WenatcheeTheHatchet

Friday, July 03, 2015

six available accounts of the Mark Driscoll resignation, presented in chronological order

THE RESIGNATION LETTER ITSELF, ON GODLY MEN AND WOMEN ACROSS THE COUNTRY SOUGHT FOR COUNSEL
http://www.religionnews.com/?p=109053
October 14, 2014Michael Van Skaik
Chairman, Board of Advisors and Accountability
Mars Hill Church
Dear Michael:
...
Last week our Board of Overseers met for an extended period of time with Grace and me, thereby concluding the formal review of charges against me.
...That is why, after seeking the face and will of God, and seeking godly counsel from men and women across the country, we have concluded it would be best for the health of our family, and for the Mars Hill family, that we step aside from further ministry at the church we helped launch in 1996. [emphasis added] I will gladly work with you in the coming days on any details related to our separation.
The initial resignation letter featured Mark Driscoll explaining that the investigation that was going on did not feature any allegations of criminality or immorality or disqualifying sin.

Mark Driscoll's wildly shifting public and private stances on the orthodoxy of T. D. Jakes with respect to trinitarianism and word-faith teaching would have seemed reason enough to doubt his doctrinal credibility but the point here is to observe how Mark Driscoll described the process of concluding resignation was the thing to do. The resignation letter itself stated that the Driscolls sought godly counsel from men and women across the country and concluded it would be best for the family and Mars Hill that Mark and Grace Driscoll step aside from further ministry at the church they helped launch in 1996.

Okay, that was October 14, 2014.

THE BOARD OF OVERSEERS ACCOUNT
On October 15, 2014 ... Mars Hill issued the following statement.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141016105922/https://marshill.com/2014/10/15/pastor-mark-driscolls-resignation
Pastor Mark Driscoll's Resignation
By: Mars Hill Church
Posted: Oct 15, 2014

On Tuesday, October 14, Pastor Mark Driscoll submitted his resignation as an elder and lead pastor of Mars Hill Church. The Board of Overseers has accepted that resignation [emphasis added] and is moving forward with planning for pastoral transition, recognizing the challenge of such a task in a church that has only known one pastor since its founding. We ask for prayer for the journey ahead.

As is well known, inside and outside of Mars Hill, Pastor Mark has been on a leave of absence for nearly two months while a group of elders investigated a series of formal charges brought against him. This investigation had only recently been concluded, following some 1,000 hours of research, interviewing more than 50 people and preparing 200 pages of information. This process was conducted in accordance with our church Bylaws and with Pastor Mark’s support and cooperation.
While a group of seven elders plus one member of the Board of Overseers was charged with conducting this investigation, the full Board of Overseers is charged with reaching any conclusions and issuing any findings.
...
Finally, Mark Driscoll was not asked to resign; indeed, we were surprised to receive his resignation letter. [emphasis added] While he can speak to his decision as he chooses, we would point to just two things from his letter. He noted that he had concluded “it would be best for the health of our family, and for the Mars Hill family, that we step aside from further ministry at the church.” Secondly, he specifically wanted to convey “to the wonderful members of the Mars Hill family, how deeply my family and I love them, thank them, and point them to their Senior Pastor, Jesus Christ, who has always been only good to us.”

Mars Hill Board of Overseers
Michael Van Skaik
Larry Osborne
Jon Phelps
Matt Rogers

Matt Rogers was, based on the publicly available information, the member of the Board of Overseers who was simultaneously on the Board of Elders.

So the resignation was a surprise to the board. So whoever counseled Mark and Grace Driscoll as alluded to in the resignation letter of October 14, 2014 those godly men and women were not on the BoAA or the BoO or the BoE, it seems. In fact, an announcement issued at Mars Hill October 19 seems to indicate that by resigning Mark Driscoll chose to not participate in the restoration plan that was considered necessary for his return to formal ministry at Mars Hill.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT DRISCOLL HAD GRIVED THE BoE and BoO BY RESIGNING RATHER THAN SUBMIT TO RESTORATION PLAN
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/10/19/mars-hill-church-board-of-elders-mark-driscoll-resigned-instead-of-enter-restoration-plan-to-deal/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/Alex-Ghioni-Announcement.m4a
starting about 3:45

The investigation of formal charges against Mark Driscoll has revealed patterns of persistent sin in the three areas disclosed in the previous letter by the Board of Overseers. In I Tim 5:20, it requires that an elder be rebuked for persistent sin. Our intention was to do this while providing a plan for his eventual restoration to leadership. The Board of Elders in agreement with the Board of Overseers are grieved, deeply grieved, that any process like that was lost to us when Mark Driscoll resigned in position and left the church. [emphasis added] Now is the time to move on and consider what God is calling us to next as a church as we participate in Jesus’ mission to make disciples in His name. Today begins a new chapter in the history of our church which has proceeded in one direction under one leadership for many years now, but I want you to understand this, God is our Father. That does not change. Jesus is the chief shepherd of the church and that has not changed.

So if it was no one inside of Mars Hill whose counsel prompted Mark and Grace Driscoll to resign in advance of participating in a restoration plan, has anyone got any ideas who DID say something?

According to Robert Morris, `twas he who conferred with Mark Driscoll that it would be wise if he stepped away from ministry.

ROBERT MORRIS EXPLAINS ON 10-20-2014 THAT HE AND MARK DRISCOLL AGREED HE SHOULD STEP DOWN
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/10/Transcript-Robert-Morris-Mark-Driscoll.pdf
Transcript of Robert Morris and Mark Driscoll from the Gateway Leadership + Worship Conference
on the evening of Monday, October 20, 2014, as broadcast live via DayStar Television:
Robert Morris: Uh, it was publicized that we cancelled him; that’s not true, we did not cancel. I’m speaking of Mark Driscoll. We did not cancel him. He and I decided together uh that he was going to step out of ministry for a season and get some healing. [emphasis added]

THRIVE 2015 PERFORMANCE, MARK DRISCOLL CLAIMS GOD RELEASED HIM AND GRACE DRISCOLL FROM RESPONSIBILITY TO MINISTRY

Then in 2015, at the Thrive performance, Mark Driscoll introduced a previously unmentioned narrative element, a direct divine edict.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/05/courtesy-throckmorton-thrive-transcript.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/05/13/transcript-of-mark-driscolls-speech-at-the-thrive-leadership-conference-2015/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wYBTnRpPHRb8N1nqtgP2FcHcdnBeMIqCYy2SyQCEWBg/edit
Transcript | Mark Driscoll | Thrive 2015-05-01
See Links to Timestamps at the end of this doc. [these omitted here]
...

[6:34]
It finally came to the point where God released my wife and I from our responsibility to ministry. He spoke to us audibly. It wasn’t what we were expecting. It wasn’t what we had agreed to. We were both pretty shocked and the announcement was going to come out that week. [emphasis added] And, uh, our server, our e-mail and things apparently were hacked and there was no way to get anything done without it being a public situation. And so the Board, which are good, godly people in authority, which I appreciate -- they released a statement earlier than we were anticipating, so um, but that meant, and I agree with that decision, I’m not critical of it. But that meant that I hadn’t told my kids that I had resigned and they were in school, taking test, it was a test week, …. we threw some stuff in a bag and ran to school to grab the kids and within minutes it was on TV, I think it was on CNN. [emphasis added]We pulled the kids out of school, and they already knew because of social media -- media moves so fast. So we told them they couldn’t go back to the house for a few days so we jumped in the car and went to a hotel and it was just kind of a emotionally wrecked. We’d served in that city for 20 years. Founded that church in our living room. And served it for 18 years. (loud applause) Baptized somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 people. (audible amens from crowd).
[8:13]
So, we’re sitting with the kids explaining to them that dad had resigned and that we were going to continue forward and that God had released us very clearly. And my middle son -- he is really the pastor’s heart of the family, he’s a shepherd -- his first question, I just lost it, he said “Who’s going to care for the people?” We stayed there for a few days. Drove them into school for their tests. I went home and checked the security footage and yeah, there was a lot of people at our house taking photos. It was a good thing we weren’t there. We finally came home.
So in the Thrive account the board released the resignation letter statement sooner than anticipated. Driscoll emphasized that the trouble the swift release of the October 14, 2014 resignation letter was that Mark and Grace Driscoll had not yet told the Driscoll kids Mark had resigned and the kids were in school.

BRIAN HOUSTON INTERVIEW SUMMER 2015, MARK DRISCOLL CLAIMS HE HEARD "A TRAP HAS BEEN SET", RESIGNS AFTER SAYING HE AGREED TO RESTORATION PLAN

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp4

on the resignation letter, this is a transcript of the audio, though thanks to coughing people and garbled voices and murmurs it's not always easy to make out every last little syllable. There may be some inaccuracies but the audio link is available. Transcription is not necessarily one of Wenatchee The Hatchet's great gifts.

39.45
I never got to say good-bye to the church and the people and so what went public was actually the resignation letter that went to the legal governing board that was in authority over me and so, uh, i uh, I know under the circumstances there wasn't a way to do that that would have been, uh, clean or easy. I don't have any criticism of the board. I think that, for the people, that there wasn't closure and I didn't, we didn't get to say anything.

And we didn't expect to resign. I met with the board. There was a whole list of things that were charged by current and former leaders and there was an internal governance struggle and threats of legal action that it got very complicated. And a lot of it was anonymous through the internet so you don't know who is saying or doing what. And so I invited the board to do a full examination, interview anybody, anything, and we woud submit to whatever verdict that they determined.
... When I think about eight weeks we met Friday and Saturday, October 10 and 11. I remember because the 11th was my birthday and so Grace and I were present with the board and they said: "We see in your history of leadership, less in more recent years but particularly in the past, pride, anger and a domineering leadership style." That would be the exact words they used. "We don't see anything disqualifying. These are areas we want you to grow. We want you to leadership at the
church soon." They wanted to do some clean up internally. "We want you back on January 4 in the pulpit, give you time to heal, things to cool down, and for some changes to be made."

We agreed to that. I sent in a go-forward plan and then we went home to have birthday cake with the kids. I think it was on Monday night. I was in the bedroom. Grace was in the living room. And so we told the board and told the kids, you know, we come back and ["will do"? garbled] preaching and try and love and serve and, and fix what was a struggling church and God had provided a way for us to do that as volunteers. And so our plan was to come back as volunteers.

42:10
And then on that Monday night I was in the bedroom, Grace was in the living room and he spoke to me and he spoke to her in a supernatural way that neither of anticipated or expected. Ah, and so Grace walked in and she said, "I feel like the Lord just spoke to me and said what we're supposed to do." and I said "I feel like the Lord spoke to me and said what we're supposed to do." It's not what we wanted; it's not what we agreed to; it's not what we've planned for. And so I asked her, "Well, what did the Lord say to you?" cuz I didn't wanna influence and she said, uh, she said we're [Grace Driscoll speaks but it's low and indistinct, Driscoll pauses a moment and is urged to continue by Houston] "The Lord revealed to me that , you know, a trap has been set, there's, there's no way, chance we can return to leadership" and I didn't know what that meant or what was going on at the time. And I'm, I said, [garbled] "We need to resign". So this is not what we anticipated
and a lot of people've thought, you know, "maybe he's another plan" but we didn't. We didn't know what we were doing.

And Grace fell to the floor and she was just sobbing uncontrollably and I'd never seen my wife like that. She was devastated. So we prayed and slept on it and decided we would make sure we got this right. Talked to pastors, those that we trust and sent in our resignation then on, it would have been Tuesday. ...

Thursday, July 02, 2015

If Driscoll's saying he's reached out to people, and he reached out to Osteen, has he reached out to Justin Brierley?

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/spiritual-authority-accountability.html

Let's consider for a moment that if, as Mark Driscoll has lately stated, he reached out to Joel Osteen's team to express some regret for stuff he said in the past, has Driscoll ever even MET Joel Osteen, or vice versa? One article reported that when Osteen was asked what he thought about Driscoll's public take-down of him from the pulpit that Osteen didn't even have any idea who Mark Driscoll even was or why he would matter.

In case you want a review of how Driscoll once discussed these sorts of things.
https://youtu.be/BpNBhJvWpoQ

Meanwhile, you'd think that if Mark Driscoll had reached out to someone whose character, journalistic integrity and theological position he'd pre-emptively attacked in 2012 that would be more impressive. Wenatchee The Hatchet is, of course, talking about Justin Brierley.

Again, this is something Wenatchee has covered in the past and it's worth revisiting if Driscoll's told Brian Houston he's been reaching out privately to people he's been less than gracious about/to in the past. As public take-downs go it would be difficult to top Driscoll's pre-emptive strike on Justin Brierley.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/08/spiritual-authority-accountability.html

http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/12/a-blog-for-the-brits
January 12, 2012

There is reportedly an article coming out in a British Christian publication that features an interview with me. As is often the case, to stoke the fires of controversy, thereby increasing readership, which generates advertising revenue, a few quotes of mine have been taken completely out of context and sent into the Twittersphere. So, I thought I would put a bit of water on the fire by providing context.

...

I have a degree in communications from one of the top programs in the United States. So does my wife, Grace. We are used to reporters with agendas and selective editing of long interviews. Running into reporters with agendas and being selectively edited so that you are presented as someone that is perhaps not entirely accurate is the risk one takes when trying to get their message out through the media.

With the release of our book, Real Marriage, we have now done literally dozens of interviews with Christians and non-Christians. But the one that culminated in the forthcoming article was, in my opinion, the most disrespectful, adversarial, and subjective. As a result, we’ve since changed how we receive, process, and moderate media interviews.

The interview in question had nearly nothing to do with the book or its subject matter, which in my understanding was supposed to be the point of the interview. My wife, Grace, was almost entirely ignored in the interview, and I felt she was overall treated disrespectfully. The only questions asked were about any controversial thing I’ve ever said in the past 15 years with a host of questions that were adversarial and antagonistic. It felt like a personally offended critic had finally gotten his chance to exercise some authority over me.

Things got particularly strange near the end of the interview. I was asked a question about, if a woman was the pastor of a church which that pastor’s husband attended, would that be emasculating to him. The question was asked in such a pointed way that it was odd.

At the end of the interview, I started asking questions of the interviewer. He admitted that his last questions were really about himself and his wife. Apparently his wife is the pastor of their church, he’s strongly committed to women as pastors, disagrees strongly with our complementarian position, and takes it to some degree personally.

This not only became more significant with Elephant Room 2's result and Driscoll's reflections on important lessons from it, it also took on significance when people had a chance to hear the interview Driscoll was blogging about for the Brits.

A short excerpt from the interview included the following:

http://cognitivediscopants.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/driscoll-brierley-on-women-in-leadership/

Driscoll: No, no, you don’t want to sit in my seat, I understand. So does your wife do counseling with men? Sexual counseling? Does she talk about masturbation, pornography, the stuff that I do?

Brierley: Well no, she doesn’t.

Driscoll: Well, who does talk to the men about those things, especially the young men?

Brierley: Well there are other people that she can pass them on to. We have male elders in our church who, you know, would be able to tackle those kinds of questions. I mean, but would you speak with those kinds of issues to a female in your church?

Driscoll: Uh no. If they’re a married couple we might meet with them as a couple. But if it’s a woman, we would have women leaders meet with them.

Brierley: Sure, well it’s the same scenario in our church really.

Driscoll: Well except for who’s in charge.
That attempt at a witty rejoinder turned out to be hypocritical. Consider a review of Real Marriage in which it was noted gloomily that Mark Driscoll described how his wife Grace was his functional pastor.

http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/book-review-real-marriage

The highlight of what the Driscolls teach on marriage is probably the importance of friendship. This is, indeed, an overlooked topic and experience shows that many of the best marriages are the ones in which the spouses are fast friends. A strange mis-step in this chapter is Mark’s statement that he has asked Grace to be his “functional pastor,” Because he is a pastor and he does not have anyone to pastor him, he has asked Grace to fill that role. [emphasis added] This must speak as much to his church’s leadership structure as to the Driscoll’s marriage; it is an unusual position and not one I would want others to emulate.
As we've noted earlier there's this other problem in Driscoll's taxonomy of relationships. Headship for the husband was described as follows a while back:
Church Discipline
Pastor Mark Driscoll April 11, 2006

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2869488958920803538
http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/church-discipline-biblical-responses-to-various-sins--errors/

In discussing spiritual leaders given authority, in a discussion on Hebrews 13:17 Driscoll mentions at about the 1:21 mark:

"... I always like to say `It's not really submission until you disagree.' Up until that point two people can agree and there is no such thing as submission, there's agreement. Submission is required when there is disagreement. That's when it is required."
So the wife who serves as the functional pastor could be that up to the point that there's a disagreement and then it's not really submission until she disagrees and then, well, woman submit? Where's the functional pastor there? Now aside from the problematic claim that there were no men to pastor Mark Driscoll, wouldn't it seem more consistent with Driscoll's publicly espoused complementarianism for him to have gone out looking for older and more spiritual men to submit to than to choose as his "functional pastor" his wife? After all, in Driscoll's publicly formulated views on ministry and authority, the wife's the one toward whom the headship card can be played. It's not submission for a wife until there's a disagreement.

The other reason the Grace as Mark's functional pastor seems ridiculous is not just because his theology of marriage would render her eternally subordinate in spiritual hierarchy if his complementarianism is what he seems to have espoused, it's that he'd publicly testified to various guys being his pastor, including ...

http://theresurgence.com/2008/04/07/question-and-answer-with-mark-driscoll-video
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/qa-with-mark-driscoll/

Some of my dearest friends today are not at Mars Hill. They're also pastors at other churches. Darrin Patrick is here. He's the vice-president of Acts 29. I love him. He's a brother. He's the guy I call. ... He's a pastor to me, you know? [emphasis added]

Who? Oh, right ...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/08/acts-29-network-removes-co-founder-mark-driscoll-and-mars-hill-church-from-membership/

...

Mark,
As the Board of Acts 29, we are grateful to God for the leadership, courage, and generosity of both you and Mars Hill in not only founding the network but also sustaining it through the transition to this board three years ago. The very act of giving away your authority over the network was one of humility and grace, and for that we are grateful.

Over the past three years, our board and network have been the recipients of countless shots and dozens of fires directly linked to you and what we consider ungodly and disqualifying behavior. We have both publicly and internally tried to support and give you the benefit of the doubt, even when multiple pastors in our network confirmed this behavior. In response, we leaned on the Mars Hill Board of Advisors & Accountability to take the lead in dealing with this matter. But we no longer believe the BoAA is able to execute the plan of reconciliation originally laid out. Ample time has been given for repentance, change, and restitution, with none forthcoming.

We now have to take another course of action. Based on the totality of the circumstances, we are now asking you to please step down from ministry for an extended time and seek help. Consequently, we also feel that we have no alternative but to remove you and Mars Hill from membership in Acts 29. Because you are the founder of Acts 29 and a member, we are naturally associated with you and feel that this association discredits the network and is a major distraction. ...

Matt Chandler
Darrin Patrick
Steve Timmis
Eric Mason
John Bryson
Bruce Wesley
Leonce Crump

So if one of the guys who Mark Driscoll described as "my pastor" signed off on the ejection of Mars Hill from Acts 29 out of concern for unrepentant sin that couldn't even have happened if Mark Driscoll didn't have Patrick around as a pastor to be in relationship with, could it? And yet according to the 2012 book, Mark Driscoll asked Grace to be is functional pastor because he didn't have anyone to be a pastor to him. "If" that's the case then what this suggests is that the various men whose names Mark Driscoll dropped in the last 18 years were more for the sake of name-dropping prestigious people than for the sake of actual accountability.

And if Grace is Mark Driscoll's functional pastor now he might as well be an egalitarian.

And in that sense he REALLY owes Justin Brierley a public apology if Grace is his functional pastor. It's not as though the way Mark Driscoll laid into Joel Osteen's theology was as harsh as what he had to say about Justin Brierley before the interview he conducted with the Driscolls was published, was it? Of course reader opinion may vary.

Driscoll to Houston, "so it wasn't a big deal and we didn't anticipate that it would become what it ultimately did." and that's why Driscoll envisioned MH starting a record label, a Bible college, and hosting conferences before it was even 200 people

God's Work, Our Witness Part 1
Pastor Mark Driscoll
December 04, 2011
about 12:30 in

You know, and I thought, for sure, we’d probably tap out at two hundred. I thought if we can get this
thing to two hundred, that would be amazing.

And I had big vision for more. I put together a forty-page vision statement. I said, “We’re going to
start a school. We’re going to plant churches. We’re going to do a record label.” I had this whole vision, and I handed it out to, like, fifteen people, and they’re like, “Are you kidding me?”

So I had big dreams. But to be honest with you, man, if we could just get up to two hundred, I thought that would be amazing.

Say what? About 200?

http://web.archive.org/web/20010305230251/http://www.marshill.fm/who/our_history.htm
From "Seasons of Grace" by Mark Driscoll

In the fourth season, we launched the church in October 1996 at 6pm with an attendance around 200, which included many friends and supporters. The attendance leveled off shortly thereafter, somewhere around 100 adults, and we continued meeting until the Christmas season.

So at the launch of Mars Hill Church, according to Mark Driscoll's "Seasons of Grace" they had already launched at the number that Driscoll was saying in the 2011 film would be "amazing".

With that in mind, let's revisit Driscoll's 2006 book

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. The church started as an idea I shared with Lief Moi and Mike Gunn. Lief is a descendant of Genghis Khan and his dad was a murderer, and Mike is a former football player. They proved to be invaluable, except for the occasional moments when they would stand toe-to-toe in a leadership meeting, threatening to beat the Holy Spirit out of each other. Both men were older than I and had years of ministry experience, and they were good fathers, loving husbands, and tough. ...

World domination? Shooting for the moon, decided that the church as small as Mars Hill was would, nevertheless, plant a bunch of churches, run a concert venue, start a Bible institute, publish books, host conferences and change the city for Jesus. Oh, yes, plus that music label. From the Capstone Institute to the Resurgence Training Center to Mars Hill Schools the seminary/college thing didn't work out. From Re:Sound to Mars Hill Music to an apparently fizzled partnership with Tooth & Nail Mars Hill seemed to have three strikes and an out on the music label side, too.

For the times Mark Driscoll said he just imagined he'd be a local church pastor, we've got Driscoll's old testimony to the contrary from his 2006 book. Just when everything had settled into a stable place Driscoll, as he put it, got bored:

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/confessions-of-reformission-rev-i.html

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
CHAPTER FIVE: JESUS, WHY AM I GETTING FATTER AND MEANER?
350-1,000 peoplepages 135-136

A very wise friend who is a successful business entrepreneur, Jon Phelps, [WtH, for more on Phelps]shared an insight with me around this time that was very clarifying. He said that in any growing organization, there are three kinds of people, and only two of them have any long-term future with a growing organization. First, there are people on the rise who demonstrate the uncanny ability to grow with the organization and become vital leaders. Second, there are people who attach themselves to the people on the rise as valuable assistants who rise by being attached to someone else on the rise. Third, there are people who neither rise nor attach to anyone who is rising, and they cannot keep up with the growing demands of the organization. These people fall behind, and the organization can either allow their inability to slow down the whole team or release them and move forward with out them. This is difficult to do because they are often good people who have been partly responsible for the success of the organization. But the needs of the organizational mission, not the individual in the organization, must continually remain the priority if there is to be continued success.

Up until this point, nearly everyone in the church had been connected to me, and I could no longer pull them all up with me. Simply, leaders needed to rise on their own or attach themselves to other people on the rise, or they would have to be let go.

So we made all these difficult decisions, and the church stabilized. Finally, we had facilities, money, men rising up to lead, intentional community housing, a successful concert venue, and a church that seemed organized to us. We had grown a church of one thousand people in a tough urban culture despite massive hardship. With things going so well, I feared we'd get too comfortable, and so I decided it was time to blow it all up, create some strategic chaos, and start over again. [emphasis added]
CHAPTER SIX JESUS, TODAY WE VOTED TO TAKE A JACKHAMMER TO YOUR BIG CHURCH
1,000 to 4,000 people
from pages 140-141

It was a warm spring day and I sat in my office at the church, gazing out the window at large white clouds blowing through a clear blue sky, enjoying our success. I had lost about forty pounds by shifting from the Fatkins to the Atkins diet, had paid off all the personal debts I had accrued as a broke pastor, had fitted up the old home for my family, was getting closer to my lovely wife, was enjoying my three children while looking forward to a fourth, finally owned a vehicle with less than 200,000 miles on it, and was the pastor of one of the largest churches in our city at the age of thirty-one. My eye no longer twitched, I wasn't throwing up from acid reflux, and my vertigo had cleared up.

I was sitting at my new desk, which was the first piece of furniture I had ever owned that was not a donated hand-me down. ... We owned our church building outright and had money in the bank. I had a large staff for a church our size and was sleeping like a Calvinist at nights because things were under control.

On that day I had only a few appointments, with lengthy breaks in between. I decided to walk down to the deli a few blocks away and get a Reuben sandwich on sourdough bread and some fresh air. On the way back, I walked barefoot and remember thinking these simple pleasures had made the day one of the most relaxing and satisfying days I ever had. But by the time I walked back to the church, I realized I was already getting bored. There was no dragon to slay, no hill to charge, no battle to fight, and no foe to conquer. [emphasis added]

In other words, it looks like when Driscoll finally got the nascent Mars Hill to take shape as a stable and viable spiritual community he felt like there was no dragon to slay, no battle to win, no foe to conquer. It was time to bow it all up, create some strategic chaos, and start over again.

Driscoll fairly early on had that stable local little church and it was clearly, by his own testimony, not good enough for him so he blew things up, introduced strategic chaos, and started again and it seems he did that for about eighteen years. If Driscoll didn't anticipate that Mars Hill even could get big why did he cast a vision of starting a record label and a Bible college and hosting conferences before the church had even reached 200?

Bear in mind this, if you've listened to the recent audio, Wenatchee The Hatchet has only blogged so far to clarify statements made by Mark Driscoll within a three minute excerpt from almost an hour's worth of stuff. We'll get to the Social Gospel of Mars Hill (first formulated to Wenatchee's recollection by Dan Gogue over at City of God) a little later.

Houston interviews Driscoll, Driscoll's claim "The first three years we didn't collect a salary" seems to skim over Driscoll's own public testimony to the contrary

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp4

03.00ish
I've made a lot of mistakes and one of them was going too fast. There's the Lord's calling and there's the Lord's timing and I should have waited longer. I should have been under godly spiritual authority, for Grace and I to be under a godly couple, that was [a] senior pastor, so that we could learn and grow. I, I, my character was not caught up with my gifting and I did start to young. And I believe God called us to start the church and he was very, very, very gracious to us, uh, but had I to
do it over again I would not look at a 25-year old and say, "Do what I did."

03:57ish
... We went into the urban core and we felt, specifically, called to go after young, college-educated males. That was really my heart. I wanted everybody to meet Jesus but I felt particularly if we were gonna make in the city and the legacy of families and, you know, the way that women and children and culture treated, that getting young men to love Jesus would be paramount. So that was really the focus and I didn't think the church would amount to much. The first three years we didn't
collect a salary [emphasis added]; it was very small; we met at night; we moved a lot because we kept losing our rental location; the offices were in our house, so it wasn't a big deal and we didn't anticipate that it would become what it ultimately did.

A lot depends on what is meant by "collect a salary". While Driscoll has elsewhere testified that the nascent church plant couldn't afford to give enough to have him be on salary this didn't mean that there was no network of older churches with established leaders providing financial support who got public props from Driscoll.

http://web.archive.org/web/20001210191200/http://www.marshill.fm/who/our_history.htm
from Seasons of Grace
by Mark Driscoll

In the second season, Grace and I began attending Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, where we volunteered our time working with their college ministry. We then located in Seattle to be closer to students and after a few months I was brought on staff as a part-time intern to oversee the college group. I served in that position for nearly two years and learned a great deal in my first position of ministry leadership in a church. At that time I met Mike Gunn who had moved from a pastorate in Southern California to begin a ministry to athletes at the University of Washington. I also met Lief Moi, a local radio show host, who came in to teach a class for us. These two men and their wives and children became like family [WtH: but now Driscoll's recently claimed that at the start of MH there was no childrens' ministry because there weren't any kids] and together we began dreaming about the possibility of planting an urban church for an emerging postmodern generation in one of the least churched cities in the U.S. We began praying, studying the scriptures, reading a great deal on postmodernity, and dialoging together to formulate a philosophy of ministry appropriate for our context. Helping us formulate our launch plan was Dr. Greg Kappas, who graciously mentored us and provided wise insight and counsel.

In the third season, we began a small Bible study in graciously loaned space from Emmanuel Bible Church in Seattle. The original small core of about a dozen people was a Bible study comprised largely of twenty-somethings from the college group, the Gunn and Moi families, and Chris Knutzen who had joined the Campus Crusade for Christ staff at the U.W. We began meeting weekly in an extremely hot upstairs youth room, and after a few months outgrew the space and began meeting in the sanctuary. It was during this season that the rest of our current elders - the Browns, Currahs and Schlemleins [but Mark was the only pastor on stuff, huh?] - and some singles and families joined us. It was also during this season that Pastor Ken Hutcherson and our friends at Antioch Bible Church began their generous financial support to cover my salary to ensure that I would not be a financial strain on the young church. [emphasis added]

In the fourth season, we launched the church in October 1996 at 6pm with an attendance around 200, which included many friends and supporters. The attendance leveled off shortly thereafter, somewhere around 100 adults, and we continued meeting until the Christmas season.

Then there's this.

March 24, 2004
from 1 Timothy 5:17-25
http://marshill.com/media/1-timothy/1-timothy-5-17-25#transcript

When we started this church, I didn't get paid anything. First year, nothing. `Cause we had no people, we had no money. If you called the church, the church office was at my house, and I would answer the phone in my underwear and pretend like we were a high-powered organization. "Hi, thanks for calling Mars Hill." "I s Mark there?" "Yeah, let me get him." So I'd, you know, "Hi, how you doing?" I'd pretend like I had a secretary. I'd pretend like we were legit. I would, seriously. And I'm sitting there in my underwear just like the short guy in the Wizard of Oz, just pulling the levers, maintaining the illusion of this tremendous empire. Woo hoo.

There's nothing, man. No money, no people, no nothing. The first year we put a box in the back, and I said, "Hey, if anybody feels led to give, feel free to give." Nobody apparently felt led. God didn't move in anybody's heart. The first year we brought in $90,000.00, first year, which wasn't great. It's a nice SUV, but it's not a great budget, and that first year I didn't have any money. My wife was working full time. I was working full time while we were starting the church.

My wife started having major health complications from work, stress related. I told her, I said, "Honey, 1 Timothy says that, you know, I gotta make the money. If I don't provide for the needs of my family, I've denied the faith, I'm worse than an unbeliever. Quit your job. It's my responsibility. I'll figure it out. I don't know how we're gonna pay the bills. We're not getting any money at the church."

And I was thinking about it, too. I started getting a little scared `cause I wanted to live in the city, do a church in the city, the least churched city in the country. I wanted to have a big family. I wanted to be able to pay my bills. I wanted to be able to have a nice church, and I'm going after 20-year old indie rockers that are committed to poverty and anarchy. Thinking, "This is not real liquid. This is not a brilliant business plan, really." You know, teenage kids who take scooters to church tend not to be a huge donor base, you know?

But I felt like that what's God said, "Go to Seattle and ... " You know, we lived in Seattle. I grew up in Seattle. I love this city. This is my home, so it was like I knew God told me to do that. I'm like, "Lord God, I mean, I'm cool with not eating, but I gotta get food for the kids. I gotta get shoes on the wife. What am I gonna do here?"

So I went to Antioch Bible Church and I said, "They're not, you know, we're not generating any revenue." Antioch Bible Church, where I'd been the college director for a year and a half, they gave me $30,000 the first year as my salary. Praise God, they gave me money, so that's what we lived off. My wife and I and my daughter Ashley, family of three, living in Wallingford on $30,000 a year. No medical, no dental, no retirement, no nothing. Had to pay all of that. And then we tithed out of that, and then we gave above and beyond that for hospitality and for wedding presents and food `cause all the Bible studies and all the meetings were in our home. So we'd feed everybody and have everybody over and do all that kind of stuff.

And so when you subtracted it all out just from the tithes, I mean, we're living off of about $24,000 that first year. And then out of that, you've gotta pay medical, dental, retirement, food, rent, car, the whole thing. Family of three living in Wallingford, not a lot of bling. Didn't have the huge amount of extra the first couple of years.

Second year the church comes. Antioch kicks in again, gives me $30,000.00. Third year Mars Hill still wasn't able to really cover a full salary for me, so I went out and raised some additional dollars from another church, Spanish River Church, in Boca Raton. They gave me about half of my salary.
...
So, sure, maybe Driscoll wasn't collecting a salary from attenders of Mars Hill but that's obviously not to say Driscoll had no compensation and had no salary. By Driscoll's own public account he got a salary from Antioch Bible Church Antioch kicked in for the first two years of Driscoll's salary and in the third year he went out and raised additional money from another church, Spanish River Church, over in Boca Raton. If going out and petitioning a church in Florida for money for a larger salary doesn't constitute "collect a salary" there's a limited and fuzzy way with words afoot.

Driscoll distinguishes between "the Lord's calling and there's the Lord's timing ... " revisits the wish that he had a mentor or two--let's revisit the older guys he kept bragging were in his life circa 2000

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp4

03.00ish
I've made a lot of mistakes and one of them was going too fast. There's the Lord's calling and there's the Lord's timing and I should have waited longer. I should have been under godly spiritual authority, for Grace and I to be under a godly couple, that was [a] senior pastor, so that we could learn and grow. [emphasis added] I, I, my character was not caught up with my gifting and I did start to young. And I believe God called us to start the church and he was very, very, very gracious to us, uh, but had I to do it over again I would not look at a 25-year old and say, "Do what I did."

03:57ish
... We went into the urban core and we felt, specifically, called to go after young, college-educated males. That was really my heart. I wanted everybody to meet Jesus but I felt particularly if we were gonna make in the city and the legacy of families and, you know, the way that women and children and culture treated, that getting young men to love Jesus would be paramount. So that was really the focus and I didn't think the church would amount to much. The first three years we didn't
collect a salary; it was very small; we met at night; we moved a lot because we kept losing our rental location; the offices were in our house, so it wasn't a big deal and we didn't anticipate that it would become what it ultimately did.

So this comes up again and it makes it worthwhile to revisit that for those who kept tabs on Mark Driscoll's public ministry over the last 18 years he kept assuring us how many older and wiser spiritual men he had mentoring him at various stages in his career.

But we've discussed problems in this narrative before. For instance, if there was no older spiritual guy of whom Mark Driscoll could say "he is my pastor" was there no Antioch Bible Church? Remember when Driscoll said this?

http://marshill.com/media/james-jesus-s-bold-little-brother/james-1-1
Pastor Mark Driscoll
James 1:1
January 12, 2014

I’m not just in authority; I’m under authority. I have pastors do my performance review, can rebuke me, can terminate me, whatever the case may be. It’s important to know that everyone needs to be under spiritual authority, including those who are in spiritual authority.
...
When I felt called to start Mars Hill, I went and met with elders. When I felt called into ministry, I went and met with my first pastor. I said, “I think this is what God’s telling me to do.” He said, “I think that’s right, but you’re nowhere near ready. It’s going to be a really long time.” “OK, I’ve got a lot of work to do.” When I felt called to plant, I went through a full assessment. Pastors oversaw me, a team interviewed me, a church sent me, an overseer had authority over me.

So by Driscoll's account some elders believed Driscoll was called but that he was nowhere near ready and it would be a long time before he was. Let's put some emphasis here, by Mark Driscoll's own account WHEN HE FELT HE WAS CALLED TO PLANT A CHURCH he went through a full assessment; pastors oversaw him, a team interviewed him, a church sent him; and an overseer had authority over him.

So how on earth can Driscoll tell Brian Houston that he wished he'd, oh, done all that sort of thing that it's implied he didn't do when he did all that stuff?

And lest we forget how many older guys and elders seem to have played a role in assisting or instructing Driscoll in the earlier years of his ministry, how about the public roll-out of the collaboration between Mark Driscoll and Acts 29 founder David Nicholas?

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/spring-2000-roll-out-of-mark.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20010308211949/http://www.a29.org/about_us_history.htm
Leadership Journal, Spring 2000
MAKING DEVOTED DISCIPLES
Generation to generation
How mentoring works for pastors
Mark Driscoll

I'm a 29-year-old church planter in Seattle. A couple years ago I met David Nicholas, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida. He pastors a large church, Spanish River Presbyterian, that he planted 35 years ago, and he still has a heart for church planting. We developed a close mentoring friendship. I fly down

Then there's this written account of how financial and personal accountability was something required of those churches participating in the nascent Acts 29 Network.

TODAY'S ALL-STAR MISSIONS CHURCHES: STRATEGIES TO HELP YOUR CHURCH GET INTO THE GAME

Tom Telford
copyright 2001 by Tom Telford
Published by Baker Books

ISBN 0-8010-6381-7

Spanish River Church has listed as its "Most valuable missions agency: Acts 29 Network"
from page 63

page 66 David Nicholas' "Acts 29: Churches planting Churches" gets a reference from Telford. Is that message still accessible for consultation?

from page 69

Acts 29 Network. With things moving well with the network of church-planting pastors, Pastor Nicholas felt led of God to start a new network of churches that wasn't directly part of the denomination. He decided to call it the Acts 29 network and wrote up guidelines: the planted churches should be theologically Reformed, have a heart for church planting, and prmoise that when they become self-supporting, theyw ill pay back the amount that was given to them to initially begin, and put 10 percent of their income into new church plants.

As he shared the idea with the church and others, almost right away, ten established churches responded enthusiastically and committed to the Acts 29 Network, agreeing to sponsor church plants. A Network agreement was drawn up to show the relationship between Spanish River Church and the church plant. The agreement requires reports for financial and leadership accountability.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2000/fall/6.44.html?start=2

How do you do this over such long distance?

Driscoll: We talk all the time. David is my pastor [emphasis added]. He prays for me. He invests in me. He doesn't tell me what to do, but when he sees things in my character or theology that need to be challenged, he speaks to that very directly. I desperately need that. I tend to be stubborn and aggressive. I need someone strong speaking into my life, saying, "Think about this." But it has to be predicated on friendship and love.
So Driscoll was talking profusely about how David Nicholas was his pastor and a great mentor and how Nicholas spoke into his life. It's not possible for Mark Driscoll to plausibly say he didn't have older godly mentors and men in his early years of ministry.

And then there's this other problem, being that the other two co-founding pastor of Mars Hill were both guys older than Mark Driscoll with more ministry experience.

Confessions of a Reformission RevMark Driscoll, Zondervan
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:03-10-27016-2

page 54

... The church started as an idea I shared with Lief Moi and Mike Gunn. Lief is a descendant of Genghis Khan and his dad was a murderer, and Mike is a former football player. They proved to be invaluable, except for the occasional moments when they would stand toe-to-toe in a leadership meeting, threatening to beat the Holy Spirit out of each other. Both men were older than I and had years of ministry experience, and they were good fathers, loving husbands, and tough. [emphasis added]...

So by Driscoll's account the idea to plant a church was one he shared with two other men who helped him co-found the church. Crucial in his recruitment of them was they were both older men with years of ministry experience and he considered them to be good husbands and fathers.

Mike Gunn's not only about a dozen years older than Driscoll but had that M. Div from Talbot seminary. Leif Moi's about eight years older than Driscoll and had the Street Talk radio program. Driscoll was the spring chicken and in the early years Mars Hill was a collaborative/community church plant sent about by Antioch Bible Church. We can consult Mike Gunn's own account of how he met and began to collaborate with Driscoll and Moi to found what was once Mars Hill.

http://www.harambeechurch2.org/aboutHarambee.php

The Harambee story is a bit wrapped up in my (Mike Gunn’s) story. The vision began around 1992 as I began to feel the need to plant a church that represented the diversity of God’s creation, as well as a gospel that centered on God’s glory and not our own needs. I was prompted by the Spirit to engage the culture in a more meaningful and direct way, so God decided to send me and my family on an unknown journey to Seattle to begin a campus ministry for athletes at the University of Washington. This began to hone our skills in apologetics, evangelism, and discipleship, creating a desire to reach the next generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

At that point, Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland and Mark Driscoll entered our lives. My family began attending Antioch in January of 1994, and we started helping the college group, which was run by Mark Driscoll, at that time, a 23-year-old intern recently graduated from Washington State University. [emphasis added]. It became obvious that we had similar backgrounds and ministry callings, so we began to explore the possibilities of our vision (reaching truly postmodern, post-Christian people for Christ), and it became abundantly clear that we were to begin a new work in the city of Seattle.

With the blessing of Antioch and the exodus of about 30 of the students, Mark, Lief Moi, and I began Mars Hill Church in October of 1996. [emphasis added] We watched God work His mosaic miracle as He began to put together the matrix that became Mars Hill Church. The church grew to more than 1,200 people in five years, and because of facility limitations at the time, we were running seven services at three different locations in the Seattle area. One of these was Mars Hill South, which began as an evening service in October of 2001 with about 40 people. During that time it became evident that God was calling us to a different work, and that we needed to plant as an autonomous church. Subsequently, as of October 6, 2002, we became Harambee Church and began meeting at the Tukwila Community Center. [emphasis added]

You'd think that after all this time Mark Driscoll would find it impossible to have avoided mention of the Rev. Gib Martin, since the man was not only a pastor but the father of his wife, Grace. It's ridiculous to claim, as Driscoll has, that he wished he had older and spiritually more mature men to guide him and help him. They abounded. The question is not what might have happened differently "if" there had been older and pious men to help him learn how to plant a church, the question is more how, given the abundance of older and godly men who initially seemed so invested in the aim of planting a church that would revitalize Christian life of a particularly evangelical strand within the Puget Sound area, Mark Driscoll seems to have had little use for any of them.

As if all that weren't strange enough, if Mark Driscoll's lament was that he wished he'd submitted to older and wiser men in leadership when he started out, it's not just that he talks as though these older guys weren't around. What's stranger is that in 2002-2003 he began to recruit younger types to help him vision cast. Jamie Munson ended up being president and Lead Pastor of Mars Hill.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/if-driscoll-made-mistake-of-being-under.html

There was this whole termination/trial thing that was going on because Paul Petry and Bent Meyer were accused of not respecting Munson's authoritah. Well, okay, so if for himself Mark Driscoll regrets that he didn't submit to older and wiser gents then for him to not publicly address the terminations of Petry and Meyer makes Driscoll look pretty bad. Not only did Driscoll seem to not notice the older guys in ministry who helped him, he's skipping over that two of them were subjected to trials for not respecting the authority of someone who became a Christian because of Driscoll's preaching. If Mike Gunn and Lief Moi were "young and new and green" Jamie Munson might as well have been a seed barely in the ground.

HT Pulpit & Pen: Driscoll publicly repents for criticizing Joel Osteen

http://pulpitandpen.org/2015/07/01/driscoll-publicly-repents-for-criticizing-osteen/

At the moment nobody seems to have confirmed whether someone from Osteen's side can even confirm that Mark Driscoll reached out to Osteen's ministry or to Osteen personally, at least just yet.

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Brian Houston/Driscolls interview question, can someone from Joel Osteen's side verify that Driscoll contacted him recently?

More stuff can be blogged later but the most pertinent question in light of the audio reviewed so far, for now, centers on that topic. Driscoll famously gunned for Osteen in the 2007 Rebel's Guide to Joy sermon series. It sure SOUNDED like Driscoll said he reached out to Osteen this year.

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

that interview

yep, heard about it, but not heard the audio yet. Things have been busy for Wenatchee The Hatchet in other settings besides blogging in the last month or so. Mere mortality being what it is, only so many things can be done.

Technically Wenatchee The Hatchet never finished the review of Real Marriage and the recent ruling has been a reminder that there's a certain limitation to Driscoll's taxonomy of functional adulthood in males but that's something that can be addressed a bit later. Most of Wenatchee's reading and thinking this month has really been about musicology and what Leonard Meyer predicted would be a polystylistic dynamic steady state for Western arts.

But since folks connected to Mars Hill keep saying stuff, okay, we'll get to some of that stuff as we can. Well, let's put it another way, Wenatchee likes music and sometimes you get this idea of transcribing a baritone aria from the Matthew Passion for voice and guitar and want to find where the old copy of the Bach score is and can't find it. So readers hoping Wenatchee will keep up with everything Mars Hill, have some patience. :)

There's also a couple of off-line projects in the works.

a linkathon

It would be hard to find a more accurate statement about the band than this little gem of directness.

http://artsfuse.org/130005/fuse-concert-review-rush-celebrating-40-years-of-prog-rock/
One thing I’ve learned in years of being a Rush fan: Nobody ever changes their mind on this band.

and special agent Lana Kane would say "Yup."

Decades ago there was this film called Pocahantas.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/pocahontas-feminism/397190/

Never saw it, never wanted to see it. By then Disney's star was at a low ebb for Wenatchee The Hatchet and some other studio with a lamp in its branding became abruptly and memorably more significant.

There is apparently some concern that streaming music services butcher classical music and the reason? It's about the metadata.

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right

Wenatchee The Hatchet only shifted to digital download albums out of economic necessity and one of the problems with them is the lack of old stuff like liner notes and publisher information and many a digital download from the big river company DOESN'T EVEN BOTHER TO INCLUDE COMPOSER INFORMATION IN TRACK LISTINGS! So unless I already knew that such and such a guitar sonata was by Lennox Berkeley I would be in for the luck of the draw purchasing a recording and while at a point of sale page you can find some stuff out often you can't. And this becomes a big annoyance if you're inclined to, oh, dig up repertoire for alto saxophone and classical guitar. It'd be a whole lot easier to go invest in a score for a piece of chamber music if that information were made available in the download album format as well as the physical copy. Fortunately Kechley's got a website

In a moment of deciding to use fighting words, Richard Brody declared over at the New Yorker that in contrast to George Miller "Michael Bay has and gives more fun." Not that Brody didn't seem to enjoy the movie but, man ... did he watch the last Bayformers film? After the third outing the fourth seemed way too dodgy.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/ridin-dirty-mad-max-fury-road

Quaintly enough, though George Miller may not have as much fun as Michael Bay does in making a film as Richard Brody calls it, they both saw fit to feature the same model ... . Maybe there's some witty observation in there about casting and eye candy but that's probably enough linking for a linkathon on a weeknight.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Throckmorton: Brian Houston interviewed the Driscolls after all [?]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/

Nothing to add but, certainly, it's curious that Houston decided to interview the Driscolls after all having made such a public show of saying he had changed his mind about that.

some more thoughts on what some call watchblogging, the Samuel James double bind on blogging--don't minimize bad stuff but never watchdog blog about it.

You'll have noticed Wenatchee The Hatchet was on something of a vacation from blogging for a while. There were some things that were topics WtH aimed to address earlier but later suffices. Let's get back to something that came up because a Christian blogger talked about how to not talk on the internet about stuff as a Christian. Because, you know, it wouldn't exactly be a real Christian blog without posts talking about what it's immoral for people to actually do, which makes Christian moralizing sort of like Objectivist moralizing. :)

Cue, some links to Samuel James.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inklingations/2015/05/07/what-not-to-do-when-a-fellow-christian-embarrasses-the-rest-of-us/

What started off with hectoring got worse in the sequel.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inklingations/2015/05/12/for-whom-the-blog-trolls-a-drama-in-10-acts/

Thursday, Somewhere in Cyberspace
Scene 1: A humble, 20something blogger writes a short, probably simplistic post about how (not) to talk about the church.

Scene 2: Our youthful hero writes disparagingly about a certain genre of online blogging that he finds distasteful and generally unhelpful. He is careful, however, to mention no names and no real scenarios.

Scene 3: He publishes the post, expecting little feedback. After all, it is a brief post, and makes only one real point: That Christians should not be bitter towards the church.

Call it the experience of age that comes unbidden but it seems impossible to imagine a humble, 20something blogger. "short, simplistic"? Ah, yes, THAT is utterly believable!

The irony of Samuel James inveighing against watchdog blogging from a blog is probably not lost even on Samuel James' part.

Back when James formulated the axiom of don't start a watchblog, ever, it was before Wenatchee The Hatchet had a chance to read the soon-to-be quoted content. It's a sprawling quotation but the reader's urged to read it thoroughly:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/06/01/gay_marriage_study_faked_how_grad_student_david_broockman_uncovered_a_huge.html
...
But back in 2013, the now-26-year-old Broockman, a self-identifying “political science nerd,” was so impressed by LaCour’s study that he wanted to run his own version of it with his own canvassers and his own survey sample. First, the budget-conscious Broockman had to figure out how much such an enterprise might cost. He did some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what he’d seen on LaCour’s iPad—specifically, that the survey involved about 10,000 respondents who were paid about $100 apiece—and out popped an imposing number: $1 million. That can’t be right, he thought to himself. There’s no way LaCour—no way any grad student, save one who’s independently wealthy and self-funded—could possibly run a study that cost so much. He sent out a Request for Proposal to a bunch of polling firms, describing the survey he wanted to run and asking how much it would cost. Most of them said that they couldn’t pull off that sort of study at all, and definitely not for a cost that fell within a graduate researcher’s budget. It didn’t make sense. What was LaCour’s secret?
Eventually, Broockman’s answer to that question would take LaCour down.
...
This might seem like a strange, mafia-ish argument to a non-academic, but within the small world of political science—particularly within the even smaller world of younger, less job-secure political scientists—it makes sense for at least two reasons. The first is that the moment your name is associated with the questioning of someone else’s work, you could be in trouble. If the target is someone above you, like Green, you’re seen as envious, as shamelessly trying to take down a big name. If the target is someone at your level, you’re throwing elbows in an unseemly manner. In either case, you may end up having one of your papers reviewed by the target of your inquiries (or one of their friends) at some point—in theory, peer reviewers are “blinded” to the identity of the author or authors of a paper they’re reviewing, but between earlier versions of papers floating around the internet and the fact that everyone knows what everyone else is working on, the reality is quite different. Moreover, the very few plum jobs and big grants don’t go to people who investigate other researchers’ work—they go to those who stake out their own research areas.

...

Jason Peterson, then, was their man—he might be able to explain what was going on with their poor response rates. Broockman asked Kalla to call him; Kalla went upstairs and did. He came back a little bit later. “Holy shit,” he said. There was no employee named Jason Peterson at uSamp. An email to double check confirmed this: A uSamp staffer responded later that day, saying, “There was never a Jason Peterson at uSamp at any time.” (Not only had LaCour made up an employee, he’d promoted that made-up employee all the way up to vice-president—and note the weird capitalization in LaCour’s name in the forwarded message, which may or may not mean anything.) The firm also reiterated the message Broockman had received a year and a half prior, the one he hadn’t realized the significance of at the time: The firm couldn’t even do the research LaCour had described. This was now a far cry from vague concerns about artificial-looking data patterns and weirdly reliable thermometers.

Later that night, Broockman hosted a Hawaiian-themed graduation party at his apartment. About 70 people came—a mix of grad-school friends, family, and friends he had made in the Bay Area. All day, Broockman’s boyfriend had begged him to help get the place ready, but he was too fixated on the LaCour and Green paper. Yet even with the revelation about Jason Peterson, Broockman and Kalla still thought they lacked the smoking gun they needed. “We were in a state of panic, not sure if we should keep looking, what we should look for, and what to do with what we had found,” Broockman says. Right as the party started, Kalla tried to get Broockman to chill: “No more talking about this!” he told Broockman. “Your boyfriend made a nice party for you!”

But it was now almost impossible for Broockman to stop talking about the paper. He was surrounded by his academic advisers and imbibed more than a couple of sparkling rosés. He ended up talking to Malhotra some more. Yet again, Malhotra said: Be careful. Don’t expose yourself. But, in addition to the revelation about Peterson, Broockman was starting to feel moral concerns: “The Ireland referendum was coming up,” he says. “Big grants were about to be spent.” He hated the idea that people were being misled by “findings” that looked increasingly suspect. [emphasis added]

See, when it came time to decide whether or not to just "let it go" and "move on" over the prospect the vast sums of money were about to spent on activity inspired by the belief that a study was true when, in fact, the study was a sham, somebody felt obliged to say something, something for the record.

Meanwhile, it seems a bunch of evangelicals with blogs seem to think it's bad if evangelicals take up what's called watchdog blogging.

Which gets Wenatchee The Hatchet back to "don't start a watchdog blog, ever."

Samuel James' 7 can be read, basically, as a declaration that 1 doesn't really count in the end.

Of course longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet will understand that this is not, in fact, a watchdog blog.

But when gay activists have the principles and intellectual integrity to debunk research that had been cited to lend creedance to their cause while Christians, in the wake of Mark Driscoll's plagiarism scandals, actually proposed that intellectual property isn't even really remotely Christian then, well, okay. What's there to say to that?

Well, if gay activists are better at policing fraudulent claims among their own peer group than Christians are that DOES tell us something ... but it may not be something evangelicals who would rather talk about gays than consider their own foibles might want to read.

For folks who don't read the Old Testament quite enough, the book of Judges is not a book that proposes that everybody in that book was a hero. Sure, a few names made it into Hebrews 11 but if you read Judges on its own terms you get the distinct impression those heroes were still monsters. A hero may well just be a monster whose expediency to a particular cause and effectiveness in promoting it is weightier to the constituency than the vices of the hero. When the vices and damage outweigh the positive representation and expediency of the cause the hero becomes a liability. Or, over time, it may turn out the hero didn't represent the values the group thought the hero stood for. When that happens is the way to handle it really to not minimize that ... or is it to not start a watchdog blog, ever? Every team, given enough time, will have its atrocities. We live in an era where no one can pull the "no true Scotsman" defense for their team. Let's be mindful of the possibility that the difference between a hero and a monster is his or her usefulness to a cause.

There's more that could be said about this as it could potentially apply to Driscoll, but this year WtH hoped to not have anything that seemed necessary to say about the nobody who's trying to tell everybody about somebody.

We live in an era where on the internet a lot of people want to police every team's thoughts and actions and words ... except for their own. People at Mars Hill have no doubt not exactly appreciated Wenatchee The Hatchet over the years and that's understandable. It should be said that as a moderately conservative Reformed not-cessationist Christian people at Mars Hill could at least have some confidence that Wenatchee The Hatchet's criticisms, admittedly at times severe, were intended to be constructive in spirit. It's a shame Driscoll opted to quit but at this point the world is a big world, and it's a big world in which somebody the Driscoll kids might read "Pussified Nation" and "Using Your Penis". Driscoll's gotta live with the reality of that possibility. No honest accounting of Mark Driscoll's legacy can avoid that.

Ten years ago Wenatchee The Hatchet imagined spending a lifetime at Mars Hill. Things change, obviously. Driscoll used to tell us that if he ever went off the rails to leave. So a lot of us did. He apparently did not take that as a sign that he was going off the rails but that a bunch of us weren't on mission. Now he has no church and his legacy is mixed at best.

Here's something for people who are averse to watchdog blogging to consider, what if watchdog blogging is capable of being a demonstration of repentance? Sure, it might awkwardly be a process of repenting for being part of a church culture the blogger has come to consider malignant and abusive ... but a watchdog blog does not have to be undertaken from a perspective of condemnation. Wenatchee The Hatchet has never told people at Mars Hill to leave Mars Hill. All Wenatchee has done is document things as carefully as humanly possible and has invited people to reconsider the narrative. When controlling the narrative has been so much at the heart of how people were kept in line, giving people a chance to reconsider the narrative themselves has more power to effect change than telling people that if they have any ethics at all they should be on your side already. The big problem with that approach is, well, it's kinda what we saw the top dog doing at the top of Mars Hill.

If evangelicals cannot appreciate even the possibility that so-called watchdog blogging can be undertaken not from spite or envy but out of a love of neighbor, and out of a desire to serve not just the body of Christ but to try to contribute positively to the benefit of the greater public good and public discourse on the role of religion in civic life, then that's going to reflect badly on us. It could tell the world at large we care quite a bit less about the truth (even if it makes us look like the sinners we so obviously are) than we care about the branding. Not all of us who identify as Christians consider that the right path to walk.

link: Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History

http://www.academia.edu/4074689/Black_Beethoven_and_the_Racial_Politics_of_Music_History

One would have imagined that the whiteness of Beethoven would have been more or less a given but, well, not necessarily thanks to the internet's capacity to revive long debunked ideas.

This is a relatively breezy read. The name George Walker gets dropped near the end and you should give some of Walker's music a chance. His cello sonata is nice, for instance. I learned of his work through the blogging of Ethan Iverson and have only gotten any familiarity with Walker's compositions in the last year or so.

That we could or should rethink how we approach the history of the Western musical canon doesn't seem like a bad idea. It's not so much that the canon itself has to or needs to exactly change but perhaps we could make a few distinctions. For some of the super Calvinists in Moscow, for instance, it'd be good to remember that the major/minor key system is not particularly "robustly Trinitarian" seeing as it's mere centuries old. When you consider that we've only had that equal-tempered chromatic approach to diatonic scales for just a couple of centuries it might be reason to not tell ourselves that's all there is to music. I tdoesn' tmean you have to, say, enjoy Partch or Carter (though ifyou actually do that's fine).

Anyway, an interesting little piece for those interested in polemics in musicology and music history stuff.

You are clothed in injustice, literally, an old Atlantic feature here about exploited labor and the clothes on your back.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/all-your-clothes-are-made-by-exploited-workers/394658/
...
Most if not all global apparel manufacturers exploit workers abroad, not only at companies that produce cheap or low-quality goods. And evidence of forced labor doesn't mean that a company is being willfully negligent. Patagonia’s admission stands out in that it comes from a brand considered a leader in the movement for ethical production, demonstrating the enormity, and the difficulty, of the task of protecting workers in massive, fractured supply chains.

“Labor trafficking is a huge problem globally. There really isn't any industry that is immune to this problem,” says Agatha Tan, a senior adviser on labor trafficking at the Polaris Project.

jazz, politics, and irrelevance, considering the cultural place of the worst-selling genre of music in America, just a little.

A few years back Terry Teachout wrote a piece called "Can jazz be saved?'

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204619004574320303103850572

Teachout declared that however much jazz may be an American treasure, nobody's listening. The article inspired a few dissenting opinions, to put it briefly.

A couple of months ago Teachout revisited the article with an update by way of new numbers.

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2015/03/jazz-by-the-numbers.html

Contrary to widespread popular belief, I didn’t say anywhere in that column that jazz is dead. This is what I really said:

“
It’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak. ...

and he had some numbers. But he posted this year to note some newer numbers.
http://thejazzline.com/news/2015/03/jazz-least-popular-music-genre/
http://s0.thejazzline.com/tjl/uploads/2015/03/nielsen-2014-year-end-music-report-us.pdf

Jazz became the least successfully selling style of music in the land, basically, even more so than classical music. If Teachout was as wrong as some said he was years ago he can't have been that wrong about noting the decline in buying customers. You can talk about reification and commodification of music all you want. If people aren't paying for it how does the art form survive in this cultural setting? High school jazz bands? Well, maybe in some places.

But in the last year there were little bursts of debate about the relevance of jazz as an art form and about its relationship to politics. This may seem like the strange detour that it pretty much is but here's a few quotes for consideration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/08/08/all-that-jazz-isnt-all-that-great/
By Justin Wm. Moyer August 8, 2014
...
This music has retreated from the nightclub to the academy. It is shielded from commercial failure by the American cultural-institutional complex, which hands out grants and degrees to people like me.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/jazz-after-politics/
...
Justin Moyer’s recent Washington Post hit piece on jazz provoked a lot of hostility, much of it deserved. It was, after all, pretty shoddy work.

Based on the Left’s long history of embracing jazz and jazz musicians, we might feel we have a dog in this fight. But it’s been years since jazz had any claim to a counter-cultural, outsider, adversarial status, or communicated a revolutionary or even mildly reformist mindset. Any doubts on that score can be answered with a trip to the wall of corporate sponsors of jazz in Lincoln Center, followed by a visit to Dizzy’s Coca Cola club, the center’s flagship concert hall.
If the Left is losing its affinity for jazz, that’s not really a problem: plenty of other musical styles can fill the void, and we can argue about whether they succeed in complementing a radical political and economic critique or even whether it’s important that they do so.

The problem for jazz is that few on the left, right, or center care enough about it anymore to argue its merits — political, aesthetic, or otherwise. Moyer is an exception: he clearly cares enough to take the time to write about why it fails to move him emotionally and engage him intellectually.
He’s right to point out the damage done to jazz by generations of uncritical consensus about its greatness, certified by a phalanx of respectability ranging from musicological mandarin Joseph Kerman and CIA operative Henry Pleasants to civil libertarian Nat Hentoff and black nationalist Amiri Baraka (not to mention the master of triangulation himself, Bill Clinton). The aesthetic status of jazz is reinforced through top-down institutional acceptance: the MacArthur awards, the endowed professorships, the Ken Burns documentary, the massive corporate and nonprofit support, and so on.

Nonstop official consecration makes judging any given piece, performance, or artist superfluous — even risky. Listeners become anxious about expressing what they really think and feel about the music. You can’t find jazz boring and self-indulgent without appearing to be a boob. Machiavelli says that politicians should prefer the public’s fear to its love, but that’s a death sentence for an art form.

Moyer pretty effectively slays one sacred cow implicated in this: not all improvised music is great. Yes, improvisation has produced some wonderful music, but it has also imposed plenty of tedium on audiences over the years. And given the cult of the improvisor created by generations of A-list intellectuals, listeners don’t argue, they vote with their feet — politely turning down invitations to the Village Vanguard, a university-sponsored gig by one of the remaining jazz icons, or a local band “blowing” on standards at a pizza parlor or coffee house.

Jacobin being the socialist publication it is if you don't happen to be socialist then the idea that jazz has become irrelevant by dint of a lack of political engagement on behalf of the Left might seem like the wrong reason to consider a musical art form dead. But there's a sense in which the concern that jazz has become the music of the establishment could be a serious one for jazz fans in general.

http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/music/jazzblog/in-defence-of-jazz-jazzbros-and-other-people-who-approve-of-jazz

... Regarding jazz and the Left, Halle’s perspective is, if not distorted, severely limited. From what I’ve seen, jazz players and left-leaning politics remain naturally connected. Recall the concerts that jazz musicians staged in support of U.S. President Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008, the various pieces such as Robin Eubanks’ Yes We Can that celebrated Obama’s victory, or Toronto saxophonist Rich Underhill’s performance for at the 2011 state funeral of NDP leader Jack Layton. Recall the anti-Bush statements of albums such as Charlie Haden’s 2005 album Not In Our Name, the World Saxophone Quartet’s like-minded 2006 disc Political Blues, or Montreal saxophonist Christine Jensen entitling her 2006 CD Look Left. Now try to name some meaningful right-wing expressions or shows of support by jazz stars.

This is not to say that all music is politically charged or needs to be. When jazz musicians show their stripes, they seem to have skewed left (myself included), but at other times, the music is simply apolitical. As Iverson writes, sometimes pieces such as Without A Song “are just good tunes for a improvisor to dig into.”

Put it this way, sometimes the jazz musicians on my Facebook feed get political and decry Stephen Harper or climate change, and at other times they simply promote their gigs and post photos of cats

Socialist realism's never going to completely go away from socialists embarking on the arts. That's not going to change. But perhaps the clearest indication that jazz has a kind ofe stablishment status hit Wenatchee The Hatchet while waiting on hold for some bureaucratic thing, mayhbe it was a government office or a customer service thing for some bill The main take-away was the hold music was Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. So what, literally!

When classic albums from jazz have become hold music you get to listen to while waiting to talk to someone who may or may not actually care about your situation then, well, jazz has become establishment music in the worst possible way. This should not detract from the beauty of its art but it was a memorable occasion for Wenatchee The Hatchet to consider that those who resent jazz may not just resent it for musical reasons. They may feel that jazz is aimless and snobby and that can be utterly true .. but those are extramusical values, too.

To some degree Teachout pointing out what has since become more obvious did not need to be the occasion to point out that he writes for right wing publications. Wenatchee The Hatchet obviously lkes reading stuff ranging from Commentary to Jacobin and is curious about stuff across the entire spectrum. It's fascinating how much traditional and arch conservatives agree with some progressives on the innate evil of Jeff Koons, for instance. :) But let's not dwell on that now.

We were writing about actual art, after all. :)

In light of the recent passing of both Ornette Coleman and Gunther Schuller we could ask how effective Third Stream fusions may be if classical and jazz are among the worst-selling styles of music out there. Two of my favorite types of music, obviously, these are. Even in the peak of my days being involved with Mars Hill "engaging culture" by knowing or caring what was going on in pop music at large was not exactly my thing. The last album I got that was neither classical nor jazz would have been ... the third Portishead album, I suppose.

It's been interesting reading about music and the state of music. Wenatchee The Hatchet at one point considered the possibility of getting into the music business. It seems a bit unlikely now. But even if it were to happen it's interesting to read about the cries artists believe are upon us. Perhaps the most striking crisis that has not been discussed quite as thoroughly as it could have in the wake of the "Blurred Lines" verdict is how very little of our musical mass culture is actually public domain.

The case for publicly sponsored music education has often hinged on the idea that promoting the arts is good for well-rounded citizens. What if we playfully propose another reason for music education in schools, if you tell the kids these days what is and isn't public domain it helps them learn fro molder musical styles so they can have the musical literacy to draw upon source materials less likely to land them in court. If corporations are going to sue infringers then it would seem a public service to citizens to let them know in school, while they're young, which music they can copy without fear of getting sued by massive corporate interests.

And having spent the last few months blogging about the ways in which guitar sonatas from the early Romantic era can be easily transformed and mutated into ragtime, a more thorough-going musical education which treats Western music as a unified whole spanning European classical music as well as American pop music seems like a more honest way to approach music education. You'll give people more fo a chance to suffer, maybe, if yu show that a Haydn string quartet and a Weezer song have the same linear pattern between Op. 76,2 and "Island in the Sun" if they don't like that music. But if we can talk about music AS music and not just as lifestyle associations then some real fusion in musical culture can happen. When the chords and tunes in early 19th century guitar sonatas can be changed into ragtime my personal take is that the boundaries between the two styles of music are not that big. It's not a matter of the harmonic and melodic vocabulary, really, so much as it is about the categories of thought organizing the material.

in the year of dissolution, some MH pastors continue with disclosures of material connections, case studies from Seth Winterhalter

Winterhalter is not a name that would probably mean that much even to people who have been inside Mars Hill Church, much less to outsiders. However, the pastor is at a church plant spin-off/re:boot of the Mars Hill corporate entity and, as such, might be worth keeping at least some moderate tabs on.

The blog posts linked to below are fairly boilerplate. In fact there's nothing about them that's particularly worth commenting on from the texts of the posts themselves.

http://sethwinterhalter.com/discipleship/
http://sethwinterhalter.com/is-church-membership-biblical/

But what is pretty new, compared to the sea of blogging done by MH-affiliated pastors and deacons, would be wording that's this specific:

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Depending on one's assessments of Winterhalter as a pastor one may or may not wish to purchase the recommended books by following the links. Mileage may vary.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

the Benedict Option and the conundrum of the low church culture

http://mereorthodoxy.com/home-retreat-and-the-benedict-option/

Some of you readers may have some idea, at a glance, what the "Benedict Option" is supposed to be and why some Christians have been discussing it. It has been interesting in the last twenty years to observe an ascendancy of Christian American talk of cultural engagement at the period in which Protestant Christianity is no longer necessarily a given as a key ingredient in American civic religion.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/serious-non-sarcastic-questions-about-the-benedict-option/
For those who are not of a Christian practice or confession a paradox in the mere idea of the Benedict Option is that kind of perceived cultural withdrawal inherent in the enterprise when, at least amongst evangelicals in the United States, the evangelistic impulse within evangelicalism would seem to preclude a Benedict Option.

But ... there's another, probably more serious problem, with evangelicals in the United States proposing a Benedict Option, such as it is. If you're going to, to put this in the most polemical sense of the term for sake of conversation, create a cultural bunker, what kind of culture have you got that would be preservable?

It is on this note that Alastair Roberts' observation about the poor form of American evangelicalism may be salient.

https://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/evangelicalisms-poor-form/
http://christandpopculture.com/evangelicalisms-poor-form/

Perhaps another little detail American evangelicals might need to bear in mind is that any culture that is preserving something distinct will, essentially by practical definition, be a cult. The use of the term "cult" has been so pervasive in pejorative use that it might be difficult for anyone to attempt to use "cult" in a neutral sense, and yet it seems as though cult formation is the very essence of what humans do. That contemporary progressive thought can occasionally forget this is understandable but evangelicals can also forget that it's true of them, too, just as it is true of all of us. It's more dangerous to convince ourselves that cult formation is what we try to avoid than what we aim to do.

Perhaps due to a preference for lower liturgical forms and a suspicion of "dead religion" evangelicalism in the United States may have so gutted itself of cultural formation tools that even if those in evangelicalism attempt a Benedict Option, they have spent generations actively divesting themselves of the things that could have most served them toward the end of creating a cultural garrison of whatever sort they hope could be created.

Not that people haven't tried to create cultures in which values and aesthetics were preserved. That was, arguably. what many observed was being attempted within the social system and corporate enterprise that up until recently was known as Mars Hill.

There's considerably more that could be said about that enterprise but it won't be easily put into words. Recent coverage of what's been described as Mark Driscoll's testosterone Gospel needs to be reframed a bit not in terms of what people think he was alleged to have been selling but by examining what social and economic difficulties he and his associates believed they were trying to solve. It is possible to disagree with where a person goes on a particular issue; or to disagree with the methodology by which they propose to address an issue or goal; and yet at the same time understand the significance of the problem they have tried to solve. Time and energy permitting, Wenatchee The Hatchet hopes to address a bit more of the "testosterone Gospel" to point out what the nature of its Social Gospel was (HT to Dan at City of God for formulating the idea of the Social Gospel of Mars Hill).

Meanwhile, evangelicals talking about a Benedict Option may need to keep talking about what that even means and whether or not American evangelicalism has truly formulated the kinds of cultural tools with which to create such an option.

And as culture stuff goes, we're going to get to writing about books on music later this year. And revisit The Legend of Korra, which Wenatchee The Hatchet has recently renamed "The Legend of Entitlement". But the music stuff will be more fun to write about.

But, as noted earlier in this post, WtH isn't necessarily erupting with content for here just yet.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

correction/update, Lasting Legacy LLC not so expired after all

Having previously blogged about the expiration for this company over here ...
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/04/cant-remember-which-of-mark-driscolls.html

Well, turns out Wenatchee The Hatchet ended up being wrong (it happens, obviously).

https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=603199549

UBI Number 603199549
Category LLC
Active/Inactive Active
State Of Incorporation WA
WA Filing Date 04/17/2012
Expiration Date 04/30/2016
Inactive Date
Duration Perpetual
It was described as set to expire at the end of April 2015, really, but it got some kind of extension.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

there will, eventually, be a return to reviews

Andrew Durkin's book Decomposiion has been out for a bit and Wenatchee The Hatchet hopes to write about the book some in the upcoming weeks. There's some stuff that's interesting and persuasive about the book and there's some stuff that seems less persuasive and some stuff that's just weak sauce. It probably doesn't help matters that I started reading Durkin's book shortly before I also picked up Leonard Meyer's 1967 work Music, The Arts, and Ideas and one of these two books is a marvel of esoteric and abstract thought on practical matters and ... I'm afraid Durkin's book is not that book.

But Durkin's book could have been a fantastic polemic on the cultural crisis we have in which there is no public domain in pop culture. I just think he made a mistake of making his manifesto against "authenticity" and "authorship" about music when he should have made it about more that. Think less music than ... Episode VII.

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