Things that probably shouldn’t have been put in writing

Speaking of slow motion crashes suddenly accelerating, the latest from the flaming train wreck that is Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church. Back in July leaders of Mars Hill admitted that non-trivial portions of the millions donated to their “global fund,” ostensibly to aid in missions in Ethiopia and India, was in fact being pumped into the Church’s general fund, and whatever undisclosed salaries it supports. Today we learn, via Brendan Kiley, that Warren Throckmorton has got his hands on some internal memos suggesting that was the plan all along. From the memo:

The Global Fund could be beneficial in a number of ways, besides the obvious gain of increased funding:
• For a relatively low cost (e.g. $10K/month), supporting a few missionaries and benevolence projects would serve to deflect criticism, increase goodwill, and create opportunities to influence and learn from other ministries.

• Many small churches who may consider joining Mars Hill hesitate because they do not believe we support “missions.” While we need to continue to challenge the assumptions underlying a claim, the Global Fund would serve as a simple, easy way to deflate such criticism and help lead change in these congregations.

• The ability to communicate and interact with supporters of Mars Hill Global provides an avenue for promoting events, recruiting leaders, and developing Mars Hill core groups in strategic cities

Here’s at LGM we’ve managed to obtain an image of the meeting where the plan for the global fund was constructed. Context for the “low cost” estimate of 10K a month: as of May, the fund was taking in 300K a month. What’s most striking to about this memo isn’t the plan it reveals, which is more or less what I’ve come to expect from that organization. It’s that it was actually written down in some sort of formal memo. I’m legitimately curious about the intended audience for this memo. It was a group of people that, on the one hand, must have been assumed to be sufficiently cynical about the nature of the Church that such frank admissions wouldn’t be jarring or alarming, but at the same time, be deemed to be sufficiently trustworthy that they could be trusted with such a potentially damning document. How big was that group?  If I were running this scam, my concern would be that people who meet the first criteria were unlikely to meet the second, and vice versa, such that the number of people I would trust to have their hands on such a document must be very small, and the risks associated with putting something this in writing couldn’t possibly be worth it. The memo doesn’t appear to be dated, but it must have been sometime prior to the launch of Mars Hill global fund, which I believe was sometime in 2012. That would place this document most likely in 2011 or early 2012, well after Driscoll’s consolidation of power, but before ex-members and pastors started speaking publicly and critically about the Church in significant numbers, which makes this memo a striking artifact from the high water mark of an extraordinarily successful long con, just before the fall.