Driscolls announce The Trinity Church launch, share the Martin family backstory associated with the name, and revisiting Real Marriage to observe Grace Driscoll's description of Mark's unhappiness about the Martin family

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/02/01/mark-driscoll-announces-launch-of-the-trinity-church/
Video 2:40
Gib Martin founded Trinity church. Grace Driscoll described the church.  Mark Driscoll, for his part, described how Gib Martin's church was where he was allowed to preach his first sermon.
This is interesting. What's interesting is to compare this warm and affable account of the Martin family with the account Grace Driscoll shared in Real Marriage, where there seemed to have been an undercurrent of resentment on Mark Driscoll's part toward the Martin family, at least from the following passage from Real Marriage (earlier edition):

Real Marriage: the truth about sex, friendship and life together
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Thomas Nelson
copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0
pages 10-11
...
Making issues even worse, I (Grace) realized I hadn’t really followed the Genesis command to leave my family and cleave to Mark as my new family. I still called my mom daily and complained when Mark and I were fighting; we spent all our holidays, birthdays, and vacations with my side of the family, rather than starting some of our own family traditions. My parents had keys to the house and would stop by at any time unannounced, so we lacked privacy and I didn’t see it as a problem. I called them “my family” which made Mark feel as if he and I weren’t family. I had to learn to pray and work through our conflict differently, plan some of our own traditions and memories, set healthy boundaries of privacy, and refer to Mark as “my family” and others as our “extended family.”

Learning to others "extended family" ... did that, say, apply to Grace Driscoll's parents or sibling? The passage suggests that early in the marriage Mark Driscoll had some significant issues with his wife calling her actual blood relatives "my family" as if that somehow implied that he was just ... the husband? 

So by Grace Driscoll's account in Real Marriage from 2012 it seemed that in the early years there were some issues Mark had with how close she was to her family verses how close he felt she was to him or him to her.

It's also worth remembering that by 2006 and 2008 Mark Driscoll's ideas of healthy boundaries of privacy and access to Grace may have evolved a bit.

http://joyfulexiles.com/2012/03/19/my-story-by-jonna-petry/
Shortly before Paul was confirmed as a pastor/elder, I was invited to a dinner to celebrate Grace’s (Mark’s wife and my friend) birthday. There were a dozen or so women in attendance and I ended up sitting next to Karen Schaeffer, who was Mark’s administrative assistant - a lovely, older, godly woman whom I greatly respected. Sitting next to us was an elder’s wife who was close in age and who also had quite a bit of previous ministry experience. The three of us enjoyed great conversation – alive, encouraging, as iron sharpens iron. We ended up being the last three to leave the restaurant and as we walked to the car decided we should  pray together for some of the things that had been shared. We got in the car and ended our time together praying for many things, including the elders, our families and the church.

The next morning I heard from the elder’s wife, the one Karen and I had so enjoyed - that she had shared our conversation with her husband and he felt that it showed “disloyalty” on Karen’s part, was gossip, and that it needed to be brought to Mark, which he did. Karen was fired. The gist of what she shared that was branded “disloyal” was a heart of thankfulness that my husband, Paul, was being made an elder because Mark needed strong men around him who could handle and stand up to push-back. When I found out what this elder and his wife had done, I called Mark immediately in tears and asked him to forgive me for my part in that conversation. Looking back, I’m not sure that Karen or I really did anything wrong, but I was sure afraid.
For those who don't remember Mark Driscoll's marathon session teaching staff about spiritual warfare from early 2008, it stands as a landmark in the history of what was once Mars Hill as Mark Driscoll's instruction not just on spiritual warfare but also on things like the generally satanic nature of women who have wanted to be friends with pastors' wives.  Since you probably will not find this content anywhere else Wenatchee The Hatchet has to quote content transcribed and published here. The odds that the Driscolls will bring this content back seem remote.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/07/from-mark-driscolls-2008-spiritual.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/11/2-5-2008-spiritual-warfare-part-2-part_70.html

February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Part 2: The Devil
...

I'll tell you, in the history of Mars Hill, I mean, I have had to put up a firewall, a moat, guard dogs, and a high wall with barbed wire on top, and snipers behind it, around my wife. There are certain women who, they just need to know what Grace is doing and they are determined, they say things like, uh, "Hey, we need to have dinner with your family." [slight chuckle] No you don't. "Hey, we need to have coffee." No you don't.  "Hey, phone number." What? Nope. "Email." Nope.  Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
"Oh, come on." Nope.
"But I thought you were our pastor."
I am and my first lesson is to tell you you're Satanic.
"Oh, come on, in our last church the pastor's wife [sob] she was my best friend and I got to talk to her all the time."

Well, she was Satanic, too.  Give me her number, I'll call her and tell her. We'll help her out.
...
Sometimes womens' ministry is the cesspool that this kind of activity flourishes in. Some have asked, "Why don't you have womens' ministry?" The answer is we do, but it's, you have to be very careful, it's like juggling knives. You put the wrong women in charge of womens' ministry, the drama queen, the gossip mama, all of a sudden all the women come together, tell her everything, she becomes the pseudo-elder  quasi-matriarch; she's got the dirt on everybody and sometimes the women all get together to just rip on their husbands in the name of prayer requests. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. We have worked very hard so that the women who teach here are like Wendy Alsup who I really love and appreciate and respect. She's not like that.

Womens' ministry was like juggling knives?  Is Grace Driscoll absolutely sure Mark Driscoll never, ever said anything that could be construed as even possibly misogynistic? 

Now perhaps the Driscolls have taken a more open approach in Phoenix that lets Grace have some friends in comparison to what Mark Driscoll was saying in 2008.

But the recent presentation Mark and Grace Driscoll gave about the connection that Gib Martin's family had to Mark Driscoll's earliest attempts at ministry is a bit different.  To go by the gritty narrative of Real Marriage from 2012 it seems Grace's account (assuming no ghostwriting happened) was that Mark could almost be understood to have resented the Martin family. Grace got presented as not feeling there was any problem of a lack of privacy and that it was okay for family to make unannounced visits that, by implication, Mark seemed to have some significant problems with.

looks like we've reached ten years of Wenatchee The Hatchet

The tenth anniversary of the first post at Wenatchee The Hatchet was a week or so back, a riff on Roger Scruton's writing about music.

Ten years ago when I started the blog I was fairly content here in the Puget Sound area in terms of location.  Not maybe happiest about everything across the board but I felt very confident I would be at Mars Hill the rest of my life.

Obviously things changed in a decade. This still isn't really a watchblog as far as I'm concerned.  That said, when the blog "has" been a watchblog here's hoping it has been of a high quality. As far as possible I've tried to source and cite primary sources and statements and document things as accurately as possible.  When things have been incorrect I try to issue a correction as soon as practical. 

You may have noticed over the years how rarely comments are allowed.  That''s been on purpose.  Yep, I have actively stifled commentary at this blog because the number of people who have wanted to contribute information and historical context have been fewer than those who have already made up their minds one way or another. As long-time readers over this last decade probably already know the crankier comments often came from people against Driscoll or Mars Hill who were not happy about a failure here to take the desired tone.

One of the temptations of a watchblog is to attempt to infer motives on the part of people who say and do things.  As an effort toward journalistic standards of some kind, try to avoid that.  Should you say that the"media" doesn't do this so why care about that?  Well, if you don't care about aspiring to a higher standard than mainstream reporters who butcher the topic of religion you're welcome to stay at that level ... somewhere else.

This isn't intended to be a watchblog but it's unavoidable that the "reality" seems to be the blog has come to be known as a watchblog dealing with the history of Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll and other figures in the history of the recently split up church.

There's still a lot that can and should be said about the rise and fall of Mars Hill and about Driscoll's course as a public figure.

I have seen, from time to time, atheists and agnostics suggest that in the long-run Driscoll's just another right-wing fundy type and that there wasn't anything "that" unusual about what happened at Mars Hill.

Well ... since we're in an election cycle let's propose an idea that will be explored further--Mark got his degree in speech communications and Grace got training in public relations; Mars Hill was a church plant started in the Puget Sound area during a tech phase in the 1990s and had a leadership core that actively sought out young people interested in innovations in the arts, media and tech. Since somebody has to invoke Jacque Ellul at some point, what made Mars Hill unusual was the intensity with which the leadership culture, even possibly from its inception in the mid-1990s featured people trained explicitly in the techniques that Ellul wrote half a century ago were characteristic of propaganda.  Now sure, some of you may say, what else does a preacher do but use speech and propaganda?  Isnt that a fact of life? 

Yeah, but the level of mastery of integrated media and tech to transform the culture of the megachurch into an instrument of propaganda may be the "one" thing that was unique about Mars Hill.  Not it being ostensibly Reformed.  Not it being hipster.  Not it being evangelical.  Not it being innovative as such.  No, perhaps the thing about the founding couple that is most noteworthy compared to other couples who have stories of being called into ministry is that in the case of Mark and Grace Driscoll the formal credentialing into the career techniques of propaganda is explicit.  Ellul, after all, in his book Propaganda, wrote that human relations and public relations were instruments of propaganda. 

When Driscoll resigned in 2014 William Vanderbloemen proposed that Driscoll's resignation "changed everything".  Nothing, in fact, has particularly changed in terms of how the business gets done, has it?  But what "could" change is for Christians and non-Christians alike to take an opportunity to see how branding and propaganda techniques work in a multi-media tech-savvy church culture. 

What the promotion of Real Marriage revealed, at length, was that it was possible for the executive leadership of a church such as the late Mars Hill to explicitly and systematically transform the media tools that could be used to spread the teachings of Christ were simply transformed into a fully integrated apparatus to promote a Driscoll book. After all those years of Mark Driscoll giving, say "Six Reasons I'm Not Going Anywhere"
https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-driscoll/6-reasons-why-im-not-going-anywhere/408704470517?__mref=message_bubble

content removed?  Oh, well ...  that's why we have the full text and a screen cap over here ...

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/mark-driscoll-from-july-6-2010-6.html

After years of promising over and over that he'd never leave Mars Hill that's exactly what Mark Driscoll did.

One of the things Jacques Ellul wrote in Propaganda was that nations who prepare for themselves for war venerate peace. It may well be that in the case of Mark Driscoll his years of declaring what he wouldn't do turned out to be protesting too much on the eve of his turning around and doing precisely what he said he didn't or wouldn't do.

Let's not anchor too much on the assumption that Driscoll will stay Reformed or even complementarian.  The opportunities that open up by rejecting both are too great.  If he spurns complementarianism Grace can have more of a ministry role--the thing that Driscoll wrote ten years ago in Confessions he resented about her, spending time on ministry and neglecting him


Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
CHAPTER FOUR 150-350 PEOPLE
page 101-102
...
Shortly thereafter, Grace gave birth to our first child, my sweetie-pie Ashley. Up to this point Grace had continuously poured endless hours into the church. She taught a women's Bible study, mentored many young women, oversaw hospitality on Sundays, coordinated meals for new moms recovering from birth, and organized all of the bridal and baby showers. Grace's dad had planted a church before she was born and has remained there for more than forty years. Her heart for ministry and willingness to serve was amazing. But as our church grew, I felt I was losing my wife because we were both putting so many hours into the church that we were not connecting as a couple like we should have. I found myself getting bitter against her because she would spend her time caring for our child and caring for our church but was somewhat negligent of me.

I explained to Grace that her primary ministry was to me, our child, and the management of our home and that I needed her to pull back from the church work to focus on what mattered most.  She resisted a bit at first, but no one took care of me but her.  And the best thing she could do for the church was to make sure that we had a good marriage and godly children as an example for other people in the church to follow.  It was the first time that I remember actually admitting my need for help to anyone.  It was tough. But I feared that if we did not put our marriage and children above the demands of the church, we would end up with the lukewarm, distant marriage that so many pastors have because they treat their churches as mistresses that they are more passionate about than their brides. 

You'd never be able to guess from that what was going to get revealed in 2012's Real Marriage, that up through about 2006 the Driscoll's were kind of miserable in their marriage. Then again, this is a quote from the first print edition of Confessions that was published a decade ago.  Things can change in ten years, including print editions.

So, occasionally, maybe this blog will still track stuff like that.

What's been remarkable about the press coverage and the video statements Team Driscoll's been making about the prospective church in a UPS mailbox that's launching later this year is that they don't seem all that eager to talk about Mars Hill.  Greater love hath no one than a guy who quit being a pastor at the only church he said he'd ever been a member of so that he could go "heal up" and start another one somewhere else after having spent the previous decade saying over and over he wasn't planning on going anywhere.

Something Ellul mentioned repeatedly in Propaganda seems worth repeating here and not "just" because it's been time for the two party system to make use of the propaganda that's inevitable in a technological society.  Ellul stated that while many people have worked with the assumption that propaganda consists of spin and lies this is not the case.  Frequently propagandists care a great deal about facts, details and accuracy in informational claims.  Ellul proposed that the real deceit was in the narrative used to interpret the information that was presented. The lie was not in the facts themselves but in what the propagandist would say the facts meant. 

Anyone remember FY2012 at Mars Hill?  The one Mark Driscoll said was their best year ever?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-fy2012-has-been-best-year.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20120808005548/http://marshill.com/media/jesus-loves-his-church/jesus-gave-us-communion#transcript
...

Our fiscal year, our budget year, runs from July through June, so we just finished our fiscal year, and those who are administratively gifted and allow us to steward the resources that God has given us, have put together a final year-end report, and I’m really excited to share it with you.

Before I get into the details, let me just say, we have just completed the greatest year in the history of Mars Hill Church, any single way you measure it: number of people, number of baptisms, number of Community Groups, number of people in Community Groups, number of Redemption Groups, number of people in Redemption Groups, number of weddings, number of children, number of services, number of locations. Whatever variable you would take a look at, it’s the highest it’s ever been.

In the fifteen years of Mars Hill Church, we’ve just completed the greatest year we’ve ever had, and I can say with full confidence, it’s firstfruits and there’s much, much more to come. So, I want to start by saying thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving Mars Hill Church. And I want to thank you who love Mars Hill Church, and some of Jesus’ love is coming through you as you give, as you serve, as you pray, as you care.
Yet raw statistics need context.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/10/sutton-turner-in-2012-on-mars-hill-churchs-financial-situation-we-are-in-a-big-mess/

Turned out that based on a memo Sutton Turner sent in earlier 2012, it seemed that even if Mark Driscoll would later say FY2012 was the greatest year ever, prior to that announcement it appeared someone in the top brass thought Mars Hill was on the brink of financial disaster.

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf

Then there's correspondence from Dave Bruskas from May 2012, documented by Warren Throckmorton.

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

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

That was just a few days after Mark and Grace Driscoll, using the financial instrument Future Hope Revocable Living Trust, purchased a roughly one million dollar home in Woodway.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html
https://www.snoco.org/proptax/(x5uewe45hikjyf55g2guwo3l)/search.aspx?parcel_number=00704300000600

You might remember it, that house that Russ Bowen visited for a news report, from inside which someone who kinda sounded like Mark Driscoll said "wrong address"?  The address about which, apparently, Driscoll was willing to admit that it was, in fact, his home to share a story about one of his kids being afraid of a chopper flying overhead?  That one.

Driscoll simply declared FY2012 was the greatest year ever in the history of Mars Hill.  There were stats from earlier in the calendar year showing that giving was less than hoped-for. There were even references to a series of layoffs.  But when it came time to sum things up, those statistics were glossed over for "greatest year ever".  If there was a lie in there in all that it wasn't likely in the statistics but in a remarkably bold declaration of how great the year was regardless of what the actual facts on the ground were.  Ellul would propose that that's precisely the way propaganda works.  In 2013 Driscoll would regale Mars Hill with the claim "We're not a wealthy church" as if about 24.6 million dollars in net income for 2012 was small potatoes in the non-profit scene.

Now, sure, perhaps could say that spin-masters and politicians and preachers excel in this sort of thing.  Maybe it's their bread and butter.  But if it is, if what we're looking at is nothing short of propaganda then it behooves us all to study the details.  Yeah, yeah, we can consider the dubious master narrative but we also consider the details. 

When I started blogging a decade ago I certainly never imagined this blog would end up being thought of as a watchblog.  I also didn't imagine that I wouldn't be at Mars Hill. 

It would be nice to shift the blog entirely back to things like music and animation and stuff like that.  It would appear some guy is determined to keep on keeping on.  So, if intermittently, we'll keep tabs on some stuff but this year maybe we'll get to discussing Ellul's ideas about propaganda and see how they may be able to explain everything from media/tech use in the culture of Mars Hill to the relevance of small groups in Ellul's explanation of propagandistic dynamics. 

So for those who have slogged through the last ten years, thanks for reading Wenatchee The Hatchet.  Here's hoping for a few more years of being able to write about music, theology, the arts, and maybe sometimes the history of the Puget Sound church scene. 

Thanks for reading. This certainly has turned out to be what I envisioned for the blog when I started it back in 2006.

an annotated overview of the support roster for the new church Driscoll's launching, noting that a decent chunk of names look familiar from the A29/MH BoAA era

http://thetrinitychurch.com/support/
Church Leaders and Pastors Praying for The Trinity Church

Trevor Barton – Lead Pastor
The Creek Church
London, Kentucky

Matt Brown – Senior Pastor
Sandals Church in Riverside California

Bil and Jessica Cornelius – Senior Pastor
Church Unlimited in Corpus Christi Texas

Terry and Judith Crist – Senior Pastors
City of Grace Church in Mesa, Arizona
Chair of the Arizona Governors Council on Faith and Community Partnerships

Dr. Darryl Delhousaye – President
Phoenix Seminary

Mark Demoss – Founder
The Demoss Public Relations Group

Jimmy Evans – Pastor
Trinity Fellowship in Amarillo Texas
President of Marriage Today

Travis Hearn – Senior Pastor
Impact Church in Scottsdale Arizona

Chris Hodges – Founding and Senior Pastor
 Church of the Highlands in Alabama

Dr. Greg Kappas and Debbie Kappas
 Grace Global Network planting churches globally, Christian authors

Kappas was around in the earliest years.  It's hard to know why Kappas could play a useful role in reining in Mark Driscoll's character issues now when he produced no evidence of being able to play such a role in the last twenty years.

Chan Kilgore – Senior Pastor
 CrossPointe Church in Orlando Florida

Levi Lusko – Senior Pastor
 Fresh Life Church in Kalispell Montana

Josh McDowell
 Christian author and speaker

Josh McPherson – Senior Pastor
 Grace City Church in Wenatchee Washington
 Northwest Regional Director Acts 29
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/08/acts-29-network-removes-co-founder-mark-driscoll-and-mars-hill-church-from-membership/

http://www.acts29.com/network/west-us/
Josh McPherson: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska - 26 Churches

Once again this raises an interesting question of why Acts 29 leadership backed off the content in which they said they wanted Driscoll to step away from ministry and get help if a regional director of Acts 29, the Northwest division where you'd think Acts 29 would be most informed of the problems board leadership said Driscoll had, is publicly listed as a prayer supporter.

Miles McPherson – Senior Pastor
 The Rock Church in San Diego California

Johnnie Moore
 Christian author, speaker, humanitarian, former chaplain and Senior Vice President of Liberty University

Robert Morris – Founding and Senior Pastor
 Gateway Church in Dallas Texas
Throckmorton has that topic fairly decently covered for those who aren't already up to speed.

Perry Noble – Senior Pastor
 NewSpring Church in Anderson South Carolina

Larry Osborne – Senior Pastor [a Wayback link establishing Osborne was on the Mars Hill BoAA]
 North Coast Church in Vista California
[see page 3 of the linked doc where Driscoll explained in 2007 that he consulted with Osborne on re-architecting Mars Hill into a multi-site)
http://www.acts29nw.com/pastors-school/

This is a reminder that according to Mark Driscoll's stories on the road in 2015 the Board of Mars Hill proposed he submit to a restoration plan and Mark Driscoll even said he agreed.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-diachronic-survey-of-driscoll.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/07/six-available-accounts-of-mark-driscoll.html

Osborne had been named publicly as far back as the middle of 2012 as someone who would be part of a team that would assess formal charges against Mark Driscoll.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120531232846/http://marshill.com/governance
...
In the event that a formal charge and/or accusation is made against Pastor Mark that, if investigated and found to be true, would disqualify him from his position as an elder in Mars Hill Church, a group of five men consisting of both elders within Mars Hill Church and Christian leaders outside of Mars Hill Church, will investigate the charge or accusation and determine if it is true. This group currently consists of Jamie Munson, Dave Bruskas, James MacDonald, Darrin Patrick, and Larry Osborne. If the charge or accusation is found to be true, this group can rebuke Pastor Mark or, if warranted, remove him as an elder at Mars Hill Church. If Pastor Mark is removed as an elder, he automatically ceases to serve on the Board of Elders, on the Executive Elder Team, and as president of Mars Hill Church.

So it would appear that by Mark Driscoll's account he agreed to a restoration plan, then decided to resign, and now it would appear that one of the members of the Board at the time Driscoll resigned in October 2014, is publicly willing to say that the way Mark Driscoll decided to not comply with the restoration plan was okay?

http://www.religionnews.com/2014/10/15/exclusive-mark-driscoll-resigns-from-mars-hill-church/

“The Board of Overseers has accepted that resignation 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,” states the letter, signed by Michael Van Skaik, Larry Osborne, Jon Phelps and Matt Rogers.

and for the rest of the list:

Les and Lesslie Parrott
 Christian authors and speakers

Kent Redfern – Senior Pastor
 Muldoon Community Assembly Church in Anchorage Alaska

Ryan Rice – Senior Pastor
 North Valley Church in Phoenix Arizona

Brandon Thomas – Senior Pastor
 Keystone Church in Keller Texas

Carl Totti – Senior Pastor
 Trinity Church in Lubbock Texas

Ryan and Amy Visconti – Lead Pastors
 Generation Church in Mesa Arizona

Don Wilson – Senior Pastor
 Christ Church of the Valley in Peoria Arizona

Wayne Grudem's name, notably, was reportedly there and then not.  But the names that have stuck around through today that can be obviously observed from the history of Mars Hill in the last eighteen years are interesting.  If Osborne didn't manage to be part of a governance system that kept Driscoll from going askew in the 2007-2012 era during a couple of significant re-orgs why should anyone be sure Osborne will play a different role now?  The same goes for Kappas.  These were guys who were in positions, if we're to believe things said about Driscoll's submission to spiritual authority in the last eighteen years, to have advised Driscoll that this or that idea was not so good.  And yet Result Source and citation errors and fiscal cliffs happened anyway. 

As you've had a chance to read for yourself, some of the people who are praying for the church launch are people who have had their own headlines involving Result Source; their own stories of advising Driscoll in the 2007 through 2012 period of governance; their own explaining to do as to why Acts 29 associates are publicly letting themselves be listed as prayer/support people when Acts 29 board leadership seemed pretty clear Mark Driscoll needed to step aside and get help.

Osborne, he was on the Board of Advisors and Accountability at the time Mark Driscoll resigned.  He could have a lot of explaining to do.

a little before-and-after of supporters for the new Driscoll venture, the swift dissappearance of Wayne Grudem's name, as noted elsewhere

http://thetrinitychurch.com/support/
While earlier today the list looked more like this:

Trevor Barton – Lead Pastor
The Creek Church
London, Kentucky

Matt Brown – Senior Pastor
Sandals Church in Riverside California

Bill Cornelius – Senior Pastor
Church Unlimited in Corpus Christi Texas

Terry and Judith Crist – Senior Pastors
City of Grace Church in Mesa, Arizona
Chair of the Arizona Governors Council on Faith and Community Partnerships

Dr. Darryl Delhousaye – President
Phoenix Seminary

Mark Demoss – Founder
The Demoss Public Relations Group

Jimmy Evans – Pastor
Trinity Fellowship in Amarillo Texas
President of Marriage Today

Dr. Wayne Grudem – Professor
Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary
General Editor for the ESV Study Bible

Travis Hearn – Senior Pastor
Impact Church in Scottsdale Arizona

Dr. Greg Kappas and Debbie Kappas
Grace Global Network planting churches globally, Christian authors

Chan Kilgore – Senior Pastor
CrossPointe Church in Orlando Florida

Levi Lusko – Senior Pastor
Fresh Life Church in Kalispell Montana

Josh McDowell
Christian author and speaker

Josh McPherson – Senior Pastor
Grace City Church in Wenatchee Washington
Northwest Regional Director Acts 29

Miles McPherson – Senior Pastor
The Rock Church in San Diego California

Johnnie Moore
Christian author, speaker, humanitarian, former chaplain and Senior Vice President of Liberty University

Robert Morris – Founding and Senior Pastor
Gateway Church in Dallas Texas

Perry Noble – Senior Pastor
NewSpring Church in Anderson South Carolina

Larry Osborne – Senior Pastor
North Coast Church in Vista California

Les and Lesslie Parrott
Christian authors and speakers

Kent Redfern – Senior Pastor
Muldoon Community Assembly Church in Anchorage Alaska

Ryan Rice – Senior Pastor
North Valley Church in Phoenix Arizona

Brandon Thomas – Senior Pastor
Keystone Church in Keller Texas

Carl Totti – Senior Pastor
Trinity Church in Lubbock Texas

Ryan and Amy Visconti – Lead Pastors
Generation Church in Mesa Arizona

Don Wilson – Senior Pastor
Christ Church of the Valley in Peoria Arizona

As of February 1 7:10pm it looks more like:

Trevor Barton – Lead Pastor
The Creek Church
London, Kentucky

Matt Brown – Senior Pastor
Sandals Church in Riverside California

Bil and Jessica Cornelius – Senior Pastor
Church Unlimited in Corpus Christi Texas

Terry and Judith Crist – Senior Pastors
City of Grace Church in Mesa, Arizona
Chair of the Arizona Governors Council on Faith and Community Partnerships

Dr. Darryl Delhousaye – President
Phoenix Seminary

Mark Demoss – Founder
The Demoss Public Relations Group

Jimmy Evans – Pastor
Trinity Fellowship in Amarillo Texas
President of Marriage Today

Travis Hearn – Senior Pastor
Impact Church in Scottsdale Arizona

Chris Hodges – Founding and Senior Pastor
 Church of the Highlands in Alabama

Dr. Greg Kappas and Debbie Kappas
 Grace Global Network planting churches globally, Christian authors

Chan Kilgore – Senior Pastor
 CrossPointe Church in Orlando Florida

Levi Lusko – Senior Pastor
 Fresh Life Church in Kalispell Montana

Josh McDowell
 Christian author and speaker

Josh McPherson – Senior Pastor
 Grace City Church in Wenatchee Washington
 Northwest Regional Director Acts 29

Miles McPherson – Senior Pastor
 The Rock Church in San Diego California

Johnnie Moore
 Christian author, speaker, humanitarian, former chaplain and Senior Vice President of Liberty University

Robert Morris – Founding and Senior Pastor
 Gateway Church in Dallas Texas

Perry Noble – Senior Pastor
 NewSpring Church in Anderson South Carolina

Larry Osborne – Senior Pastor
 North Coast Church in Vista California

Les and Lesslie Parrott
 Christian authors and speakers

Kent Redfern – Senior Pastor
 Muldoon Community Assembly Church in Anchorage Alaska

Ryan Rice – Senior Pastor
 North Valley Church in Phoenix Arizona

Brandon Thomas – Senior Pastor
 Keystone Church in Keller Texas

Carl Totti – Senior Pastor
 Trinity Church in Lubbock Texas

Ryan and Amy Visconti – Lead Pastors
 Generation Church in Mesa Arizona

Don Wilson – Senior Pastor
 Christ Church of the Valley in Peoria Arizona

While this has already been reported

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/02/01/mark-driscoll-announces-launch-of-the-trinity-church/


Some attempt at a before and after listing was worth a shot.  Unsurprisingly, the change happened so fast the wayback machine never got a single capture of the vanishing of Grudem's name from the list.

While we could go through the names later for now just a before and after listing may suffice.

Rachel Held Evans takes aim at Donald Trump, the day before White House announces her appointment to an administrative post in the Obama administration

On January 28, 2016 Rachel Held Evans decided to write something about candidate Trump.

http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/donald-trump-gospel-liberty
...

This is the gospel of Donald Trump, his “good news” to Christian voters:  Stick with me and you’ll be a winner. Stick with me and I’ll give you power, protection, prestige. 

It’s also the very thing Satan promised Jesus when he tempted him in the desert.

 “I will give you power and authority over all the kingdoms of the world,” Satan said, “it has been given to me and I can give it to anyone I want to.” 

Clearly not aiming for subtlety, Evans directly compared the appeal she thinks Trump has made to conservative Christian voters with the temptation Satan offered Jesus in the wilderness.  Clearly its not possible for anyone on a left or progressive side to be in any way influenced by the possibility of prestige, success, influence and so on. 

Well, okay, if the moral challenge is whether to stick with a guy whose ability to stick to one marriage is a problem for red state Christians who are sympathetic to Trump what about Rachel Held Evans' history of connection to, say, Tony Jones, another guy who hasn't managed to stay married to his first wife?  If Evans is going to propose in all seriousness that red-state Christians should have doubts about standing by their man Trump because of his failure to soldier on with wife #1 couldn't Evans be more consistent when it came to someone like Tony Jones?

And while it's easy for Evans to strike a confident tone regarding the acquiescence of Christians with political sympathies to power it would seem a bit more principled if she wasn't just recently announced as an appointee for the Obama administration. 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/29/president-obama-announces-more-key-administration-posts
Rachel Held Evans, Appointee for Member, President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships

Rachel Held Evans is a Christian blogger and the author of Faith Unraveled, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Searching for Sunday. In addition, Ms. Evans speaks at retreats, conferences, universities, and churches across the country. She has been featured on NPR, Slate, The BBC, The Washington Post,  The Huffington Post, CNN, The View, and The Today Show, and in 2012, she was named one of Christianity Today's “50 Women to Watch.”  Ms. Evans received a B.A. from Bryan College.  

Unfortunately, being the sort of pessimistic person that I often am, it seems that Evans has fallen prey to the temptation to pander to her fan base by shooting fish in barrels.  In that respect Evans has done something that would have seemed more typical of Mark Driscoll circa 2012.  Well, in a way the difference is striking because Mark Driscoll's shown up on shows like Glenn Beck's but Evans has received an appointment to the Obama administration.  Now might not be the best time for Evans to take a condescending tone toward any Christians about the temptations of prestige and influence given to Christians by politicians.

a history lesson in reasons to be doubtful about the predictions of journalists in New York, HT Atlantic, someone predicted in 1897that Hiram Maxim's invention would make people think twice about war ... that invention ...

Not that Jim West really needs more ammunition for his position that we don't take the proclamations of journalists seriously but ...

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/maxim-guns/428253/
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E0DE3DF1630E132A2575BC2A9659C94669ED7CF
Recently the Atlantic Monthly featured a little blast from the past.  Hiram Maxim invented this thing that was considered so terrifying that someone at the New York Times declared it would cause people to think twice about starting wars.

“These are the instruments that have revolutionized the methods of warfare, and because of their devastating effects, have made nations and rulers give greater thought to the outcome of war before entering … ” the Times wrote in 1897. “They are peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors.”

For those who don't already know, Maxim's invention was ...

the machine gun.

So if New York journalists ever struggle with the feeling that ordinary people don't take their proclamations and predictions seriously, they need to be reminded once in a while that this could be because writers in New York have a history of making insanely stupid predictions such as saying that the invention of the machine gun will make nations and rulers give greater thought to the outcome of war before starting a war.

That's not how people work, clearly. Surely after World War I and World War II and all that came after we can say that at least one prediction by an author at the New York Times proved ridiculously wrong. Not that journalists haven't been getting predictions wrong all over the world, it's just that there may be something special about New York. 

a then and now momenet 2012: Rachel Held Evans considers why sheeple follow Christian celebrities, in 2016 appointed to an Obama adminsitration administrative post [updated]

Back on February 6, 2012 Rachel Held Evans wrote a piece about celebrity pastors.  It could have been about celebrity Christians in general but Evans restricted the scope of her piece to celebrity pastors.  Much of it was boilerplate discussion about why "we" do this.  The piece as a whole isn't worth quoting at much length.  In fact the bold-type bullet points suffice for summarizing much of the piece. 

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/features/28236-when-jesus-meets-tmz
We make celebrity pastors when we believe they can do no right or do no wrong.
...
We make celebrity pastors when we become their disciples rather than Christ’s.
...
We make celebrity pastors when we measure success by numbers.
...
We make celebrity pastors when we think we need them.
...

I’m no psychologist, but I suspect a big part of what drives celebrity-pastor culture is insecurity. It is part of human nature to long for an authority figure to tell you what to do and how to think, someone to lead the kind of life you might not think you’re strong enough to lead. But Christians, of all people, should be different. For inside each one of us lives the Holy Spirit, who convicts us, guides us, teaches us and reminds us of the things Jesus taught.

Perhaps the first step to moving past a celebrity pastor culture is to listen to that voice, to remember we are all followers of Jesus, all heirs to Christ’s Kingdom, all part of the priesthood of believers, and all capable of bearing the sort of fruit that comes from the stubborn, everyday faithfulness of regular people who  have been transformed by an amazing God

Ah, if only those sheeple would just stop being sheeple, huh? Thing is, if everyone listened to that voice they'd realize that there's a wealth of Christian reflective writing that's public domain in addition to, ah that's right, the Bible.  Then nobody would have any reason to buy Rachel Held Evans' books (or those of Mark Driscoll) because people would interpret the Scriptures for themselves.

But in reality the people who say they want the people to not be sheeple actually need the people to be sheeple enough to read them or they don't have their jobs (or hobbies).

Take this author:

http://rachelheldevans.com/about/
Rachel Held Evans is a New York Times best-selling author whose books include Faith Unraveled (2010), A Year of Biblical Womanhood (2012), and Searching for Sunday (2015). Hailing from Dayton, Tennessee—home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925— she writes about faith, doubt and life in the Bible Belt.

Rachel has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Christianity Today, Slate, The Huffington Post, The CNN Belief Blog, and on NPR, The BBC, The Today Show, and The View. She keeps a busy schedule speaking at churches, conferences, and colleges and universities around the country.

A lifelong Alabama Crimson Tide fan, Rachel is married to Dan. Her preferred writing fuel is animal crackers and red wine

If people just relied on the Holy Spirit to guide them into the truth and not rely on a Christian celebrity Rachel Held Evans wouldn't have sold very many books. 

What Evans' 2012 piece failed to do (and was it intentional?) is to account for the mechanics of the star-making machine.  Without the machinery of mass media in place there could not be celebrities of the sort we have now.  In the apostolic era the super-apostles had letters of recommendation.  In our era they can tout being a best-selling author on the NYT.  Ah, yes, but then that would mean that Evans herself could be one of those self-promoting super-apostles, couldn't it? 

It seems recently Rachel Held Evans can have a nomination administrative appointment to celebrate. [updated 12:28pm, misread the wording]

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/29/president-obama-announces-more-key-administration-posts

If she weren't a Christian celebrity in her own right could she even have been considered for such an appointment?  Can a Christian blog post posing a question on a public issue ever be something besides rhetorical? ;) Over the years I've differed with some Christian bloggers about Rachel Held Evans, it has been said of her "she's asking questions".  My beef with her kind of Christian blogger is that, like a Mark Driscoll, the questions she keeps coming back to seem to be leading questions and rhetorical questions.  Meanwhile ...

In light of what she's decided to not say or do with respect to Tony Jones and Julie McMahon it's hard to shake the impression that having lectured the sheeple on how they don't need to be sheeple back in 2012 because they don't need celebrities , Rachel Held Evans has her own role in the celebrity manufacturing machine to play. 

I've been saying this for years but the two celebrities Evans and Driscoll are two sides of the same coin, the money that the Christian pop culture establishment has been able to make money off of literally and figuratively left and right.

Mark Driscoll had his turn for a while, it seems that perhaps Rachel Held Evans is getting her turn, too.  If Evans still holds to her 2012 proposal, her being able to be a Christian celebrity might as well be "your" fault because you think you need to read or hear what she has to say.  Would 2016 Rachel Held Evans be willing to use her 2012 theory of the popularity of celebrity pastors to explain the existence of her own fan base in 2016?

from Books & Culture--early Christians were in general agreement (the ones who wrote things down) that being a soldier was bad and that

Apparently some people are trying to make a case that the early Christians were divided on the matter of whether or not being a soldier was acceptable and whether killing was wrong.  There was a consensus of accepted conviction there.  You don't get to kill and you should not be a soldier.  Reality in the trenches, pun unavoidable here, was not always the same as the ideal.  Surpise.

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2016/janfeb/early-church-on-war-and-killing.html?paging=off
...

There are a substantial number of passages written over a period of many years that explicitly say that Christians must not and/or do not kill or join the military. Nine different Christian writers in 16 different treatises explicitly say that killing is wrong. Four writers in 5 treatises clearly argue that Christians do not and should not join the military. In addition, four writers in eight different works strongly imply that Christians should not join the military. At least eight times, five different authors apply the messianic prophecy about swords being beaten into ploughshares (Isa. 2:4) to Christ and his teaching. Ten different authors in at least 28 different places cite or allude to Jesus' teaching to love enemies, and, in at least nine of these places, they connect that teaching to some statement about Christians being peaceful, ignorant of war, opposed to attacking others, and so forth. All of this represents a considerable consensus.

 

Indeed, there is very little basis in the texts for describing the early Christian view as "divided and ambiguous." There are no authors who argue that killing or joining the military is permissible for Christians. On these questions, every writer who mentions the subject takes essentially the same position. Some pre-Constantinian Christian writers say more about these topics than others. Some do not discuss them at all. But to conclude from this relative silence or paucity of some surviving texts that other writers disagreed with the extant texts would be sheer speculation. The texts we have do not reflect any substantial disagreement. Every extant Christian statement on killing and war up until the time of Constantine says Christians must not kill, even in war.

 

That a growing number of Christians, especially in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, acted contrary to that teaching is also clear. That in doing so they were following other Christian teachers and leaders who justified their conduct, we cannot deny with absolute certainty. But we have no evidence to support the suggestion that such teachers ever existed until the time of Constantine.

 

...

 

 

 

Furthermore, we have the clear, striking case of Lactantius, who clearly changed his mind after he joined Constantine. His Divine Institutes (started about 304 in the midst of Diocletian's persecution and while Lactantius served as a prominent professor of Latin rhetoric in Nicomedia, where the emperor lived) vigorously condemn every kind of killing (including capital punishment) and reject Christian participation in the army. But by 310, Lactantius has joined Constantine and is tutoring Constantine's son. In On the Death of the Persecutors (c. 313-315), Lactantius celebrates Constantine's military victories. And in later works, Lactantius omits any condemnation of warfare and defends rather than condemns capital punishment.

The case of Lactantius shows not that since Christians embraced and defended Constantine's military victories, they must therefore have not previously thought that killing in war was wrong. Rather, the story of Lactantius demonstrates that one of the most vigorous, uncompromising Christian teachers rejecting all killing in his writing before the time of Constantine could quickly change his views about Christians and killing after experiencing the astonishing end of persecution and embrace of Christianity by Constantine. [emphasis added] The case of Lactantius challenges the argument that since Christians quickly celebrated Constantine's military victories, there must not have been much earlier widespread Christian teaching against Christians being soldiers

It's a bit cynical, perhaps, but it's never amazing how a person's views can change when a patronage shift happens or something comes up.  A guy who was anti-immigration for years might suddenly favor immigration reform if his wife is from overseas, for instance.  Someone who thought a war was a great idea until his/her kid gets in a tour is another example. 
asf

a Slate piece by someone with 200k in student debt

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2016/01/student_loan_crisis_at_its_ugliest_i_graduated_and_found_out_i_owe_200_000.single.html

Long and kind of gloomy.  While some have advocated that community college and education be free to all who need it it's hard to feel much enthusiasm about that.  It's not the job training part that's bad.  No ... it's just that a century ago we didn't have the public school system o fthe sort we now take for granted.  The various caste systems were not yet in play.

No, I'm just wondering about the cultural possibility that once community college is available across the board, given the American obsession with performance, it'll be like we're preparing a new generation to be in public school before transitioning into the workforce even longer.  It seems as though what we want to try to do is not keep raising the start time for getting work when we could brainstorm ways to revive the unskilled labor market.  Otherwise inequality will continue to expand.  Why would it not? 

CMP facing indictment for its planned parenthood film project, nothing from DG Hart yet about that?

It's turning out that the group that secretly filmed discussions at a Planned Parenthood have come under indictment.  For a survey of the issues at hand ...

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-faqs-grand-jury-indicts-filmmakers-who-secretly-recorded-planned-parenthood
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/01/david_daleiden_and_sandra_merritt_s_undercover_videos_have_created_massive.single.html

One of the things that comes to mind is that last year DG Hart over at Old Life raised a question about whether or not the deceit inherent to the project wasn't able to boomerang against it.

http://oldlife.org/2015/08/journalists-and-saints-together/
...
None of this means that Daleiden doesn’t deserve some credit for exposing a truly despicable aspect of American society. But if he is going to claim either the mantle of journalistic ethics or Christian morality, can’t we/I question that? http://oldlife.org/2015/08/if-you-can-deceive-planned-parenthood-why-not-a-gay-couple/

It looks like it could, and that it could even be official.

For those Americans who are persuaded that, so long as the living things that could be identified as human aren't American citizens (at least not yet), we can choose to pre-emptively kill them for the sake of preserving long-term consumer options, then the question might not be whether or not it's okay to kill pre-emptively but whether that use of pre-emptive lethal force is the celebration of an individual opportunity to abort a fetus or a national opportunity to invade Iraq.  It could be construed as might makes right in both cases. It may be that what unites Americans left and right is a basic agreement that "we" get to use lethal force pre-emptively when it suits us in ways we don't permit others to, whether this might be at an individual or a corporate (in all senses of the term) level.

from The New Republic "The Dark History of Liberal Reform" ... revisiting eugenics and other stuff in the Progressive movement

https://newrepublic.com/article/128144/dark-history-liberal-reform

Being the kind of dour Calvinist I am I'd say this is a "duh".  But it's good to not forget that as a certain old passage put it, there's none that is righteous, not even one.  When it comes to the matter of race and racism in the United States the Left and the Right have plenty of guilt and sin to go around.

For those who didn't subscribe to evolution as a basis for looking down on blacks there was still the curse of Shem/Canaan theory, after all.

The 1926 case Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes is a favorite liberal American story. On one side, a substitute accused of teaching evolution, the famed progressive attorney Clarence Darrow, and science itself. On the other, the state of Tennessee, creationism, and the populist demagogue William Jennings Bryan, who by the end of the trial was only days from death. Scopes lost the battle, but reason and progress won the war and the film adaptation. The Scopes Monkey Trial, as it was called, is a progressive touchstone, and in the minds of many it continues to describe the difference between the two mainstream American political ideologies.

When one revisits the primary material, however, the mainstream liberal narrative is far too simple. Jennings Bryan railed against evolution, true, but not just evolution as we understand the theory today. His never-delivered closing statement indicted the “dogma of darkness and death” as a danger to the country’s moral fabric. It sounds far out, but at the time evolution came with a social agenda that its proponents taught as fact. Jennings Bryan didn’t use its name; today, we call it eugenics.

Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

The textbook was wrong, both about degenerate genes and humanity’s near-term tolerance for genocide. Read between the twin specters of human engineering, The Holocaust and the American slave-breeding industry—the abolition of which was younger than Jennings Bryan—the warning in his closing argument seems not only warranted, but prophetic:

Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.

“Some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo” is a near-perfect criticism of evolutionary theory and the era’s progressive thought as a whole. And if today’s liberals were to revisit their ideological foundations with some attention, they might not like what they see.

For those who think that racism was chiefly a thing in the American South, well, wrong again.  It was everywhere, even in the Pacific Northwest.  Dig a little on the original formulation of the constitution or the state of Oregon, for instance.

from the Atlantic, pieces about soap box comedy having a hey day and on how comedians became our public intellectuals

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/the-triumph-of-soap-box-comedy/427104/

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/how-comedians-became-public-intellectuals/394277/

 

The idea that comedians have become our public intellectuals could go a long way to explaining how a guy like Mark Driscoll ever got taken as seriously as he was taken ... if comedians who are officially comedians are taken for public intellectuals now. 

 

They can be funny, but there are fundamentally two modes of operation in humor, laughing with and laughing at. It's hard to be sure how true it really is that comedians have become our version of public intellectuals but if so then this could explain why political and philosophical discourse sometimes seems to have stopped being about ideas and started being more about punchlines playing to a base.

comparing and contrasting the plagiarism controversies that have surrounded Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll

This post presupposes you're up to speed on not just the sum of controversy that surrounded Mark Driscoll during his late 2013 plagiarism controversy but also plagiarism controversy that has surrounded Doug Wilson.

One of the things some people have pointed out was that Mark Driscoll was not accused of having done anything immoral or illegal.  Well, that might only be true in the most technical sense that nobody opted to take legal action on the issue of copyright infringement concerns.  That's not something anybody would tend to be in a rush to do.  Take a recent article in Slate on the matter of Fair Use, which discusses how much a full blown copyright litigation case can tend to run into. 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/01/25/what_beyonc_and_justin_bieber_taught_me_about_fair_use.html
...
Considering that in 2011, the cost to litigate a full-blown copyright case ranged from $384,000 to $2 million, pursuing a fair use case is often cost prohibitive for smaller actors. Time is another cost factor: The rulings in both Lenz and Authors Guild rulings were 10 years in the making. If disproportionality becomes accumulated in case law over time, the boundaries of fair use might drift or recede from a socially optimal point.

Yep, somewhere between 300k and 2 mil for costs and cases can sometimes take up to a decade to be arrived at.  Even if, say, it could be proven beyond all doubt that an author plagiarized intentionally or unintentionally of what benefit would it be to enter full-blown litigation of the sort that happened over "Blurred Lines"?  You'd have to anticipate a return of something like at least 4 or 5 million bucks for the legal battle to be worth starting to begin with, or would you?   So when Driscoll's advocates say that nobody accused him of wrong-doing that's a pretty generous claim, seeing as Janet Mefferd did confront Driscoll on air with a case that he had plagiarized material.  She then produced evidence for that case, which included quoting passages from the Trial study guide for the 1 & 2 Peter series; subsequent to that case, the book was retracted, citation errors got conceded, and the book withdrawn.  Not before the research help was blamed in a somewhat passive aggressive way.

So if you feel like it, revisit the chart Warren Throckmorton assembled summarizing Mark Driscoll's citation errors in his published work at a glance.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/02/20/mark-driscolls-citation-errors-at-a-glance/
http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/02/Driscollgridfinal.pdf

Throckmorton also documented that in a reprint of Real Marriage citation errors got fixed.  Thomas Nelson and On Mission may have felt it was worth it to fix the mistakes that got missed when people got galley proofs prior to the first print run rather than do what Canon Press did with A Justice Primer, which was to retract it altogether.

For those who haven't kept tabs on this there are a few more foreign language editions of Real Marriage out there now.  One of the rights reserved by the publisher, if  memory serves, was foreign language and adaptations of the product.  The plagiarism controversy may have been a net benefit for Thomas Nelson in the sense, at least, that if there were any infringement issues those could be gotten out of the way before a push for foreign language editions.  While the publisher is clearly not actively promoting the book any longer it hardly needs an obvious media push.  Direct sales, catalog sales, and overseas markets can still happen.  See 1.4.8 over here.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/01/an-agreement-from-february-28-2011.html

Even if Real Marriage was rigged a place at the top of the NYT best seller list it was still a talked-about book.  Never mind that there are plenty of marriage books out there or that the primary selling point about the thing was the framing narrative of the Driscoll marriage, the product is still the product.  So somebody paid for the corrections and permissions to use cited (or not-quite-cited first time around) works in the reprint of Real Marriage.

Who?  Well, to go by the wording of the publishing agreement the author, which would have been the corporation known as On Mission LLC which constituted Driscolls.

It would seem from Doug Wilson's history of controversies to do with plagiarism that having your books turn out to have some plagiarism in it doesn't mean the end of your ministerial career after months of controversy the way it might seem for Mark Driscoll's run at Mars Hill.  What was different?  Wilson and Booth actuallyadmitted to making big mistakes by publishing a book that had plagiarized content, for starters.  That might not seem like a big deal but let's recall whether or not Mark Driscoll said much beyond "maybe I made a mistake" about any of his published books. 

One study guide got retracted, along with retractions of statements made by MHPR about that study guide, too.  Then when it seemed the plagiarism issue was going to setle down the Result Source issue erupted.  It doesn't seem that Canon Press has contracted with anyone like Result Source. 

It might be instructive to ask what has been different about the Driscoll case and the Wilson case.  You might not like the things either guy has published over the last fifteen years but as plagiarism controversy goes the Wilson/Booth team was more direct in conceding "mistakes were made".  They also retracted a book.  Team Driscoll had at least one book (possibly more) reprinted without fanfare and without any kind of public statement addressing why reprints with correctiosn were even beign made. 

Wilson is not a stranger to controversy about his leadership style, either, now that I think of it.  So what possible difference might there be between Doug Wilson's controversial publishing career and that of Mark Driscoll beyond the books?  Well ...

http://www.marshillwas.us/index.html

Let's consider that as this site has gone up and people have shared stories of their time at Mars Hill there were people who were concerned about:

Mars Hill expanding faster than it could sustainably be handled by a budget; Driscoll transforming sermon times into opportunities to publicly lash out at criticism.

Heavy-handed leadership that too often had a "shut up and do what you're told vibe.

A particularly memorable passage. " ... days when he would come to "talk" to the staff were always the worst. Anytime you heard from Mark about something on staff he was pissed. His rants were ridiculous and so discouraging. one time he was coming to our team to talk—totally out of the blue, was not part of the day's schedule—I had to pray with another girl because she was so fearful of him and what he'd be coming to say."

It's not certain that Doug Wilson's staff have or might express a comparable sense of dread that the boss man is coming.  Maybe, but there's only so much that could be discussed in a single blog post.  The suggestion here is that while authors could attempt to draw "lessons" about what there was in the history of Mars Hill that could somehow be lessons for us, there was a lot that was distinct and not replicable.  Some contributors to the site linked to above have mentioned it's hard to know how to describe things to outsiders as the whole thing was so messy.

But there's a thread that emerges in some of the narratives, the dawning and sickening senseation of realizing that, just maybe, the place they thought was their church home had somehow been transformed into a giant propaganda apparatus whose ultimate goal was marketing Driscoll's wares rather than being a local church that served people.  Mark Driscoll did not get "taken down" by anys ecular or liberal press, it seems the more people feel comfortable sharing what they saw and heard the more it can seem that Mark Driscoll was brought down by controversies of a sort that Doug Wilson has weathered because Wilson, however controversial he's been, has not alienated his own base the way Mark Driscoll seemed to do. 

No publishers or authors saw reason enough to litigate on anything that could have been plagiarism in any Driscoll books.  That doesn't necessarily "prove" there was never any plagiarism.  If anything the reprinted editions with extra footnotes and thank you's suggests the problems were real enough to need fixing.  If Christian publishers actually went to court over everybody's infringements there couldn't be a mainstream Christian publishing complex, could there? 

Faced with a plagiarism controversy that stretched so far back as to include questions about his first published book, Mark Driscoll and company opted to fix the books.  Correct the mistakes.  There were a lot of things to correct. 

But it's worth considering that the controversies that embroiled Driscoll involved issues that touched other authors.  Les and Leslie Parrott turned out to have benefited from Result Source, as documented by Warren Throckmorton.  They still seem to have their respective jobs.  David Jeremiah's books have benefited, in some cases, from RSI.  He didn't feel obliged to quit his job, either.  What was unusual about the scandals connected to mark Driscoll was not really what they were or what they involved but that they converged on Mark Driscoll as an individual and that they ONLY had a negative impact on him when the same point of controversy, when highlighting some one else, did not lead to a career-ending season of crisis.

Of course Mars Hill had been hemorrhaging attenders for a while even by the time Driscoll resigned. 
We had a little post in September 2013 discussing how leadership within MH encouraged people to ask people to visit during a season of documentable decline.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/its-all-about-numbers-how-to-get-over.html

If anyone would say people started to leave "only" after Mark Driscoll resigned that's a demonstrably false assertion. 

Contrary to what William Vanderbloemen proposed when Driscoll resigned, his resignation didn't "change everything".  It didn't seem to change anything at all.  The Christian publishing industry went on.  Mars Hill collapsed but it was in a downward spiral already.  On the whole, the more that came to light the more it began to seem that that downward spiral into death for Mars Hill was the result of the leadership culture and the way it chose to conduct itself. When Tripp was quoted as describing Mars Hill as one of the most abusive ministry cultures he'd ever seen that suggests that there was something beyond controversies about plagiarism or using REsult Source that led to the decline.  Driscoll's books got fixed but somebody had to pay for that.  Is it possible that an industry at large let Driscoll reap what he had sown and let him literally pay a price for his sloppiness?  It at least seems possible.  Driscoll had managed to make a majority of content published by and through Mars Hill his own IP anyway, so it's not much work for his team to recycle and repurpose it now.

Ten years ago Mark Driscoll published Confessions of a Reformission Rev. In that book he closed with a bold vision of what Mars Hill would become.  Of course today there is no Mars Hill.

Well, no, strike that.
https://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=601677819

It's still listed as activity by the Washington State Secretary of State website even to this hour.  So the corporation exists but not as anything like a church.  The listing doesn't even have an up to date listing of who the officers are.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-dodd-a4174712

https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebwalters?trk=pub-pbmap

So it looks like these guys are still in charge of a corporation that is still active for the moment even though it formally expired at the end of December 2015.  The corporation, it seems, lingers on but the church, as a church, seems to have been unable to survive without its dominant personality.

It seems strange to think that controversies surrounding intellectual property and promotions of books that DIDN'T crush the reputations of other figures turned out to have a damaging effect on Mark Driscoll. Doug Wilson, by contrast, seems poised to weather a few more storms staying right where he is.  Being able and willing to admit to mistakes in public might be a key difference between these two guys.  Wilson may very well not like  to have to do it, but he did it. 

Driscoll has managed to say he's grieved and "cried a lot" and things like that, but that's hardly rising to the level of admitting that a book with his name on it had incompetent levels of plagiarism in it necessitating a public retraction of the work, is it?

Considering how much Mark Driscoll used to commend Doug Wilson's writings as instructions for manliness a few readers here and there might be forgiven for wondering what, if anything at all, Mark Driscoll actually "learned" about manliness from the writings of Doug Wilson after all.

Sometimes it almost seems like an industry found it easier to let a guy hang out to dry for his own hubris than to let things get to a point where mountains of litigation could happen.  The sheer scope of the Driscoll plagiarism controversy compared to the "Blurred Lines" litigation seems like a case where the musical "vibe" evidence was, whatever you made of that, small compared to the sheer magnitude of uncredited material cycled into Driscoll's books since what turned out to be the dawn of his publishing career.  The puzzle is not necessarily what happened to Driscoll's reputation for any one controversy with his name on it, it's more like there's a question of why his reputation suffered so much when other authors and public figures were able to weather contorversies on more or less the same kinds of scandals and get by just fine.  A conspiracy seems impossible, but self-destruction through pride that comes before a fall might be a possibility. 

The unifying thread for a lot of Mark's controversy was Real Marriage.  It looks as though when people share their feelings about what happened a theme emerges, that people felt that the welfare of the church was sacrificed on the altar of promoting a book.  When all the scandals connected to the book came and went it can seem as though that sentiment was based on more than just a feeling, it turned out to be based on some substantial evidence. Shepherds are obliged to care for the sheep, not sacrifice them for the skae of personal prestige.