Phoenix Preacher: Bloggers Beware [a brief commentary on blogging and the importance of sourcing statements)

http://michaelnewnham.com/?p=17506

While it might be possible to write more in addition to what Phoenix Preacher has written Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't planning to write very much in response to this useful caution.

Back when someone was taking journalism classes the professor shared something about sources and anonymity. The counsel was that, on balance, anonymous sources should essentially not be trusted and that no one anonymous source should EVER be trusted as the basis from which to publish anything.  Most of the time even the best anonymous source is not likely to share information that can't be gained through materials that are frequently already on the record and anonymous sources attempting to be whistle-blowers may be no more and possibly even less trustworthy than those on whom they mean to blow the whistle.

When the identity of Deep Throat was finally established there were some interesting comments about the significant of Deep Throat's identity.  The popular narrative up to the confirmation had been something along the line of "the press took down the Nixon administration" when the reality was more that the Nixon administration took down the Nixon administration and the press was kind of sort of given an invitation to come along for the ride.

Let the reader understand (or not)

Mike Wilkerson is on his way out from MHC

Details subject to better verification but half a dozen points of verification have established that after having held a role in the biblical counseling branch of Mars Hill Church for years Mike Wilkerson is transitioning out.  Wenatchee has been aware over the last few weeks that this change was on the horizon but waited for multiple attestations before blogging anything about it.  Word seems to be that Cliff Ellis is going to be at least the interim replacement for Wilkerson. 

things keep getting purged in the MH media library

http://marshill.com/2012/06/13/an-update-on-the-church-from-pastor-mark-june-2012

Anyone remember that link?  Well, it's 404 now

Where has this link and its content been discussed in the past?

How about here at Wenatchee The Hatchet in the following blog post.

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

For those who didn't read that blog post it discussed Driscoll's financial updates on Mars Hill in May and June of 2012 where he mentioned how it would be handy if people gave more. 

From the June 2012 update there were the following stats that were posted at this blog earlier:
The June 2012 budget update included the following
                                             PAST     PRESENT       FUTURE
Weekly giving per adult        $20.25     $30.25           $35.00
church costs                        -$14.20   -$11.82         -$10.00
facilities costs                     -$12.37   -$8.81           -$10.00
central costs                        -$22.69   -$16.07         -$10.00
projects/investments           -$3.60     -$0.99           -$3.50
expansion
Margin/Loss                        -$22.61    -$7.44           $1.50

presents list of weekly deficits per campus, we'll add corresponding percentages of givers per campus into this list since Driscoll went to that stat set next
                           wkly deficit  % adults that gave
Rainer Valley      -$3.39                27%
Portland              -$3.74                42%
Federal Way        -$4.71                42%
Ballard                -$4.81                41%
Everett                -$5.73                45%
Bellevue              -$6.14                54%
Albuquerque        -$7.16               38%
Downtown           -$8.29               24%
Olympia               -$8.35               59%
Orange County    -$8.65               32%
Sammamish        -$9.75               64%
West Seattle        -$11.55              66%
U-district             -$11.82              29%
Shoreline             -$18.02              67%
The reason those statistics were significant was because in May of 2012 Mark and Grace Driscoll bought a million-dollar home in Snohomish County during the period where Driscoll was encouraging people to give more from the pulpit. When in June 2012 Driscoll mentioned that MH had a financial model that was not good for its long term future it got summed up at this link.

http://marshill.com/2012/06/13/an-update-on-the-church-from-pastor-mark-june-2012

But all that will get you now is a 404 Error.  If you try to start plugging things like the above link into Mars Hill's website marshill.com into The WayBack Machine you're going to start finding that it, too, cannot be crawled by archive.org because of robots.txt.

Fascinating.

Well, for those who didn't read any of the blog post about Driscolls getting million-dollar homes in Snohomish County during the period when mass layoffs were happening and systemic deficits were conceded to be a significant problem you can go back to this

But if you want to find out where the majority of the content is, it didn't actually go anywhere.  It's still in the same sermon series it originated in.

go to about 52:54 minute and just before minute 54, it begins, An Update on Mars Hill Church

http://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in

http://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in/ajax_transcript?lang=en
http://download.marshill.com/files/2012/06/10/20120610_missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in_tv_sd_progressive.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2012/06/10/20120610_missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in_sd_audio.mp3
http://download.marshill.com/files/2012/06/10/20120610_missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in_vodcast.m4v
http://download.marshill.com/files/2012/06/10/20120610_missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in_tv_hd_progressive.m4v

http://download.marshill.com/files/2012/06/10/20120610_missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in_en_transcript.pdf

http://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in/ajax_transcript?lang=es

http://download.marshill.com/files/2012/06/10/20120610_missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in_es_transcript.pdf
http://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in

hunt for the following phrase
AN UPDATE ON MARS HILL CHURCH
and read on from there

Same basic stuff blogged about before from
http://marshill.com/2012/06/13/an-update-on-the-church-from-pastor-mark-june-2012

same basic stuff that was referenced in
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/mars-hill-church-in-may-and-june-of.html

One of the things about Driscoll's sermons is that personal anecdotes and updates about Mars Hill have been so organically woven into how he approaches a biblical text that it is in some sense impossible to extricate the MH updates from a discussion of a text in a sermon. 

As we've been observing here over the last month or so.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-removed-entirety-of-nehemiah.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/mars-hill-church-scaling-back-homiletic.html

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/resurgence-introduces-robot-that.html
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/warren-throckmorton-mars-hill-orange.html

MHC has been purging record and epic levels of MD content in the last two months. It's hard to know for sure what the aim and point of this could be even if it were proposed that Driscoll's angry young prophet days are somehow over.  We've discussed how problematic it is to frame Driscoll's past teaching as "angry young man" before.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/03/on-driscoll-stating-angry-young-man.html

A Call to Resurgence was published just last year and in its promotional materials Driscoll implicitly seemed to appeal to the necessity of making people angry enough to take action.

But so it goes.

POSTSCRIPT April 28, 2014
Don't be fooled by the "Audio Only" button, if you click on it you'll get to watch the video and at about 59:07 you can see which campuses were running what weekly deficits based on the church-wide average giving of $30.25 per adult per week, more or less.

.

Warren Throckmorton: Mars Hill Orange County and the City of Santa Ana, the church that didn't want to move

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/04/21/mars-hill-orange-county-and-the-city-of-santa-ana-the-church-that-didnt-want-to-move/

A few brief observations.

First, while Throckmorton links to an update in the following way:

"The video of Driscoll has now been made private (not viewable) and Bogardus’ update has been scrubbed from the site. However, you can read it via the Internet Archive."

Well, no, not now.  You see this link
https://web.archive.org/web/20120528185351/http://marshill.com/2012/05/26/update-on-mars-hill-orange-countys-building

Doesn't work.  Why?  Because robots.txt is in effect.

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

See marshill.com robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.

 

So there you go. Mars Hill seems to have introduced robots.txt to marshill.com so that not even The WayBack Machine can be used to get to some stuff.  It's curious that both theresurgence.com and marshill.com have now introduced robots.txt to limit WayBack Machine crawls.  Wenatchee The Hatchet has been noting over the last month or so that Mars Hill Church purged all the sermon content prior to the 2008 Doctrine series and that Mars Hill also purged the 1 & 2 Peter sermon materials, too.  Additionally, Mars Hill Church purged 2008 Peasant Princess material which, alert readers may recall, was material that was considered to have handled the Song of Solomon in a better way than the retracted 2007 Scotland sermon that came under criticism from John MacArthur.  But let's get to the Christian Post link

 

http://www.christianpost.com/news/mars-hill-orange-county-church-pressured-to-move-from-rock-concert-hall-76066/

 

Murashko's coverage mentioned that Driscoll said in a video update that since the Galaxy/Observatory venue was a concert venue it didn't exactly make sense what the eviction was about.  Precisely what distinguishes between permitting music concerts and arts events at a venue but not a church gathering does seem like a fair question, actually. 

 

But when Driscoll mentioned that Mars Hill was retaining legal counsel and would stick up for itself if it seemed there was religious discrimination afoot that doesn't seem to have been what happened.  After all, the Mars Hill website features a Mars Hill Huntington Beach now, not Mars Hill Orange County. 

 

But if Mars Hill Church had legal counsel at the time of the eviction that was apparently no longer going to be Chris Pledger, at least in terms of being a legal officer of the organization. 

 

http://twitter.com/ChrisPledger/status/206934500599537664
Chris Pledger‏@ChrisPledger

Last church service @MarsHill. Very thankful for the ministry and mission of Mars Hill and the privilege to
have been part of it.
7:26 PM - 27 May 2012 via HootSuite ·

 

And of note, even if the link is dead and the video has been made private the date stamp is right in the url. 

 

http://marshill.com/2012/05/26/update-on-mars-hill-orange-countys-building

 

We'll never know why Pledger's last church service at Mars Hill seemed to be the same weekend the eviction notice became a news item Driscoll addressed via video.  It might just be a coincidence.

 

Now if Mars Hill had reason to believe that the City of Santa Ana maybe that was, well, a rookie mistake.  Past coverage suggested that Bogardus told the Christian Post

 

The city made it clear from the outset that the church could not stay long term, Bogardus said.

 

So it seems there's virtually no basis from which to propose that elders at any level were completely unaware of what the likelihood was of a zoning problem coming up.  Conversely, why didn't Mars Hill opt to fight to stay at the real estate once the zoning/eviction issue became news?  If they had a solid case to defend being able to meet in the Galaxy/Observatory couldn't they have opted to have done that?  There's a lot of claims and counterclaims so it's impossible to be entirely certain what was going on but if Mars Hill were in a position to have actually gone to bat for the opportunity to meet at the site they were evicted from couldn't that have been a battle that would set a precedent for other churches in the region? 

 

It's all moot since that's clearly not what Mars Hill Church opted to do.  Because Driscoll was willing to raise the topic that perhaps Mars Hill could have faced some religious discrimination and that legal counsel was retained it seems moot to suggest that after the eviction made headlines and Driscoll made a video announcement that it was private

 

Throckmorton has more correspondence and documents that suggests that the elders of MH at multiple levels knew they were moving Mars Hill into a venue that was going to land them some trouble and that it's alleged some leaders believed this trouble wouldn't happen because the City of Santa Ana wouldn't risk the PR problems of evicting a church.

 

Maybe, as someone remarked in a track on a Frank Zappa album, "If we'd all been living in California things would be different".(paraphrase).   

 

It makes it difficult, looking back on things, to be certain that Mars Hill had much of a case for claiming religious discrimination (even if that might have been the case, for instance) if they just pulled up stakes and went to Huntington Beach. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

some stats from Alexa show a slight bump down in Mars Hill related traffic

As Mars Hill Church notes over at their site their web presence could be summed up as marshill.com, theresurgence.com, theconnectdesk.com and pastormark.tv

Well, how have these sites been doing in the last three months in the wake of about half a year of controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll's publications (either the ResultSource contract that got Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list or the plagiarism or factual errors spread across seven of Mark Driscoll's published books)?

What's alexa.com got on the trends of the MH sites?

Alexa rankings for Mars Hill sites
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fmarshill.com
marshill.com
Global Rank
109,490 (down 43,205 vs the previous 3 months)
Rank in United States
30,329

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Ftheresurgence.com
theresurgence.com
Global Rank
93,856 (down 30,210 vs the previous 3 months)
Rank in United States
33,949

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Ftheconnectdesk.com
theconnectdesk.com
Global Rank
1,358,043 (down 728,795 vs the previous 3 months)
Rank in United States
18,2632

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fpastormark.tv
http://pastormark.tv/
Global Rank
689,898 (down 231,968 vs previous 3 months)
Rank in United States
261,670

A downward trend on all fronts, it seems.  These are more yardsticks of a moment rather than meaningfully hard numbers in themselves but the drop across the board is interesting to note.

Precisely what it may mean, though, would be difficult to say.   And as Driscoll himself has pointed out the speed of change at MH can be pretty high so numbers and stats will tend to vary. 

Mars Hill Church introduces Steve Tompkins as director of Mars Hill Schools

http://marshill.com/2014/04/25/introducing-the-director-of-mars-hill-schools

fyi

for a supervisor (a haiku)

There may be no "I"
in "team" but look carefully
and you will find "me".


 

a lively March has been followed by a fallow April

The title of the blog post essentially speaks for itself but not entirely.

It has been a while since Wenatchee The Hatchet has blogged about things in the arts.  I vaguely recall writing something about Claudio Giuliani's worthy commercial recording of the complete guitar sonatas of Diabelli, for instance.  And there was some stuff about how the wind rises over at another blog but there's been a lot that's been fallow.  This may change but it depends on a number of variables that are not entirely in Wenatchee The Hatchet's control.

Still, a lack of activity online is not necessarily a sign of a lack of activity.  It might be a bit forward to note that because Resurgence added robots.txt so that The WayBack Machine can no longer do web crawls that archive material published there that this has been a variable to consider in how to write about what sorts of things.  It's been rather striking what and how much material from Mark Driscoll has been purged in the last month. 

Some things under consideration for the blog are ways to make it slightly more user-friendly.  The blog does not have a history of having easily tagged sets of posts for consultation.  The possibility of constructing a timeline of basic events might also be handy.

But there's other material germinating.  Basically you'll probably know it when you see it and since at this point the blog has this reputation for being about X when Y, Z, A, W and Q also appear at the blog and that's not likely to change.  People are going to be thinking about the Mars Hill related posts regardless of what may show up at the blog about anime or the music of Ferdinand Rebay.

But in the interest of getting a blog post back toward the arts, if briefly ... we'll have a little something momentarily.

Forbes article byJeff Bercovici--RSI goes into stealth mode, Driscoll controversy as likely catalyst

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/04/18/firm-that-helps-authors-buy-their-way-onto-bestseller-lists-goes-into-stealth-mode/

In an article published on Good Friday 2014, no less, Jeff Bercovici discusses how in the wake of the Mark Driscoll NYT bestseller rigging controversy ResultSource has gone into stealth mode. He suggests the timing of the low profile for RSI seems to coincide with the last six months of controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll, particularly the contract between Mars Hill and RSI to get Real Marriage on to the NYT bestseller list.

The article goes on to mention the role blogger James Duncan has played in calling attention to the story.  Duncan has produced a clear, simple and readable timeline for how the LLCs that seem to be connected to Real Marriage emerged.

As a survey of Driscoll related content at Pajama Pages goes.

A discussion of plagiarism and citation errors in the Trial study guide (which was retracted by MH in the wake of Mefferd's on-air accusation that Mark Driscoll was a plagiaris).

http://www.pajamapages.com/on-driscoll-its-a-straight-red/

Duncan's response to the BOAA statement about the NYT place rigging news
http://www.pajamapages.com/mars-hill-responds-to-the-book-marketing-story-and-i-respond-to-their-response/

That Mark Driscoll even has any side company (let alone a few) to handle book royalties flies in the face of a sermon he gave in 2009 where he explicitly explained how he didn't start a side company (which a lot of pastors at big churches have done) because, as he put it, that was a sign of selfish greed.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/mark-driscoll-in-2009-i-didnt-start.html
For those who don't want to go back to that link and who may not realize that much of Driscoll's preaching has been scrubbed, here's the pertinent quote:

http://marshill.com/media/trial/humble-pastors/prophets-priests-and-kings#downloads

Prophets, Priests and Kings
 Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter
May 3, 2009
1 Peter 5:1-5

... So in all of this, as well, I've had people ask, "So what about the book sales?"  Here's how it works, I didn't start a separate company. One of the ways that guys work this, they become a leader in a church and they have a company on the side and they use the church to funnel business into their side company and I didn't start a side company (like a lot of guys do) for my book writing. Instead I publish under Mars Hill.

So the way it works, I don't get all the money. Mars Hill gets a huge take. Mars Hill gets all the marketing dollars, they get paid by the publishers. Mars Hill gets half of all the royalties so the books that I publish, about 75% of the revenue goes to Mars Hill Church, not me. Not me.  Because I'm worried about this issue, greed, shameful gain. Just using Mars Hill as a platform so I can start a business to rake in massive dollars. I don't think it's a sin for a pastor to get a salary but we're now at the point where the books and the marketing, that a huge portion of my salary is covered by income that I generate.  And, I'll be honest with you, I hope one of my books pops or I get enough books on the shelf, titles in print , I'd love to see the day where I'm basically working for free and that the book sales and royalties and such let me generate enough money for Mars Hill that I can work free of charge. That's my hope and my goal. I don't know if we'll get there but that's what I'm trying to do. [emphasis added]

Since Driscoll explicitly said from the pulpit he had a goal of having one of his books "pop" so that he could make enough money from book sales and royalties he'd generate enough money to work for Mars Hill free of charge it's a bit mysterious how he, in the same sermon, described the process of a church leader having a company on the side having any even tangential association with shameful gain.

So it would sound as though the Mark Driscoll of 2009 would have said the Mark Driscoll of 2011 was wrong to be setting up a side company for book royalties that let massive dollars get funneled in the general direction of Mark Driscoll and yet 2009 Driscoll expressed hope that one of his books would "pop" and bring a financial boon great enough that he could preach at Mars Hill free.  He also indicated a huge portion of his salary in 2009 was covered by income that he generated.

So how much was that in 2009 and what is it now?  That Mark Driscoll was able to buy a million-dollar home in Snohomish County in 2012 is beyond dispute.  That the purchased house was transferred from Future Hope Revocable Living Trust to the Downs Family Revocable Living Trust with a Melanie J Thompson as ttee does not particularly change the facts on the ground--Mark and Grace Driscoll were able to use the Future Hope Revocable Living Trust financial instrument to purchase a house outside of King County in May 2012.  This was the period during which Mark Driscoll was telling people from the pulpit they could step up their giving game and by June 2012 Driscoll was describing how there had been systemic deficits at every single Mars Hill campus.  Despite the promise that the new model for the budget was going to remedy things by early 2013 Mark Driscoll was still conveying to members how they had narrowly avoided their own fiscal cliff.

For those who may not remember that post or what was in it:
As a result, we were unable to raise our above-and-beyond goal in December. We did, however, raise enough to cover our operating expenses for the year, in large part because we spent $670,000 less than what we had budgeted for during the last six months of 2012. Throughout the church we are doing everything we can to be good stewards of what God has given us, and so we have significantly cut our spending as another part of our budget reform.

So the good news is, we implemented our new budget model just in time—had we not made the changes when we did, we would have faced our own version of a fiscal cliff. The not-so-good news is that we have inadequate funds to complete some necessary renovations: in downtown Seattle, we have a row of frozen outdoor porta potties instead of indoor bathrooms; in Everett, we have $126,000 to complete $750,000-worth of work on the building; and we can’t move into Tacoma until we raise another $600,000. Budget is tight, and we simply don’t have a lot of margin to complete these and other projects.

Driscoll was getting specific about dollar amounts needed for fixing some things at specific campuses.  It's worth noting those kinds of numbers as a background for the revelation in the last half year that Mars Hill Church contracted with Result Source to place Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list.  Regardless of what the BOAA thinks about the RSI contract or the plagiarism controversy the sheer numbers bandied about in connection to real estate renovation suggest that there needs to be a discussion among MH members and staff about how and why ANY amount of money was ear-marked for getting one of Mark Driscoll's books on any list in any fashion if Driscoll could go on to write to members about how the Downtown campus had a row of frozen outdoor porta potties instead of indoor bathrooms in early 2013 almost a year after he'd bought a million-dollar home outside of King County and had set up a side company of the sort he'd said in 2009 he didn't have and implied was the kind of thing that, if you had it, was a symptom of selfish gain and greed.

For all that Driscoll said from the pulpit in 2009 (and it's worth noting, again, that most of Driscoll's formerly publicly available sermons have been scrubbed away from the Mars Hill sermon library), particularly about how guys with side companies work this ministry thing to rake in money, it sure seems as though the last seven months of controversy surrounding Mark Driscoll's books for both plagiarism and rigging sales to get a book on the NYT bestseller list might look like a case of Mark Driscoll turning out to have betrayed nearly everything he used to say he didn't do and wasn't doing from the pulpit even as recently as 2009.  Meanwhile, the Board of Advisors and Accountability has decided to stand by their man even after conceding that essentially gag orders do exist and that Mars Hill did sign a contract to rig a spot for Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list.  Precisely how the BOAA stands by the executive elders amid false accusations that are things the BOAA itself has seemed to admit are true remains a mystery.

Moreever, as Warren Throckmorton has noted, the very nature of how formal charges against someone like Mark Driscoll would even be made has been changed in the wake of public statements from former MH pastor Dave Kraft about having made formal charges.  Throckmorton has also compiled nearly all the factual errors and citation errors (i.e. instances of plagiarism) found in seven of Mark Driscoll's published books into a chart over here.

And in the last few weeks Mars Hill Church has scrubbed away may three fourths of Mark Driscoll's entire sermon output from its media library and The Resurgence has set up a robot.txt to prevent The WayBack Machine from capturing any content over there.  Retroactively obliterating most of Driscoll's teaching and preaching material on the Mars Hill side of things and setting up a protection against web crawls by The WayBack Machine on the Resurgence side is an awful lot of scrubbing and purging for a church with a BOAA that says it's standing by its executive elders.  If there's nothing to hide and nobody did anything wrong why purge such a vast proportion of Driscoll's material and preclude The WayBack Machine as a tool for finding out what Driscoll and other Resurgence contributors have written or said?

Bercovici's article hits a lot of points that have already been covered in various parts of the internet but in a time when Valerie Tarico managed to get basic facts about Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll wrong on nearly a paragraph by paragraph basis in some stretches of her AlterNet piece, summarizing what people have already covered while remaining factually accurate isn't that small an accomplishment..

Resurgence introduced robot that precludes WayBack Machine crawls, semi-related news, John Catanzaro makes a counter-accusation amid his license suspension appeal

http://theresurgence.com/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /v

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

http://web.archive.org/web/http://theresurgence.com

Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.

So after linking to all of Catanzaro's previously published content at The Resurgence via links and captures from The WayBack Machine it looks like The Resurgence has opted to introduce a robot that disallows all WayBack crawls. 

On April 3, 2014 the Bothell/Kenmore Reporter published an update on Catanzaro's suspension and response.

http://www.bothell-reporter.com/news/253773281.html

Catanzaro has stated that a Swedish Medical Center oncologist reported him in response to having lost a patient to Catanzaro.

So it seems Catanzaro is not only appealing his suspension but has made counteraccusations of his own.

Triablogue--Steve Hays discusses counterexamples in the canon to three proofs of a real prophet

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/04/how-to-recognize-false-prophet.html

Rather briefly Steve points out in response to three criteria three counterexamples from within the biblical canon itself.

1. doctrinal orthodoxy.  The problem with asserting that a true prophecy or prophet will be doctrinally orthodox is that the canon attests to multiple instances of fulfilled prophecies from people who weren't orthodox by any measure of either Jewish or Christian understanding.  Balaam was not exactly "orthodox".  Saul was a prophet, ever so briefly, and yet he was ultimately rejected by God from kingship.  Other examples may be consulted

2. moral integrity.  While it would be nice to propose that real prophets of the Lord lived lives of moral integrity this isn't sustainable when we remember which people were described as prophetic in the sum of the canon.  David was described as a prophet and he massacred villages (including women and children) during his wilderness wandering.  David's affair and use of royal power to cover up taking a man's wife and killing him is just the most famous and obvious counterexample.  Since polygamy was not actually prohibited by the Torah David's multiple wives would not in themselves be entirely problematic but David's late-career census that brought down the wrath of God on Israel would hardly be an encouraging case study of a well-behaved prophet.

For that matter, as I've recently blogged, while everyone likes to talk about Nathan confronting David about taking Bathsheba and killing Uriah the Hittite, virtually nobody holds up Nathan's active participation in intra-royal politics to get Solomon installed on the throne as a case of salutary prophetic behavior!  Then there's Jonah ... even prophets recognized as legitimate prophets could have entire books written to reveal their substantial character flaws

3. If it's real prophecy it really comes true.  As Steve notes, the traditional acid test for a legitimate prophet but he highlights ever so briefly the exegetical work done by conservative scholars to establish what was going on with prophecies liberal scholars have considered to have never been fulfilled, taking the case of Jeremiah predicting the fall of Babylon as just a single for-starters.

A more customary cautionary tale about the dangers of presuming "the anointing" means you have God's favor AND that your life is exemplary has been the life of Samson.  Even among Pentecostals it has not been presumed that manifestations of spiritual power, however we'd wish to define that, is an indication of well-developed moral character.  Many of the people in the OT who were described as having the greatest power or authority were capable of being as petty as anyone else.  While Samuel could object that Israel wanted a king because it was a sign of disobedience to God this hardly exonerated Samuel from being culpable for the nepotism he displayed (a bit like Eli, his forebear) in appointing corrupt sons to manage things. 

Valerie Tarico publishes article on Mars Hill/Driscoll at Alternet & Salon, an overview of factual errors in the article

Wenatchee The Hatchet has been dormant for a week but is now back with a post.

On April 1, 2014 an article went up at alternet.org by Valerie Tarico.  This piece warranted enough fact-checking and consideration that WtH has offline for a while going through primary source materials.  You see, dear reader, the Tarico article, which apparently got enough traffic to get picked up by Salon, has a variety of statements and summations of events that are either fuzzy or that can be proven to be factually inaccurate.  Before getting to where the details are wrong, here are the links to the article.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/christian-right-mega-church-minister-faces-mega-mutiny-abusive-behavior
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/christian-right-mega-church-minister-faces-mega-mutiny-abusive-behavior?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark


April 1, 2014  
republished in Salon at the following link:
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/christian_right_mega_church_minister_faces_mega_muntiny_for_abusive_behavior_partner/

Presenting Mark Driscoll as founding Mars Hill Church has not been paying attention to the range of blogging and journalism that has been published over the last year.  Furthermore, to list only Driscoll as the founder rather than one of three co-founders of Mars Hill Church would display ignorance of Mark Driscoll's own published work from 2006 that mentioned Mike Gunn and Lief Moi as co-founders.  That will probably seem pedantic to a reader of AlterNet or Salon, perhaps, but the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details in this article that have devils in them.

As we'll see throughout Tarico's article second and third hand statements are presented where primary source material has been available.  That can happen from time to time but there are several mistakes that are simply astonishing. 

Let's get the biggest one out of the way, perhaps a copy editor simply betrayed Tarico here, who took the trouble of linking to Janet Mefferd's on-line content but doesn't seem to have realized those links have been dead for about half a year now. This at least establishes that Tarico must have known how the name is spelled.  Something seems to have happened along the way. 

Of late, though, the armor of invulnerability may be cracking. Last November, a conservative fan of Driscoll’s theology, radio host  Janet Merford [emphasis added], accused Driscoll of plagiarizing material for his book, A Call for Resurgence. Further research revealed other incidents of apparent plagiarism which Merford detailed carefully (here, and here), leading others to back her claims and follow up with examples of their own.

And yet somehow Janet Mefferd gets transformed into some "Janet Merford" in Tarico's piece.  "Merford" is used in place of "Mefferd" in both the AlterNet and Salon iterations of the article, an error that is unfortunate and inexcusable.

Now let's get to another significantly problematic statement in Tarico's piece, just a few paragraphs into the article.

Though Driscoll rarely dabbles directly in politics—his followers know implicitly where he stands—his comments about queers and, in particular, women have been a source of ire for many. When Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals was caught with meth and a male prostitute, Driscoll pointed the finger at Haggard’s wife: “It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness.” Outrage on the part of feminists merely stoked Driscoll’s fire.

No, Driscoll didn't.  Tarico quotes the David Goldstein HuffPo piece from 2006 which in turn quotes a single bullet point from Driscoll's relevant commentary at Resurgence and from local commentary from The Stranger's Dan Savage, which Tarico has linked to for the backing for her statement.  So a partial quote from Mark Driscoll joked about by Dan Savage and then summarized by an author at HuffPo gets presented by Tarico as the basis for claiming that Driscoll pointed the finger at Gayle Haggard when Ted Haggard was caught with meth and a male prostitute. This looks like a fourth hand account basis for backing up a claim that doesn't hold up.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061116040025/http://theresurgence.com/md_blog_2006-11-03_evangelical_leader_quits

Go read it in full.  Here's the more notorious bullet point.
Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.

There's nothing in there referring to any Haggards at all.  Some authors and bloggers transformed this into a comment about Gayle Haggard by force of will.  Nobody asked how on earth Mark Driscoll was going to be constantly probing other pastors in active ministry about whether they were satisfied with their sex lives with their wives.  How many was "most" supposed to be referring to? Five?  Twenty?  Seven hundred? The obviously rhetorical flourish apparently meant nothing and a variety of people seized on the bullet point as having to mean something about Gayle Haggard. 

Let's not forget that Driscoll has spent about a decade telling guys that their standard of beauty is their wife and not some external standard of beauty.  By this paradigm how is it possible for a wife to "let herself go" if she is, in whatever shape she takes, her husband's standard of beauty?  Tarico's piece relying on essentially fourth-hand back-up for an easily disproven statement is the second most unfortunate and avoidable factual error in the alternet/Salon article.

Then we get to the very next paragraph and we have an anecdote that, while basically true, never gets backed up by any primary citation. Tarico wrote of Driscoll:

Another time, he set the blogosphere abuzz by recounting a self-congratulatory story in which he advised a woman in his congregation that she should apologize to her husband for the sin of not
“serving” him, and then should get down on her knees and give him a blow job. By Driscoll’s account this excellent advice caused the husband to start attending church.


And the source?
http://barthsnotes.com/2009/06/27/mark-driscoll-slammed-by-baptist-press-over-sex-teaching/

Hey, not the worst second hand source as far as things go but why didn't Tarico or her editors go a step further? It's not like Peter Lumpkins hadn't presented a synopsis of the content years ago.

http://peterlumpkins.typepad.com/files/driscoll-scotland-sermon-copypdf.pdf

And it's not as though the sermon has not been made available recently. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sNVDyW-ws

At this point what reason can there be for not citing the primary source, Mark Driscoll himself, instead of relying on second and third hand commentaries?  To be sure, Mars Hill Church and associates have purged content at an epic rate in the last month but it's still possible to find the materials that have been getting purged.  This anecdote from Driscoll about oral sex from the Scotland sermon can be sourced and verified and it's a shame that Tarico's article didn't go the full distance in establishing the credibility of the account. 

On to the next paragraph where ... :

In Mars Hill theology, female members are viewed through the lens of complementarianism, a theological position that prescribes separate roles for women and men including male headship. A woman being advised to get down on her knees and give her husband a blow job represents just one of a spectrum of submissive behaviors touted for females, who are encouraged to find their meaning in the traditional roles of wife and mother. The virginity of women is prized, and by some reports Driscoll’s late discovery and fury that his wife had sex with another male as a teenager became bizarrely significant in their relationship and in the life of the church even though he himself was not a virgin when he married.

Let's just float the idea that complementarianism may be described as the proposal that sex differences are, in general, biologically derived and that a set of specialized trade-offs in the genders can be inferred as the basis from which differentiation in gender role can be inferred.  The problem in proposing that "complementarianism" is a theological position is that the idea that sex differences play out in practical ways could, in theory, be an entirely secular proposal. 

Now Tarico went on to say the virginity of women is prized.  So is the virginity of anybody who isn't married at Mars Hill Church.  The report Tarico proposes made the statement that Mark Driscoll made a late discovery that his wife had sex with another male as a teenager comes out of thin air.  There's nothing presented as direct evidence that Kyle Firstenberg ever even proposed this idea that Tarico magically extracts from nowhere in particular at Firstenberg's blog.

That neither Mark nor Grace Driscoll were virgins when they met each other is recounted by none other than Mark Driscoll himself in page 7 of Real Marriage. It's the first sentence at the top of the page, no less.  Even if, against all odds, Tarico thought Kyle Firstenberg made any claim to the effect that Mark was angry to discover Grace wasn't a virgin, even if Firstenberg had ever made such a claim (and there's no evidence he has) Mark Driscoll's own account sets the issue to rest.  Tarico could have avoided all of this by, once again, consulting primary source material. 

The closest thing I could spot at Firstenberg's blog to anything Tarico seems to have found in it is the following:

http://sinrepentancegraceforgiveness.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-official-charges-against-mark.html

You have led the staff in bitterness and rage for years because of your unforgiven sin that Grace committed against you. (This was very obvious in the abusive tone during staff meetings and trainings for several years, leading to demoralization and fear.)

But there's nothing there indicating the nature of what Mark perceived Grace's sin against him to have been.  

The unique element of the Mark Driscoll narrative about discovering that Grace had cheated on him in an early stage of their relationship was not the discovery itself but the attribution of this discovery by Mark Driscoll to a dream/oracle he had, in his account at Real Marriage, shortly before the birth of their first child, Ashley Driscoll.  Here at Wenatchee The Hatchet we've examined how the nightmare that led Mark to wake up, throw up, and stay up all night shortly before Ashley's birth as recounted in the 2012 book seems similar to the 2006 account in Confessions of a Reformission Rev of a dream Mark Driscoll said he had a few years after Ashley Driscoll's birth but that he considered a demonic attack.  That is discussed at some length over here.

Tarico, unfortunately, chose to emphasize the unsupportable and easily disprovable claim that Mark Driscoll thought Grace was a virgin when he met her.  Tarico's article not only makes a statement that can be refuted by direct quotation of Mark Driscoll, the statement that Mark was furious to discover Grace wasn't a virgin can't be attributed in any clear way to anything Kyle Firstenberg published at his blog.  Tarico or an editor seems to have simply seized this assertion about Mark angrily discovering Grace had sex with other men out of thin air.

At length we get to the paragraph referring to some Janet Merford rather than Janet Mefferd. We'll skip ahead to this:

Then, in early March, another ideological ally, World Magazine, reported that church funds had been used to buy thousands of copies of Driscoll’s book Real Marriage (written with his wife, Grace) in an attempt to force it onto the bestseller list. The books were purchased by Driscoll’s publicist through a variety of channels to make it appear that the sales came from an array of booksellers and buyers. In a deal signed by Mars Hill executive pastor John Sutton Turner, over $200,000 changed hands. The contract specified that the church would “provide a minimum of 6,000 names and addresses for the individual orders and at least 90 names and address [sic] for the remaining 5,000 bulk orders. Please note that it is important that the make up of the 6,000 individual orders include at least 1,000 different addresses with no more than 350 per state.”

If there were any demonstrated history of any connection between World Magazine and Mars Hill Church it would be an incredible find!  Readers of Alternet and Salon may not particularly care for World Magazine and that's as would be expected, but Warren Smith's articles establishing that Mars Hill Church and Result Source contracted to put Real Marriage on the NYT bestseller list is more actual journalism, in the opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet, than anything in Tarico's article.  Tarico could be generally correct in observing that the most trenchant criticism of Driscoll has been coming from evangelicals and religious conservatives rather than self-identified progressives or emergents but leading the paragraph saying that World Magazine is an "ideological ally" may just be a reminder that this piece appeared at AlterNet and then Salon. 

Now we get to a bit further on in the article.
In a rare public moment of contrition, via a letter published on Reddit, Driscoll committed never to game the bestseller list again, and further, said he would pull back from his place in the spotlight.

No on all counts.  Mark Driscoll's letter, which has made the rounds, was probably published to The City. It was leaked to several outside parties and found its way on to Warren Throckmorton's blog and to Reddit.  It was never published on Reddit by anyone that can be demonstrated to be Mark Driscoll.  If anything, given that Wenatchee The Hatchet published content leaked from The City through basically the entire 2013 calendar year, and given that Stephanie Drury posted a statement from Mark Driscoll dated Dec 18, 2013 to Twitter, it would be safe to suggest at this point that Mars Hill has been aware how unsecure content from The City has been and how quickly it can be leaked to outsiders.  The tentative opinion of Wenatchee The Hatchet has been that the people who leaked the open letter and published it may have inadvertently given MH some fantastic PR.

That a variety of Christian news outlets reported the open letter that was published to The City as though it were a public act of contrition simply reinforced the unreality.  At no point has Mark Driscoll addressed that seven of his published books showed evidence of plagiarism.  When Mefferd confronted him directly on air about plagiarism Driscoll pleaded that he may have made a mistake and that a mistake is not a sin.  Intellectual property lawyers may or may not care about intent in dealing with a perceived violation and the intent did not seem to be foremost in the concerns raised when, in 2011, a cease and desist letter got sent out to a church perceived to have infringed on MH logo and trademark.  You can go read about that at your leisure. 

So, not only has Mark Driscoll not publicly addressed plagiarism in his books, the BOAA publicly stood by Driscoll and the executive elders amid what it claimed were false accusations.
... The BOAA stands unreservedly behind Pastors Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas as the Executive Elders of Mars Hill Church. We deeply appreciate their endurance through false accusation, their submission to authority, and their humility where regrettable decisions from the past have come to light.

Meanwhile, as Throckmorton has been documenting at his Patheos blog, the publishers of Mark Driscoll's books have been steadily and quietly correcting editions and adding citations in the wake of the plagiarism controversy.  It's worth noting that at no point in any of Mark Driscoll's internal statements to The City that have been leaked (assuming their wording has been preserved) has he ever even conceded that there has been a plagiarism controversy.  There is no evidence, yet, of public contrition about anything.

While Firstenberg's primary account seems to be holding up Wenatchee The Hatchet is not ideally situated to comment on whether Tarico accurately describes Firstenberg as seeking to start a MH franchise in OC.  Reports have had it that it was Bogardus who had a more prominent role in spear-heading the start of MH OC and that Firstenberg's role was a supporting one. 

Now regarding Mars Hill Refuge, Tarico may simply have failed to understand the significance of the language employed within Mars Hill Church.  IF you didn't sign a membership covenant (i.e. contract) then you were never formally a member of Mars Hill Church.  Period.  Jamie Munson's odd 2007 era bylaws withstanding that claimed even regular attenders could be disciplined as though they were members, there's a difference between a regular attender of a Mars Hill campus or church plant and a contracted member.  From the Mars Hill perspective Sophia couldn't be a former member if she never signed even one membership covenant.  This is not a mundane detail.  By refusing to sign the covenant Sophia demonstrated a clearer understanding of what was at stake than Tarico seems to have. 

Moving along, this paragraph has some unfortunate fuzziness about facts and details. Tarico's piece states.

In March, a Mars Hill blogger and elder, a naturopath by profession, was stripped of his professional license because his idiosyncratic cancer treatments, often provided to members of church family, were exposed as failing to meet minimal standards of evidence and efficacy. When the problem hit the Seattle paper, Mars Hill removed his posts from their Resurgence blog. But the incident raises broader questions about how authoritarianism, group think, suspension of disbelief, and in-group trust at Mars Hill may contribute to vulnerability on the part of members.

The man is never named and so one could only speculate as to his identity.  But John Catanzaro's license suspension has been covered by the local press and Wenatchee The Hatchet has a whole series of posts tagged in connection to Catanzaro.  Catanzaro, so far, cannot be proven to have even been a member of Mars Hill Church, let alone an elder in either a paid or unpaid capacity.  It remains to be seen how his appeal of his license suspension plays out but he's successfully withstood legal action against him in the past and it is entirely possible he may withstand this recent controversy.  That Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill have opted to purge rather than wait and see is what it is. 

This paragraph from Tarico unfortunately suggests that authoritarianism, group think, suspension of disbelief and in-group trust can apply to any side of any ideological spectrum.  Someone should have caught the various demonstrated factual errors before this article ever saw print. 

Sure, cumulatively a lot of the basic narrative in the Tarico article holds up but there are enough egregious and preventable factual errors paragraph by paragraph that, in its way, it manages to function as a kind of PR for MH to MH regulars.  But on a paragraph by paragraph basis Tarico's article bungles so many basic, easily established points in the history of Mars Hill Church in general and Mark Driscoll in particular it's unfortunate both AlterNet and Salon ran with this piece.  When numerous statements in Tarico's article can be shown to be inaccurate based on direct quotations from Mark Driscoll himself her article has problems, significant problems.  It's a shame Salon picked up the AlterNet piece and ran with it because it may be one of the most widely disseminated articles about Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll dealing with 2013 controversies may have the largest number of avoidable and egregious factual errors. 

a little word for people who left Mars Hill, your new ecclesiology won't save you, either

Word gets around and so sometimes Wenatchee The Hatchet hears about people who have left Mars Hill for this or that denominational enclave. Of course Wenatchee The Hatchet appreciates denominations of various kinds (I happen to be Presbyterian) but if there was a key lesson to be learned in the history of Mars Hill Church it's that your ecclesiology won't save you.  Your ecclesiology won't keep your church movement/institution/organization from going off the rails. 

If there are character issues in the leadership it doesn't matter how great your ecclesiological systems are.  The great temptation for some former Mars Hill people is to imagine that because there was a cult of personality at Mars Hill Church the alternative to this is a traditional ecclesiology with formal checks and balances.  Carl Trueman has been stumping for this but much as I agree with a variety of things Carl Trueman has had to say I'm siding with Steve Hays in doubting that ecclesiology in itself solves anything.  Presbyterian though I may be I'll be first to say the pastoral epistles do not prescribe a Presbyterian polity.  Baptist congregational leadership could be just as effective.  What matters in the pastoral epistles is not so much a specific ecclesiological polity as the character of those who hold whatever offices, formal or informal, may exist in a local Christian community. 

Not that I don't agree with a lot of what Carl Trueman has had to say in the last six months, it's just that if we're going to propose that an ecclesiological system will somehow ensure that cults of personality are less likely to happen we need to stop deceiving ourselves.  The character of the people in whatever capacity they are entrusted with has to be assessed first.  As some of the formerly young, restless and Reformed start approaching middle-age they need, in particular, to realize that the shift from being Mars Hill to Presbyterian or some other actually Reformed denomination will not actually eliminate the risk of a personality cult.  In fact the are arguably a number of cults of personality in Presbyterianism in spite of the theoretically better-than-Mars Hill ecclesiology some might be tempted to say they've found.  Better the congregational Arminian Baptist community that's not run by a cult of personality than the Presbyterian community that has the check sand balances on paper but functionally runs on one person's charisma. 

Remember, folks who left Mars Hill, it once had that plurality of elders and look how that's played out?  It can happen anywhere regardless of what does or doesn't happen on paper.  Politics about dominant personalities and the infighting that can breed in all directions can happen anywhere.  Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

on Nathan and David--don't miss the forest for the trees, David's abuse of royal power made his other sins possible

http://www.biblestudytools.com/2-samuel/12.html
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Samuel+12

The story of Nathan confronting David is well-known.  Now there are those who doubt the historicity of David altogether and some have gone so far as to propose everything to do with Nathan is fiction invented as a defense for the kingship of Solomon (not that we're going to get into that in this post) but let's consider the narrative for a bit as it is.

It's commonly understand Nathan confronted David about his sin of committing adultery with Bathsheba and arranging for the death (murder) of Uriah the Hittite.  Those things are certainly bad. 

But Nathan points out that David was made king over Israel and received his predecessor Saul's house and wives.  In case people weren't paying attention to this one of Saul's wives is named Ahinoam and David's wife mentioned before Abigail is named Ahinoam.  There's debate about whether Ahinoam could have been David's wife after having been Saul's wife. Joel Baden's not entirely persuasive proposal is that David stole Ahinoam from Saul in a bid for kingship and that this was why Saul wanted to kill David.  Baden proposes that Jonathan is nothing more than a literary fiction invented to be the surrogate for the sympathetic reader, which might be a way to discount that if Ahinoam, wife of Saul, was mother to Jonathan it's hard to see what the case would be for David deciding to marry Jonathan's mother, wife of Saul. 

But that Nathan states that David got Saul's harem and estate after Saul's death seems clear enough from Nathan's rebuke of David.  Here's what Nathan says on behalf of God regarding all that:

I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.

More wives would have been okay (and for people who understand that reproduction and preservation of the family line was paramount the practice of polygamy may not seem appealing but it makes sense, much like in our time if you accept that a sexual union is predicated on mutual attraction and pleasure rather than fostering business ties in contemporary society then certain subsidiary decisions like how to snub unwanted suitors and what constitutes being sexually desirable will flow from that.  Certain things are considered socially acceptable and normal once certain values are given.David was the king who succeeded Saul and David got the harem and God said that if this had been too little He would have given David more.

But before we jump straight to David taking another man's wife and having him killed how was David able to do this?  Because he was the king.  If David was being confronted merely about the consequences of his sins for individuals then what was going on with Nathan's rebuke including a
pronouncement on the future of David's dynasty?
vs 10-11
Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’

“This is what the Lord says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity on you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight. ¹² You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel.’”

David's sins were private and possible because of the power and authority he had as king.  Notice that David does not die but Nathan warns that because David has shown utter contempt for the word of the Lord by doing what he has done (using his royal station to take another man's wife and having the man murdered) David's child of Bathsheba was going to die and the sword was never going to depart from the Davidic dynasty.  Out of David's own house strife and calamity would come.  If we only read this narrative as an account of David's sin as an individual and not as a king and the head of a dynasty who abused his station then the punishment won't make any sense.  Why did a baby die because David stole a man's wife and killed the man?  Well, let's propose that it s because in so doing David annihilated Uriah's possibility of a legacy and a future altogether.  God exacting punishment on a nascent dynasty for abusing its royal station to abrogate any possibility of a family's future makes more sense if we keep in mind the norms that are implied or inherent in the narrative.

Now as some have pointed out about 2 Samuel 11, in the time when kings go to war David was at his home.  We could propose that David came upon his particularly notorious sins because he was already not doing what was described as customary for kings to do at a given time of the year.

All of this, so far, should be obvious but when Christians invoke the story of Nathan and David it tends to come up as a way to discuss confrontation of the individual sins when we would do well to remind ourselves what Nathan was clearly and ultimately confronting was David's misuse of royal power and resources for purely personal benefit over against the benefit of Israel as a whole and over against what was beneficial to a loyal servant of the king.  It was arguably because David was willing to do this that later Ahithophel opted to join Absalom's rebellion.  There are some moral failings leaders can permit themselves that cause, according to Nathan, their household to fall into calamity in a way where the sword never departs from it. 

Earlier in the books of Samuel we saw the priestly house of Eli was eventually completely deposed because of its misuse and abuse of power.  Samuel came to replace Eli and yet Samuel's own nepotism led to his corrupt sons being given charge over things, and it was the corruption of Samuel's sons that was part of the reason Israel wanted a king.  So the theme of dynastic corruption in spite of the best qualities of founding patriarchs is rampant in the Samuel-Kings narrative overall.  If even the best judges and kings end up having abominable children then the worst can hardly be better. 

David's sins were done in secret with the benefit of royal power but they eventually led to public chaos, death and discord.  As Nathan predicted, the chaos and enmity would emerge from within David's own household.  The royal/dynastic privilege David had used to take a man's wife and have him killed, depriving him of any future family becomes ironically inverted and subverted through the majority of chaos coming from intra-dynastic bloodshed and fighting.

All this is fairly obvious but as a teacher I knew in college once put it, never underestimate the obvious.

When people ask where there is a Nathan to confront a David this seems to presuppose an abuse of essentially royal authority.  If we live in an era that has a new variation on the divine right of kings then kings are defended regardless of what they may have done or said in private.  Yet when David was deposed by Absalom and accused of having shed the blood of the entire house of Saul he didn't seek to defend himself.  He trusted that this, too, was a providential outworking of the rebuke given to him by Nathan from the Lord about what would happen because David had abused royal privilege to please himself over against serving the people he was appointed over.  David isn't held up as a righteous king because he didn't sin in horrible ways so much as because when he was confronted with the reality of his misuse of royal power and and authority to serve himself against the best interests of the kingdom he admitted directly to his sins.  Saul, who had defended his actions as justifiable in the heat of the moment and in response to the clamor of the people, did not fare quite as well. 

And in the long run Nathan aids Bathsheba in her subterfuge to get Solomon on the throne so it's important to observe that even a Nathan isn't above political intrigue and taking sides.  It may well be God wanted Solomon on the throne but how Solomon was installed was not necessarily admirable.  Within two generations the house of David wasn't even ruling all of Israel any longer.  Solomon multipled wives and chariots, taxed the people, and set up forced labor to build monuments to establish his legacy while worshipping other gods in addition to Yahweh.  Rehoboam's even greater egotism fractured the temporarily united kingdom.  It might be difficult to overstate the level of disaster that was cumulatively visited on the house of David in the wake of his use of royal power to take a man's wife and have him killed.  If we forget the dynastic level of the sin and the dynastic implications of that sin then we fail to fully appreciate what the narrative of Samuel-Kings presents to us. 

Let's consider that if we're talking about a role like being king of Israel that the line between a "mistake" and a sin in that time and place was sometimes non-existent.  One of David's last acts as king was to take a census against the counsel of Joab.  For those who subscribe to the idea that the Torah wasn't anywhere close to formed the prohibition against census-taking might be moot but in any event the point is that God incited David to take a census in Samuel and in Kings Satan is the agent and David realizes that in setting up the census he sinned against the Lord.  It also was considered a sin that led to a plague as one of the lesser calamities to befall Israel.  The general point is that David is shown as not merely owning that he made mere mistakes but that he sinned against the Lord and brought real death and disaster on God's people through those sins.  If we attempt to frame the reactions of Saul and David in terms of their response to both private and public confrontation about error Saul's reaction might be broadly summarized as "mistakes were made" and David's reactions could be broadly summarized as "I have sinned against the Lord". 

MHC BOAA sent letters in 2013 inviting feedback, what did these letters look like? What did they say? Possible sample for consideration

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/03/27/leadership-board-at-mars-hill-church/

Dear Mars Hill Leaders,
I wanted to take the opportunity to give you, the current leaders of Mars Hill Church, an update as to the status of some of what we’ve been working on as a board over the course of the past year. Thank you for all that you do. We know it is extra difficult right now, but good fruit is coming out of these trials!

On May 10, 2013, a now former elder filed formal charges against Pastor Mark Driscoll and other leaders at Mars Hill. While stating that he had not personally been sinned against by Pastor Mark, he had at least seven unnamed witnesses who would testify to the offenses and hurts he claimed, which if found to be substantiated, could result in disqualification. We requested the names of the witnesses to exercise Matthew 5:23-25, but he refused to disclose them. While the issues cited as evidence from these charges came from anonymous sources, the issues all revolved around the theme of mistreatment of fellow leaders and staff. As the governing body responsible for the accountability of Mars Hill’s senior leaders, the Board took these charges extremely seriously.

In an effort to substantiate the validity of the anonymous charges, we immediately sent out over one hundred letters to former elders and staff at Mars Hill Church from the previous two years, inviting their feedback and perspectives regarding their time on staff at the church, particularly their interactions with Pastor Mark and the Executive Elders. We received eighteen responses. [emphasis added] While some were very positive, every response was read and reread, looking for anything that would disqualify Pastor Mark and any other Mars Hill leaders from serving, or that would require further investigation. Additionally, the Board looked for repetitive patterns that may also lead to potential disqualification. After a thorough review, the charges were determined to be non-disqualifying. [emphasis added] However, the Executive Elders were individually and corporately given corrective direction by the Board. Those corrective actions have been followed and have been bearing fruit over the last seven months. We have been very encouraged to see the Executive Elders learn, grow, and repent where needed.

However, we are hungry for reconciliation and are continually grieved that many offenses and hurts are still unresolved. We want to seek out and hear the hurts in a biblical manner. A Board-approved reconciliation process is currently underway and is being overseen by Dr. Paul Tripp who flew to Seattle and recently spent a day with the Executive Elders. He has also been in conversation with a person who is very capable of facilitating these reconciliations. Additionally, each of the Executive Elders has taken the initiative to reach out to people with whom they may need to reconcile. Our prayer is that as a church we can learn from this experience as we continue to grow in love and grace.

You need to know that I and the other Board members have witnessed the Holy Spirit’s work in Pastors Mark, Dave and Sutton as they’ve grieved deeply over the hurts and sorrows that they’ve been the source of. Their hearts yearn for repentance and reconciliation with those that have been hurt and offended.

By God’s grace, the reconciliation process will continue to move forward one person at a time.
Michael Van Skaik
Chairman,
Board of Advisors and Accountability

So that's the material published by Warren Throckmorton that appears to be a letter from Michael van Skaik, Chairman of Board of Advisors and Accountability.

We've already discussed that 18 out of more than 100 is a small sample, too small to be statistically significant in any fashion.  But what we haven't discussed yet is what such a follow-up process might have looked like.  What did those more than 100 former elders and staff get notified they were being contacted about?

Well, Wenatchee The Hatchet has been given documents that were part of a 2013 exit interview process.  Wenatchee The Hatchet has also been given permission to republish content from the exit interview materials.  Since by Van Skaik's account only 18 of 100+ responded there's no reason the identity of the party will be a mystery to them.  "If" this document is a sample of the kind of materials the BOAA sent out circa May 2013 in response to formal charges to investigate whether there were any potentially disqualifying issues in leaders, then perhaps presenting this document will provide an opportunity for further verification of facts and events.

If this was the kind of letter departing elders and staff received from Michael Van Skaik on behalf of the Board of Advisors and Accountability in May 2013 it doesn't indicate a date in the letter itself.  Nor does the letter include any language that suggests that the reason for setting up this review process for former staff might have been because formal charges had been made against Mark Driscoll.  Had former staff and elders who left or got fired from 2011 to 2013 been informed that the reason they were being contacted was because formal charges had been made against Driscoll and others, and that a survey was being conducted because the formal elder who made charges would not reveal the identities of seven anonymous sources, would there have been more than 18 out of 100+ responses?  Obviously we can't know for sure. But if the above letter was what more than 100 people got perhaps someone can verify if this is so.

Here is an attached set of exit interview questions that seems to have come along with the above letter.

Rather than reproduce the entire contents, which are about 9 pages long, WtH will highlight a couple of things that seem pertinent to the leadership culture in general and executive leadership in particular. So the document will be quoted from without being published in full since the main question at hand is whether the two pages themselves might be what was sent out.  Secondarily, quoting from a response to these documents that has been given to Wenatchee The Hatchet is something for consideration.  So ...

in response to 4 the former staffer attached a letter stating resignation of membership from Mars Hill Church. 

In response to 8, the former staffer wrote the following:

8. You can file this under "will never happen" but here is my feedback, specifically for the EE:

a) Mark should fire Sutton for abusing employees under him

b) Mark should then repent for 1. his pride 2. the cult of personality he has cultivated 3. his authoritarianism and 4. his decision to hire Sutton and embrace a business model for running the church that is absolutely foreign and antithetical to New Testament ecclesiology. He should then resign from eldership and leadership of the church until and unless people can honestly say he is "above reproach" without watching to see if their nose is growing.

c) Dave should take a sabbatical wherein he can contemplate why he so willingly and ably provided the glossy PR sheen to all of Mark's destructive and whiplash-like initiatives.

I believe God called Mark and blessed Mars Hill.  But I also believe Mark has, increasingly over the past 6 or 7 years, told God "I'll take it from here". The veracity of his initial calling has no bearing on whether he runs the church today in a destructive way out of his flesh.

It's worth noting that in the middle of May 2013 there was no inkling that seven of Mark Driscoll's books had plagiarism issues and nobody at large, perhaps even in staff at Mars Hill, had any idea that Sutton Turner had signed the contract with Result Source on behalf of Mars Hill Church.  Even the Board of Advisors and Accountability has acknowledged that Mars Hill contracted with Result Source, while crediting the idea of working with them to "outside counsel".  So any response to the above letter and questions would NOT have had any of the news cycle of November 2013 to March 2014 at hand for an assessment of anything.  The letter and exit interview questions were presented as a new standard operating procedure for former staff to participate in without any reference to what else it might be for.  If Van Skaik's most recent communication to Mars Hill is compared to the document given to WtH, which was given a response within May 2013, it looks like Van Skaik has a narrative for Mars Hill members now that doesn't quite match up with the narrative given to former Mars Hill elders and staff back then.

With all that in mind, in response to a question about what feedback he/she had for the executive elders in at least one potential case a former staff considered Mark Driscoll to need to repent of pride, cultivating a cult of personality, having an authoritarian leadership approach, and hiring Sutton Turner in the first place!  That is a pretty strongly worded statement, saying that Mark Driscoll adding Turner to the MH leadership was something to repent of in and of itself regardless of a cult of personality, authoritarian leadership and pride. 

Now it might be understandable if the BOAA would consider a single case of a former staffer considering even hiring Sutton Turner to be in ministry at all at Mars Hill to be a thing to repent of to be less than noteworthy.  If there were only 18 out of more than 100 and this was one of the 18 responses, however, then why not take this small percentage of the 18 as seriously as the 18 were a percentage of the 100+, if the smallness of the sample was already not going to be a matter of concern?

Here are a few statements from the former staffer's letter announcing resignation from membership at Mars Hill

A few statements from the former staff member's letter announcing resignation of membership at Mars Hill Church.  The statements are included in sections with headings regarding concerns that cumulative led the former staffer to also resign membership.  This commentary on the leadership culture at Mars Hill is interesting.

... LEADERSHIP

Mars Hill is led by the Executive Elders. However, neither Pastor Dave nor Pastor Sutton will undertake any serious actions without Pastor Mark's consultation and blessing. That fact, combined with the fact that Pastor Mark is responsible for Pastor Dave and Pastor Sutton being on the EE in the first place, means that Pastor Mark is the de facto leader of Mars Hill Church. In many operational ways, Mars Hill is closer to a bishopric or denomination than a traditional evangelical church. Even so - and somewhat ironically - an average parish priest or denominationally affiliated pastor has far more freedom and latitude than the local lead pastors of Mars Hill.  ... Anyone with their integrity intact and who had to speak honestly would have to agree that, for better or worse, when Pastor Mark says "jump" every other leader at Mars Hill is obliged to say "how high?". Even if Pastor Mark were a virtual Mother Teresa, and a wonderful person to be emulated in every way, the authority vested in him would still be too much for him to responsibly hold. Nor would it comport with the spirit of what I believe Scripture teaches about a plurality of elders and their mutual accountability.

...

MULTI-SITE

Additionally, if Central ultimately controls the budget of all Mars Hill churches, it would seem to militate against the veracity of the claim that these are individual churches and not wholly owned subservient and subsidiary entities. I would prefer that Mars Hill had a more humble stance regarding its multi-site model. Such as: "Yes, we understand that this is without notable precedent in church history, but we think we can tease out a scriptural case for it." Rather, it seems Mars Hill has adopted a more dubious position: "There is clear and unambiguous scriptural support for the multi-site model. Historically, I guess the church was just slow to catch on to that." It strains credulity when Pastor Mark re-casts the New Testament to be giving explicit imprimatur to an organizational model that happens to align with his visions of expansion.

...

"JESUS IS OUR SENIOR PASTOR"

Mars Hill leadership has been too cavalier with the "this is where Jesus is taking us" and "Jesus is our Senior Pastor" language because it absolves leadership from owning up to their responsibility for decisions that are made. It is an unfair rhetorical sleight-of-hand when the changes they want to make are presented as the changes Jesus wants to make.  After all, who can take issue with Jesus' administrative plans, organizational initiatives or ecclesiological convictions? ... Additionally this type of conversation-ending frontloading extends to other areas. For example, when Pastor Mark repeatedly tells us that Pastor Sutton is up at 4am every day praying for all of us, it forestalls legitimate concerns anyone might raise with decisions or actions coming from Pastor Sutton. 

It looks like in at least one case of the possible 18 who responded out of more than a hundred the reservations about the leadership culture seem clear enough.  Too much of the leadership culture was believed by at least one former staffer to be too centralized around the personality of Mark Driscoll and that even executive elders Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner seemed to have the "how high" reaction to cases where Driscoll might say "jump".  Another concern was that since Mars Hill Central (operations?) ultimately controlled the budget of all individual Mars Hill churches these locations were finally not churches so much as franchise extensions and that the entire ecclesiological model seemed to have doubtful exegetical and historical precedent.  Finally, the persistent use of language referring to Jesus as Senior Pastor and use of emotionally charged statements that seemed to pre-empt any distinction between the will of executive leadership and the divine will was another concern that led a former staffer to resign membership from Mars Hill Church. 

Obviously just one potential response out of the 18 from the more than 100 is just that, but if the above letter and questions were what the BOAA sent out perhaps this can be verified by others, possibly in other media settings.