Tag: Mars Hill Church

Only Two Weeks Until the End, Mars Hill Church Still Wants Donations

Even though Mars Hill Church dissolves at the end of the year, someone in charge of the website is still seeking donations. It isn’t clear just who is making decisions. Is it Dave Bruskas? He is telling Albuquerque that the new church will be marked by transparency. However, since nobody signed this communication, it is not clear who is asking for money.
The initial paragraph doesn’t seem reasonable. No explanation is given for why giving to Mars Hill and having that donation split eleven ways is going to help the local churches more than a direct donation to that local church. If they can’t raise the necessary funds on their own now, then how will they ever do it?
I have heard no explanation for this; readers, have you?

Thank you for continuing to faithfully serve and give to your church. As we close out the year and say good-bye to Mars Hill, your gifts continue to be very important as they will determine how much will be distributed to help fund the eleven independent churches launching in January. Without generous people like you continuing to give through the end of the year, many of these churches may not have the necessary funds to continue as new churches.

We wanted to provide the following information for our donors and supporters, to keep you informed as you prepare to make your final year-end gifts to Mars Hill Church.

Giving at Local Churches – Each of our local churches will continue to accept gifts made during Sunday services through December 28th, 2014. Should you desire to give this way, simply drop your gift in a giving basket or GIVE box after service.

Gifts via Mail – If you’d like to mail in your final gifts to Mars Hill Church, please make sure they are postmarked by December 31st, 2014 and sent to the following address:

Mars Hill Church
c/o Giving
1401 NW Leary Way
Seattle, Washington 98107

Feel free to use a GIVE envelope which are available at all Mars Hill Church locations to send your gift in postage free.

One Time Gifts via ACH or Debit/Credit Card – Donors may give online at marshill.com/give via debit card, credit card or ACH up until 9:00 PM PDT on December 31st, 2014.

Recurring Gifts via ACH or Debit/Credit Card – Recurring gifts setup online at marshill.com/give are drafted on the 5th and 20th of each month. If you have setup a recurring gift, we will automatically stop your gift after the final scheduled gift on Monday, December 22nd (next business day after the 20th) has cleared.

If you wish to stop your recurring gift manually, you may do so at anytime by sigining in at marshill.com/give with your Mars Hill account.

Text to Give – Donors will be able to text gifts to Mars Hill Church up until 9:00 PM PDT on December 31st, 2014. Simply text “Mars Hill” and the amount to 45777.

Stock Gifts – Mars Hill Church will continue to accept gifts of publicly traded securities or bonds through December 31st, 2014. Please contactgiving@ marshill.com if you need broker information.

DONOR STATEMENTS & UPDATED CONTACT INFO

In July 2014, Mars Hill Church sent mid-year statements to our donors to the address we had on file. Year-end donor statements will be mailed out on or around January 20th, 2015 to assist with your tax return preparation. In order to ensure your statement is received, please check your mailing address by completing one of the two options:

  • Log into the Give page and check to see if your giving account is linked (Once logged in, you should be able to see your giving history on the “View giving history” tab. If your account is linked, you can update your address under your account settings.)

  • Contact [email protected] or call our giving line at 206.816.3649. Please include your donor and family number from your mid-year statement and include your complete mailing address. We’d also appreciate your updated phone number and email address should we need to get a hold of you.

THANK YOU!

Thank you again for your generosity and faithfulness in helping us finish well. We wish you and your family a wonderful Christmas and blessings in the new year.

Should you have any questions about giving, please contact [email protected] which will remain active at least through April 2015.

 

Mars Hill Church Executive Elder Dave Bruskas on the Future of Mars Hill Albuquerque, Bible Teaching and Communication

This is the next several minutes of Dave Bruskas’ talk to the members’ meeting at Mars Hill Albuquerque (soon to be North Church). In this clip, Bruskas reminisces about opening the church building as a Mars Hill replant, and then describes his hope for the church going forward.
In doing so, he makes some hard-to-miss references to problems at Mars Hill. First he says one sermon per week and a discussion of that sermon (I assume he meant in community groups) isn’t enough. I always thought Mars Hill had lots of content online and elsewhere, but Bruskas wants to provide more. Also, he is going to improve communication and governance. The church will be elder led (in contrast to Mars Hill) and there will be better communication. He lamented that the pastors, including himself, often learned about the church online (you’re welcome).
Listen in (mostly audio with some quotes pulled out, be patient, they will come).

While this all sounds like an improvement, I still want to learn why it took the scandals and revelations of the last year to bring these changes about. I would like to hear more about why Rev. Bruskas did not activate these changes while the #2 man at Mars Hill Church. Perhaps, he feared for his job, but it would be good to know if he felt the same thing the other elders did who put their jobs and ministries on the line to make the changes now evident.

Proposed Bellevue Church (Was Mars Hill Bellevue) Bylaws; More Details About Bellevue Church Plant

As noted earlier this week, Bellevue Church announced today that Jeff Vanderstelt will become the lead teaching pastor at Bellevue Church. The Church intends to become a part of the Soma family of churches. The bylaws for the new church has been available to those interested and are linked here.
The church will be more open to the congregation than Mars Hill Church was. Members will be able to vote on purchases over $100k but not on the elders (see below).* The Board of Elders will be a self-perpetuating board.
To read the Bellevue Church bylaws, click here.
Jason Skelton posted this information earlier today:

As we wrap up 2014, we wanted you to know about the schedule for the remaining weekends, and what to expect as we enter the new year and begin the new church.

December 21st

Jeff Vanderstelt will be preaching at all of our services to continue our“Jesus: Gift of God” series, and we will formally welcome him as our Lead Teaching Pastor who will serve as one of the elders to replant the church. We have some additional exciting news to share, including the selection of our church name (“Bellevue Church” has been a placeholder while we are in the selection process for a new name). As well, on the 21st we will have the final in our series of “Interest Meetings,” with the topic of this week’s meeting being Counseling, Redemption Groups, Kids Ministry, and Student Ministry. This meeting will be led by Jeff Vanderstelt and Alex Ghioni, with other key leaders as well. Our ministry leaders will be here to talk through plans for the new church, and they also want to hear from you.

December 24th

We will not be hosting a Christmas Eve service this year, in an effort to ensure that volunteers and staff families have a great opportunity to be with their families after what has been a very busy season. If you’re interested in the festivities, many of the area churches are hosting Christmas Eve services, and we would encourage you also to attendSnowflake Lane together with your family or community group.

December 28th

This will be the last Sunday of the year, as we also celebrate the work that God has done through Mars Hill Church. Thousands of lives have been changed, millions of sermons have been downloaded and the Word of God has been powerfully at work. We will gather together for one final service together at 10am on December 28th. This will be our only service this Sunday to have an opportunity for the whole church family to be together.

January 4th

The start of the new year will mark the start of our new church. Join us on January 4th as Jeff Vanderstelt begins as the new Lead Teaching Pastor. Service times will be at 9am and 11am.

Lastly, we want to share just a few brief details related to planting the new church, especially amidst the busyness of the Christmas season. Most of these have already been communicated, we just wanted to compile to share it as reminders.

  • Last week, we shared that we have hired a number of new staff members. On Sunday we announced that Jeff Vanderstelt had resigned his position at Soma Tacoma and now joins the leadership team for the new church plant. The elders of the new church plant include Dave Cox, Alex Ghioni, Roger Molvar, Tim Patton, Matt Rogers, Jason Skelton, and Jeff Vanderstelt.

  • In the new year we will change our service times to 9a and 11a. This will allow us to focus our efforts on Sunday morning services, as well as utilizing the remainder of the day for additional training and equipping opportunities, particularly allowing those driving from a further distance to not be required to come into Downtown Bellevue on multiple days per week. It’s our prayer that this will also help our volunteer teams who have served sacrificially these past few months.

  • Also in the new year, Student Ministry will be on Sunday evenings at 5p. We will be sharing more details about Student Ministry in the coming weeks.

  • Our new church plant will seek to become a member of the Soma Family of Churches, but we will not be “Soma Church” or directly connected in any legal or financial manner with Soma Tacoma. Jeff Vanderstelt will be our Lead Teaching Pastor, but he has resigned from his role as an elder at Soma Tacoma. He will remain in an oversight role of the Soma Family of Churches but it should be noted that this network functions solely as a relational network of like-minded churches and has no governing or binding authority over local churches. The new church plant will be an independent church. We will be sharing more about our desire to become part of the Soma Family of Churches in the new year.

  • We have attached a version of our preliminary bylaws that will serve for the next six months while we evaluate and assess their effectiveness, as well as work toward affirmation of the new elder team. These bylaws are formed from the principles we shared in November at our Vision Meeting, and have been reviewed by numerous church members, leaders through our Interest Meetings,and have also been reviewed by outside counsel. We have intentionally created a version that is not extremely robust, in order that we can learn and grow over time.

  • In addition to this information, we’ll be sharing an extended post on what transparency will look like in the new church early next week.

We’re excited, and we pray that you are too. Jesus has been abundantly showing his grace and opening doors for the future and we confidently believe that a great, healthy church for the Eastside is in store. If you have not had an opportunity to talk to us in person and have feedback you’d like to share, we have created a form where you can provide it here. That being said, our elders are always available to you, please reach out to any of us moving forward.

In Christ,

Pastor Jason

*While it appears that the elders will elect people to their board, there is a provision on page 5 or the congregation to have some kind of input. According to the provision on the annual meeting, the congregation will affirm the elders:

An annual meeting of the church shall be held each year at a date, time, and place to be determined by the Board of Elders. At the annual meeting, the voting members shall affirm the elders assessed and appointed by the Board of Elders, affirm an annual budget, provide notice of changes to the church bylaws, and transact any other business as may come before the meeting.

This is not fleshed out. The congregation may simply get a slate of board members and be instructed to vote on the slate. If so, the opposition to one member would have to be intense for the congregation to vote down the entire slate. However, since the method of affirm is not spelled out, one cannot know how much congregational input there will be.

Mars Hill Church Executive Elder Dave Bruskas on Mark Driscoll, NYTs Best-Seller List, Strange Fire and More

I suspect different people will key in on different aspects of this video featuring recent remarks from Dave Bruskas. Bruskas led the Albuquerque NM City on a Hill church into an alliance with Mars Hill and then left Albuquerque in July 2011 to become an executive elder at Mars Hill Church. He is now slated to return as preaching pastor for the newly renamed North Church. Bruskas spoke on December 3, 2014 to a member’s meeting at the church. The questions were pre-selected with public questions not taken from the crowd. Yesterday, I posted a brief segment where Bruskas said Driscoll’s resignation was not the most redemptive outcome. The following segment deals with Bruskas regrets following a question from lead pastor Donovan Medina. A transcript of the video is at the link.

Click here for a transcript.

At about 1:15, in response to Medina’s question, Bruskas said the Board of Overseers (Jon Phelps, Larry Osborne, Michael Van Skaik, and Matt Rogers) found three areas of “persistent sin” via the examination of charges against Mark Driscoll: arrogance, domineering leadership and harsh words. While these were the three areas identified by the Board of Elders’ investigation, the BoO did not use the term “persistent sin” in their communication to the congregation. Rather, it was the elders later who used the term “persistent sin” in their verbal report to the various Mars Hill locations. The elders wanted Driscoll to step down and enter an elder-directed restoration process, whereas, in contrast, the BoOsaid they didn’t ask Driscoll to resign, and said that he wasn’t disqualified.

Bruskas admitted that the problems were “painfully entrenched in our culture.” He acknowledged that many leaders felt Mars Hill was special; now he sees that “God’s grace was on us in spite of us.” Bruskas didn’t believe he personally had used harsh words as Driscoll did.

For himself the three things he felt grieved about were the New York Times best-seller scam, the Strange Fire conference, and the performance driven culture of ministry.

Bruskas said he was a new executive elder in 2011 who was informed about the ResultSource contract by Jamie Munson in a car ride to work one morning. He asked if the approach had integrity and was financially feasible. Bruskas said Munson answered yes to both. After that, according to Bruskas, he didn’t ask any more questions.

Bruskas disclosed to friends that he was going to take the #2 position at Mars Hill in July 2011. That was about a month after Mark and Grace Driscoll and their agent Sealy Yates met at Thomas Nelson to discuss the ResultSource approach to scamming the best-seller list.  This June 27, 2011 note from Sealy Yates to Kevin Small was included in a Mars Hill memo on the ResultSource-Real Marriage campaign.
Yates2SmallJun11
The question is who was Jamie Munson working with? Munson has not responded to email questions on this topic. Bruskas is correct that he was a relatively new member of the executive elders. I wonder when it became clear what was actually happening with ResultSource. For instance, I wonder if he ever saw this memo. To his credit, he now believes the scheme was clearly wrong.

The second thing that grieves Bruskas is the Strange Fire incident. He said he would apologize to John MacArthur and believes he should have said something at the time. It has been over a year since that incident took place. If I had been in the Albuquerque audience, I would have asked him about the famous Driscoll tweet that security confiscated his books. I would like to hear Bruskas’ view of that tweet.

Last, Bruskas said he was sorry for being complicit with a “highly performance driven culture.” Perhaps he is referring to the actions described in this 2012 memo. In it, Bruskas took the lead in informing campus pastors that they couldn’t advocate for the staff they had to lay off due to financial pressures. The pastors were supposed to get in line. At the time, Driscoll, Bruskas and Turner had gotten significant pay increases while about 40% of the staff faced layoffs.

According to those present, nothing was asked about the Global Fund, the severance packages, Driscoll’s plagiarism, and accountability for the current sitting Board of Advisors and Accountability.

Consider this an open request for an interview to really clear the air and answer questions about Mars Hill’s unfinished business.

See also, part one of this video in which Bruskas tells the congregation that Driscoll’s resignation wasn’t the most redemptive outcome.

Dave Bruskas on Mark Driscoll's Resignation: "I Don't Think That Was The Most Redemptive Outcome"

On December 3, 2014, Dave Bruskas engaged in a Q & A period conducted by the elders with some members of the Mars Hill Albuquerque congregation (soon to be known as North Church) attending. The questions were pre-selected by the elders with the congregation not allowed to ask questions at the meeting. Bruskas is about to return to Albuquerque as preaching pastor of the church which he once pastored before it became part of Mars Hill. In the meeting, Bruskas addressed  his views about his time at Mars Hill. I have obtained some video of part of the event. The video is mostly beneficial for the audio of Bruskas remarks. I will put up a couple of posts featuring his perspective on being an executive elder at Mars Hill.
This first brief segment is Bruskas addressing Mark Driscoll’s resignation. The transcript is below the video. Although understated, he acknowledges that Driscoll’s resignation was not the intended outcome of the investigation.

Pastor Mark, I really would hope that our future would have been through the examination process that of a restored Pastor Mark leading his church to a healthy place but I’m sorry that that didn’t happen.  I know Jesus is going to work redemptively into the future but I think  that’s something we all wanted right? We always want the most redemptive  outcome, and I don’t think that was the most redemptive outcome but I trust that Jesus is going to do incredible things and I know that men come and go and church names change. Jesus loves His church and Jesus is absolutely about His mission and there comes a point in time where we say, ‘let’s put away the past and move forward because Jesus moves forward.’

Either in this post or in another one, I will add more footage where Bruskas addresses what he considers to be his mistakes at Mars Hill and offers an apology for them. Hint, he says he didn’t know the specifics about the Result Source scheme to scam the New York Times best-seller list.
See also part two of this video. Dave Bruskas discusses ResultSource, the hostile climate at Mars Hill, and the Strange Fire conference.