Warren Throckmorton

David Barton frequently claims that he speaks to over 400 groups per year. Once he said he spoke to over 600 different groups per year. Given the number of days in a year and his other activities, this seems like a fantastic claim. After reading a document from his defamation lawsuit, I now think I know how he gets to this number.
In 2012, Barton sued two candidates for the Texas Board of Education for defamation, Judy Jennings, and Rebecca Bell-Metereau. The case was settled out of court in late 2014. Jennings and Bell-Metereau said in a campaign video Barton was known for speaking to white supremacist groups. In fact, Barton only spoke to two such groups early in his career and he said he didn’t know about their views at the time. He settled out of court gaining an apology from the defendants.
In Barton’s affidavit, he claimed that the accusations of Jennings and Bell-Metereau hurt his business. To prove it, he called on one of his employees, Tracy Geron, to provide financial information from years 2009-2011. I will deal with Barton’s claims of harm in a future post. For now, I want to focus on the claim of presentations before 400 groups per year.
In the affidavit provided by Geron, a numerical summary of Barton’s activities for years 2009-2011 was provided. See all three years of presentations below:

Notice that the largest single category of presentations is “Radio.” Barton does a taped radio show (ironically called Wallbuilder’s Live) each week day. He appears on most of them. It appears that he is counting his daily show as a group presentation. Doing so pushes the number of “groups” he addresses to over 400. Looking at these lists of presentations, it does not appear that he addresses 400 different groups per year. In this list, Barton even includes the articles he writes as a presentation. By this logic, I spoke to at least 590 groups in 2014 (blog posts), and that doesn’t include my columns in the Daily Beast and elsewhere. If my college lectures and other speaking opportunities are included, I do twice as many presentations as Barton. Does that mean I speak to twice as many groups?
I would really like to know what falls under “other.”
From these data, it doesn’t appear that the 2010 allegations about white supremacy hurt Barton much. He only had two fewer presentations in 2011. As you will see from the pdf of this financial statement, his financials remained strong in 2011 despite his claims to have suffered harm. More on that in a future post.

Back in March, Brian Houston released a statement to me saying that Mark Driscoll would not speak at the Hillsong Conferences in London and Sydney but instead would be interviewed with his wife. While that move represents a diminished role at the conferences, the change is not good enough for UK resident Natalie Collins. She has started a petition asking Hillsong to remove Driscoll from the program.
The petition begins:

This is both disappointing and of great concern to many across the UK and internationally.  Mark Driscoll resigned from leadership after many leaders and other within his church raised issues about unethical and abusive behaviour including:

• Ex-leaders of Mars Hill Church repenting of their collusion with Mark Driscoll
• Ex-members of Mars Hill reporting they have experienced spiritual abuse from Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll, including controlling and manipulative behaviour
• Evidence of plagiarism in at least one book he has written
• Misuse of tithes by Mars Hill Church
• Unethical actions taken to ensure Grace and Mark Driscoll’s book was featured on a bestselling book list
• Mark Driscoll’s public statements against women in leadership over the last two decades which have greatly undermined the Gospel message of women as leaders, evangelists and full members of the Body of Christ.

With only 17 signers, the petition does not seem to be catching on rapidly.
Driscoll recently refurbished his website and renamed his non-profit entity, Mark Driscoll Ministries. Meanwhile, some former members have continued their fund raising efforts to bring a RICO lawsuit against Driscoll’s former church.

Just a little while ago, an update appeared on the GoFundMe page designed to raise money for a lawsuit against Mars Hill Church.

This campaign has ended. 

You can still help by clicking on the following link:http://www.gofundme.com/MarsHillLawsuit

Thanks to all who participated.

Rob Smith

The new page begins:

It is time for Christians everywhere to stand up and say, “Enough!! We will no longer put up with pastors who reach for honor for themselves and who enrich themselves at the expense and harm of those they claim to be shepherding!” 

When leaders in the Church choose to stay silent, others must speak up. Paul’s mandate to Timothy regarding leaders who persist in certain sins (1 Timothy 5:19-20) must not be ignored by the Church. Most of those who were leaders at Mars Hill Church have chosen to remain silent.

Please help us discover and make clear the truth about what happened at Mars Hill Church by contributing to this fund for a RICO lawsuit against the former top leaders of Mars Hill.

The funds already raised have gone to the attorney who did preliminary work on the suit. Brian Fahling constructed the RICO action and presented the requests for mediation to the church.
The president of Mars Hill Church is now Kerry Dodd. Dodd has not replied to requests for comment regarding the church.
Information about the lawsuit can be found at /2014/12/26/letter-the-legal-case-against-mars-hill-church/.
 

From late March.
Listen at 13:20…
[youtube]https://youtu.be/J-G7pdnbswk[/youtube]
This isn’t new, but he keeps on saying it.

In honor of our third president, I can suggest a worthy gift given to anyone in his name.

 
Written mostly to debunk David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies, the book stands on its own as an examination of Jefferson’s views on religion, the Bible, and slavery.
Barton spent a lot of time at the Faith Baptist Church telling the audience that the founders all followed Blackstone’s ideas that our government was based on the Bible. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t impressed with that argument as this letter to John Adams shows. Here’s just a bit that sounds like what David Barton would like us to do:

it is not only the sacred volumes they have thus interpolated, gutted, and falsified, but the works of others relating to them, and even the laws of the land. we have a curious instance of one of these pious frauds in the Laws of Alfred. he composed, you know, from the laws of the Heptarchy, a Digest for the government of the United kingdom, and in his preface to that work he tells us expressly the sources from which he drew it, to wit, the laws of Ina, of Offa & Aethelbert, (not naming the Pentateuch.) but his pious Interpolator, very awkwardly, premises to his work four chapters of Exodus (from the 20th to the 23d) as a part of the laws of the land; so that Alfred’s preface is made to stand in the body of the work. our judges too have lent a ready hand to further these frauds, and have been willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others; to extend the coercions of municipal law to the dogmas of their religion, by declaring that these make a part of the law of the land.