ResultSource – Warren Throckmorton

Sutton Turner on Church Governance at Mars Hill Church

This morning Sutton Turner posted his third in a series of reflections on the ResultSource decision and church governance.
Mainly Turner concerns himself with the debate over the role of elders in a large church versus a small one. Instead of making a biblical argument, he offers a utilitarian defense of bringing in outside advisers to govern a church they don’t attend. His rationale is that God has allowed mega-churches to get really big so He must be fine with different rules for them.
If a plurality of elders isn’t working maybe something is wrong elsewhere. Maybe the church is too big. Mars Hill could have given autonomy to video sites but the executive elders didn’t let it happen. For instance, Orange County campus pastors wanted to avoid fines from the city of Santa Ana, CA and re-locate. However, Sutton Turner said no.
Turner’s sense of Mars Hill’s history on governance is at odds with my conversations with former Mars Hill members. In addition, Wenatchee the Hatchet has a wealth of information on the governance before and after the 2007 purge of Paul Petry and Bent Meyers. He establishes that the elders did not need to vote unanimously to pass an item.
I found this paragraph to be hard to bring together with the many interviews I have done with Mars Hill former members and pastors:

Back in 2007, Mars Hill had migrated away from plurality of elders in its formal governance structure, but the strains of plurality still remained within the church culture. Every man who became a pastor, whether paid or volunteer, went through the “eldership” process to ensure the character qualifications of 1 Peter 5 and 1 Timothy 3 were met in the man’s life and home. Although the by-laws clearly stated otherwise, many church members assumed those pastors were directly involved in the governance of the church, even in 2014. Some of the pastors in 2014 felt that all 60 pastors should still be governing elders and all 60 pastors should operate in plurality on all decisions.

Mars Hill was jolted away from a plurality of elders by Mark Driscoll and his supporters in 2007. He later said it was because he needed the governance to change for his benefit. Turner says the congregation assumed that pastors were in charge. This would be a natural mistake because one, it makes sense, and two, members were often denied access to the by-laws. They appeared on the website in 2014 after I pointed out in a blog post that the state of Washington requires non-profits to make by-laws available.
Turner closed by saying he plans to write about Mars Hill Global. Looking forward to those posts.

Sutton Turner: Big Churches Like Mars Hill Church Need Big Decision Makers

Former Mars Hill Church executive elder Sutton Turner has posted part two of his reflections (he posted part one yesterday) on the decision to commit church funds to buy Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage on to the New York Times best-seller list.
In this post, Turner takes credit for changing Mars Hill by-laws to include the Board of Advisors and Accountability. The BoAA consisted of three executive elders (Driscoll, Bruskas, and Turner) and four outsiders (various members at different times, but including James MacDonald, Larry Osborne, Jon Phelps, Matt Rogers, Michael VanSkaik, and famously Paul Tripp). Turner asserts that big decisions (like the New York Times scheme) require leaders of big organizations to weigh in. In today’s post, Turner writes:

The board in place at Mars Hill in the summer of 2011 consisted of local elders who had been at Mars Hill for many years. They were inside the organization. I’m not sure what they discussed regarding ResultSource, but they needed outsiders who were experienced in big decision-making and who were outside of their context to help them.

I assert that ethical sense is more important in such decisions, but Turner attempts to make a case that outsiders help prevent groupthink. I cover groupthink when I teach social psychology and I disagree with his analysis. If anything the structure of the BoAA lent itself to groupthink. The board was small and insulated from the rest of the elders due to the control the BoAA had over the entire church. Their moves and deliberations were secret with no meaningful input allowed from the lesser elders or congregation. Moreover, preventing groupthink is primarily leadership responsibility. Solid leaders who do not need to be in control of all aspects of an organization can prevent the negative effects of group cohesion whether the board members have experience or not.
Turner’s advice to leaders in yesterday’s post is inappropriate if groupthink is a concern. Turner objected to the ResultSource contract but did not buck the system. He wrote:

What You Cannot Do

When the decision is legal, you cannot stay and complain that you did not agree with it. You cannot be divisive while continuing to remain on the team. If you are going to be divisive, you need to leave.
You cannot leave the organization and complain to your friends or through social media when you actually had an opportunity to fix it if you had stayed. I have seen many people leave Mars Hill who had positions of influence. They did not agree with decisions, resigned, and went to social media to try and bring about organizational change from the outside. To me, if you stay, you can be part of the solution, but if you leave, you need to leave and allow leaders who remain to make changes for the organization’s future.

One of the ways to avoid groupthink is to encourage dissent and disagreement. Worrying about being divisive when in fact you have principled disagreement is part of what fuels the cohesion that is at the heart of groupthink. Having a local elder board is a minor concern compared to the problems inherent in self-censorship and mindguarding (see this brief summary relating to groupthink).
Turner then outlines what he claims was the response of the BoAA to the ResultSource decision.

At our board meeting in August of 2013, I provided a detailed analysis and accounting of the ResultSource marketing plan. At this board meeting (six months before the signed ResultSource contract was leaked to the public), the new board agreed that this type of marketing strategy would never be used again. In fact, no other books that were published through Mars Hill used it. We, as board members, would certainly not always get it right. In fact, in the following months, we would even make mistakes around the public revelation of the ResultSource contract. (I desired for our first media response at that time to clearly communicate two things: my level of involvement in the decision and the BOAA’s decision to never repeat the practice. Unfortunately, this did not happen.) But six months before the public spotlight, this new board of outside leaders, who were unassociated with the ResultSource decision, evaluated the proposal afterwards and made the right decision: it was a bad idea and it was wrong.

In 2014, Justin Dean was the first one out with a statement about ResultSource and he claimed it was an opportunity. If the BoAA had made this decision, why wasn’t Justin Dean made aware of this fact? I would like to hear more from Turner about how and why three different opinions of ResultSource were communicated to the public in the space of about a week.

Mark Driscoll's Leadership Coaching: Taking Up Where He Left Off

driscoll leadership 2011 heading Today, Mark Driscoll offered several former coaching videos on his website. These are videos he developed in 2011 with the offer of leadership coaching materials through The Resurgence website. This 2011 email gives the details.
Above is an image of the email heading. The content is below:

From Pastor Mark Driscoll:
Being a leader is wonderfully complicated. Whether it’s leading in family, business, or ministry, leaders face particular challenges that make simultaneous joy and fruitfulness difficult.
By the grace of God, I would like to help if I can. So, I’m starting something new called “Leadership Coaching with Pastor Mark.” It is a free ongoing subscription service we are providing to anyone who signs up. We will ask for a bit of personal data so that we can know who subscribes, which will enable me to get the most helpful content to you. For example, if we have a lot of church planters, student ministry leaders, preachers, business leaders, small group leaders, or worship leaders, I can target my coaching content to help those people most effectively. We will not sell or share your personal information and will not continually bombard you with requests or promotions.
Who Can Sign Up
1. Any Christian leader — This can be parents leading their kids, business leaders leading their employees, unpaid ministry leaders leading others to Jesus, and paid ministry leaders leading other leaders. Also, students in high school, Bible college, university, seminary, and so on, are welcome to sign up.
2. Any Christian — Bible-believing, Jesus-loving leaders from any church, denomination, or theological tribe are welcome to sign up. You don’t have to agree with me on everything to sign up. I love you and if I can serve you, I’d be honored to.
3. Any gender — Females and males alike are welcome.
4. Any nation — Wherever you are, we welcome you.
What You Will Get
1. A weekly short video of me—shot informally on my laptop—with one big idea for leaders. At times, I will also interview other Christian leaders as I travel. For those who do not have access to high-speed Internet and find video files difficult to download, we are also expecting to transcribe each post into text to make it easier for you to access.
2. Content you cannot get anywhere else. This content will be restricted, exclusive, and not posted anywhere else on the Internet by me. I expect to cover such topics as how to get and stay organized for effectiveness, how to stay connected to your family and friends, how to deal with your critics, how to watch your overall health, how to deal with despair and depression, how to study Scripture most efficiently, how to lead an organization, how to evaluate people’s giftedness to help them find the best way to serve God, how to navigate culture as a missionary, and more. As you can see, the content will be very practical.
3. Chances to win free gifts, such as books, that we will give away to winners from the subscription list.
4. Research briefs prepared by academics. I am blessed with a team of professors/researchers spanning multiple disciplines that I contract for work in areas such as demographics and sociology. Examples include work on giving trends, sexuality, marriage and divorce, and the spiritual lives of younger people. I will give away for free some of these studies and summaries to help function as a research assistant to those on the subscription list.
5. First access to and discounts on some conferences and events, books, and other products.

Also today, Sutton Turner said this about the decision to hire ResultSource as a means to elevate Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage up the New York Times Best Seller list:

I do know that it [the decision to hire ResultSource] showed that the process of making big decisions was broken and it needed to be fixed.

Both of these events — leadership coaching, and the Result Source decision — took place in 2011.

Sutton Turner Talks About His Part in Mark Driscoll's New York TImes Best Seller Plan

Former executive elder of Mars Hill Church Sutton Turner wrote today about his part in the ResultSource scheme to get Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage on to the New York Times Best Seller list. The bottom line is that he is now saying he didn’t agree with it.
In addition to reflecting on the use of the consulting group ResultSource, Turner also addresses some of the same ground as he did in 2012 the executive elder memo I posted last year.
Turner also confirms the essential contents of this memo from a Mars Hill staffer who had significant concerns about the ethics of the scheme. In his post, he relates the concerns (I am not saying Turner is referring to the same staffer) in a similar manner as presented in that memo.
Specifically, he said he then wrote his supervisor (which I believe would have been Jamie Munson) with the following concerns:

I wrote a memo on August 26, 2011 to my supervisor saying the following:

The plan was poor stewardship.

If the plan were to be revealed, it would look poorly on the stewardship of Mars Hill Church.

If the plan were to be revealed, it would look poorly on Pastor Mark Driscoll.

Turner’s post is the first of at least one more which will outline more of his reflections on leadership at Mars Hill. He closed today’s post by saying he would not sign the ResultSource again:

Shortly after the decision to execute the ResultSource marketing plan was made, my supervisor resigned. After him, I was the highest-ranking employee in administration. The decision had been made but the contract hadn’t yet been signed. On October 13, 2011, I signed the ResultSource contract as General Manager a full month before being installed as an Executive Elder. After signing the contract, I emailed an elder, stating my frustration with having to be the one to sign the contract when I had voiced my disagreement with it. But few in the organization (or in the media since then) knew of my disagreement. When you stay in an organization and you do not agree with a decision, you have to own that decision as your own. Unfortunately, I will always be linked to ResultSource since my name was on the contract even though I thought it was a bad idea. If given the same opportunity again, I would not sign the ResultSource contract, but honestly, my missing signature would not have stopped it. Someone else would have signed it anyway since the decision had already been made.
I knew if I left Mars Hill, the likelihood of decisions like ResultSource would only continue. Through prayer and confidence that Jesus had called my family and me to Mars Hill Church, I decided to stay and change the decision-making process so that decisions like ResultSource would not be made again.

For those wanting to understand the Mars Hill story, this is a significant post.
It is ironic that this post comes on the same day that Mark Driscoll has added leadership coaching videos to his website.

A Year Ago World Magazine Broke the Mark Driscoll New York Times Best-Seller List Story; Will Hillsong Host His Comeback?

Seems like yesterday that ResultSource and Mars Hill Church’s book selling scheme came into the public consciousness. However, it was a year ago today that Warren Smith’s article was posted. The next day, I posted the contract signed by Mars Hill Church executive pastor Sutton Turner and ResultSource CEO Kevin Small that spelled out the arrangements which if followed would lead to a spot on the New York Times best-seller list.
While it took several months for Mars Hill Church to unravel, that March 5, 2014 revelation seemed to alert even friends that something might be seriously wrong at the megachurch. The disclosure ignited an ongoing conversation about the ethics of buying a spot on best-seller lists. Later, it became known that Les and Leslie Parrott, and David Jeremiah also used similar schemes to elevate their books to the best seller lists. However, they have not experienced the same level of criticism and attention as has Driscoll.
In the aftermath of the Mars Hill debacle, at least one publisher (Crossway) took a vocal stand against deception in book marketing, but it is not clear that the revelations about buying a NYT’s best seller has led to significant changes. Christian media (with two exceptions) have not been aggressive in reporting on Christian authors who have manipulated the best seller lists. The largest Christian publishers (HarperCollins Christian and Tyndale House) and have refused to answer questions on the subject.
Since he resigned in October 2014, Driscoll has kept a relatively low profile. He may return to the limelight in June and July as a speaker for the Hillsong conferences in Sydney and Europe. Hillsong still has Driscoll listed as “the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle and one of the most popular preachers in the world today.” I recently wrote and tweeted Hillsong to ask about the description and speaking engagement. No answer as yet.