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Below is a large excerpt from Janet Mefferd, the radio talk show host who publicly and directly challenged Mark Driscoll on his plagiarism. She says so much that is right, that I wanted to include it all, but please read the entire article for the context.
Quote:
That wasn’t the end, of course. Over the last nine months, there were endless Driscoll scandals that followed: There was more plagiarism to be revealed (at last count, nine books’ worth, along with sermon material), the ResultSource scandal, the accusations of verbal and spiritual abuse against his Mars Hill family, the vulgar William Wallace II rant, the church protests, the staff and board resignations, the ousting of Driscoll and Mars Hill from his Acts29 church-planting network and several conferences, the charges brought by former Pastor Dave Kraft, the charges formally brought against Driscoll by 21 former Mars Hill pastors.
Mars Hill members also released horrendous online testimonies, describing the kind of abuse they claimed to have suffered at the hands of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill. Except those tales were often undermined by the very writers themselves, who often ended their terrible accounts of spiritual abuse with strained accounts of “love” for Pastor Mark and his soul, along with some very unnecessary self-flagellation. Things like: “The bottom line is that I love Mark, and I wish the very best for him, and after all, I’m a terrible sinner — a really bad, bad sinner — too!” And I thought, “Why are these testimonies ending like this? I don’t get it. There’s no moral equivalence here.”
Sure, there were a few more pseudo-apologies from Driscoll, which were never real instances of godly sorrow and thorough repentance, but the Internet would be awash in cries for mercy: “Seeee? It’s time to heeeal and restoooore Mark Driscoll!” Then another scandal would break, and we’d go through the same cycle, AGAIN, ad nauseam.
Driscoll offered his last public mea culpa lite last Sunday (with some help from his newly hired PR firm, of course), and he announced he’d step away for a minimum of six weeks as his hand-picked Board of Advisors and Accountability reviews the charges against him — tantamount to a defendant picking his own jury. So, the bottom line? See you in six weeks, Pastor Mark! Have fun during your time off, and get some rest so you can make your triumphant return!
No surprise, then, that another bombshell followed today, when I received the letter from the nine pastors. More deceit, more evidence, more bombshell quotes, more, more, more.
And at this point, I decided, I just feel … done.
Why is this endless cycle necessary?
I’m all for grace and forgiveness, but let’s not be foolish here. Mark Driscoll shouldn’t be a pastor. And we didn’t need all these scandals from the last nine months to figure that out. Because the truth is that any intelligent Christian with the ability to read and understand the Bible could have and should have discerned who this man was years ago and abandoned ship.
Pick your moment of revelation: Should it have been when Mark Driscoll claimed that God called him to be a pastor in a “weird charismatic moment?” How about when Donald Miller dubbed him “the cussing pastor?” Or maybe when he started having “pornovisions” or angrily screamed, “How dare you? Who the (blank) do you think you are?” at his church members? How about when he referenced the “pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus” that would result from people not getting on board with his “vision?” The pile that “by God’s grace … will be a mountain by the time we’re done?” Or the Elephant Room 2 debacle — might that have been a good time to abandon support for Pastor Mark and his cult of personality?
I simply don’t get it. Why didn’t the entire membership of Mars Hill get up and head for the exits at any of those points? Why didn’t his Christian fans unfollow him on social media, stop reading him, stop watching him and stop listening to him?
More significantly: Why didn’t any of Driscoll’s Big Name enablers — and you know who you are — look past his doctrinal statement to the man’s obvious character, ponder I Timothy 3 for a nanosecond, and think, “Hmm. Something’s off here?” And assuming some of them did have that thought at some point, why didn’t they get up and head for the exits before recommending this man to anybody in the church at large? And why didn’t any of them stand up months ago and apologize to the church for previously endorsing this man?
Why didn’t the Christian publishing world, the Christian big names, the Mars Hill membership and the church at large head for the church/social media/conference exits when they found out Mark Driscoll plagiarized a number of his books? Was that just … all right with you guys?
Why have so many Christians — in so many different pockets of the church, for so long — defended him, enabled him, oozed gushy love statements about him and continued to prop him up, against all evidence, against clear biblical admonitions and against all common sense?
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