It’s been nearly seven years since Mars Hill Church, the fabulously successful multi-campus evangelical flock in Seattle, imploded when its pastor, Mark Driscoll, resigned. The church’s nearly 13,000-person Sunday attendance totals quickly dissolved, its headquarters and branch campuses were closed or sold.
I moved to the Seattle suburbs the following summer and had a long conversation with one of the church’s leaders. I’ve rarely turned down a chance to do a story, but it was clear that covering this mess would take up more time and emotional energy than I had time for.
Dodging a lawsuit that accused him of misappropriating $30 million worth of members’ tithes, Driscoll ended up moving to Scottsdale, Ariz., (whose sunny clime is like Shangri-la to many rain-drenched Seattleites) and starting a new church plant in 2016 called Trinity Church.
Recently, a number of stories have come out about Driscoll’s heavy-handed leadership and dysfunctional pastoring at Trinity that sounded all too similar to what went down in Seattle. The latest just came out Monday in Christianity Today:
Nearly 40 elders who served with Mark Driscoll during the final years of Mars Hill Church are publicly calling for him to step down from his current pastoral position and seek reconciliation with those he has hurt.
“We are troubled that he continues to be unrepentant despite the fact that these sins have been previously investigated, verified, and brought to his attention by his fellow Elders, prior to his abrupt resignation” from Mars Hill, they wrote in a statement released today to CT. “Accordingly, we believe that Mark is presently unfit for serving the church in the office of pastor.”
Christianity Today is one of two outlets that have been following the Mars Hill story a lot recently and I’ll get to CT’s podcast series in a moment.
But first I should first mention investigative journalist Julie Roys’ two podcasts. She’s been following the Mars-Hill-in-Arizona beat for some time, but her latest is an act of war. From the transcript of Inside the Driscoll Cult Part 1:
The cultic activities of Mark Driscoll and The Trinity Church have escalated to a whole new level. As Julie’s guests describe on this edition of The Roys Report, Driscoll is now sending cease and desist letters, threatening to sue whistleblowers. And the threat is not in vain. Driscoll reportedly has amassed a $10 million dollar litigation fund to sue whistleblowers into oblivion.
Both podcasts (here is part 2), are built around interviews of two former employees: Chad Freese, a information systems specialist and retired officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, who served as Driscoll’s head of security, and Ben Eneas, who served with Freese on the security detail. Both have decided to go public with the disaster unfolding in Scottsdale. Unlike the drama in Seattle, where the weirdness dragged on for years, these Arizona folks have woken up to this way earlier.
Roys’ latest podcast is about the families of Trinity employees and how they are not allowed to see grandchildren and other relatives. She talked about a red flag being churches that don’t report their financials. In my experience, churches do -– sort of. They give a general budget overview but there’s nothing on individual salaries, especially what the pastor is getting.
Roys has done one thing that journalists rarely do for liability reasons: Call Driscoll’s church a “cult.” Roys later likened the place to the Mafia. Are we talking about a “cult” in terms of leadership patterns (a sociological definition) or in terms of errors in doctrine? Or both?
At this point, if would be appropriate to ask a basic journalism question: Where are the Arizona media on this?
Driscoll is a nationally known figure and his resignation seven years ago was reported everywhere from the New York Times on down. Yet, I’ve had to rely on smaller operations like Roys’ web site (which has been breaking a lot of stories recently) and blogs, like this Wandering Eagle one that ran an April 28 story about Driscoll going after a 15-year-old boy who kissed his 17-year-old daughter.
Stories are beginning to emerge from Mark Driscoll’s The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is one of many that are coming forward. What happened in this case is that a fifteen year old and seventeen year old female who was Mark Driscoll’s daughter mutually kissed. Afterward when Mark Driscoll learned of it he became unhinged. It led to an alleged campaign of harassment including false accusations made that the Scottsdale Police had to investigate. The coming Trinity Church implosion is going to be Mars Hill 2.0 in Scottsdale, Arizona and will be very dark.
Police are having to investigate? There’s more than enough for a local reporter to sink his or her teeth into.
Then again, the Seattle Times hasn’t been following this either. But if Driscoll had been a former politician pulling similar tricks. you can bet reporters would have been all over it. Other blogs that have been following this story include WenatcheeTheHatchet and Warren Throckmorton, both of whom have lots of extra (and juicy) details. There’s no lack of eyes on Mark Driscoll.
The other recent reporting on Mars Hill has come from Christianity Today, the brainchild of Mike Cosper, director of podcasting for CT. According to a Facebook post from his boss, CEO Timothy Dalrymple, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” has been a project in the works ever since Cosper was hired 17 months ago.
What makes Cosper’s project so interesting (and I’ve listened to the first four podcasts to date), is the explanation of the theological undercurrents that caused a church like Mars Hill to happen in the first place. It reviews the movements and the zeitgeist of the late 1990s, when the church was founded by a 27-year-old man who was the first Internet-age pastor in terms of his use of blogs and social media.
CT also asks the larger question: Why does this happen again and again in current church circles? Driscoll is but one of many names of pastors who’ve gone off the deep end. The podcasts conclude that these were leaders whose abilities to lead rose before their character matured. Or their gifts didn’t line up with their character.
No kidding.
I wish CT had fingered other villains in this, such as the Christian book publishers that elevated these guys (and their books) while turning down perfectly good people (who have loads of character but no fame) on the grounds that the latter don’t have the platform to draw in the readers. Then there are the Christian conferences that invite these folks as headliners. Driscoll got a lot of prime speaking engagements that most 27-year-olds are not privy to.
Regarding this massive — and impressive CT investigation — another question arises: Why now? Why seven years after the fact? Was this because word is out that Driscoll is repeating the same stuff in Arizona?
Also — I’ve seen no one reporting on this — what is going on with Driscoll’s transformation from being Reformed to charismatic? Earlier this year, some 80 leaders in the prophetic movement signed a statement pledging accountability. Driscoll was one of those who signed. What’s up with that? Driscoll has been known for being a lot of things, but joining the ranks of Pentecostals and charismatics isn’t one of them.
I’ll close with a few notes on CT’s presentation thus far:
* The podcasts talk about the excitement that founded the place in the beginning: The magic years when all at the church were of the same spirit and mind; where spontaneous miracles and conversions happened.
In 2009, I came out with a book about the rise and fall of a similar church in Houston and the same factors were present there: The brilliance of the lead pastor at the beginning; the gifted elders who came together, the people who gave everything to this church and were available to whomever walked in the door. And then this charismatic leader falls off the wagon when he demands loyalty instead of honesty; the elders end up pulling punches and choosing peace over honesty, leaving the walking wounded among the members, (some of whom completely leave the faith over fallout).
* One thing missing from the series to date are voices of women, either as pastors or as commentators or experts, other than one former female employee, All these elders and pastors had to be married to someone. Did those wives have influence on what went on? (Cosper has said that the rule of women will be in a future podcast, but we’re halfway through the series and they’re barely there.)
* All this goes to show that Mark Driscoll is still very much in the news, but the only ones paying attention are Christian news outlets and a few weblogs.
I hope the secular media catch onto this way before they woke up to what was happening in Seattle because the stakes may be higher the second time around and the fall greater.
FIRST IMAGE: Early Trinity Church announcement, drawn from social media.