http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2014/03/the-line-at-mars-hills-communion-table.html..
You can go read her post and the comments for yourself. This post presupposes you've read those.
One of the things that intermittently comes up is to propose that one must examine one's heart about why one is choosing to blog about Mars Hill Church. I've gotten some questions from people about, "What is your heart motive in this?" That's the evangelical/conservative variation. A slightly more progressive variation is, "Would love to hear your story/perspective on this."
Well, I don't necessarily plan to share my story and consider it comparatively unimportant to "reveal my heart" on this set of topics.
But there are times where questions and comments can suggest, by their wording, where commenters are coming from.
For instance, "Check your heart motives" can be a particularly Christianese variation of, "Would you please just shut up already?" "How is this edifying?" is more a rhetorical question that comes off as meaning, "I don't feel personally edified by this so you'd best stop talking or writing."
"This is slander", see, this one reminds me of a wonderful exchange in Sam Raimi's first Spiderman film where Peter Parker objects to J Jonah Jamieson that he's slandering Spiderman. J K Simmons' over-the-top editor replies, "You insult me, son. Slander is spoken, in print it's libel." There are a lot of Christians who would simply suggest, it seems, that any viewpoint they disagree strongly with amounts to slander or libel or ...
"This is gossip". This one comes up once in a while. At the risk of borrowing some ideas from Carl Trueman he's proposed in the past that, if memory serves, when you decide you're going to blog about controversies and issues connected to a particular church or spiritual community there's a sense in which you need to ask yourself if it is your business, to put it crudely. To put it less crudely, you should ask yourself whether you have any social or tangible link to the community or issue you're planning to blog about. If you don't then maybe, just maybe you don't need to sound off on it in a public fashion.
Which gets to Wenatchee The Hatchet. I spent about ten years inside the culture and have retained connections to a variety of people who still call Mars Hill Church their church home. I have no beef with the people as a social and spiritual community, actually. People who have called Mars Hill Church home have given me jobs and I've played music with people from Mars Hill on a number of occasions. People from there have helped me in tough times and when I've been able to I've tried to help as well. Wenatchee The Hatchet may seem like an "other side" blog and certainly it seems people inside Mars Hill may have been given some impression this is an anti-Mars Hill Church blog but that's never actually been the case.
When a church like Mars Hill has the kind of staff turnover it's had in the last two years and when its history shifts and shuffles, when the leadership commits to a series of decisions as though they were directly and divinely sanctioned, even dubious proposals such as trying to get real estate in Bellevue that has already been bought by Sound Transit, then it seems worthwhile to document that history as it happens for those who may not realize that there's more to the history than PR and fundraising missions.
Mark Driscoll used to say regularly from the pulpit that we like to think there are people wearing white hats and black hats and that we wear the white hats but we don't, only Jesus does. It would appear over the last ten years that Mark Driscoll and the other leaders may have forgotten this seminal observation. The temptation to be the hero in the narrative of your own life and community is no doubt almost completely irresistible but ideally a practicing Christian will understand that this role is not possible. We cannot let ourselves be the hero in the narrative of our lives if we understand who Jesus is.
So blogging here is not necessarily about "winning". There's nothing to win in the end. Ecclesiastes warns us that everyone dies and there is no legacy you can build that will not eventually rot away with the passage of time or be inherited by someone who may be a fool. The book of Job is a reminder that no matter how great one's wealth, family, or health all these can be taken away in an instant if God permits the devil to take those things.
Wendy has gotten a number of the usual reactions I've seen from people who would like Mars Hill Church to not get discussed. There are sometimes concerns that things shouldn't be discussed in public. Well, let's keep in mind that if Christians consistently kept up the principle that no critique of the failures within God's people should be transmitted in any public fashion none of the books of the prophets could have been canonized, could they? Imprecatory psalms wouldn't have passed msuter. Even some apostolic writings would have not quite made the cut.
Years ago, on my way out of Mars Hill Church, I shared that I had some concerns. I was concerned about the fiscal policies in place in the wake of the 2007 multi-site move, that it seemed like Mars Hill was set on a course where they were acquiring real estate and expanding campuses faster than they were developing a robust donor base for each campus. This seemed like a high risk move that could lead to systemic debt. What did Mark Driscoll inform Mars Hill about in June of 2012? Something about how there were systemic deficits at every campus? That was four years after I felt it was impossible to stay as a contracted member. I didn't stop spending time with friends and associates at the church but it stopped being my church home and, in time, it turned out that Mark Driscoll announced from the pulpit the thing I privately expressed reservations about years before.
Another concern I shared was a doubt about the competence and good will of counseling pastors, all across the board. I was concerned that the by-laws that had been unanimously voted into place in 2007 provided neither confidentiality for members under discipline or any possibility of an appeal. When Andrew Lamb's disciplinary case became the subject of blogging and headlines I saw that what I had privately warned might one day blow up in the faces of Mars Hill leadership actually did so. It became regional and national news when an appeal process might have ameliorated the situation somewhat. And along the way it looks like some counseling pastors got fired for reasons that have yet to be publicly verified or discussed.
So when you see a blog post or a hundred on the subject of Mars Hill Church here you're looking at a blog written by someone who tried to articulate a set of concerns way back in 2008 about disconcerting trajectories in the leadership culture. Another thing I privately shared was a concern that while the leaders would talk to the members about the dangers of consumerism there was, if anything, some potential for the leaders to have a consumeristic mentality about the congregation, like the flock was some piggy bank to be shaken to get money for new and ambitious projects that, maybe, were not always fiscally well-advised for the time and place. That is more how I have come to articulate the reservations from then in the now.
The point is that there have been a number of people who have tried to articulate concerns in private to the leadership of Mars Hill and the leadership culture and, well, we've kind of seen how things have played out.
One of the most striking things about Mars Hill culture and leadership is a history of defining "sin" as things you say or do on purpose in defiance of God or God-appointed authority. Other stuff, that stuff would be mistakes. But who's to say that a sin can only be a sin if it was planned? Is sin something where a Paul Reubens character has to say "I meant to do that!" for it to count? Let's take plagiarism, someone was proposing last year that Mark Driscoll would not intentionally plagiarize. And yet the separation and release agreement Warren Throckmorton published reveals that former staff are told that it basically doesn't matter if they intentionally or unintentionally compromise "confidential information". Or that's how it reads so far. If Mars Hill executive elders were held to that level of potential punitive action then how would Mark Driscoll feel if he knew that his sermons provided essential clues to identifying the connection Andrew Lamb had to James Noriega and his family and that all this stuff had been sitting around in broadcast and social media for anyone to put together? Well ... perhaps Mars Hill has finally realized this and it might be a tiny, ultimately insignificant variable in yanking the entirety of the Phillipians series or even the 1 Corinthians series. After all, it was the sermon "One Body, Many Parts" from that series that Wenatchee The Hatchet quoted extensively from in the tagged posts real estate and Mars Hill discussing the acquisition of the West Seattle campus, wasn't it?
You see a blogger like Wendy or a blogger like myself, it's not as though we never tried to voice concerns privately. When cautions said in private get ignored for years and things blow up in ways that emerge into the public sphere and involve someone who has spent nearly twenty years working toward being a public figure and who has amassed a mountain of social and broadcast media content then it's ultimately not "gossip" to quote extensively from all that material, link to primary sources, provide context, provide an interpretation and invite public discussion.
If anything it's more "gossip" when people who never set foot in Mars Hill attempt to opine on it and its leadership than when former members and staff decide to finally say things in public settings and none of us are obliged to agree.
But what I would suggest to anyone attempting to jump in and attempt to keep up with things, actually do your homework. For instance, if Matthew Paul Turner publishes a sample copy of what a Result Source contract might look like, don't link to it and say it's the actual contract signed between Mat Miller and John Sutton Turner. THAT contract got published by Warren Throckmorton. If you get sloppy about these simple details it makes it impossible for alert readers to take you seriously when they otherwise might.
Anonymous comments here that make points about how so-and-so who was a former pastor or member had something coming to them, don't do those. You wouldn't want it to be you who gets people anonymously taking potshots at your character in blog comments now that you've lost your job or church home because of events you wished had never happened. Let's keep the Golden Rule in mind. This blog is probably not a normal watchblog and perhaps I can take some time to explain why that is.
Years ago I took ... some journalism classes. The professor teaching a number of the courses (okay, nearly all of them) once explained that there is a common and serious misconception people have about editorial writing and that is that anybody at all cares what you think. An editorial that is merely an opinion isn't worth writing. "Nobody cares what you think. People want to know what the facts are. Even in editorial writing you should still think like a reporter." That's as close to a quote as can be managed some twenty years on. That, dear readers, is close to the ethos of Wenatchee The Hatchet. Think of this as a blog that, at least on the subject of Mars Hill Church, is more of a journalistic/historical experiment than what you might normally think of when you think of a "watchblog".
My story, my personal opinion, my feelings, my thoughts about this or that specific issue that you might feel I'm morally or intellectually obliged to sound off in precisely the way you want me to, that's not important. This is not some blog where you're going to see "Mark Driscoll is evil". That's for some other place. This is not some blog where you're going to see things framed in terms of the tone of outrage and indignation. Outrage is quite possibly the cheapest emotion on the internet. Don't come here to find more fuel for your indignation.
Don't come here expecting this to be some strictly anti-Mars Hill blog, nor imagine for even a moment that somehow this blog constitutes a defense of things about Mars Hill Church you find objectionable. It's none of those things, however badly some visitors seem to want it to be one thing or another. That anyone, at this stage, could imagine Wenatchee The Hatchet has let Mark Driscoll off the hook for anything after having been the first blogger (it seems) to have actually documented how the Driscolls made use of but did not adequately credit published work by Dan Allender when Real Marriage was first published, is absurd.
If there's something I've noticed in the metaphorical water that flows through watchblogs it is that they are often written by people who seem confident that if they just say the right words at the right time with the right tone in the properly forceful way they can "win". Here, too, this is not one of those sorts of blogs. Failure is a foregone conclusion. When I was a teenager I read the book of Isaiah and was thunderstruck by the calling of the prophet. Back then I was inspired by the divine commission and of the responsibility it seemed to entail. Now on the edge of forty I'm impressed by the built-in future of failure that commission had built into it. Anyone who would for a second imagine that something some people call a "watchblog" will succeed and "speak truth to power" and confront the powers that be had best prepare for abject failure or reconsider the entire foolish enterprise. Of course it's foolish and most likely doomed to fail. Thing is, if you've read the prophets you'd understand that the certainty of complete and fatal failure is not a reason to not do something.
In exceptional circumstances I've been told that I need to realize that whatever negative things I've written about Mars Hill I have to recognize that one day I will have to answer to God for those things.
I've been told that some people know stuff much worse than anything published at this blog but that is kept hidden because the reputation of the church or the reputation of God is important. Well, okay, but I thought one of the key points of the book of Job was that God's reputation is most insulted by those who most feel obliged to defend His honor. So keep that in mind, dear reader.
And ... think of it this way, if you put it like that why would I not write about the history of Mars Hill Church? If by any chance I have misquoted someone or not understand a statement in a specific context I've shown I'm willing to listen, but it can seem as though people who have made a point of raising the future in which I will have to account to God why I have written as I have about Mars Hill Church may not realize that's actually a big, big reason to write. You've seen the details of the "story", such as they are, if you spent a decade inside a church; had some training in journalism; realized that nearly all mainstream and independent media coverage and blogging was falling terribly short of uncovering what is easily found on the record; and realized that it was important to document the history of Mars Hill Church as it shifts and changes and happen to also be a practicing Christian, then what do you suppose might happen if you stand before God one day and He asks you why you didn't say anything about what was happening? A Christian who tries to play the guilt card to another Christian in such a setting may discover he or she has inadvertently reinforced the incentive to write. Now there's such a thing as discretion and attempting to cultivate journalistic ethics and there's a lot that could be said about the problems of watchblogs on journalistic integrity and ethics and reliability of information but this blog post is not the place to discuss that, if ever the matter will get discussed here.
So here's the proposal, such as it is, the term "watchblog" may inadvertently get at the primary thing about such a blog, which is to watch, which is to see, to observe. The most you can do is see what is to be seen and document it for the consideration of others. You can't entirely anticipate, let alone change, the course of whatever the future is. Properly understood, the emergence of the prophetic role in ancient Israel within the Mosaic law was not a predictive or eschatological role (and if you don't feel like reading Frank Crusemann on that subject that's probably your loss more than mine). It's not that what you write will change anything at all, that's not why you do it.
You do it because, for want of a less trite way of putting it, you find you have to. It may mean you get considered a traitor by people you don't see yourself betraying. You'll end up being the villain from all sorts of directions. I've gotten more flak and vitriol from people who are against Mars Hill than from anyone who has called Mars Hill Church home. I have never actually felt intimidated or threatened by people from Mars Hill Church in any fashion. The people who actually know me know that I bear them no ill-will. If it happens that quoting leaders of Mars Hill accurately, in context, and in a timely fashion on a variety of subjects; if quoting leaders of Mars Hill from the past in ways that highlight problematic statements or decisions should come off as making them look bad, well, there's no apologies here for that. Once something's put on record it's on the record. Scrubbing doesn't change anything.
If the people of Mars Hill are uncomfortable with that sort of thing it raises the very disconcerting possibility that they will do anything but accept what they historically can't wait to dish out. Of course it's usually presented as "speaking the truth in love" when you're on the giving end of this. :) I was that way for years, might still be that way, but this is, I hope, tempered by the realization that finding a way to articulate those concerns in a way where I can get a grasp of what it would be like to be on the receiving end is one of my goals.
So, at the risk of giving some specific examples this isn't exactly like Wartburg Watch or Stuff Christian Culture Likes. There are people who appreciate those blogs and for folks who absolutely have to vent about Mars Hill, okay, you can head over to either of those places or somewhere else. But if you come here, to Wenatchee The Hatchet, this is not that kind of place on the internet. This is not a place where just ripping on Mark Driscoll or other people who have been around in the history of Mars Hill is going to get smiled upon.
So perhaps by now you may see that when bloggers like myself or Wendy or others who once called Mars Hill Church home say some things on line don't assume that we didn't spend months or years trying to privately express concerns inside before making some things known to the public. If the cliche application of Matthew 18 had worked five to seven years ago there probably wouldn't BE any blogs discussing the history of Mars Hill Church beyond "Isn't Mars Hill great!?" The approach of publicly documenting the shifting sands of the history of Mars Hill Church was a last resort option, chosen with the realization that "failure" to catalyze change is a given, and chosen as much because so much journalistic coverage fell so terribly short of finding even basic facts.
The goal of this blog, on the subject of Mars Hill at least, is not to cement existing opinions but to, where possible, educate and inform. If you want to keep attending Mars Hill Church, then this blog may help you make a more informed decision about its history. If you are thinking of becoming a member but have some reservations, well, this might be the perfect blog for you if you're exceptionally patient. If you already can't stand Mark Driscoll this blog is not for you. There are other places to go. And, finally, this is not a blog that has an aim to "win", as though anyone wins in this kind of situation. Let's say that I think that if someone's going to be a watchblogger the goal is to watch more than opine. If you watchblog to succeed, however you define it, you're probably better off not doing it. But if you're reconciled to the inevitability of failure, whatever you fear that might be, and believe you should share what you observe and be as accurate as possible anyway, then, well, see how it goes.