Screen capture from Mars Hill Church video, 2014
If her article at the Washington Post today is any indication, columnist Kirsten Powers is more than a little peeved at my blog host Patheos for taking in Pastor Mark Driscoll as a blogger. In the piece, Powers smartly summarized Driscoll’s history of misogynous utterances and then opined:
Any outlet that promotes him as a respectable teacher is as complicit in our culture’s misogyny as other abusers’ enablers.
But what do I know? I’m just a woman.
As her article shows, Powers knows a lot. But she might not know how much cash one can pull in even with a reputation as a purveyor of toxic masculinity. Stay with me, I am about to show you.
Mark Driscoll Ministries
According to the 2014 and 2015 IRS 990 forms required to be filed by nonprofit organizations, Mark Driscoll Ministries pulled in $1,132,009 from November 2014 to December 2016 (figure comes from adding all donations and speaking fees).
Of course, it takes money to run a “ministries” (why is one guy’s ministry called ministries?) so he didn’t get all of that million, but most of the donations went to his compensation, moving expenses, and housing allowance. His new church got $25,000. I wonder how many donors thought they were helping to plant that church with their donations.
Former Mars Hill Church members: you might be interested to know that much of current content of Mark Driscoll Ministries website was paid for by your charitable giving. Just recently on the Patheos blog, his posts have been recycled from his books and the Resurgence website. Mars Hill fundspaid Docent Research Group and a team of people at Mars Hill to provide the research for the content of the books. These materials have been recycled and keep on giving Driscoll returns on your investment.
So don’t worry about Driscoll. After he resigned from Mars Hill Church rather than comply with his elders’ recommendations in October 2014, his brand seems to have recovered well. Now all he has to worry about is people who remember things and write about them in the Washington Post and of all places Patheos.
Last week, reader Aaron New pointed out a couple of paragraphs in a blog post by fellow Patheos blogger Mark Driscoll which were nearly identical to material in a previously published book by Aubrey Malphurs. Using previously published material without citation is plagiarism.
Well, Professor New has found another copied paragraph. Driscoll’s paragraph is from part two of a series adapted from his book Doctrine with Gerry Breshears and is below:
Now compare Driscoll’s paragraph with this excerpt from How We Got the Bible by Neil Lightfoot (copied material is underlined).
Driscoll left out the Bible citations and rearranged a couple of words. Otherwise, this is lifted from Lightfoot. Taking into account last week’s incident and this one, it is hard to see how this could be accidental or some kind of coincidence. Some may protest that the amount of material is small. While true, the paragraphs are quotes with no quotation marks. This should be corrected and an apology immediately offered when it happens.
I contacted Driscoll’s co-author Gerry Breshears about the citations and he has not answered.
I have been able to consult a few individuals who did ghostwriting and research work for Mars Hill Church. Their descriptions provide insight into how some citations make it into published material and how some doesn’t. Much of the research for Doctrine was paid for by Mars Hill Church. Then Driscoll chose the information he needed and reworked it. Some passages obviously didn’t get reworked much and ended up in published works without citations. In all cases, so I was told, the citations were in the research. However, for some reason, either the author or an editor removed some citations. In any case, the beat goes on.
To follow along on social media, click the following links:
After my post yesterday about Fellow Patheos Blogger Pastor Mark Driscoll’s citation issues, reader and college prof Aaron New sent along an example of another problem in Driscoll’s most recent Patheos blog post.
The post, “What is the Bible? Answering 4 Common Questions About the Bible: Part 1,” largely comes from his book with Gerry Breshears, Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. To his credit, Driscoll alerted readers to that fact at the end of the post.
More troubling is the lack of quotes and citation for the following section. From yesterday’s post:
Now take a look at a book first published in 1997 (2nd edition in 2009) written by Aubrey Malphurs and titled, Ministry Nuts and Bolts: What They Don’t Teach Pastors in Seminary. On page 190 of that book, Malphurs provides the following description of the Bible. The portion of interest begins in the third full sentence of the paragraph below.
The passages are nearly identical. Even though the facts are commonly known, the order, wording, and presentation of those facts are nearly the same in both places. The Driscoll and Breshears book has a 2010 copyright date; Malphurs’ book shows two copyright dates, 1997 and 2009. Most of the Malphurs’ material is also in the Doctrine book, but a couple of the copied sentences are only in the Patheos blog post.
Readers, I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. I report, you decide. Just to make it clear, below is the Patheos blog post passage with the identical material underlined. What is not underlined is only slightly reworded. Only a very few additional words were added.
There may be more instances like this. I only examined two paragraphs in the Patheos blog. I think some explanation should be forthcoming for why the water that was under the bridge is now gushing forth in this new season.
After reading the most recent post by my Fellow Patheos Blogger Pastor Mark Driscoll™ last night, a frequent reader of my blog informed me that the new post recycles lots of material from Driscoll’s book on doctrine. Indeed, there are several paragraphs in his Patheos post on evil in Las Vegas which first appeared in his book with Gerry Breshears titled Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. For instance, Driscoll wrote in his post:
The Bible uses a constellation of images to explain sin as everything from rebellion to folly, self-abuse, madness, treason, death, hatred, spiritual adultery, missing the mark, wandering from the path, idolatry, insanity, irrationality, pride, selfishness, blindness, deafness, a hard heart, a stiff neck, delusion, unreasonableness, and self-worship. Sin and evil are not rational or reasonable.
In his Doctrine book, he introduces a section on sin with the same paragraph:
To Recycle or Not?
Recycling previously published material without citation is somewhat controversial in the world of writers. Journalist Jonah Lehrer had his career sidetracked over it. I discovered lots of it in Fellow Patheos Blogger Mark Driscoll’s™ books. However, in this case, I doubt many people will care that he is recycling previously published material at his new blog.
On the other hand, his co-author might care. Unless Gerry Breshears was not really very involved or just lent his name, the material claimed now by Driscoll might have been written by Breshears. Having a co-author is one reason why authors should cite the original source for recycled material.
Deja Vu All Over Again*
However, the same reader alerted me to something else I hadn’t seen before. It appears I found another “citation error” (some would call it plagiarism) in Doctrine (see this image for other such citation errors). On pages 149-150 of the 2010 book (see the page image here), Driscoll and Breshears wrote:
To help you understand sin, in general, and your sin, in particular, we will examine eight aspects of sin that the Old Testament teaches us.
1) Sin in the Old Testament is first a relational breach. This is painfully clear in Genesis 2–3 where, because of their sin, our first parents are separated from God and one another; they hide from God and one another, fear God, blame one another, and seek to cover their sin and shame while living their life apart from God.
2) Sin in the Old Testament is a social matter because shalom has been vandalized. This is evidenced by the litany of murder, perversion, drunkenness, the continual evil that precipitated the flood, and human attempts at an Edenic-like society without any regard for God that spring forth in Genesis 4–11.
3) Sin in the Old Testament is a covenantal rebellion against God and his authority. This is witnessed perhaps most clearly in Exodus 32 to 34, where following God’s liberation of his people, they dishonor, disregard, and disobey him by worshiping idols while God is giving them the Ten Commandments through their leader Moses.
4) Sin in the Old Testament is a legal transgression that results in guilt that necessitates punishment. One clear example is found in Deuteronomy 32, where in worshipful song Moses recollects some of the most treasonous behavior of God’s people and the price that had to be paid for justice to be maintained.
5) Sin in the Old Testament results in ritual uncleanness, pollution, and filth, marked by the use of words such as “filth,” “defiled,” “unclean,” and “whore.”18 Importantly, this defilement happens both to sinners and victims; we defile ourselves by our own sin and are defiled by others when they sin against us.
6) Sin in the Old Testament includes emotional pain such as shame and disgrace.19 This is first seen in Genesis 3, where our first parents sin and then hide in shame and disgrace, whereas prior to their sin they “were not ashamed.”20
7) Sin in the Old Testament is spoken of in historical terms as an accumulating burden whereby sin is piled up from one generation to the next.21 In this way, sin only worsens over time as people invent new ways to do evil more effectively.
8) Sin in the Old Testament is spoken of with the finality of death.22 Sin is deadly, and ends only in death. This is because when we sin and prefer created things to our creator God, we stop ruling over creation and are ruled by it so that in the end we lose and the dust wins.23
(The footnotes go to Bible verses not human authors as you can see in the page image)
Now read the same eight aspects written by Christopher Wright in a 2008 book about the atonement (Scroll down to Chapter Four “Atonement in the Old Testament” and read the first four pages of that chapter – See the page images for the relevant parts of Wright’s chapter here as well: one, two)
The eight aspects of sin described by Wright ended up in Driscoll’s book without citation. The explanations were gently reworded but reflect the same classification and meaning as Wright’s two years earlier. Some of the same key words, phrases, and Bible passages also remain used as Wright did, e.g., Adam and Eve, shalom, Exodus 32-34, shame and disgrace, accumulating burden, etc. (See also this side by side comparison.)
It was as if I was transported back to 2014.
*”Deja vu all over again” is often attributed to Yogi Berra.
Judging from a couple of tweets I have seen (for instance here), he must have announced on Twitter too. I wouldn’t know it since he blocked me a long time ago after I wrote a few articles about him and his former church.
Screen capture from Mars Hill Church video, 2014
We are now practically neighbors!
K.P. Yohannan isn’t as well known as Driscoll in the U.S. but he is the Most Reverend Eminence in India. It will be interesting to see if Yohannan blogs about his organization’s legal troubles and trial preparations. It will give readers a couple of different perspectives to read about it there and here.
Having Yohannan and Driscoll in the family makes me wonder when David Barton and Eric Metaxas plan to join up.