process. After he finished the membership process, oversees our drug and alcohol addiction recovery. We just voted him onto the Board of Directors. Why? Because God opposes the proud and he gives grace to the humble.
This would have been a reference on the part of Mark Driscoll to James Noriega being part of the Board of Directors and Noriega may have been on the board in mid-2011. He was no longer listed as a pastor in any capacity by about September or October 2011, though the reason for this absence has never been explained yet. As General Manager it seems difficult to imagine that Sutton Turner wouldn't have been able to figure out who was on the old Board of Directors. If Turner had been listening to Driscoll sermons since 2007, however, he would have heard Mark Driscoll reference not only James Noriega as having gained a role on the old BoD, but Tim Beltz, too.
http://marshill.com/media/rebels-guide-to-joy/the-rebels-guide-to-joy-in-humility#transcript
Another man we appointed to that board is a man names Tim. I’ll tell you his story. He has an MBA in not-for-profit management. He has 20 or 30 years, I can’t remember, of not-for-profit manage experience. He’s run some very large, very significant ministries. He’s consulted for very large, very significant ministries. He nominated himself for eldership. Was a faithful member of this church. And he said, “You know, I think I can help. I think my management background will help organize Mars Hill.” We said, “Okay, well what’s your proposal?” He said, “I’ll work 50 hours a week for six months free of charge. I’ll quit my well paying job. I’ll shut down most of my consulting business. I’ll reduce my expenses, live off of my savings. I’ll nominate myself for eldership. I will work for free for six months, and I’ll come under Pastor Jamie, who’s young enough to be my son, and has none of the experience or education that I do so that I can humbly serve him so that Mars Hill can become a better church.”
God opposes the proud. Gives grace to the humble. The elders vote and say, “He should be an Executive Elder and on the Board of Directors.”
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/08/httpwww.html
Beltz' role as a consultant prior to his executive eldership and his role in conveying the end of Lief Moi's time as a Mars Hill pastor is covered at some length in the following set of tagged posts:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/moi
Turner would understandably have not had total access to that kind of background. But what Turner probably would have been able to see were the by-laws from 2007 that were probably the ones in place when he arrived.
The 2007 by-laws drafted by Munson (and/or Mark Driscoll, another topic in itself), appointed the lead pastor as president of the organization. Since the Lead Pastor was Jamie Munson, Sutton Turner's observation about the problems in the governance that led the church to the brink of financial failure and rubber-stamped Result Source indicate that Turner found the fiscal competence and the general approach to stewardship on the part of Mars Hill leadership doubtful.
That was just ResultSource 1, now we finally get to ResultSource2.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Sutton Turner posts How to Follow When You Disagree, ResultSource Part 1, examining how Turner's account fits in with what has been reported previously
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource1/
Part 2 is forthcoming and the first question that comes to mind is if Turner would be willing to talk on the record with Warren Cole Smith, who broke the story of Mars Hill using Result Source last year. Turner opens matter-of-factly and quickly mentions:
... One of the biggest mistakes of Mars Hill Church was using a company called ResultSource. It deserves to be a business school case some day, but for right now, let’s focus on the leadership lessons.
Mars Hill Church may have made a lot of history, for sure. Turner goes on to explain the following:
In April 2011, I joined Mars Hill as the General Manager and reported to the Executive Pastor. I had enjoyed the teaching via podcast from overseas since 2007. My family and I looked forward to attending and serving in the church that we had enjoyed from afar, a church that loved Jesus and preached the gospel. I looked forward to using my gifts and experience to further the mission of Jesus through the local church.
When I arrived at Mars Hill, the financial books were a mess. During my first week, I asked the finance director to bring me the financials. He said he could provide me with September 2010 because they were about to close out the books for October. Financial reporting was six months behind. I thought, “How do they know how they’re doing financially?!” The finance team handed me a bank statement. (If you are in finance or accounting, you just cringed as you read the last sentence.)
Through the grace of the Lord Jesus, the efforts of a hard-working team, and the hiring of a chief financial officer, we had put in a new chart of accounts, gotten the books closed out within 30 days of the previous month, and started to figure out where we were financially. That was all within only five months! At the same time, I was getting familiar with other ministries and departments, such as Media and Communications.
September 2010 financials in April 2011 is pretty creepy. In a more competent and experienced non-profit setting, even in literally disastrous circumstances the books would still be expected to be closed by, say, the fifth day of the next month for the month given. What's striking about the date Turner mentions is how it seems to correspond with officers.
September 2010 financials would have fallen under the tenure of Tim Beltz' time as an executive pastor.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/
Biblical Living Pastor - Downtown Seattle
For reasons that have never been explained, Beltz stopped being Pastor of Central Operations after a mere nine months, and he stopped being an Executive Pastor at the same time that he stopped being Pastor of Central Operations.
What seems clear was the last available set of financials Turner was able to get dated back to when Tim Beltz was an Executive Pastor and from the short stint Beltz was handling Central Operations. But by Turner's account by the time he arrived there was not a chief financial operations officer.
Why wasn't there a CFO around by the time Sutton Turner arrived? Given that since the 2007 by-laws revisions Jamie Munson had been made the president of the corporation known as Mars Hill Church this would seem like something Jamie Munson could explain at some point.
Turner goes on to recount RSI:
In July 2011, a new marketing proposal was already in the works at Mars Hill: ResultSource. I learned of the project from the manager who was overseeing it. ResultSource was a marketing practice that purchased books through small individual bookstores that would qualify the book for the New York Times Best Seller List. Then, these books would be shipped to Mars Hill and sold in our nine church bookstores. It was proposed that being listed on the New York Times Best Seller List would increase the awareness of the church, support the upcoming sermon series, and increase church size.
This appears to correspond with details reported by Warren Throckmorton
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/11/16/why-did-resultsource-need-david-jeremiahs-ministry-to-help-get-mark-driscoll-on-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/
In June 2011, Kevin Small wrote to then Mars Hill Church executive elder Jamie Munson to provide details about how ResultSource could get Mark Driscoll on the New York Times best-seller list. ...
...
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/11/ResultSourceJoiner.png
2. Consulting: RSI (Result Source Inc) will work with your staff to establish a pre-sale plan that will generate the necessary 11,000 copies. We will give you the plays to run as well as help by creating a shopping cart similar to the OnwardBook.com cart I showed you. We will engage Paul Joiner at Turning Point to provide the insight into constructing a donor campaign that will result in a higher donation than book cost.
So Turner's account matches up with and seems to confirm earlier reporting that the idea to use Result Source Inc. was pitched to leaders at Mars Hill and was accepted, apparently, by the executive leadership before Turner was formally on the executive elder team.
Turner has described his reaction to news of the RSI deal as follows:
I had a couple of meetings with the manager who was working on this project and at the time he stated his concern with the marketing proposal. I was not invited to any meetings to discuss ResultSource in my role as General Manager overseeing finance. However, I wrote several memos to my supervisor sharing my concern and lack of support for this marketing practice. I was relatively new to the staff and obviously not on the Board of Directors, nor was I asked to be a part of this particular decision. But due to my adamant disagreement and desire to best serve the staff and church, I wrote a memo on August 26, 2011 to my supervisor saying the following:
Best guess is that given that up until his resignation Jamie Munson had been lead pastor and legal president of Mars Hill that Jamie Munson was "probably" Turner's supervisor. But if Turner didn't even know who made the decision to approve the plan then that suggests that leadership decisions were opaque even to those within the highest levels of leadership in the corporate culture of Mars Hill. Or someone could choose not to believe Turner didn't know but let's just propose for the sake of consideration he was actually that kept in the dark. This would seem more potential evidence that there was neither transparency nor accountability inside the leadership culture of Mars Hill if even Sutton Turner could say he didn't know who approved the plan to use Result Source.
Still, a quick review of the by-laws drafted in 2007 may be able to establish that Munson would have been legal president, and would have the highest level of formal decision-making power with the other executive elders.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
Bylaws of Mars Hill Fellowship
A Nonprofit Corporation With Members
Article VI
The Executive Elder Team
SECTION G – The Executive Elder Team shall include the preaching elder and the lead elder,
who shall be determined by the Board of Directors. The preaching elder functions as the principal
teacher and preacher for the church. The lead elder functions as the organizational head and
leads the Executive Elder Team, the Board of Directors, the Full Council of Elders and the rest of
the church in effectively obeying God’s leading as revealed in Scripture.
SECTION H – Immediately following the election of the members of the Board of Directors, the
Board of Directors shall appoint members of the Executive Elder Team to serve as President,
Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer to serve as officers for purposes of the Washington
Nonprofit Corporation Act. The lead elder described in Section G shall be the President. He shall
chair the meetings of the Executive Elder Team, the Board of Directors, and the Full Council of
Elders. The preaching elder shall be the Vice-President and serve the role of president during
the absence of the president. The treasurer shall maintain proper books of account for the
church.
Skipping past Turner's ideas about how to approach decisions you don't agree with, the next part of the narrative of how RSI was engaged reads as follows:
...
Shortly after the decision to execute the ResultSource marketing plan was made, my supervisor resigned. After him, I was the highest-ranking employee in administration. The decision had been made but the contract hadn’t yet been signed. On October 13, 2011, I signed the ResultSource contract as General Manager a full month before being installed as an Executive Elder. After signing the contract, I emailed an elder, stating my frustration with having to be the one to sign the contract when I had voiced my disagreement with it. But few in the organization (or in the media since then) knew of my disagreement. When you stay in an organization and you do not agree with a decision, you have to own that decision as your own. Unfortunately, I will always be linked to ResultSource since my name was on the contract even though I thought it was a bad idea. If given the same opportunity again, I would not sign the ResultSource contract, but honestly, my missing signature would not have stopped it. Someone else would have signed it anyway since the decision had already been made
Turner could well be right, if he hadn't signed the contract maybe someone else would have. The question would still be who else would have. As Warren Throckmorton was able to verify, the guy who got invoiced for the contract was Mark Driscoll. Understandable though it may be from Turner's account he seemed to have to be the one to sign since Munson had lately resigned and he was the next highest-ranking person, what about the part where the vice-president would be the president according to the 2007 by-laws? Wouldn't that have made Mark Driscoll the de facto president in the case of Munson's resignation? Turner may well clear up a number of things in the forthcoming Part 2. At the moment it's not 100% clear why it had to be Turner and not someone else in leadership who signed.
Something for concern is the all or nothing approach to loyalty that seems expressed in Turner's approach to operating in a leadership culture. Not only does it seem a bit extreme presented at face value it may need to be gently corrected by some counter-examples from narrative literature in the Old Testament. At the risk of invoking a biblical narrative example, couldn't the book of Daniel be consulted as a case study in how a person could occupy a position in an organization in which the leaders above make decisions you disagree with and to disagree in a way that is respectful of their authority but not of their lack of wisdom? Or what about Obadiah in the court of Ahab ,shielding prophets from campaigns undertaken by Jezebel to kill prophets of the Lord? It's possible to politely suggest Turner's advice may spring from a potential lack of biblical literacy as to examples in which one can dissent from the decisions of leaders in a way that avoids giving consent while consenting that something wrong may get done all the same. Prophets occasionally did this with kings. Then again ... Sutton was described as the "king" at Mars Hill, and the shortfall in that formulation is not suitably a topic for this post.
Turner's account does at least clear up that he privately dissented from the use of Result Source Inc.
If it turns out even Sutton Turner didn't approve of the plan but it was already decided upon as the way to approach before he became an executive elder then who was in executive leadership at the time? It would seem to have been Jamie Munson, Mark Driscoll, and Dave Bruskas.
Part 2 of Sutton Turner's discussion of Result Source is not published just yet but that may get published soon. Perhaps in Part 2 there can be an explanation of how it would have been divisive to not sign something you don't believe in but it's not possible to be "divisive" by belatedly and publicly expressing dissent nearly four years later. Couldn't the Mars Hill faithful and fans of Mark Driscoll construe it as more divisive that Turner mentions only in 2015 he was against the RSI deal?
We'll just have to see what gets stated in Part 2. One would imagine that a reason to look warily on an RSI deal is that gaming a list could be construed as a false measure of success, a matter we may have to return to later this week.
Part 2 is forthcoming and the first question that comes to mind is if Turner would be willing to talk on the record with Warren Cole Smith, who broke the story of Mars Hill using Result Source last year. Turner opens matter-of-factly and quickly mentions:
... One of the biggest mistakes of Mars Hill Church was using a company called ResultSource. It deserves to be a business school case some day, but for right now, let’s focus on the leadership lessons.
Mars Hill Church may have made a lot of history, for sure. Turner goes on to explain the following:
In April 2011, I joined Mars Hill as the General Manager and reported to the Executive Pastor. I had enjoyed the teaching via podcast from overseas since 2007. My family and I looked forward to attending and serving in the church that we had enjoyed from afar, a church that loved Jesus and preached the gospel. I looked forward to using my gifts and experience to further the mission of Jesus through the local church.
When I arrived at Mars Hill, the financial books were a mess. During my first week, I asked the finance director to bring me the financials. He said he could provide me with September 2010 because they were about to close out the books for October. Financial reporting was six months behind. I thought, “How do they know how they’re doing financially?!” The finance team handed me a bank statement. (If you are in finance or accounting, you just cringed as you read the last sentence.)
Through the grace of the Lord Jesus, the efforts of a hard-working team, and the hiring of a chief financial officer, we had put in a new chart of accounts, gotten the books closed out within 30 days of the previous month, and started to figure out where we were financially. That was all within only five months! At the same time, I was getting familiar with other ministries and departments, such as Media and Communications.
September 2010 financials in April 2011 is pretty creepy. In a more competent and experienced non-profit setting, even in literally disastrous circumstances the books would still be expected to be closed by, say, the fifth day of the next month for the month given. What's striking about the date Turner mentions is how it seems to correspond with officers.
September 2010 financials would have fallen under the tenure of Tim Beltz' time as an executive pastor.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/
Biblical Living Pastor - Downtown Seattle
Mars Hill Church
– (1 year 2 months)Greater Seattle AreaFor reasons that have never been explained, Beltz stopped being Pastor of Central Operations after a mere nine months, and he stopped being an Executive Pastor at the same time that he stopped being Pastor of Central Operations.
What seems clear was the last available set of financials Turner was able to get dated back to when Tim Beltz was an Executive Pastor and from the short stint Beltz was handling Central Operations. But by Turner's account by the time he arrived there was not a chief financial operations officer.
Why wasn't there a CFO around by the time Sutton Turner arrived? Given that since the 2007 by-laws revisions Jamie Munson had been made the president of the corporation known as Mars Hill Church this would seem like something Jamie Munson could explain at some point.
Turner goes on to recount RSI:
In July 2011, a new marketing proposal was already in the works at Mars Hill: ResultSource. I learned of the project from the manager who was overseeing it. ResultSource was a marketing practice that purchased books through small individual bookstores that would qualify the book for the New York Times Best Seller List. Then, these books would be shipped to Mars Hill and sold in our nine church bookstores. It was proposed that being listed on the New York Times Best Seller List would increase the awareness of the church, support the upcoming sermon series, and increase church size.
This appears to correspond with details reported by Warren Throckmorton
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/11/16/why-did-resultsource-need-david-jeremiahs-ministry-to-help-get-mark-driscoll-on-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/
In June 2011, Kevin Small wrote to then Mars Hill Church executive elder Jamie Munson to provide details about how ResultSource could get Mark Driscoll on the New York Times best-seller list. ...
...
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/11/ResultSourceJoiner.png
2. Consulting: RSI (Result Source Inc) will work with your staff to establish a pre-sale plan that will generate the necessary 11,000 copies. We will give you the plays to run as well as help by creating a shopping cart similar to the OnwardBook.com cart I showed you. We will engage Paul Joiner at Turning Point to provide the insight into constructing a donor campaign that will result in a higher donation than book cost.
So Turner's account matches up with and seems to confirm earlier reporting that the idea to use Result Source Inc. was pitched to leaders at Mars Hill and was accepted, apparently, by the executive leadership before Turner was formally on the executive elder team.
Turner has described his reaction to news of the RSI deal as follows:
I had a couple of meetings with the manager who was working on this project and at the time he stated his concern with the marketing proposal. I was not invited to any meetings to discuss ResultSource in my role as General Manager overseeing finance. However, I wrote several memos to my supervisor sharing my concern and lack of support for this marketing practice. I was relatively new to the staff and obviously not on the Board of Directors, nor was I asked to be a part of this particular decision. But due to my adamant disagreement and desire to best serve the staff and church, I wrote a memo on August 26, 2011 to my supervisor saying the following:
- The plan was poor stewardship.
- If the plan were to be revealed, it would look poorly on the stewardship of Mars Hill Church.
- If the plan were to be revealed, it would look poorly on Pastor Mark Driscoll.
Best guess is that given that up until his resignation Jamie Munson had been lead pastor and legal president of Mars Hill that Jamie Munson was "probably" Turner's supervisor. But if Turner didn't even know who made the decision to approve the plan then that suggests that leadership decisions were opaque even to those within the highest levels of leadership in the corporate culture of Mars Hill. Or someone could choose not to believe Turner didn't know but let's just propose for the sake of consideration he was actually that kept in the dark. This would seem more potential evidence that there was neither transparency nor accountability inside the leadership culture of Mars Hill if even Sutton Turner could say he didn't know who approved the plan to use Result Source.
Still, a quick review of the by-laws drafted in 2007 may be able to establish that Munson would have been legal president, and would have the highest level of formal decision-making power with the other executive elders.
https://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/elders-response-to-questions-11-9-07.pdf
Bylaws of Mars Hill Fellowship
A Nonprofit Corporation With Members
Article VI
The Executive Elder Team
SECTION G – The Executive Elder Team shall include the preaching elder and the lead elder,
who shall be determined by the Board of Directors. The preaching elder functions as the principal
teacher and preacher for the church. The lead elder functions as the organizational head and
leads the Executive Elder Team, the Board of Directors, the Full Council of Elders and the rest of
the church in effectively obeying God’s leading as revealed in Scripture.
SECTION H – Immediately following the election of the members of the Board of Directors, the
Board of Directors shall appoint members of the Executive Elder Team to serve as President,
Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer to serve as officers for purposes of the Washington
Nonprofit Corporation Act. The lead elder described in Section G shall be the President. He shall
chair the meetings of the Executive Elder Team, the Board of Directors, and the Full Council of
Elders. The preaching elder shall be the Vice-President and serve the role of president during
the absence of the president. The treasurer shall maintain proper books of account for the
church.
Skipping past Turner's ideas about how to approach decisions you don't agree with, the next part of the narrative of how RSI was engaged reads as follows:
...
Shortly after the decision to execute the ResultSource marketing plan was made, my supervisor resigned. After him, I was the highest-ranking employee in administration. The decision had been made but the contract hadn’t yet been signed. On October 13, 2011, I signed the ResultSource contract as General Manager a full month before being installed as an Executive Elder. After signing the contract, I emailed an elder, stating my frustration with having to be the one to sign the contract when I had voiced my disagreement with it. But few in the organization (or in the media since then) knew of my disagreement. When you stay in an organization and you do not agree with a decision, you have to own that decision as your own. Unfortunately, I will always be linked to ResultSource since my name was on the contract even though I thought it was a bad idea. If given the same opportunity again, I would not sign the ResultSource contract, but honestly, my missing signature would not have stopped it. Someone else would have signed it anyway since the decision had already been made
Turner could well be right, if he hadn't signed the contract maybe someone else would have. The question would still be who else would have. As Warren Throckmorton was able to verify, the guy who got invoiced for the contract was Mark Driscoll. Understandable though it may be from Turner's account he seemed to have to be the one to sign since Munson had lately resigned and he was the next highest-ranking person, what about the part where the vice-president would be the president according to the 2007 by-laws? Wouldn't that have made Mark Driscoll the de facto president in the case of Munson's resignation? Turner may well clear up a number of things in the forthcoming Part 2. At the moment it's not 100% clear why it had to be Turner and not someone else in leadership who signed.
Something for concern is the all or nothing approach to loyalty that seems expressed in Turner's approach to operating in a leadership culture. Not only does it seem a bit extreme presented at face value it may need to be gently corrected by some counter-examples from narrative literature in the Old Testament. At the risk of invoking a biblical narrative example, couldn't the book of Daniel be consulted as a case study in how a person could occupy a position in an organization in which the leaders above make decisions you disagree with and to disagree in a way that is respectful of their authority but not of their lack of wisdom? Or what about Obadiah in the court of Ahab ,shielding prophets from campaigns undertaken by Jezebel to kill prophets of the Lord? It's possible to politely suggest Turner's advice may spring from a potential lack of biblical literacy as to examples in which one can dissent from the decisions of leaders in a way that avoids giving consent while consenting that something wrong may get done all the same. Prophets occasionally did this with kings. Then again ... Sutton was described as the "king" at Mars Hill, and the shortfall in that formulation is not suitably a topic for this post.
Turner's account does at least clear up that he privately dissented from the use of Result Source Inc.
If it turns out even Sutton Turner didn't approve of the plan but it was already decided upon as the way to approach before he became an executive elder then who was in executive leadership at the time? It would seem to have been Jamie Munson, Mark Driscoll, and Dave Bruskas.
Part 2 of Sutton Turner's discussion of Result Source is not published just yet but that may get published soon. Perhaps in Part 2 there can be an explanation of how it would have been divisive to not sign something you don't believe in but it's not possible to be "divisive" by belatedly and publicly expressing dissent nearly four years later. Couldn't the Mars Hill faithful and fans of Mark Driscoll construe it as more divisive that Turner mentions only in 2015 he was against the RSI deal?
We'll just have to see what gets stated in Part 2. One would imagine that a reason to look warily on an RSI deal is that gaming a list could be construed as a false measure of success, a matter we may have to return to later this week.
as preaching content has gone online at Mark Driscoll Ministries some of the sermons may be shorter, a case study in the "Philadelphia" sermon from The Seven
Over at markdriscoll.org sermons from the old days are up and available for listening, though no longer for downloading like they seemed to be a couple of months ago.
Something else seems to have changed, too. It's not that you won't hear a sermon or two referencing Mars Hill at this point, it's that some of the sermons are noticeably shorter. Take the sermon from The Seven on the church in Philadelphia. Over at
http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/missional-in-philadelphia-dont-give-up-or-give-in/
You'll see the run time for the sermon is 53:01. But let's not kid ourselves, that seems kinda short for a Driscoll sermon, doesn't it? Is that how long it was when he first preached it and the media was available?
http://web.archive.org/web/20150101054731/http://markdriscoll.org/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in
or from
http://web.archive.org/web/20120623222621/http://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in#downloads
Because if you downloaded the sermon when it was preached back in 2012 the run time of the sermon was 01:04:33. Where'd the eleven and a half minutes go that used to be in there? Well, starting from 53:02 (wow, down to the second?) Driscoll went on to discuss the church financial update.
It looked kind of like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120623144516/http://marshill.com/2012/06/13/an-update-on-the-church-from-pastor-mark-june-2012
The figures and trends were discussed some in the following post here:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The broader nature of the financial situation within the church and related correspondence got some discussion over here.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
It would seem, at least at first glance, that the roughly eleven minutes sliced out of the Driscoll sermon was sthe stuff dealing with the financial state of Mars Hill in mid-2012. The name "Mars Hill" isn't pervasively wiped out, but if the "Philadelphia" sermon from The Seven is indicative of changes that have come and may be to come, then whatever preaching content Driscoll makes available could be steadily scrubbed of any references to Mars Hill, the only church Driscoll has ever been a pastor at or even a member of so far.
Something else seems to have changed, too. It's not that you won't hear a sermon or two referencing Mars Hill at this point, it's that some of the sermons are noticeably shorter. Take the sermon from The Seven on the church in Philadelphia. Over at
http://markdriscoll.org/sermons/missional-in-philadelphia-dont-give-up-or-give-in/
You'll see the run time for the sermon is 53:01. But let's not kid ourselves, that seems kinda short for a Driscoll sermon, doesn't it? Is that how long it was when he first preached it and the media was available?
http://web.archive.org/web/20150101054731/http://markdriscoll.org/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in
or from
http://web.archive.org/web/20120623222621/http://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in#downloads
Because if you downloaded the sermon when it was preached back in 2012 the run time of the sermon was 01:04:33. Where'd the eleven and a half minutes go that used to be in there? Well, starting from 53:02 (wow, down to the second?) Driscoll went on to discuss the church financial update.
It looked kind of like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120623144516/http://marshill.com/2012/06/13/an-update-on-the-church-from-pastor-mark-june-2012
The figures and trends were discussed some in the following post here:
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
The broader nature of the financial situation within the church and related correspondence got some discussion over here.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/12/throckmorton-dave-bruskasmark-driscoll.html
It would seem, at least at first glance, that the roughly eleven minutes sliced out of the Driscoll sermon was sthe stuff dealing with the financial state of Mars Hill in mid-2012. The name "Mars Hill" isn't pervasively wiped out, but if the "Philadelphia" sermon from The Seven is indicative of changes that have come and may be to come, then whatever preaching content Driscoll makes available could be steadily scrubbed of any references to Mars Hill, the only church Driscoll has ever been a pastor at or even a member of so far.
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