http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
from Pastor Jamie Munson to the elders of Mars Hill Church on September 30, 2007
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
Pastor Bent Meyer - Grounds for Immediate Termination of Employment
* Total lack of trust for Executive leadership and insubordination
* Multiple unfounded accusations from Bent regarding abuse of power, power grabbing and motives of leadership
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorny without permission
* Showing unhealthy family favoritism by establishing son Cameron as spokesman for Salts recap meeting
* No communication with elders regarding Cameron's sin and removal of grace group leadership
Some might conclude this is a political move to gain more support for the bylaws as Paul and bent were outspoken critics of the current direction. [emphasis added] This is not the case, the executive team wants to conduct itself in a way that is full of integrity, walking in the light, under full disclosure and in a decisive manner that best serves Jesus and His church through Mars Hill. If the bylaws don't pass, so be it, we didn't want to wait on what we had determined were necessary and inevitable firings until after the bylaws had been voted into approval because that would have been deceptive. [emphasis added] We made the decision to terminate them now and givem them the option to resign or undergo the full investigation. We have a higher value of being men of integrity than playing politics to swing a vote in our favor.
There's been linking to Jamie Munson these days from Dave Kraft and it's worth revisiting the fact that Dave Kraft was on the Elder Investigative Taskforce that looked into the charges Jamie Munson made as to why Bent Meyer and Paul Petry needed to be fired. Kraft's long association with Ministry Coaching International (Michael Van Skaik was on the board of directors for MCI in 2007 and has since gone on to be on the MH BOAA) has already been noted. Because Munson has recently been hinting that he's looking into leadership consultancy it's worth revisiting the beginning of Jamie Munson's time as Lead Pastor and legal president of Mars Hill Church because basically as soon as he was given the role and drafted bylaws that made himself Lead Pastor this termination and trial scenario flared up.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE REASONS JAMIE MUNSON SAID PAUL PETRY HAD TO BE FIRED
What can be ascertained, if anything, about the charges Munson outlined above?
Let's consider them one by one for the two pastors. For Petry:
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
What does this refer to? Is this a general opening summary, perhaps? Which leadership was Petry continually insubordinate toward? That Jamie Munson had drafted bylaws that made himself legal president and that Paul Petry was engaged to provide comment and feedback on the bylaws can be established over at Joyful Exiles.
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
If this was a project of Ministry Coaching International then even having Dave Kraft appointed to the Elder Investigative Taskforce could have been construed by some as a potential or actual conflict of interest for Kraft. Conversely, if Kraft was connected to both Mars Hill Church and Ministry Coaching International then by now access to the documents that could establish whether or not Munson's specific allegation was legitimate should have been easy and could theoretically be made available to the public now.
After all, if it was MCI that did the coaching program Petry was alleged to have refused participation in then the fastest way to defend the 2007 termination of Petry would seem to be to produce all documentation that would establish whether or not Paul Petry was participating in the Ministry Coaching Program if Ministry Coaching International was doing that program. If Petry didn't participate that would be easy to prove, just as it would be easy to prove if Petry participated. If Petry did participate who was Petry's ministry coach?
For that matter, since a Ministry Coaching Program was in place what documentation can be provided by Mars Hill that this existed? How much did it cost, if it cost anything? Who brokered the arrangement for the Ministry Coaching Program to happen with Mars Hill? This particular stated reason for why Petry was to be terminated immediately could be documented and the allegation is specific enough that someone like Dave Kraft (who was with both MH and MCI at the time, it seems) could potentially clarify.
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
This would imply that Petry had a role within Mars Hill Student Ministry but whether Petry was actually even in that ministry would be hard to establish. Munson's allegations here state that Petry was being divisive and undermining and blame shifting some kind of ministry leadership for misbehavior of children. But Driscoll had been saying for years from the pulpit things such as that "headship means it's your responsibility even if it's not your fault".
And even Munson would have been around at a time when Mark Driscoll said from the pulpit they had no plans to have a childrens ministry because that would unnaturally divide groups of believers that should have fellowship together in church life. This particular allegation of Munson's against Petry may need to be explained in light of what had already been a drastic change within MH culture, the emergence of youth and childrens ministries after years of leadership saying they wouldn't set those up. If Petry was considered divisive for not being supportive of a kids ministry or youth group ministry then he was considered divisive for retaining what had been the historically early stance of the Mars Hill elders.
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
What "public" even meant here is impossible to be certain about. In fact prior to this material being published at Joyful Exiles whatever was being referred to in this particular reason for firing Petry was anything but public. In fact Munson neglects to even explain what the public accusation that Paul Petry allegedly made even was! For that matter Jamie Munson didn't exactly highlight that he was then the Lead Pastor. If Munson believed he was accused of something by Paul Petry in a public setting then what was going on with Munson stating the reasons to terminate Petry after the event happened, and what was the deal with the accuser announcing the appointments of members of the Elder Investigative Taskforce? In normal judicial settings in the United States the plaintiff doesn't simultaneously have the power to be the judge, select the jury, and appoint all the legal counsel ... or does the plaintiff have that option?
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
So does this one mean that basically Mars Hill pastors employed by Mars Hill Church were not supposed to contact the church attorney without permission? What, exactly, was the protocol and process Munson was referring to? Where was it written down and published? This is another case where by now Mars Hill could have easily published for public consideration whatever that protocol and process was.
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
This, too, is vague. Munson had been credited by Mark Driscoll with spotting what has since become the Mars Hill corporate headquarters. There's plenty to read about that in posts about the 50th street building in tagged posts on "real estate and Mars Hill".
What can be ascertained from the cluster or reasons Munson gave for why Paul Petry had to be fired seem to revolve around allegations that Petry disliked the direction he saw Mars Hill Church going in. This could be a reason a pastor might dislike a few programs but simply dissenting from a number of programs hardly seems like grounds for immediate termination in a church with a plurality of elders.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE REASONS JAMIE MUNSON GAVE FOR WHY BENT MEYER SHOULD BE FIRED
* Total lack of trust for Executive leadership and insubordination
Once more with "insubordination". Toward whom? The executive elders, which at that point consisted of Mark Driscoll, Jamie Munson, Scott Thomas and Bubba Jennings (if memory serves). What did that look like? Apparently this ... ?
* Multiple unfounded accusations from Bent regarding abuse of power, power grabbing and motives of leadership
What were Bent Meyer's actual accusations? So far these stated reasons from Munson read less like a case with evidence in hand as much as a summary judgment of a decision that had already been reached.
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorny without permission
Once again, it looks as though Munson was claiming that Mars Hill pastors could not even talk to the church attorney without following some kidn of process or protocol for making any comments about bylaws. Apparently to even do this involved getting permission from ... ? In what kind of business does an employee get fired for talking to the company attorney without having first gotten permission from no one in particular?
* Showing unhealthy family favoritism by establishing son Cameron as spokesman for Salts recap meeting
This statement is mainly interesting for showing that Munson's vocabulary seemed to be so limited he couldn't even use the word "nepotism". But plenty of churches have nepotism as a leadership practice. Wasn't Jamie Munson's own brother-in-law a pastor at Mars Hill by then? Wasn't it customary for pastors to have wives who were deacons pretty much by default? It had been this way since as far back as 1999 and 2000, what precisely made Bent Meyer having his son in an associated ministry capacity so problematic for Jamie Munson? Wouldn't the head of the EIT Scott Thomas eventually go on to work in organizations in which his son also found work? What made it such a sticky point for Munson that Meyer had his son in a ministry capacity while no concern was expressed about the father/son trajectory of Scott and Derrin Thomas? It can't have just been that a father appointed a son to a role.
* No communication with elders regarding Cameron's sin and removal of grace group leadership
This statement seems to presuppose familiarity on the part of all recipients as to whatever that sin was. That's not particularly of interest to Wenatchee the Hatchet as a thing in itself ,but it's interesting to note that Munson's statement supposes universal famliarity with this sin. It would seem that the earlier statement withstanding nepotism couldn't have really be the main problem Munson had with Meyer ... if it was Munson who was formulating the reasons for terminations rather than someone else.
What is worth noting about this communication from Munson is that it was Munson, who had drafted bylaws making himself legal president of Mars Hill and Lead Pastor after being given the Lead Pastor role, it seems, by Mark Driscoll, who hammered away at the failure of these two men to respect his authority and judgment. But even by this time people could have had reasons to doubt whether someone who went from being a waitperson at Bucca de Beppo before becoming a Mars Hill intern and eventually an executive pastor had really picked up as much practical business experience as was sometimes credited to him.
But we're not done just yet. Munson went on from the numerous reasons given for the immediate termination of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer to saw the following:
Some might conclude this is a political move to gain more support for the bylaws as Paul and bent were outspoken critics of the current direction. [emphasis added] This is not the case, the executive team wants to conduct itself in a way that is full of integrity, walking in the light, under full disclosure and in a decisive manner that best serves Jesus and His church through Mars Hill. If the bylaws don't pass, so be it, we didn't want to wait on what we had determined were necessary and inevitable firings until after the bylaws had been voted into approval because that would have been deceptive. [emphasis added] We made the decision to terminate them now and given them the option to resign or undergo the full investigation. We have a higher value of being men of integrity than playing politics to swing a vote in our favor.
So Meyer and Petry were outspoken critics of the current direction but firing them was not a political move. Because Munson just said so. The executive team, according to Munson, wanted to conduct itself in a way that was full of integrity and under full disclosure and so on.
Like this?
Calling what had happened up until October 11, 2007 "a conciliatory process" doesn't just stretch the imagination, it's demonstrably not true. Having an executive elder lie to a person at Mars Hill and use an Acts 29 Network email address to convey that false message is not a promising event in what was supposedly an already completed conciliatory process. What was in fact about to happen was that Thomas was going to present some kind of case with EIT members Dave Kraft, Gary Shavey and Steve Tompkins for why the removal of Meyer and Petry from employment was justified. Petry had even been informed by Scott Thomas by that point that he didn't even need to be at his own trial.
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-10-10-2007-no-show-for-trial.pdf
From: Pastor Scott Thomas <scott@acts29network.org>
To: Paul Petry
CC: "Steve Tompkins" <st@marshillchurch.org>; "Pastor Dave Kraft" >dave@marshilchurch.org>; "Pastor Gary Shavey" <gary@theresurgence.com>
Sent: Wednesday October 10, 2007 4:08pm
Subject: RE: Elder Investigation Taskforce
Paul,
The hearing has been moved to October 15. The taskforce was meeting with you to hear your response to their questions in fulfillment of Article III, Sec. E. Today's outcome will be conveyed to the full council of elders for a judgment. All four of us agree that we adequately heard your responses to the charges/accusations and your presence will not be necessary. We believe that in so doing, we are fulfilling the requirements of the Bylaws. This is something that we discussed and consulted on with the lawyer. The elders will submit their vote by show of hands.
Thanks,
Scott
So whatever Kraft has said lately Scott Thomas said on Dave Kraft's behalf that Dave Kraft was convinced that he had heard Paul Petry's responses to the charges and accusations that had been made by Jamie Munson and that Kraft did not consider it to be necessary for Paul Petry to be present at his own trial. That's what Scott Thomas was saying, and he was saying something similar on behalf of Gary Shavey and Steve Tompkins.
Kraft, Shavey, Tompkins and Thomas can feel free to speak up any time now as to what all of that evidence was they had collected and why each and every single one of them were convinced that, according to Scott Thomas, that they had adequately heard Paul Petry's response to Jamie Munson's accusations and allegations.
So we've got a case where the head of the EIT lied about what had happened, saying a conciliatory process had been completed when he'd really just told Petry to not bother showing up to his own trial. On October 1, 2007 Mark Driscoll shared that there was "a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus" and "by God's grace it'll be a mountain before we're done" or something like that.
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
Because this link at Joyful Exiles doesn't work (or at MH) you can go here to hear what Driscoll said at the end of the Nehemiah series about how there were some, even in the leadership of Mars Hill Church, that he wanted to go Old Testament on.
There's nothing in what Driscoll said about "we fired two guys" for the "first time" in the history of Mars Hill Church that sounds like there was a conciliatory process going on. Even if we account for the reality that Mark Driscoll and the leaders let Brad Currah go years before Meyer and Petry were fired in 2007 the 2007 terminations could not in any sense be construed as "a conciliatory process" that was completed by October 11, 2007.
So Munson insisted that firing the two men in leadership who disagreed with the new direction was not in any way a political move but that the firings were "both necessary and inevitable".
And yet how many pastors voted in the bylaws Jamie Munson had drafted once Paul Petry and Bent Meyer had been fired and set aside? All of them.
In the last few years there has been a narrative presented by MH PR to the effect that the problem in the past was that all the elders had to agree on everything for anything to get done. This clearly couldn't have been the case if the two men who DIDN'T AGREE WITH the direction the church was going in were fired and the Lead Pastor said the firings were necessary and inevitable. This looks more like a case where everyone was expected to agree and those who didn't could (and would) actually get fired and then subjected to a trial to underline the point that they weren't on mission.
So there's nothing in Munson's email outlining the allegations against Meyer and Petry that seems to be anything BUT politics in terms of bylaws and ecclesiology. Munson went so far as to make several of the allegations/accusations specifically about ways in which he felt he was not respected or submitted to by just two of 24 pastors at Mars Hill Church.
After all of that, if there was really a full investigation there's no reason Mars Hill Church couldn't publish the entire set of documents and correspondence connected to that investigation, is there? Normally investigations involve the collection of and the consideration of evidence. At least two members of the 2007 EIT, Gary Shavey and Steve Tompkins, are even still within leadership at Mars Hill Church in some kind of capacity. Dave Kraft has since moved on but his connections to Ministry Coaching International (if still current) could give him an opportunity, in theory, to verify whether there was any legitimacy to Jamie Munson's accusation against Paul Petry that Petry was refusing to cooperate with the Ministry Coaching Program. Actually, technically it's been conveyed to Wenatchee The Hatchet that as of yesterday Jamie Munson himself is still listed as a pastor at Mars Hill on The City. If Munson doesn't at some point publicly address his handling of the trials of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer then by now it's a lot more public than whatever Munson himself accused Petry of saying seven years ago, isn't it?
Jamie Munson's role in the 2007 termination and trials of former pastors Paul Petry and Bent Meyer is too central to that period of Mars Hill history to be ignored. In fact Munson's allegations about Meyer and Petry were explicit in listing their distrust and disrespect of him as key reasons they had to be fired. And yet Jamie Munson himself stopped being Lead Pastor in 2011 and Mars Hill has for some reason scrubbed even the announcement of that transition. By June 2012 Mark Driscoll was sharing from the pulpit that every single campus of Mars Hill had been running systemic deficits. Mars Hill sold the Lake City campus at a loss after shutting it down because, as Munson put it, they weren't getting the numbers the expected or hoped for. If Munson's going to present himself as a leader of leaders in the future there are some really specific events in the history of Mars Hill and a history announced by none other than Mark Driscoll of systematic deficits that began to develop since Munson became Lead Pastor that might need some explaining and context. Munson isn't even involved in Storyville Coffee any more.
Munson put a lot of stock in submission and authority but both of these can be earned by demonstrating integrity and competence. The 2007 firings smell too much like insider politics to persuade Wenatchee The Hatchet the firings and trials were done with integrity, and no matter how many times Mark Driscoll may say Mars Hill isn't a wealthy church why a church that rented the city of Ephesus for a day and had signed a contract with Result Source was running systemic deficits by June 2012 has yet to be fully explained. Nor is it clear why even since Sutton Turner took over Jamie Munson's "kingly" role that there have been times where Mars Hill still narrowly avoided its own fiscal cliff. If when Jamie Munson resigned Mark Driscoll stressed that Munson was always above reproach then what's with having lately removed the published public announcement that Munson was stepping down in late 2011? Given that Munson's publicly shared ideas about how you should keep growing your church even when it's not a good idea it's hard to escape the possibility that systemic deficits at Mars Hill could have emerged while he was Lead Pastor and legal president of the organization from 2007 to 2011.
And so far the documents available to us through Joyful Exiles show that Jamie Munson's first major moment in leadership as Lead Pastor was drafting bylaws that made him legal president of Mars Hill and being part of a team that had two men fired for not agreeing with the direction Mars Hill was going. This makes it impossible for Mars Hill Church to claim that the trouble in the past was that everyone had to agree on everything in the leadership culture without the proviso that what this really meant in practice was that those men who DID disagree about some things were urged to resign and then, failing their voluntary resignation, they were fired and then subjected to trials. Practically the first thing did Munson did even before he was technically made legal president of Mars Hill Church was participate in the firing of those who didn't respect or trust his authority, by his own account.
Starting off with two controversial terminations and trials for two pastors at Mars Hill and ending up resigning in late 2011 as Mars Hill spiraled into systemic deficits at every single campus doesn't seem like a sparking track record. Right now Munson isn't even publicly listed as a pastor of Mars Hill Church and the church has even scrubbed away the 2011 announcement that Munson was stepping down. At this point, so far as publicly documentable activity goes, if the trend keeps going the way it's going with Mars Hill purging stuff all that may be left of Jamie Munson's role in leadership at Mars Hill might potentially be what has been documented at Joyful Exiles.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Jamie Munson. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Jamie Munson. Sort by date Show all posts
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Friday, October 04, 2013
Where are they now update 2: Jamie Munson is apparently still a member and a pastor at Mars Hill Downtown
In an earlier post we noticed that Jamie Munson is no longer publicly listed among the pastors of Mars Hill Church. For those who aren't up to speed, Munson resigned from executive eldership in late 2011. Driscoll mentioned that Munson would not be on paid staff abut would remain in eldership at Mars Hill as a pastor.
Mike Anderson, who has no current affiliation with Mars Hill (let's just say we've checked this out and confirmed it a couple of different ways), has mentioned Jamie Munson at his website. Anderson's background includes a variety of projects for Mars Hill over the last few years but he is not currently associated with them.
Anderson, in the following post, mentions Jamie Munson as follows:
http://mikeyanderson.com/you-should-know-jamie-munson
I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. When I was originally hired to get the Resurgence up and running Jamie was my boss’, boss’, boss. He was only 30 years old and was running a multi-million dollar organization with thousands of people involved. It wasn’t until after he moved on that I realized how important his leadership was. I’ve learned a lot from watching Jamie and think it would be worth you bookmarking his blog. -
Anderson's wording might be construed as suggesting Munson has moved on from being in Mars Hill leadership altogether. The Stranger strongly suspects that Storyville Coffee, owned by Jon Phelps, is full of Mars Hill members and advocates. If information conveyed to Wenatchee The Hatchet earlier this week is still reliable ...
Spouse
Haley Munson
Daughter - over 7 years
Orin Munson
Son - over 9 years
Kara Munson
Daughter - almost 11 years
Caleb Munson
Son - over 12 years
Mike Anderson, who has no current affiliation with Mars Hill (let's just say we've checked this out and confirmed it a couple of different ways), has mentioned Jamie Munson at his website. Anderson's background includes a variety of projects for Mars Hill over the last few years but he is not currently associated with them.
Anderson, in the following post, mentions Jamie Munson as follows:
http://mikeyanderson.com/you-should-know-jamie-munson
I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. When I was originally hired to get the Resurgence up and running Jamie was my boss’, boss’, boss. He was only 30 years old and was running a multi-million dollar organization with thousands of people involved. It wasn’t until after he moved on that I realized how important his leadership was. I’ve learned a lot from watching Jamie and think it would be worth you bookmarking his blog. -
Anderson's wording might be construed as suggesting Munson has moved on from being in Mars Hill leadership altogether. The Stranger strongly suspects that Storyville Coffee, owned by Jon Phelps, is full of Mars Hill members and advocates. If information conveyed to Wenatchee The Hatchet earlier this week is still reliable ...
Pastor Jamie Munson
Contact Info Send a Message
Request Friend
Last engaged
about X hours ago.
Membership
Member of Downtown Seattle
Family
Crystal Munson Spouse
Haley Munson
Daughter - over 7 years
Orin Munson
Son - over 9 years
Kara Munson
Daughter - almost 11 years
Caleb Munson
Son - over 12 years
About
Facebook – facebook.com/jamiemunson Twitter – @jamiemunson
Groups
Shared groups: Ballard, Green Lake / Phinney Neighborhood Network, Mars Hill
In: DTS | Aspire, DTS | Deacons, DTS | Elders, DTS | Elders & Wives, DTS | KIDS Parents & Families, DTS | Service Team Check-in, Downtown Seattle, MH KIDS | Downtown Volunteers, MH Kids | Ballard, MH Kids | Ballard: Guests, RNV | MH Kids | Parents, UWD Children's Ministry
then Jamie Munson is still currently at Mars Hill Church Downtown and still listed as a pastor. Not a surprise, Driscoll did mention something about Munson being able to be a pastor at Mars Hill indefinitely and that Munson's welcome to transition back on to paid staff any time.
For people who are wondering, yes, it's content from a profile on The City. Yes, it was current as of some time in the last week or two. No, it's not a given that this profile is still on The City right now but people with access to The City can go look it up, perhaps. When Mike Anderson mentioned that Jamie Munson had moved on that was no doubt a statement made in good faith with the best information he had available at the time of the post.
It's just not clear now that Munson has moved on from Mars Hill in any way, let alone from formal leadership. It may be that Mars Hill Church, for whatever reasons, has decided to simply not list Munson publicly as among its leaders. Given the great level of suspicion with which staff at The Stranger view Storyville Coffee there may be some understandable reasons for deciding that downplaying any and all religious affiliation, let alone Mars Hill Church affiliations, on the Storyville Coffee side of things might benefit from a lack of public disclosure on Mars Hill Church's part about Munson still being a pastor there ... if he is, in fact, still a pastor there in some capacity.
For people who are wondering, yes, it's content from a profile on The City. Yes, it was current as of some time in the last week or two. No, it's not a given that this profile is still on The City right now but people with access to The City can go look it up, perhaps. When Mike Anderson mentioned that Jamie Munson had moved on that was no doubt a statement made in good faith with the best information he had available at the time of the post.
It's just not clear now that Munson has moved on from Mars Hill in any way, let alone from formal leadership. It may be that Mars Hill Church, for whatever reasons, has decided to simply not list Munson publicly as among its leaders. Given the great level of suspicion with which staff at The Stranger view Storyville Coffee there may be some understandable reasons for deciding that downplaying any and all religious affiliation, let alone Mars Hill Church affiliations, on the Storyville Coffee side of things might benefit from a lack of public disclosure on Mars Hill Church's part about Munson still being a pastor there ... if he is, in fact, still a pastor there in some capacity.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Jamie Munson: Own it and Move On--own and move on from what?
http://www.jamiemunson.com/2014/07/11/own-it-and-move-on/
In a somewhat Driscollian fashion, Jamie Munson recounts a story about his son as a way to springboard on to nothing in particular beyond some bromides about leadership and moving on. Precisely what Jamie Munson could own up to and move on from about Mars Hill in the post is impossible to guess at because Munson's not exactly advertising his career at Mars Hill as much these days as he once did. Mars Hill, for its part, has gone from Mark Driscoll publicly sharing that Munson was always above reproach to not taking much effort to even mentioning Jamie Munson's name. And, of course, the link just previously mentioned is utterly dead.
For those who might want to read at least some of that content:
My proposal to the Board of Directors (BOD) is that Pastor Jamie Munson remain an elder at Mars Hill Church Ballard. Following a sabbatical through the end of the year to enjoy his family, rest up, and finish writing a book, he will rejoin us as an unpaid board member at the highest legal level of Mars Hill Church. [Munson ended up on several boards] In God’s providence, the same day that Pastor Jamie made this decision, one of our unpaid BOD members had to resign due to escalating demands at his place of employment. So, while this man will remain an elder at his local Mars Hill Church, it opened a seat on the BOD for an unpaid elder, which Pastor Jamie fills perfectly. We need many more unpaid elders and Pastor Jamie helps us to raise the profile of that service. The plan is simply that Pastor Jamie will remain an elder at Mars Hill indefinitely. He has clearly communicated his desire to stay at Mars Hill and serve as an elder and we welcome this. So, Pastor Jamie is still Pastor Jamie. Also, the door to employment is always open to Pastor Jamie. It has been clearly communicated to him by myself personally and by his performance review team collectively that should he ever change his mind, we would welcome him back on staff at Mars Hill Church. Our bylaws require that our Executive Elder (EE) team have at least three members. Pastor Dave Bruskas and I remain on the EE. Thankfully, Pastor Dave and his family recently moved to Seattle after leading Mars Hill Albuquerque. His leadership, wisdom, and experience come at just the right time and we praise God he is on the team. In God’s providence, the sermon he preached at Mars Hill Ballard will air this Sunday at all our other churches, helping you to get to know him better. To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29.[emphasis added] Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people.
...
We are inviting other churches to join us on this big campaign, and in the grace of God I believe 2012 will be the biggest year we’ve ever had. While we celebrate the past and honor the present, we also need to prepare for the future by God’s grace. We’ve been here before, many times before, in fact. As our church grows, we encounter obstacles and hit ceilings of complexity and need to adjust as necessary to get through the next size barrier. This was true at 200, 800, 2,000, and 6,000, just like the experts predicted. At 10,000 we are there again. I’ve been working on the beginnings of a comprehensive plan, as I can see into the future to 25,000 people a week, Lord willing. A finished version of that document will be released once it is revised with input and change from various leaders in the church, as well as wise counsel from leaders of churches larger than ours who have become friends.
For those who are curious, the most significant early event in Jamie Munson's tenure as Lead Pastor at Mars Hill Church was the termination and trial process for Bent Meyer and Paul Petry. Among the charges Munson formulated for the immediate termination of both men were a couple of points about his authority not being respected.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-discussion-of-jamie-munsons-2007.html
To date Munson has yet to provide an explanation for why the firings of 2007 were both inevitable and necessary. The grounds for immediate termination included allegations of nepotism and of disagreement with ministry programs in spite of the fact that none other than Mark Driscoll himself had pilloried some of the kinds of ministries Munson said Petry had been critical of.
While Munson would eventually explain the bylaws he drafted were needed to architect the church that was Mars Hill Fellowship for a multi-site approach a thorough examination of the 2005 bylaws and the 2007 bylaws does not show that there was more language addressing multi-site.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/06/regrouping-for-jesus-fame-explanation.html
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-29-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-30-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
Munson clearly seemed to consider nothing at all from the 2007 firings and trials to be problematic.
There is a potential lesson here in Munson's absence from the public face of Mars Hill in spite of Mark Driscoll's accolades, and the lesson is that no matter how important you may think your role is (important enough to decide someone needs to be terminated immediately for not respecting you as you think you deserve) you're still a replaceable cog. There's not necessarily any reason to even consider Jamie Munson important to the history of Mars Hill now that the guy with "kingly" gifts has been replace with Sutton Turner, who is himself another guy with "kingly" gifts who isn't fundamentally necessary. Mars Hill is about dudes but what sociologists and psychologists could and have brought to light is that when dudes get together and make systems and organizations those things don't need any one person to survive. It's been shown true of Jamie Munson, former lead pastor and legal president of Mars Hill, and it may yet even be true of Mark Driscoll himself some day ... assuming at this point that Mars Hill survives Driscoll's bound-to-be-decreasing relevance in the grand arc of human history.
As for what, if anything, Munson would consider worth owning and moving on from his tenure at Mars Hill that would be interesting to consider ... if Munson had said anything other than pious bromides about generic leadership concepts that have no connection to any jobs he's actually had as a leader. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, at this point in the history of Jamie Munson's public career if he doesn't address Joyful Exiles directly at some point it may be the only publicly available witness to his leadership style and substance anyone may be able to consult.
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
Celebrate the fact that Pastor Jamie is Mars Hill 1.0. He is exactly why Mars Hill exists. A lost young person meets Jesus and grows to be a godly leader, spouse, and parent who loves and leads well by the grace of God with humility and passion. He has given us every day of his life since he was 19 years of age. Mars Hill does not exist as a church of more than maybe a few hundred without God’s grace through Pastor Jamie. If a book were written about what God is doing among us, at least one whole chapter would be devoted to telling the story of God’s grace in Pastor Jamie’s life.
... whether or not a book about Mars Hill gets written remains to be seen but Wenatchee The Hatchet is willing to guess that Mars Hill would not want Wenatchee The Hatchet writing that book.
In a somewhat Driscollian fashion, Jamie Munson recounts a story about his son as a way to springboard on to nothing in particular beyond some bromides about leadership and moving on. Precisely what Jamie Munson could own up to and move on from about Mars Hill in the post is impossible to guess at because Munson's not exactly advertising his career at Mars Hill as much these days as he once did. Mars Hill, for its part, has gone from Mark Driscoll publicly sharing that Munson was always above reproach to not taking much effort to even mentioning Jamie Munson's name. And, of course, the link just previously mentioned is utterly dead.
For those who might want to read at least some of that content:
My proposal to the Board of Directors (BOD) is that Pastor Jamie Munson remain an elder at Mars Hill Church Ballard. Following a sabbatical through the end of the year to enjoy his family, rest up, and finish writing a book, he will rejoin us as an unpaid board member at the highest legal level of Mars Hill Church. [Munson ended up on several boards] In God’s providence, the same day that Pastor Jamie made this decision, one of our unpaid BOD members had to resign due to escalating demands at his place of employment. So, while this man will remain an elder at his local Mars Hill Church, it opened a seat on the BOD for an unpaid elder, which Pastor Jamie fills perfectly. We need many more unpaid elders and Pastor Jamie helps us to raise the profile of that service. The plan is simply that Pastor Jamie will remain an elder at Mars Hill indefinitely. He has clearly communicated his desire to stay at Mars Hill and serve as an elder and we welcome this. So, Pastor Jamie is still Pastor Jamie. Also, the door to employment is always open to Pastor Jamie. It has been clearly communicated to him by myself personally and by his performance review team collectively that should he ever change his mind, we would welcome him back on staff at Mars Hill Church. Our bylaws require that our Executive Elder (EE) team have at least three members. Pastor Dave Bruskas and I remain on the EE. Thankfully, Pastor Dave and his family recently moved to Seattle after leading Mars Hill Albuquerque. His leadership, wisdom, and experience come at just the right time and we praise God he is on the team. In God’s providence, the sermon he preached at Mars Hill Ballard will air this Sunday at all our other churches, helping you to get to know him better. To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29.[emphasis added] Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people.
...
We are inviting other churches to join us on this big campaign, and in the grace of God I believe 2012 will be the biggest year we’ve ever had. While we celebrate the past and honor the present, we also need to prepare for the future by God’s grace. We’ve been here before, many times before, in fact. As our church grows, we encounter obstacles and hit ceilings of complexity and need to adjust as necessary to get through the next size barrier. This was true at 200, 800, 2,000, and 6,000, just like the experts predicted. At 10,000 we are there again. I’ve been working on the beginnings of a comprehensive plan, as I can see into the future to 25,000 people a week, Lord willing. A finished version of that document will be released once it is revised with input and change from various leaders in the church, as well as wise counsel from leaders of churches larger than ours who have become friends.
For those who are curious, the most significant early event in Jamie Munson's tenure as Lead Pastor at Mars Hill Church was the termination and trial process for Bent Meyer and Paul Petry. Among the charges Munson formulated for the immediate termination of both men were a couple of points about his authority not being respected.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-discussion-of-jamie-munsons-2007.html
To date Munson has yet to provide an explanation for why the firings of 2007 were both inevitable and necessary. The grounds for immediate termination included allegations of nepotism and of disagreement with ministry programs in spite of the fact that none other than Mark Driscoll himself had pilloried some of the kinds of ministries Munson said Petry had been critical of.
While Munson would eventually explain the bylaws he drafted were needed to architect the church that was Mars Hill Fellowship for a multi-site approach a thorough examination of the 2005 bylaws and the 2007 bylaws does not show that there was more language addressing multi-site.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2012/06/regrouping-for-jesus-fame-explanation.html
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-29-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-30-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
Munson clearly seemed to consider nothing at all from the 2007 firings and trials to be problematic.
There is a potential lesson here in Munson's absence from the public face of Mars Hill in spite of Mark Driscoll's accolades, and the lesson is that no matter how important you may think your role is (important enough to decide someone needs to be terminated immediately for not respecting you as you think you deserve) you're still a replaceable cog. There's not necessarily any reason to even consider Jamie Munson important to the history of Mars Hill now that the guy with "kingly" gifts has been replace with Sutton Turner, who is himself another guy with "kingly" gifts who isn't fundamentally necessary. Mars Hill is about dudes but what sociologists and psychologists could and have brought to light is that when dudes get together and make systems and organizations those things don't need any one person to survive. It's been shown true of Jamie Munson, former lead pastor and legal president of Mars Hill, and it may yet even be true of Mark Driscoll himself some day ... assuming at this point that Mars Hill survives Driscoll's bound-to-be-decreasing relevance in the grand arc of human history.
As for what, if anything, Munson would consider worth owning and moving on from his tenure at Mars Hill that would be interesting to consider ... if Munson had said anything other than pious bromides about generic leadership concepts that have no connection to any jobs he's actually had as a leader. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, at this point in the history of Jamie Munson's public career if he doesn't address Joyful Exiles directly at some point it may be the only publicly available witness to his leadership style and substance anyone may be able to consult.
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
Celebrate the fact that Pastor Jamie is Mars Hill 1.0. He is exactly why Mars Hill exists. A lost young person meets Jesus and grows to be a godly leader, spouse, and parent who loves and leads well by the grace of God with humility and passion. He has given us every day of his life since he was 19 years of age. Mars Hill does not exist as a church of more than maybe a few hundred without God’s grace through Pastor Jamie. If a book were written about what God is doing among us, at least one whole chapter would be devoted to telling the story of God’s grace in Pastor Jamie’s life.
... whether or not a book about Mars Hill gets written remains to be seen but Wenatchee The Hatchet is willing to guess that Mars Hill would not want Wenatchee The Hatchet writing that book.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
some implications the recent letter of the 18 may have about the leadership legacy of Jamie Munson now that Mars Hill is dying
http://repentantpastor.com/confessions/letter-confession-bent-meyer-paul-petry/
There's something interesting about this letter of public apology, that at no point does the letter make mention of the bylaws over which Meyer and Petry got fired. Sure, various stories were given as to why the firings took place and Munson might even still believe to this day that they weren't politically motivated and were still "necessary and inevitable" but at this point with the entire EIT of 2007 and a dozen-ish former elders publicly declaring that what was done to Meyer and Petry was wrong and that it was done in a wrong way, it matters quite a bit that Munson formulated the grounds for dismissal around a general theme, that Petry and Meyer distrusted spiritual authority. That's rather abstract though, isn't it? It might be accurate to say Munson believed Petry and Meyer distrusted the judgment and character of the executive elders.
Well, let's see what Munson's legacy was. By later 2011 Sutton Turner seemed to consider Jamie Munson to be mainly "checked out" and was so alarmed about the financial cliff Mars Hill was about to topple over under Munson's leadership he apparently issued a memo mentioning it. Munson's resignation was presented in later 2011 as a time where Driscoll mentioned that Munson was above reproach yet Turner's memo seemed to consider Munson's engagement and the competence of Mars Hill financial staff all around to be null.
And now that Mars Hill Church is a dying corporation who, exactly, has any reason to be sure that the corporations Munson works with are going to go anywhere? He's never started any companies of note, has he? Storyville was a project that seems more the work of Jon Phelps and Munson only had a five percent ownership in that. In practical terms he may have had an actual managerial role or he may have been window-dressing. We can't know for sure.
What we can know for sure was that under Munson's tenure as legal president of Mars Hill the church was running systemic deficits at every single campus.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/things-keep-getting-purged-in-mh-media.html
https://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in/ajax_transcript?lang=en
Driscoll said that Mars Hill had a financial model that wasn't good for its long term future before 2012 but this had changed.
Evidently not, seeing as the church has been dissolved. If Munson's no longer at Storyville and the only other corporation of any note that he had a leadership role in (Mars Hill) is now dead in the water what future does Munson think he'll have as a leadership consultant? Might he start some companies? When have any companies he's started gotten off the ground? A side company to manage royalties from books he wrote? Well ... in light of the controversies surrounding the authorship and content of Driscoll's books we don't even know if Jamie Munson wrote any of the books with his name attached to them. How do we know those weren't ghostwritten for him by staff at Mars Hill over the years? Did Munson write his books himself or were they ghostwritten? That's something Mars Hill is unlikely to open the books on at this point.
But as Mars Hill dies and as Munson's role within the corporation has been scrubbed it will matter that Mars Hill died precisely because Munson was its legal president from later 2007 to later 2011. Four years is not really all that long a time to bring a corporation the size of Mars Hill to the brink of financial ruin in its 18 year history, is it? If we're to believe Sutton Turner's memo as a type of evidence it was Turner and not Munson whose efforts saved Mars Hill from the brink of fiscal collapse.
Actually ... Mars Hill opting to sell The City around 2008 to save itself from a fiscal cliff was another potential incident, which raises the specter of whether Zack Hubert was ever compensated for developing The City or whether under Munson's rule Hubert's work was treated as some kind of work-for-hire. There's no evidence amidst the Generous Campaign preaching and speaking that Hubert ever saw a penny from the sale of The City.
Wenatchee The Hatchet can't remember any Munson sermons. Munson never seemed to preach and one of the only things Munson said that lodged in the memory was something from about the Dead Men sessions. Munson once said something like, "There aren't any righteous poor in America." About a week later Munson modified the statement to something more like, "There are righteous poor in America, I just don't think there are very many of them." Attenders of Dead Men might be able to establish whether Munson said such a thing. Wenatchee the Hatchet may have misremembered.
And to date, while all four members of the EIT have repudiated the nature and substance of the process they were involved in, Munson hasn't said a word. Munson can blog things like "Own it and Move On" as much as he likes, he hasn't seemed to own anything of 2007 and if he has, he now has to testify against the public witness and retraction of the EIT and a majority of the elders who voted in 2007.
If Munson plans to be a consultant on leadership then he might need to consider the reality that at this stage the most publicly accessible example of his leadership legacy is over at Joyful Exiles. Mars Hill is dead due to fiscal implosion and the EIT that Munson put in place to oversee the trials of Petry and Meyer have this week publicly repudiated the process and its results. Munson, meanwhile, seems to have said nothing and may well believe to this day that what he did was the right thing. If a tree is known by its fruit, though, what are we to make of the death of the corporation of Mars Hill and the public recanting of 2007 elders as indicators of the health of Munson's leadership style for corporations? Did Munson oversea a few site launches at Storyville? Well, great, it's easy to launch a few new sites in an already established franchise. Has Munson started a company from scratch that has done something productive? Not yet and it remains to be seen if he can do that.
We've never been told why Munson resigned in 2011 but if Munson resigned because managing Mars Hill was stressful and if it was tough for a small executive team to handle everything whose fault was that? Well, who drafted by-laws in 2007 that consolidated leadership even more into a small coterie of executive elders? Depending on who you ask and when, it was Mark (by Driscoll's 2013 account in "Stepping Up") or, during the 2007 period, Jamie Munson. It may be that if Jamie Munson found the stress of managing Mars Hill too much to handle (if that was even the case) then Munson only had himself to blame, since it was his brilliance and competence that got him and Mars Hill Church to that point, after all.
In the face of Mars Hill dying and a majority of 2007 elders publicly apologizing for their votes against Petry and Meyer it can look as though Munson's 2007 claim that Meyer and Petry had a sinful distrust of spiritual authority (i.e. Munson's leadership) may be true if we include a caveat that the death of Mars Hill suggests that Munson's basic competence for leading Mars Hill is now retroactively in question. After all, if Munson was above reproach and set Mars Hill on a good path from 2007 on why is the corporation dying again? Why was Turner in some kind of panic mode in March 2012 over the financial health of Mars Hill again? Didn't Driscoll credit Munson with finding the building that became the corporate HQ that is on sale now? $1.5 million. If anything it can seem as though Meyer and Petry were wise to question Munson's competence and financial acumen and the consolidation of power into a shrunken executive branch. That's the executive branch whose leadership helped steer the corporation to its miserable death.
For those who might consider Munson as a leadership consultant, take heed of an old Latin phrase ... caveat emptor.
Dear Paul and Bent, we want to publicly confess our sin against you regarding events that took place at Mars Hill Church back in 2007. We were wrong. We harmed you. You have lived with the pain of that for many years. As some of us have come to each of you privately, you have extended grace and forgiveness, and for that we thank you. Because our sin against you happened in a public way and with public consequences, we want to make our confession public as well with this letter.
On September 30th 2007, you were both terminated from your employment as pastors at Mars Hill Church. Your status as elders of the church was suspended, according to the church’s bylaws at the time, pending an investigation of your qualification for eldership. It’s hard to imagine just how disorienting and painful this experience must have been for you. That night, Bent, you called Mike Wilkerson, your direct supervisor, to let him know that you’d been terminated. Within hours, Paul, you emailed all of the elders to notify us of what had happened to you that night. We had the opportunity and the responsibility to intervene, to care, to listen to you, and to make sure that any harmful treatment against you was corrected. Instead, we allowed the process of your investigation and trial to continue unimpeded and we participated in it. By failing to intervene and by participating in that process without protest, we implied to the members of Mars Hill Church, to each other, and to you and your families that your termination was above reproach. We stood by as it happened, and that was wrong.
There's something interesting about this letter of public apology, that at no point does the letter make mention of the bylaws over which Meyer and Petry got fired. Sure, various stories were given as to why the firings took place and Munson might even still believe to this day that they weren't politically motivated and were still "necessary and inevitable" but at this point with the entire EIT of 2007 and a dozen-ish former elders publicly declaring that what was done to Meyer and Petry was wrong and that it was done in a wrong way, it matters quite a bit that Munson formulated the grounds for dismissal around a general theme, that Petry and Meyer distrusted spiritual authority. That's rather abstract though, isn't it? It might be accurate to say Munson believed Petry and Meyer distrusted the judgment and character of the executive elders.
Well, let's see what Munson's legacy was. By later 2011 Sutton Turner seemed to consider Jamie Munson to be mainly "checked out" and was so alarmed about the financial cliff Mars Hill was about to topple over under Munson's leadership he apparently issued a memo mentioning it. Munson's resignation was presented in later 2011 as a time where Driscoll mentioned that Munson was above reproach yet Turner's memo seemed to consider Munson's engagement and the competence of Mars Hill financial staff all around to be null.
And now that Mars Hill Church is a dying corporation who, exactly, has any reason to be sure that the corporations Munson works with are going to go anywhere? He's never started any companies of note, has he? Storyville was a project that seems more the work of Jon Phelps and Munson only had a five percent ownership in that. In practical terms he may have had an actual managerial role or he may have been window-dressing. We can't know for sure.
What we can know for sure was that under Munson's tenure as legal president of Mars Hill the church was running systemic deficits at every single campus.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/04/things-keep-getting-purged-in-mh-media.html
https://marshill.com/media/the-seven/missional-in-philadelphia-didnt-give-up-or-give-in/ajax_transcript?lang=en
Driscoll said that Mars Hill had a financial model that wasn't good for its long term future before 2012 but this had changed.
Evidently not, seeing as the church has been dissolved. If Munson's no longer at Storyville and the only other corporation of any note that he had a leadership role in (Mars Hill) is now dead in the water what future does Munson think he'll have as a leadership consultant? Might he start some companies? When have any companies he's started gotten off the ground? A side company to manage royalties from books he wrote? Well ... in light of the controversies surrounding the authorship and content of Driscoll's books we don't even know if Jamie Munson wrote any of the books with his name attached to them. How do we know those weren't ghostwritten for him by staff at Mars Hill over the years? Did Munson write his books himself or were they ghostwritten? That's something Mars Hill is unlikely to open the books on at this point.
But as Mars Hill dies and as Munson's role within the corporation has been scrubbed it will matter that Mars Hill died precisely because Munson was its legal president from later 2007 to later 2011. Four years is not really all that long a time to bring a corporation the size of Mars Hill to the brink of financial ruin in its 18 year history, is it? If we're to believe Sutton Turner's memo as a type of evidence it was Turner and not Munson whose efforts saved Mars Hill from the brink of fiscal collapse.
Actually ... Mars Hill opting to sell The City around 2008 to save itself from a fiscal cliff was another potential incident, which raises the specter of whether Zack Hubert was ever compensated for developing The City or whether under Munson's rule Hubert's work was treated as some kind of work-for-hire. There's no evidence amidst the Generous Campaign preaching and speaking that Hubert ever saw a penny from the sale of The City.
Wenatchee The Hatchet can't remember any Munson sermons. Munson never seemed to preach and one of the only things Munson said that lodged in the memory was something from about the Dead Men sessions. Munson once said something like, "There aren't any righteous poor in America." About a week later Munson modified the statement to something more like, "There are righteous poor in America, I just don't think there are very many of them." Attenders of Dead Men might be able to establish whether Munson said such a thing. Wenatchee the Hatchet may have misremembered.
And to date, while all four members of the EIT have repudiated the nature and substance of the process they were involved in, Munson hasn't said a word. Munson can blog things like "Own it and Move On" as much as he likes, he hasn't seemed to own anything of 2007 and if he has, he now has to testify against the public witness and retraction of the EIT and a majority of the elders who voted in 2007.
If Munson plans to be a consultant on leadership then he might need to consider the reality that at this stage the most publicly accessible example of his leadership legacy is over at Joyful Exiles. Mars Hill is dead due to fiscal implosion and the EIT that Munson put in place to oversee the trials of Petry and Meyer have this week publicly repudiated the process and its results. Munson, meanwhile, seems to have said nothing and may well believe to this day that what he did was the right thing. If a tree is known by its fruit, though, what are we to make of the death of the corporation of Mars Hill and the public recanting of 2007 elders as indicators of the health of Munson's leadership style for corporations? Did Munson oversea a few site launches at Storyville? Well, great, it's easy to launch a few new sites in an already established franchise. Has Munson started a company from scratch that has done something productive? Not yet and it remains to be seen if he can do that.
We've never been told why Munson resigned in 2011 but if Munson resigned because managing Mars Hill was stressful and if it was tough for a small executive team to handle everything whose fault was that? Well, who drafted by-laws in 2007 that consolidated leadership even more into a small coterie of executive elders? Depending on who you ask and when, it was Mark (by Driscoll's 2013 account in "Stepping Up") or, during the 2007 period, Jamie Munson. It may be that if Jamie Munson found the stress of managing Mars Hill too much to handle (if that was even the case) then Munson only had himself to blame, since it was his brilliance and competence that got him and Mars Hill Church to that point, after all.
In the face of Mars Hill dying and a majority of 2007 elders publicly apologizing for their votes against Petry and Meyer it can look as though Munson's 2007 claim that Meyer and Petry had a sinful distrust of spiritual authority (i.e. Munson's leadership) may be true if we include a caveat that the death of Mars Hill suggests that Munson's basic competence for leading Mars Hill is now retroactively in question. After all, if Munson was above reproach and set Mars Hill on a good path from 2007 on why is the corporation dying again? Why was Turner in some kind of panic mode in March 2012 over the financial health of Mars Hill again? Didn't Driscoll credit Munson with finding the building that became the corporate HQ that is on sale now? $1.5 million. If anything it can seem as though Meyer and Petry were wise to question Munson's competence and financial acumen and the consolidation of power into a shrunken executive branch. That's the executive branch whose leadership helped steer the corporation to its miserable death.
For those who might consider Munson as a leadership consultant, take heed of an old Latin phrase ... caveat emptor.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
jamiemunson.com is here
http://www.jamiemunson.com/
http://www.jamiemunson.com/books/
So the book on money is rebranded from Re:Lit to Jamie Munson with a bow and arrow logo.
It's curiously apt that Munson's new book is on authority. Authority was considered a big concern on Munson's part when he circulated reasons for the immediate termination of two employees of Mars Hill back in 2007.
Munson was, at least officially, promoted to Lead Pastor and according to the by-laws he'd drafted, he was considered president. Who was listed with the Secretary of State of Washington as the actually legal standing president of Mars Hill during that time would be something someone can go look up. It's worth nothing that as an executive elder Munson confirmed the appointment of Scott Thomas to head the elder investigative taskforce. This was something Munson conveyed to Paul Petry directly, as well as to Mars Hill members. The October 16, 2007 letter Munson sent to members did not exactly explain what had transpired beyond formalities. Munson wrote the following about Elder Investigation Taskforce members Scott Thomas, Dave Kraft, Garey Shavey, and Steve Tompkins on October 16, 2007:
These men had the unenviable task of investigating two fellow pastors and reporting their findings to the entire Elder Council. They spent significant time in silence and solitude, reading and meditating on Scripture, repenting of personal sin, and praying for God's wisdom ...
So what were these men doing during the investigation process? Any of them can feel free to speak on record when they like. Scott Thomas, for instance, was explaining to Petry that there was no need for Petry to attend his own trial on October 10, 2007. Scott Thomas then turned around and told a member of Mars Hill church that a conciliatory process had just been completed on October 11, 2007. What personal sins Scott Thomas was repenting of, according to Jamie Munson's letter, might be interesting for Munson to elaborate on now, since he was apparently confident enough to say the four members of the EIT spent the investigative process repenting of personal sin.
Munson conveyed to members that Petry needed to be shunned in December 2007, saying that the elders had repeatedly attempted to reconcile with Petry and that these reconciliation attempts were rebuffed.
In later correspondence in early 2008 with Paul Petry, Jamie Munson seemed pretty convinced that neither he nor other executive elders or elders at Mars Hill generally, had done or said anything questionable.
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/ltr-munson-01-26-2008.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-29-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-30-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
There's more that you can read about Munson's role within the real estate history of Mars Hill if you like. He shows up in posts tagged "governance" and "real estate and Mars Hill".
Munson's currently still a pastor at Mars Hill and on a few boards.
Whether or not Jamie Munson was actually the legal president of Mars Hill on record with the Washington Secretary of State's office records while Mark Driscoll was, by his own account, no longer legal president, might be worth investigating.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_results.aspx?search_type=simple&criteria=all&name_type=contains&name=Mars+Hill+&ubi=
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=601677819
POSTSCRIPT:
It's interesting how accusation of distrust and disrespect for executive elders included specific claims of a lack of trust or respect for Jamie Munson. Munson apparently never stopped to consider that simultaneously being the accuser and being able to appoint a committee might involve a conflict of interest in organizational terms. Driscoll in early 2008 once remarked (documented elsewhere here)
that having Munson as president meant Driscoll no longer had to deal with conflicts of interest. What those were never got explained, but it was significant that Driscoll characterized (for whatever reason) his own role as legal president of Mars Hill as characterized by conflicts of interest.
When Driscoll preached in later 2007 in Nehemiah he made it sound like he had particular grievances with particular elders. Then on 10/01/2007 Driscoll was using some kind of royal "we" to say that two men had been fired from being pastors for the first time in the history of Mars Hill. If by that Driscoll meant terminated in some process that involved documentation of end of employment, okay, but it can't have literally been the case that no one had been fired from employment at Mars Hill at any point between 1996 and September 2007, can it? In any case, it sounds (literally) like Driscoll said something about his issues with specific leaders within Mars Hill in 2007 and along the way of leaders being terminated it stopped being personal and started to be more of a "we" thing, a "we" thing that at various points involved Jamie Munson.
http://www.jamiemunson.com/books/
So the book on money is rebranded from Re:Lit to Jamie Munson with a bow and arrow logo.
It's curiously apt that Munson's new book is on authority. Authority was considered a big concern on Munson's part when he circulated reasons for the immediate termination of two employees of Mars Hill back in 2007.
Munson was, at least officially, promoted to Lead Pastor and according to the by-laws he'd drafted, he was considered president. Who was listed with the Secretary of State of Washington as the actually legal standing president of Mars Hill during that time would be something someone can go look up. It's worth nothing that as an executive elder Munson confirmed the appointment of Scott Thomas to head the elder investigative taskforce. This was something Munson conveyed to Paul Petry directly, as well as to Mars Hill members. The October 16, 2007 letter Munson sent to members did not exactly explain what had transpired beyond formalities. Munson wrote the following about Elder Investigation Taskforce members Scott Thomas, Dave Kraft, Garey Shavey, and Steve Tompkins on October 16, 2007:
These men had the unenviable task of investigating two fellow pastors and reporting their findings to the entire Elder Council. They spent significant time in silence and solitude, reading and meditating on Scripture, repenting of personal sin, and praying for God's wisdom ...
So what were these men doing during the investigation process? Any of them can feel free to speak on record when they like. Scott Thomas, for instance, was explaining to Petry that there was no need for Petry to attend his own trial on October 10, 2007. Scott Thomas then turned around and told a member of Mars Hill church that a conciliatory process had just been completed on October 11, 2007. What personal sins Scott Thomas was repenting of, according to Jamie Munson's letter, might be interesting for Munson to elaborate on now, since he was apparently confident enough to say the four members of the EIT spent the investigative process repenting of personal sin.
Munson conveyed to members that Petry needed to be shunned in December 2007, saying that the elders had repeatedly attempted to reconcile with Petry and that these reconciliation attempts were rebuffed.
In later correspondence in early 2008 with Paul Petry, Jamie Munson seemed pretty convinced that neither he nor other executive elders or elders at Mars Hill generally, had done or said anything questionable.
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/ltr-munson-01-26-2008.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-29-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/01-30-2008-munson-ltr.pdf
There's more that you can read about Munson's role within the real estate history of Mars Hill if you like. He shows up in posts tagged "governance" and "real estate and Mars Hill".
Munson's currently still a pastor at Mars Hill and on a few boards.
Whether or not Jamie Munson was actually the legal president of Mars Hill on record with the Washington Secretary of State's office records while Mark Driscoll was, by his own account, no longer legal president, might be worth investigating.
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_results.aspx?search_type=simple&criteria=all&name_type=contains&name=Mars+Hill+&ubi=
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_detail.aspx?ubi=601677819
MARS HILL CHURCH
| UBI Number | 601677819 |
| Category | REG |
| Profit/Nonprofit | Nonprofit |
| Active/Inactive | Active |
| State Of Incorporation | WA |
| WA Filing Date | 12/22/1995 |
| Expiration Date | 12/31/2013 |
| Inactive Date | |
| Duration | Perpetual |
| Registered Agent Information | |
| Agent Name | JOHN SUTTON TURNER |
| Address | 1411 NW 50TH ST |
| City | SEATTLE |
| State | WA |
| ZIP | 98107 |
| Vice President | Bruskas, Dave | 1411 NW 50th Street SEATTLE, WA 98107 |
| Secretary | TURNER, JOHN SUTTON | 1411 NW 50TH ST SEATTLE, WA 98107 |
| Treasurer | TURNER, JOHN SUTTON | 1411 NW 50TH ST SEATTLE, WA 98107 |
| President | Driscoll, Mark | 1411 NW 50th Street SEATTLE, WA 98107 |
POSTSCRIPT:
It's interesting how accusation of distrust and disrespect for executive elders included specific claims of a lack of trust or respect for Jamie Munson. Munson apparently never stopped to consider that simultaneously being the accuser and being able to appoint a committee might involve a conflict of interest in organizational terms. Driscoll in early 2008 once remarked (documented elsewhere here)
that having Munson as president meant Driscoll no longer had to deal with conflicts of interest. What those were never got explained, but it was significant that Driscoll characterized (for whatever reason) his own role as legal president of Mars Hill as characterized by conflicts of interest.
When Driscoll preached in later 2007 in Nehemiah he made it sound like he had particular grievances with particular elders. Then on 10/01/2007 Driscoll was using some kind of royal "we" to say that two men had been fired from being pastors for the first time in the history of Mars Hill. If by that Driscoll meant terminated in some process that involved documentation of end of employment, okay, but it can't have literally been the case that no one had been fired from employment at Mars Hill at any point between 1996 and September 2007, can it? In any case, it sounds (literally) like Driscoll said something about his issues with specific leaders within Mars Hill in 2007 and along the way of leaders being terminated it stopped being personal and started to be more of a "we" thing, a "we" thing that at various points involved Jamie Munson.
Monday, June 09, 2014
Jamie Munson's role within Mars Hill seems to have continued, absence of public disclosure about his membership or role as a pastor withstanding
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/09/where-are-they-now-update-jamie-munson.html
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors
My proposal to the Board of Directors (BOD) is that Pastor Jamie Munson remain an elder at Mars Hill Church Ballard. Following a sabbatical through the end of the year to enjoy his family, rest up, and finish writing a book, he will rejoin us as an unpaid board member at the highest legal level of Mars Hill Church. [Munson ended up on several boards] In God’s providence, the same day that Pastor Jamie made this decision, one of our unpaid BOD members had to resign due to escalating demands at his place of employment. So, while this man will remain an elder at his local Mars Hill Church, it opened a seat on the BOD for an unpaid elder, which Pastor Jamie fills perfectly. We need many more unpaid elders and Pastor Jamie helps us to raise the profile of that service. The plan is simply that Pastor Jamie will remain an elder at Mars Hill indefinitely. [emphasis added] He has clearly communicated his desire to stay at Mars Hill and serve as an elder and we welcome this. So, Pastor Jamie is still Pastor Jamie. Also, the door to employment is always open to Pastor Jamie. It has been clearly communicated to him by myself personally and by his performance review team collectively that should he ever change his mind, we would welcome him back on staff at Mars Hill Church. Our bylaws require that our Executive Elder (EE) team have at least three members. Pastor Dave Bruskas and I remain on the EE. Thankfully, Pastor Dave and his family recently moved to Seattle after leading Mars Hill Albuquerque. His leadership, wisdom, and experience come at just the right time and we praise God he is on the team. In God’s providence, the sermon he preached at Mars Hill Ballard will air this Sunday at all our other churches, helping you to get to know him better. To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people.
Before the above material was removed this was available for consultation. Mark Driscoll wrote that he recommended Scott Thomas to join the Executive Elder team for what was at the time the foreseeable future. That apparently did not last long if, in fact, it actually happened.
But that's neither here nor there. While Jamie Munson is no longer necessarily publicly listed, these days, as a pastor at Mars Hill Church, that doesn't mean he has stopped being a pastor at Mars Hill Church, even if no longer in a paid staff role. Munson's recent departure from Storyville Coffee, which has been co-owned by Jon and Esther Phelps (and Jon Phelps has a history of connection to Mark Driscoll that has been discussed elsewhere at this blog). Munson's role in the 2007 terminations and trials of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer has been documented to some extent elsewhere. This entry could be a starting point.
That Jamie Munson has not stopped having some role inside Mars Hill Church, even as a pastor, got documented last year in early October over at this post.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/10/where-are-they-now-update-2-jamie.html
But for today's blog post a visual demonstration of a recent screen capture (as in today, literally) might be helpful in establishing whether perhaps Jamie Munson has remained a pastor at Mars Hill Church regardless of what has or hasn't been revealed to the public at large about him. Remember, Driscoll said in 2011 the plan was for Munson to remain a pastor at MH indefinitely.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Sutton Turner post "Good Decisions Made By the Right People", Turner's account revisits the question of who formulated the governance he considered badly in need of a fix
http://investyourgifts.com/resultsource2/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
A Board to Match the Organization
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. [emphasis added] Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
We've discussed a couple of the Board of Director members who may or may not have been part of the BoD in 2011 by the time Sutton Turner arrived.
Turner has been emphatic that the core problem that led to the unwise decision that was using Result Source to promote the Driscolls' book Real Marriage stemmed from governance. Well, for the sake of conversation, let's assume that's true. Who formulated the flawed governance structure? There are two distinct but not necessarily conflicting or competing narratives that have been made available regarding this topic.
The first is available by way of Joyful Exiles, Paul Petry's site that includes a mountain of documents and correspondence pertaining to his termination and trial. We can see the formal accusations made by Jamie Munson, rather, the grounds for immediate termination:
The second narrative is as follows, from a video that seemed to get posted in earlier 2013.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
transcript of Mark Driscoll statement in a video called "Stepping Up", discussed over at Warren
Throckmorton's blog:
I don’t know what the most courageous thing I’ve ever done is. I know the one thing that was one of the hardest was, the church was growing, it had exploded, it had grown to, I think, maybe six thousand. So it made it one of the largest, fastest growing churches in America in one of the least churched cities, and in a conversation one night it was just up in our bedroom on a couch we were visiting, Grace and I were talking about past relationships and just kind of a casual conversation and we’d been together at that point for maybe seventeen, eighteen years or something. [WtH, i.e. either 2005 or 2006] I mean we’d been together a while between dating and marriage. And she just explained to me a few occasions where she had been sexually assaulted, raped, and abused [prior to my meeting her, (WT's transcript differs from what is presented here and this is punctuation that WtH believes makes more sense of Driscoll's actual words)]. I just broke and I just started weeping, thinking that I had not known that about my wife, and she just said it matter of factly, like she was just reading the script of someone else’s life. And there was no emotion in her, and I could tell she didn’t even really understand what she had just explained. That sort of led to a season of me really getting to know her, and her getting to know her past, and us getting to know Jesus in a deeper way.
It was around that time I could just tell that she’s gonna need me available more.
Emotionally present more, we just had our 5th child. So the timing’s not great. We just decided to go multi-site in video, cause we had outgrown our location and everybody’s looking and all the critics are around and is this gonna make it? A couple of things combined at that season as well, overwork and stress and everything else. I fatigued my adrenal glands, I was in a bad place health-wise, was not sleeping. It was a pretty dark time for me, and I told Grace, “For me to recover, for you to recover, for us to build our friendship, I feel like we’re kind of at that watershed moment where our marriage is gonna get better or it’s gonna get colder, and you’ve really opened yourself up and I need to love and serve you better and pursue you more.”
I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
I told Grace, I said “I’m going to give it one year, and if it doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to quit, because you’re more important to me than ministry, and I feel like if I quit right now, the church will probably die, and there’s all these thousands of people that met Jesus.” I said “So we’re either going to change it or I’m going to quit, but we’re not going to do this forever and you’re my priority,” and that led to everything that I feared, quite frankly. [emphasis added]
It was really brutal, and I couldn’t tell the story at the time of and here’s why- because Grace is really hurting, and I love her, and I’m broken, and we need to pull back and make some course corrections because it’s Grace’s story to tell, and she wasn’t ready at that point to tell that story, and I had no right to tell that story for her.
And so everybody got to speculate for years what the motive was, “oh he’s power hungry, he’s controlling, he wants to take over, he doesn’t love people, you know he’s just a bully.” And no, it’s actually he’s broken and his wife is hurting and the church is gonna probably literally kill him or put him in the hospital and his wife needs him right now, so he’s gotta make some adjustments. So, you know, by the grace of God, we weathered that storm.
That's a lot of text but it is best to keep it all there. The second narrative is that it was Mark Driscoll who rewrote the constitution and the bylaws for the benefit of working on his marriage. There are a couple of basic questions as to what was going on there. Why would Driscoll have needed to rewrite the constitution of Mars Hill in order to spend more time with Grace? It's not like Grace was a charter member of the corporation, was she? If someone were to find the articles of incorporation and the earliest by-laws that could be something that could be established, perhaps, but otherwise the whole idea of rebuilding the governance of Mars Hill from the ground up so Mark Driscoll could spend more time with Grace seems strange. But, if true, then it means that whatever Jamie Munson was doing with the by-laws could have been with supervision from Mark Driscoll.
And whether it was Jamie Munson acting on his own or under direction from Mark Driscoll, or whether it was Mark Driscoll personally rewriting the constitution and the by-laws with Jamie Munson being formally credited with that during the termination and trial process, it's pretty hard to escape the fact that Mark Driscoll and Jamie Munson seem to have the credit or blame for the governance system that Sutton Turner has lately described as flawed. The governance was flawed inasmuch as it permitted the Mars Hill leadership culture to endorse Result Source as a way to promote Real Marriage on the one hand, and on the other it may have had something to do with the shambolic state of financial reporting when Sutton Turner arrived at Mars Hill.
Turner's summary of Mars Hill financials and governance seems dire enough that it seems to cast some doubt on something Mark Driscoll was emphatic about the year Jamie Munson resigned.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/wayback-machine-archive-of-jamie-munson.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130925181152/http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
By: Mars Hill Blog
Posted: Sep 06, 2011
Important Letters from Pastors Jamie Munson and Mark Driscoll
[from Mark Driscoll's letter]
...
I want to make it emphatically clear: there is no disqualifying sin or error of any kind in Pastor Jamie’s life. This is in no way connected to anything negative. He is, by God’s grace, "above reproach," as he always has been. [emphasis added]
...
To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king."
Yet if under Munson's tenure the church was teetering toward the edge of some kind of fiscal cliff and was greenlighting rigging the New York Times best-seller list for the advancement of a Driscoll book how was that supposed to be "above reproach"?
Turner has described the replacement board as fixing the problems of the earlier board but that merits another post.
For this post we'll end with Mark Driscoll in 2008 explaining why putting Jamie Munson in charge of everything was the best move he'd made.
Back in 2008 when Mark Driscoll talked about making Jamie head of Mars Hill he described it as the best decision he ever made for a memorable reason:
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
2.28.2008
"Jamie Munson is head of the elder board. Jamie Munson is executive pastor. He is legal president of the organization. And for me, to be honest, it was the most freeing, liberating thing I could have dreamed of because now I don't have all that conflict of interest. I can be friends with someone but I don't have to fire them, do their performance review, and decide how much they get paid. It's just too conflicting for me."
Putting Jamie Munson as head of the elder board and legal president liberated Driscoll from all that conflict of interest. Curious phrase there, and it seemed from Driscoll's wording he was implying that conflict of interest was the normal managerial plight for him. Well, whatever improvements Driscoll may have thought would accrue from the governance changes of 2006-2007, it seems by the time Sutton Turner arrived in 2011 he considered the governance in place problematic enough to need an overhaul.
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 21, 2015
In my first months on staff at Mars Hill Church, the ResultSource contract was approved even though I had advised my direct supervisor against it. I don’t know who approved the plan. I don’t know what process was conducted concerning the decision, even after reviewing the board minutes for that time frame. I do know that it showed that the process of making big decisions at Mars Hill was flawed and should be fixed.
A Board to Match the Organization
In 2011, the Board of Directors was made up of men that were local church pastors within Mars Hill. I was not a board member at the time, so I do not know any of the specific deliberations on ResultSource. At the time, I did not care who was to blame for making the decision, and I don’t blame them now. (As you will see, the flawed governance structure contributed more to the situation than the individual decision-makers.) Within weeks of the decision to use ResultSource, my supervisor had resigned. [emphasis added] Within months, I was installed as Executive Elder (a position that would have allowed me to better voice my concerns on the ResultSource decision just months prior). At that point, the decision was done and in the past, but Mars Hill could certainly learn from it. My goal over the next few months was to restructure the decision-making process and the board that made those decisions.
We've discussed a couple of the Board of Director members who may or may not have been part of the BoD in 2011 by the time Sutton Turner arrived.
Turner has been emphatic that the core problem that led to the unwise decision that was using Result Source to promote the Driscolls' book Real Marriage stemmed from governance. Well, for the sake of conversation, let's assume that's true. Who formulated the flawed governance structure? There are two distinct but not necessarily conflicting or competing narratives that have been made available regarding this topic.
The first is available by way of Joyful Exiles, Paul Petry's site that includes a mountain of documents and correspondence pertaining to his termination and trial. We can see the formal accusations made by Jamie Munson, rather, the grounds for immediate termination:
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
from Pastor Jamie Munson to the elders of Mars Hill Church on September 30, 2007
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
For those familiar with the mountain of documents at Joyful Exiles, the consensus from Mars Hill leadership was that Jamie Munson was drafting a new set of by-laws that Paul Petry and Bent Meyer had objections to. They were soon terminated and both went through trials. from Pastor Jamie Munson to the elders of Mars Hill Church on September 30, 2007
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
The second narrative is as follows, from a video that seemed to get posted in earlier 2013.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/08/07/the-storm-at-mars-hill-church-mark-driscoll-explains-it-all/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgl6QmHrXEo
transcript of Mark Driscoll statement in a video called "Stepping Up", discussed over at Warren
Throckmorton's blog:
I don’t know what the most courageous thing I’ve ever done is. I know the one thing that was one of the hardest was, the church was growing, it had exploded, it had grown to, I think, maybe six thousand. So it made it one of the largest, fastest growing churches in America in one of the least churched cities, and in a conversation one night it was just up in our bedroom on a couch we were visiting, Grace and I were talking about past relationships and just kind of a casual conversation and we’d been together at that point for maybe seventeen, eighteen years or something. [WtH, i.e. either 2005 or 2006] I mean we’d been together a while between dating and marriage. And she just explained to me a few occasions where she had been sexually assaulted, raped, and abused [prior to my meeting her, (WT's transcript differs from what is presented here and this is punctuation that WtH believes makes more sense of Driscoll's actual words)]. I just broke and I just started weeping, thinking that I had not known that about my wife, and she just said it matter of factly, like she was just reading the script of someone else’s life. And there was no emotion in her, and I could tell she didn’t even really understand what she had just explained. That sort of led to a season of me really getting to know her, and her getting to know her past, and us getting to know Jesus in a deeper way.
It was around that time I could just tell that she’s gonna need me available more.
Emotionally present more, we just had our 5th child. So the timing’s not great. We just decided to go multi-site in video, cause we had outgrown our location and everybody’s looking and all the critics are around and is this gonna make it? A couple of things combined at that season as well, overwork and stress and everything else. I fatigued my adrenal glands, I was in a bad place health-wise, was not sleeping. It was a pretty dark time for me, and I told Grace, “For me to recover, for you to recover, for us to build our friendship, I feel like we’re kind of at that watershed moment where our marriage is gonna get better or it’s gonna get colder, and you’ve really opened yourself up and I need to love and serve you better and pursue you more.”
I said so I got to change the church. I mean all the way down, I have to rewrite the Constitution, bi-laws, I got to let some people go. I have to put in place some hard performance reviews. I’ve got to be willing to lose a lot of relationships, endure criticism, preach less times, hand off more authority, and I said I don’t know if the church is going to make it and I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
I told Grace, I said “I’m going to give it one year, and if it doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to quit, because you’re more important to me than ministry, and I feel like if I quit right now, the church will probably die, and there’s all these thousands of people that met Jesus.” I said “So we’re either going to change it or I’m going to quit, but we’re not going to do this forever and you’re my priority,” and that led to everything that I feared, quite frankly. [emphasis added]
It was really brutal, and I couldn’t tell the story at the time of and here’s why- because Grace is really hurting, and I love her, and I’m broken, and we need to pull back and make some course corrections because it’s Grace’s story to tell, and she wasn’t ready at that point to tell that story, and I had no right to tell that story for her.
And so everybody got to speculate for years what the motive was, “oh he’s power hungry, he’s controlling, he wants to take over, he doesn’t love people, you know he’s just a bully.” And no, it’s actually he’s broken and his wife is hurting and the church is gonna probably literally kill him or put him in the hospital and his wife needs him right now, so he’s gotta make some adjustments. So, you know, by the grace of God, we weathered that storm.
That's a lot of text but it is best to keep it all there. The second narrative is that it was Mark Driscoll who rewrote the constitution and the bylaws for the benefit of working on his marriage. There are a couple of basic questions as to what was going on there. Why would Driscoll have needed to rewrite the constitution of Mars Hill in order to spend more time with Grace? It's not like Grace was a charter member of the corporation, was she? If someone were to find the articles of incorporation and the earliest by-laws that could be something that could be established, perhaps, but otherwise the whole idea of rebuilding the governance of Mars Hill from the ground up so Mark Driscoll could spend more time with Grace seems strange. But, if true, then it means that whatever Jamie Munson was doing with the by-laws could have been with supervision from Mark Driscoll.
And whether it was Jamie Munson acting on his own or under direction from Mark Driscoll, or whether it was Mark Driscoll personally rewriting the constitution and the by-laws with Jamie Munson being formally credited with that during the termination and trial process, it's pretty hard to escape the fact that Mark Driscoll and Jamie Munson seem to have the credit or blame for the governance system that Sutton Turner has lately described as flawed. The governance was flawed inasmuch as it permitted the Mars Hill leadership culture to endorse Result Source as a way to promote Real Marriage on the one hand, and on the other it may have had something to do with the shambolic state of financial reporting when Sutton Turner arrived at Mars Hill.
Turner's summary of Mars Hill financials and governance seems dire enough that it seems to cast some doubt on something Mark Driscoll was emphatic about the year Jamie Munson resigned.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/01/wayback-machine-archive-of-jamie-munson.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130925181152/http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
By: Mars Hill Blog
Posted: Sep 06, 2011
Important Letters from Pastors Jamie Munson and Mark Driscoll
[from Mark Driscoll's letter]
...
I want to make it emphatically clear: there is no disqualifying sin or error of any kind in Pastor Jamie’s life. This is in no way connected to anything negative. He is, by God’s grace, "above reproach," as he always has been. [emphasis added]
...
To fill Pastor Jamie’s vacancy on the EE, I am recommending that the BOD vote for Pastor Scott Thomas to join the EE for at least the foreseeable future. Pastor Scott has served faithfully for many years as an elder at Mars Hill, is among our most trained and seasoned leaders, is already a BOD member, and has served previously for many years as an EE member while also leading Acts 29. Pastor Dave and I both believe Pastor Scott is the best choice for this role in this season. Pastor Scott has been very clear in his love and commitment to Mars Hill and has said he will gladly serve wherever he is needed, which we deeply appreciate. Administratively, Pastor Jamie was our senior "king" and his departure requires very competent leadership to cover his many responsibilities. Thankfully, Pastor Jamie was a great leader and humble man. He surrounded himself with great people. This allows us to not have the kind of crisis that could otherwise ensue. Pastor Dave and I agree that Sutton Turner should function as our highest-ranking "king."
Yet if under Munson's tenure the church was teetering toward the edge of some kind of fiscal cliff and was greenlighting rigging the New York Times best-seller list for the advancement of a Driscoll book how was that supposed to be "above reproach"?
Turner has described the replacement board as fixing the problems of the earlier board but that merits another post.
For this post we'll end with Mark Driscoll in 2008 explaining why putting Jamie Munson in charge of everything was the best move he'd made.
Back in 2008 when Mark Driscoll talked about making Jamie head of Mars Hill he described it as the best decision he ever made for a memorable reason:
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
2.28.2008
"Jamie Munson is head of the elder board. Jamie Munson is executive pastor. He is legal president of the organization. And for me, to be honest, it was the most freeing, liberating thing I could have dreamed of because now I don't have all that conflict of interest. I can be friends with someone but I don't have to fire them, do their performance review, and decide how much they get paid. It's just too conflicting for me."
Putting Jamie Munson as head of the elder board and legal president liberated Driscoll from all that conflict of interest. Curious phrase there, and it seemed from Driscoll's wording he was implying that conflict of interest was the normal managerial plight for him. Well, whatever improvements Driscoll may have thought would accrue from the governance changes of 2006-2007, it seems by the time Sutton Turner arrived in 2011 he considered the governance in place problematic enough to need an overhaul.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
If Driscoll made the mistake of being under "green" elders in1996 why make Munson president in 2007--HT to Musings from Under the Bus
As noted over here
https://musingsfromunderthebus.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/i-couldnt-trust-young-and-green-elders-so-i-put-jamie-munson-in-charge/
There's another question that emerges if we take Driscoll at his word that he made the mistake of appointing elders in authority over him who were "young and new and green" back around 1996. In 2007 Mark Driscoll decided to make Jamie Munson legal president of Mars Hill Church and the Lead Pastor. To get a clearer sense of how stupid this move would be if Driscoll was serious circa 2012 about the problem of young/new/green men in eldership let's revisit the signal quote itself, which to go by the set design and Grace Driscoll's haircut would have been during the Real Marriage period of earlier 2012.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/throckmorton-quotes-driscoll-i-made.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/24/eldersauthority/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9vbaq5cO20&feature=youtu.be
5:25
That's one practical thing is, I'd never been a member of a church until I started my own. So I didn't know a lot about church. But I wanted, I knew I was a big personality and pretty intense so I wanted to be under authority but I made a mistake of--how do I say this carefully?--trying to be under the authority of my elders but the truth is all my elders were new and young and green and they would want to help but they really didn't know what they were talking about.
And so what I should have had was a team of pastors outside of the church who were older and more seasoned that could, you know, help Grace and I put life together.
Of course for alert readers of the histories of Mars Hill according to Mark Driscoll someone could ask, "What elders?" For instance, in later 2011 Mark Driscoll explained in a post that the problem early on was there wasn't much of a team and he had to carry the burden alone. The emphasis seems to shift in the narrative Mark Driscoll gives from topic to topic. In one narrative the problem was he made the mistake of trying to submit to the authority of elders who were young and new and green. Even if there's a compelling case to be made for that, another narrative from Mark paints the early years of Mars Hill as one in which he was the only paid pastor on staff shouldering a terrible burden all by himself as though he weren't under any authority of any elders because he had failed to raise up leaders to help him.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-ten-painful-lessons-from-early-days_9.html
http://pastormark.tv/2011/12/06/10-painful-lessons-from-the-early-days-of-mars-hill-church
...
For the first five or six years of Mars Hill, I was the only paid pastor on staff and carried much of the ministry burden. I was doing all the premarital counseling and most of the pastoral work as the only pastor on staff. This went on for years due to pitiful giving and a ton of very rough new converts all the way until we had grown to about 800 people a Sunday. [emphasis added] At one point I literally had over a few thousand people come in and out of my home for Bible studies, internships, counseling, and more. My phone rang off the hook, my email inbox overflowed, my energy levels and health took a nose dive, and I started becoming bitter and angry instead of loving and joyful. It got to the point where either something had to change or I was going to go ballistic and do something I really regretted. [WtH, yeah, well, clearly this was published before the writings of William Wallace II got republished and Driscoll had a chance to remember he already HAD done something he regretted, maybe]
Through much prayer and study of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit impressed upon me that I’d done a poor job of raising up leaders along with me to help care for his church. I was carrying the burden myself and was not doing a good job because it was too much. [emphasis added] I needed to transition from caring for all the people to ensuring they were all cared for by raising up elders, deacons, and church members. This spurred me to make some dramatic changes to increase membership and train leaders.
We began a process of intentionally challenging qualified men to step up as elders to lead, finding and training men and women to serve and lead as deacons, and we started a Gospel Class to clearly articulate what we believed about Jesus, the Bible, and the church to make clear what we expected from members. Our first teams were not amazing, but some of those people, through years of maturing by God’s grace, are now amazing leaders and servants.
The one person who would best be in a position to call BS on the constantly shifting narratives about whether there were or weren't elders "in authority" over Mark Driscoll at the time seems to be willing to let him say whatever he wants in front of a camera without stopping him. So now we're supposed to simultaneously hold that Mark Driscoll failed to raise up leaders along with him to help care for the church because he was carrying the burden himself in spite of a team of older guys. But those older guys were young and new and green and he made the mistake of trying to submit to the authority of men he recruited to help him who were older and had some more ministry experience?
What to do? What to do?
Now, if the elders whose authority Mark Driscoll tried to submit himself to in the mid-1990s were "young and new and green" and didn't know what they were talking about then maybe that was even more the case with Mark Driscoll when he decided to let Jamie Munson be legal president and Lead Pastor of Mars Hill.
If anything Jamie Munson would have been even newer and greener and younger than Gunn or Moi. Munson was one of the earlier converts to Christianity under Mark Driscoll's preaching and teaching. So if Driscoll circa 2012 was willing to say that Mars Hill suffered because he didn't raise up leaders Jamie Munson's entire ministry career suggests that Driscoll did, in fact, raise up a young leader or two in the form of Jamie Munson and Tim Smith and that we can consult the leadership styles and decisions and conduct of these men as some insight into how the students took after their teacher.
This was the Jamie Munson who scouted the 50th street building that became Mars Hill corporate headquarters, the building that couldn't be zoned for the big vision Driscoll cast in his 2006 book. Munson was also Lead Pastor during 2007 when the controversial firings of Meyer and Petry happened. In fact a review of the reasons for immediate termination for both men seemed to revolve in part around the two older men not trusting or showing sufficient respect to spiritual authority, particularly with regard to Munson.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-discussion-of-jamie-munsons-2007.html
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
Pastor Bent Meyer - Grounds for Immediate Termination of Employment
* Total lack of trust for Executive leadership and insubordination
* Multiple unfounded accusations from Bent regarding abuse of power, power grabbing and motives of leadership
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorny without permission
* Showing unhealthy family favoritism by establishing son Cameron as spokesman for Salts recap meeting
* No communication with elders regarding Cameron's sin and removal of grace group leadership
Some might conclude this is a political move to gain more support for the bylaws as Paul and bent were outspoken critics of the current direction. [emphasis added] This is not the case, the executive team wants to conduct itself in a way that is full of integrity, walking in the light, under full disclosure and in a decisive manner that best serves Jesus and His church through Mars Hill. If the bylaws don't pass, so be it, we didn't want to wait on what we had determined were necessary and inevitable firings until after the bylaws had been voted into approval because that would have been deceptive. [emphasis added] We made the decision to terminate them now and givem them the option to resign or undergo the full investigation. We have a higher value of being men of integrity than playing politics to swing a vote in our favor.
Because firing two of twenty-four elders was necessary and inevitable because without a 100% uniform vote for Munson's by-laws (or were they Driscoll's bylaws?) nothing could get done? Let's bear in mind that Jamie Munson's first major incident recorded in his tenure as Lead Pastor who was placed there, apparently, by some combination of his own selection and the approval of Mark Driscoll, was explaining why two guys had to be fired because they distrusted spiritual authority. It is at this point that it may be pertinent to quote from Mark Driscoll himself about Jamie Munson.
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
Celebrate the fact that Pastor Jamie is Mars Hill 1.0. He is exactly why Mars Hill exists. A lost young person meets Jesus and grows to be a godly leader, spouse, and parent who loves and leads well by the grace of God with humility and passion. He has given us every day of his life since he was 19 years of age. Mars Hill does not exist as a church of more than maybe a few hundred without God’s grace through Pastor Jamie. If a book were written about what God is doing among us, at least one whole chapter would be devoted to telling the story of God’s grace in Pastor Jamie’s life.
Munson resigned membership earlier this year, which means that if Mars Hill Church survives long enough to have a book written about it there won't be a chapter dedicated to Jamie Munson's role within Mars Hill if the book were written by someone still at Mars Hill.
But in spite of Mark Driscoll's former claim that Munson was always above reproach, it seems Sutton Turner had some issues with the fiscal competency of leadership at Mars Hill and seemed to believe that Jamie Munson was "checked out" and had left Mars Hill in a financial situation that was something like a disaster.
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
So Driscoll may change his tune depending on the topic and who is asking him a question. If he told Grace he made a mistake in trying to submit himself to the spiritual authority of new and green elders it makes even less sense that ten years after the start of Mars Hill he would have had Jamie Munson be legal president and Lead Pastor of Mars Hill if Mark Driscoll really took seriously the problem of trying to submit to the authority of new, young and green Christians. If anything appointing an even younger man who was a new convert under Driscoll's preaching and teaching would be an example of Mark Driscoll amplifying his earlier error. He wasn't just trying to submit to the spiritual authority of young, green and new elders, he was trying to lower the bar for executive leadership even lower at a crucial stage of Mars Hill in 2007.
A few months after that crucial change Mark Driscoll described the impossibility of working with friends in ministry.
http://theresurgence.com/2008/04/07/question-and-answer-with-mark-driscoll-video
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/qa-with-mark-driscoll/
(starts at 00:31:52)
Q. How do you lead staff who are your best friends?Do you want the honest answer or should I punt?
... You can't. ... you can't.
I hate to tell you that. ... Deep down in your gut you know if you're best friends and someone works for you that changes the relationship. Right? Because you can fire them. Of course you want to be friends with your elders and the people you work with. I mean, we're a church. I mean you wanna, you NEED to love the people you work with. But one of the hardest things, and only the lead guy gets this. Nobody else on staff even understands what I'm talking about. When you're the lead guy you wear multiple hats. Say it's someone who works with you and they're a good friend. You wear the "Hey, we're buddies" hat. We're friends. We go on vacation. We hang out. We do
dinner. We're friends.
But you also wear the "I'm your boss" hat "You need to do your job or I might have to fire you" hat, and you also wear the "I'm your pastor. I love you, care for you, and I'm looking out for your well-being" hat. Those three hats are in absolute collision. Because how do you fire your friend and then pastor them through it? Right? I mean that is very complicated. I love you, you're fired, can I pray for you? That is a very .. what are we doing? I think if you're going to have your best friends working with you they need to be somewhere else on the team but not under you or the friendship really needs to change.
And what happens is when people are your friend ... I don't think that many do this intentionally but they want you to wear whatever hat is at their best interest at the time. So they didn't do their job, they're falling down on their responsibility, and you talk to them and say, "Look, you're not getting this done." They put on the "hey buddy. Yeah, I've been kinda sick lately and my wife and I are going through a hard time." and they want the friend hat on. And as a friend you're like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, dude." But then you put your boss hat back on and you're like "Yeah, but we pay you and we need you to get the job done."
And then they want you to put the friend hat back on and keep sympathizing.
And you're totally conflicted. ...
I have very good friends in this church. I have elders that are very dear friends, but when you have to do their performance review, when you have to decide what their wage is, when you have to decide whether they get promoted, demoted or terminated it's impossible to do that because you can't wear all three hats at the same time.
First guy I fired, he was a dear friend. A godly man, no moral or doctrinal sin whatsoever, he just wasn't keeping up with what we needed him to do. And it wasn't `cause he didn't try and wasn't working hard. And he had a wonderful wife and a great family and to this day I think the world of this guy. And if my sons grew up to be like him, I'd be proud. And I'm not critical of this man at all.
But I remember sitting down at that first termination. First I put on the friend hat. I said, "I love you, I appreciate you. I value you." Then I put on the boss hat, "I'm gonna have to let you go. Here's why." And then I put on the pastor hat, "How are you feeling? How are you doing?" And he was really gracious with me and he said, "This is just the weirdest conversation I've ever had." And I said, "Me too, `cause I'm not sure what hat I'm supposed to wear."
Does that make any sense? The best thing is if you have a best friend maybe the best thing to do is not have them work with you. Or if they do have them work under someone else. And to also pursue good friendships with people outside of your church. Some of my dearest friends today are not at Mars Hill, they're also pastors of other churches. Darrin Patrick is here, Vice-President of Acts 29. I love him. He's a brother. He's the guy I call. ... He's a pastor to me, you know? Matt Chandler is here. I count as a friend. By God's Grace, C. J. Mahaney, I count as a friend. ...
Jamie Munson is head of the elder board. Jamie Munson is executive pastor. He is legal president of the organization. And for me, to be honest, it was the most freeing, liberating thing I could have dreamed of because now I don't have all that conflict of interest. I can be friends with someone but I don't have to fire them, do their performance review, and decide how much they get paid. It's just too conflicting for me." [emphasis added]
But Mark Driscoll is legal president of Mars Hill since 2011. So either Mark Driscoll no longer has a presidency characterized by conflicts of interest or he's arrived at a point where he doesn't have problems with conflicts of interest in a way that does not necessarily indicate that conflicts of interest don't exist. We can't be sure.
But what is clear is that Driscoll can't have it both ways. He can't claim that he made the mistake of trying to submit to the spiritual authority of young, new and green elders who were all older and more experienced than him while having made a point of appointing the even younger, even greener, and even newer-to-the-faith-than-himself Jamie Munson. If submitting to the spiritual authority of Gunn, Moi and others was a problem because they lacked spiritual experience and wisdom then why appoint Munson Lead Pastor ten years later? That looks like an exponential increase in stupid if Mark Driscoll actually ever believed the problem was he was trying to submit to the spiritual authority of young, green Christians. And if Munson was so great a Lead Pastor and a spiritual authority somebody pull up all the fantastic sermons Munson preached while a pastor at Mars Hill.
And now? Mars Hill isn't saying anything about Munson, the "king" who was heading the corporation for so long. If what Driscoll did in 1996 was stupid what Driscoll did circa 2006-2007 was stupid times stupid if we're going to take that video seriously and believe that Mark's problem was that he made the mistake of trying to submit to the spiritual authority of green elders. In late 2011 the story Mark told was he hadn't raised up a team to help him. Fascinating how this works. Mark didn't raise up a team of elders to help him and he had to do the majority of the work and yet somehow, at the same time, he made the mistake of trying to submit to the spiritual authority of the elders who were older men he asked to help him co-plant MH because they were young and new and green? So they didn't exist for all practical purposes when Mark's talking about all the work he did but then they did exist when he wants to talk about how he made the mistake of trying to submit himself to their authority.
And then assuming all that isn't a little bit weird ... picking Jamie Munson to be legal president in spite of being a young guy with little real-world work experience to manage Mars Hill as a legal entity when he was an even newer Christian than Driscoll himself was makes it hard to imagine that at any point Driscoll was very sincere or serious when he said the problem was he was trying to submit the authority of new and green leaders. He let Munson stay president of MH for years, after all.
https://musingsfromunderthebus.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/i-couldnt-trust-young-and-green-elders-so-i-put-jamie-munson-in-charge/
There's another question that emerges if we take Driscoll at his word that he made the mistake of appointing elders in authority over him who were "young and new and green" back around 1996. In 2007 Mark Driscoll decided to make Jamie Munson legal president of Mars Hill Church and the Lead Pastor. To get a clearer sense of how stupid this move would be if Driscoll was serious circa 2012 about the problem of young/new/green men in eldership let's revisit the signal quote itself, which to go by the set design and Grace Driscoll's haircut would have been during the Real Marriage period of earlier 2012.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/09/throckmorton-quotes-driscoll-i-made.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/24/eldersauthority/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9vbaq5cO20&feature=youtu.be
5:25
That's one practical thing is, I'd never been a member of a church until I started my own. So I didn't know a lot about church. But I wanted, I knew I was a big personality and pretty intense so I wanted to be under authority but I made a mistake of--how do I say this carefully?--trying to be under the authority of my elders but the truth is all my elders were new and young and green and they would want to help but they really didn't know what they were talking about.
And so what I should have had was a team of pastors outside of the church who were older and more seasoned that could, you know, help Grace and I put life together.
Of course for alert readers of the histories of Mars Hill according to Mark Driscoll someone could ask, "What elders?" For instance, in later 2011 Mark Driscoll explained in a post that the problem early on was there wasn't much of a team and he had to carry the burden alone. The emphasis seems to shift in the narrative Mark Driscoll gives from topic to topic. In one narrative the problem was he made the mistake of trying to submit to the authority of elders who were young and new and green. Even if there's a compelling case to be made for that, another narrative from Mark paints the early years of Mars Hill as one in which he was the only paid pastor on staff shouldering a terrible burden all by himself as though he weren't under any authority of any elders because he had failed to raise up leaders to help him.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-ten-painful-lessons-from-early-days_9.html
http://pastormark.tv/2011/12/06/10-painful-lessons-from-the-early-days-of-mars-hill-church
...
For the first five or six years of Mars Hill, I was the only paid pastor on staff and carried much of the ministry burden. I was doing all the premarital counseling and most of the pastoral work as the only pastor on staff. This went on for years due to pitiful giving and a ton of very rough new converts all the way until we had grown to about 800 people a Sunday. [emphasis added] At one point I literally had over a few thousand people come in and out of my home for Bible studies, internships, counseling, and more. My phone rang off the hook, my email inbox overflowed, my energy levels and health took a nose dive, and I started becoming bitter and angry instead of loving and joyful. It got to the point where either something had to change or I was going to go ballistic and do something I really regretted. [WtH, yeah, well, clearly this was published before the writings of William Wallace II got republished and Driscoll had a chance to remember he already HAD done something he regretted, maybe]
Through much prayer and study of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit impressed upon me that I’d done a poor job of raising up leaders along with me to help care for his church. I was carrying the burden myself and was not doing a good job because it was too much. [emphasis added] I needed to transition from caring for all the people to ensuring they were all cared for by raising up elders, deacons, and church members. This spurred me to make some dramatic changes to increase membership and train leaders.
We began a process of intentionally challenging qualified men to step up as elders to lead, finding and training men and women to serve and lead as deacons, and we started a Gospel Class to clearly articulate what we believed about Jesus, the Bible, and the church to make clear what we expected from members. Our first teams were not amazing, but some of those people, through years of maturing by God’s grace, are now amazing leaders and servants.
The one person who would best be in a position to call BS on the constantly shifting narratives about whether there were or weren't elders "in authority" over Mark Driscoll at the time seems to be willing to let him say whatever he wants in front of a camera without stopping him. So now we're supposed to simultaneously hold that Mark Driscoll failed to raise up leaders along with him to help care for the church because he was carrying the burden himself in spite of a team of older guys. But those older guys were young and new and green and he made the mistake of trying to submit to the authority of men he recruited to help him who were older and had some more ministry experience?
What to do? What to do?
Now, if the elders whose authority Mark Driscoll tried to submit himself to in the mid-1990s were "young and new and green" and didn't know what they were talking about then maybe that was even more the case with Mark Driscoll when he decided to let Jamie Munson be legal president and Lead Pastor of Mars Hill.
If anything Jamie Munson would have been even newer and greener and younger than Gunn or Moi. Munson was one of the earlier converts to Christianity under Mark Driscoll's preaching and teaching. So if Driscoll circa 2012 was willing to say that Mars Hill suffered because he didn't raise up leaders Jamie Munson's entire ministry career suggests that Driscoll did, in fact, raise up a young leader or two in the form of Jamie Munson and Tim Smith and that we can consult the leadership styles and decisions and conduct of these men as some insight into how the students took after their teacher.
This was the Jamie Munson who scouted the 50th street building that became Mars Hill corporate headquarters, the building that couldn't be zoned for the big vision Driscoll cast in his 2006 book. Munson was also Lead Pastor during 2007 when the controversial firings of Meyer and Petry happened. In fact a review of the reasons for immediate termination for both men seemed to revolve in part around the two older men not trusting or showing sufficient respect to spiritual authority, particularly with regard to Munson.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-discussion-of-jamie-munsons-2007.html
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-email-from-jmunson.pdf
Pastor Paul Petry - Grounds for immediate termination of employment
* Continual insubordination and submission to leadership and spiritual authority
* Refusal to Ministry Coaching Program
* Divisive within Mars Hill Student Ministry and undermining of Pastor Adam, Deacons and entire ministry
* Blame shifting to Proxy leadership for misbehavior of children
* Public accusation of Lead Pastor [Jamie Munson] regarding hiding the real bylaw document
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorney without permission
* Ongoing contentious spirit to leadership regarding changes and direction.
Pastor Bent Meyer - Grounds for Immediate Termination of Employment
* Total lack of trust for Executive leadership and insubordination
* Multiple unfounded accusations from Bent regarding abuse of power, power grabbing and motives of leadership
* Not following protocol and process for making bylaw comments by contacting church attorny without permission
* Showing unhealthy family favoritism by establishing son Cameron as spokesman for Salts recap meeting
* No communication with elders regarding Cameron's sin and removal of grace group leadership
Some might conclude this is a political move to gain more support for the bylaws as Paul and bent were outspoken critics of the current direction. [emphasis added] This is not the case, the executive team wants to conduct itself in a way that is full of integrity, walking in the light, under full disclosure and in a decisive manner that best serves Jesus and His church through Mars Hill. If the bylaws don't pass, so be it, we didn't want to wait on what we had determined were necessary and inevitable firings until after the bylaws had been voted into approval because that would have been deceptive. [emphasis added] We made the decision to terminate them now and givem them the option to resign or undergo the full investigation. We have a higher value of being men of integrity than playing politics to swing a vote in our favor.
Because firing two of twenty-four elders was necessary and inevitable because without a 100% uniform vote for Munson's by-laws (or were they Driscoll's bylaws?) nothing could get done? Let's bear in mind that Jamie Munson's first major incident recorded in his tenure as Lead Pastor who was placed there, apparently, by some combination of his own selection and the approval of Mark Driscoll, was explaining why two guys had to be fired because they distrusted spiritual authority. It is at this point that it may be pertinent to quote from Mark Driscoll himself about Jamie Munson.
http://marshill.com/2011/09/06/important-letters-from-pastors/
Celebrate the fact that Pastor Jamie is Mars Hill 1.0. He is exactly why Mars Hill exists. A lost young person meets Jesus and grows to be a godly leader, spouse, and parent who loves and leads well by the grace of God with humility and passion. He has given us every day of his life since he was 19 years of age. Mars Hill does not exist as a church of more than maybe a few hundred without God’s grace through Pastor Jamie. If a book were written about what God is doing among us, at least one whole chapter would be devoted to telling the story of God’s grace in Pastor Jamie’s life.
Munson resigned membership earlier this year, which means that if Mars Hill Church survives long enough to have a book written about it there won't be a chapter dedicated to Jamie Munson's role within Mars Hill if the book were written by someone still at Mars Hill.
But in spite of Mark Driscoll's former claim that Munson was always above reproach, it seems Sutton Turner had some issues with the fiscal competency of leadership at Mars Hill and seemed to believe that Jamie Munson was "checked out" and had left Mars Hill in a financial situation that was something like a disaster.
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2014/09/Current-Financial-Situation-March-17-12.pdf
One of the greatest and most harmful events was Pastor Jamie resigning and leaving me in this job as General Manager/Executive Elder. From early June until he resigned in August, he had basically checked out. So I had less than 6 weeks as General Manager before becoming #1 King without being an Elder. Then finally in November, I was made an Executive Pastor without have any creditability with the staff. This single fact hindered my ability to really even understand the organization or the people, much less see the problems as they had existed for a long time.
So Driscoll may change his tune depending on the topic and who is asking him a question. If he told Grace he made a mistake in trying to submit himself to the spiritual authority of new and green elders it makes even less sense that ten years after the start of Mars Hill he would have had Jamie Munson be legal president and Lead Pastor of Mars Hill if Mark Driscoll really took seriously the problem of trying to submit to the authority of new, young and green Christians. If anything appointing an even younger man who was a new convert under Driscoll's preaching and teaching would be an example of Mark Driscoll amplifying his earlier error. He wasn't just trying to submit to the spiritual authority of young, green and new elders, he was trying to lower the bar for executive leadership even lower at a crucial stage of Mars Hill in 2007.
A few months after that crucial change Mark Driscoll described the impossibility of working with friends in ministry.
http://theresurgence.com/2008/04/07/question-and-answer-with-mark-driscoll-video
http://www.theresurgence.com/mark_driscoll_2008-02-27_video_tnc_qa
http://www.acts29network.org/sermon/qa-with-mark-driscoll/
(starts at 00:31:52)
Q. How do you lead staff who are your best friends?Do you want the honest answer or should I punt?
... You can't. ... you can't.
I hate to tell you that. ... Deep down in your gut you know if you're best friends and someone works for you that changes the relationship. Right? Because you can fire them. Of course you want to be friends with your elders and the people you work with. I mean, we're a church. I mean you wanna, you NEED to love the people you work with. But one of the hardest things, and only the lead guy gets this. Nobody else on staff even understands what I'm talking about. When you're the lead guy you wear multiple hats. Say it's someone who works with you and they're a good friend. You wear the "Hey, we're buddies" hat. We're friends. We go on vacation. We hang out. We do
dinner. We're friends.
But you also wear the "I'm your boss" hat "You need to do your job or I might have to fire you" hat, and you also wear the "I'm your pastor. I love you, care for you, and I'm looking out for your well-being" hat. Those three hats are in absolute collision. Because how do you fire your friend and then pastor them through it? Right? I mean that is very complicated. I love you, you're fired, can I pray for you? That is a very .. what are we doing? I think if you're going to have your best friends working with you they need to be somewhere else on the team but not under you or the friendship really needs to change.
And what happens is when people are your friend ... I don't think that many do this intentionally but they want you to wear whatever hat is at their best interest at the time. So they didn't do their job, they're falling down on their responsibility, and you talk to them and say, "Look, you're not getting this done." They put on the "hey buddy. Yeah, I've been kinda sick lately and my wife and I are going through a hard time." and they want the friend hat on. And as a friend you're like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, dude." But then you put your boss hat back on and you're like "Yeah, but we pay you and we need you to get the job done."
And then they want you to put the friend hat back on and keep sympathizing.
And you're totally conflicted. ...
I have very good friends in this church. I have elders that are very dear friends, but when you have to do their performance review, when you have to decide what their wage is, when you have to decide whether they get promoted, demoted or terminated it's impossible to do that because you can't wear all three hats at the same time.
First guy I fired, he was a dear friend. A godly man, no moral or doctrinal sin whatsoever, he just wasn't keeping up with what we needed him to do. And it wasn't `cause he didn't try and wasn't working hard. And he had a wonderful wife and a great family and to this day I think the world of this guy. And if my sons grew up to be like him, I'd be proud. And I'm not critical of this man at all.
But I remember sitting down at that first termination. First I put on the friend hat. I said, "I love you, I appreciate you. I value you." Then I put on the boss hat, "I'm gonna have to let you go. Here's why." And then I put on the pastor hat, "How are you feeling? How are you doing?" And he was really gracious with me and he said, "This is just the weirdest conversation I've ever had." And I said, "Me too, `cause I'm not sure what hat I'm supposed to wear."
Does that make any sense? The best thing is if you have a best friend maybe the best thing to do is not have them work with you. Or if they do have them work under someone else. And to also pursue good friendships with people outside of your church. Some of my dearest friends today are not at Mars Hill, they're also pastors of other churches. Darrin Patrick is here, Vice-President of Acts 29. I love him. He's a brother. He's the guy I call. ... He's a pastor to me, you know? Matt Chandler is here. I count as a friend. By God's Grace, C. J. Mahaney, I count as a friend. ...
Jamie Munson is head of the elder board. Jamie Munson is executive pastor. He is legal president of the organization. And for me, to be honest, it was the most freeing, liberating thing I could have dreamed of because now I don't have all that conflict of interest. I can be friends with someone but I don't have to fire them, do their performance review, and decide how much they get paid. It's just too conflicting for me." [emphasis added]
But Mark Driscoll is legal president of Mars Hill since 2011. So either Mark Driscoll no longer has a presidency characterized by conflicts of interest or he's arrived at a point where he doesn't have problems with conflicts of interest in a way that does not necessarily indicate that conflicts of interest don't exist. We can't be sure.
But what is clear is that Driscoll can't have it both ways. He can't claim that he made the mistake of trying to submit to the spiritual authority of young, new and green elders who were all older and more experienced than him while having made a point of appointing the even younger, even greener, and even newer-to-the-faith-than-himself Jamie Munson. If submitting to the spiritual authority of Gunn, Moi and others was a problem because they lacked spiritual experience and wisdom then why appoint Munson Lead Pastor ten years later? That looks like an exponential increase in stupid if Mark Driscoll actually ever believed the problem was he was trying to submit to the spiritual authority of young, green Christians. And if Munson was so great a Lead Pastor and a spiritual authority somebody pull up all the fantastic sermons Munson preached while a pastor at Mars Hill.
And now? Mars Hill isn't saying anything about Munson, the "king" who was heading the corporation for so long. If what Driscoll did in 1996 was stupid what Driscoll did circa 2006-2007 was stupid times stupid if we're going to take that video seriously and believe that Mark's problem was that he made the mistake of trying to submit to the spiritual authority of green elders. In late 2011 the story Mark told was he hadn't raised up a team to help him. Fascinating how this works. Mark didn't raise up a team of elders to help him and he had to do the majority of the work and yet somehow, at the same time, he made the mistake of trying to submit to the spiritual authority of the elders who were older men he asked to help him co-plant MH because they were young and new and green? So they didn't exist for all practical purposes when Mark's talking about all the work he did but then they did exist when he wants to talk about how he made the mistake of trying to submit himself to their authority.
And then assuming all that isn't a little bit weird ... picking Jamie Munson to be legal president in spite of being a young guy with little real-world work experience to manage Mars Hill as a legal entity when he was an even newer Christian than Driscoll himself was makes it hard to imagine that at any point Driscoll was very sincere or serious when he said the problem was he was trying to submit the authority of new and green leaders. He let Munson stay president of MH for years, after all.
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