Ye shall know them by the bilirubin brown of their noses.

It was in the mid-90s on Saturday. I can’t imagine that Driscoll can have much of a Saturday outdoor circus in the summer, given how insanely hot it is in the late afternoon. I once protested in 110 F heat and made myself sick. Luckily I was very close to home and was able to drive back and get a cold shower. Scottsdale is too far away for that. I’ll probably have to stick to Sunday morning.

Fourth possibility: He doesn’t know what an Elder is supposed to be, and he’s thinking the people on the boxes below Driscoll in the church org chart qualify.

This man comes out in response to Dee and says the church has elders. That, of course, is either a brand new development or was carefully hidden from former staff who never heard of them and don’t know who they are.

Third possibility: He’s lying.

In a derivation of the wisdom of Sun Tzu: get your opponent talking and they will defeat themselves.

Any elders will be in some way beholden to him and useless in keeping him in line–as is perfectly clear from the episode of his teenage daughter’s kissing a boy from the church. Driscoll’s action was obviously waaaaay overblown, but went unchecked by anybody from the government of the church. I can’t see Mark Driscoll’s time at Trinity ending any better than it did at Mars Hill.

It looks like Mars Hill appointed this first set of rules when the church was small and very young and Driscoll was still finding his feet as pastor, so it was all in place before the structure became an annoyance to him.

Not exactly. He had to submit to an investigation of former elders when they pressed charges against him. The bylaws required it. He quit before he submitted to their judgment that he was disqualified and needed to be in a restoration plan.