News Roundup: Israel, Slavery, ShepCon, Driscoll, Revival, & More

John MacArthur, Shepherd’s Conference, and the Cost of Standing Firm

I don't think I really understood in seminary how relentless this battle would be, and how much discernment it would take, and how it would affect relationships, how many relationships eventually look like they're going in the right direction but are sacrificed to an unwillingness to do battle.

And you wind up sort of at the end of your life having been stripped of people who at some point gave in to the other side, and the ranks get thinner and thinner. I'm sort of living in that era. I'm living in an era on one hand as a shepherd and a pastor where I have 50 years of loving people who have filled my life with so much love and so much kindness and so much affection that it's just beyond comprehension, and that's Grace Church, and that's the people who hear the Word of God and believe it and follow it.

But on the other hand, I watch my life as it comes to an end being stripped of relationships with many, many evangelical leaders because at some point they're unwilling to stand where I stand. They will call up and ask, how do we re-engage with MacArthur?

What did we do? And it really comes down to whether or not you're a faithful soldier.

Well it is time for the Conversations That Matter podcast, and you just heard the voice of John MacArthur. I have played that clip before, and I know I play it now with some sadness. You can probably hear some of it in my voice.

I miss him, right? And there's a lot of people. I was realizing that this morning that I miss, not just personal but public figures. It wasn't that long ago, it feels like to me at least, Rush Limbaugh died, and I wasn't a huge follower of Jerry Falwell or anything, but I remember when he died and it was a giant, it was like a giant fell.

It was a moment that everyone just thought, what's next? And we're in that moment now, and we're in that moment in ways I've never seen it with John MacArthur, and of course, Charlie Kirk and Bode Bauckham all around the same time and following some scandals that took guys out that were guys that could have been waiting in the wings, at least in the evangelical reformed world.

Anyway, God's in control. God knows what he's doing. You are on this earth for such a time as this. I don't think God made a mistake. I think he knows exactly what he needs to do. He's the kind of God who sifts the chaff.

He saves the wheat. He makes sure that his people are protected, that if you serve him, he will make sure that you have food, you will have shelter, and all you have to do is seek first his kingdom. So I look at those things.

I cling to his promises, but there are times, and I'm going to admit, I say, Lord, why that.

Person?

Why'd you take, I mean, if you're going to take John MacArthur, why didn't you at least leave us Bode Bauckham, right? Why did you have to take both of them? And I know I'm not alone in that. I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but I can't help but saying that as we open the podcast today, hearing that clip from an old friend, John MacArthur.

I play that clip though, for a specific purpose. I play it because the Shepherds Conference lineup, and I've had many people ask me to talk about this, is public, and it's been public for, I don't know, about a month or.

So.

It's coming up in 2026, and usually it's end of February, beginning of March, somewhere around there. I should probably know this. I have the website open right in front of me.

When is it?

It is in 2020, March 6th. Okay, yeah, that's about right. So the lineup though is a little surprising, and I play that clip to set the stage for my commentary on this, which I don't think is going to be too long, but I don't think it'll be a surprise where I come down on this.

The first four speakers in the lineup are, of course, John Piper, Lincoln Duncan, Albert Moeller, and Mark Debert. John Piper, I know this confused some people because he had differences with John MacArthur, especially on cessationism and even the social justice stuff, to some extent, but they recultivated a relationship because they met again at the Puritan Conference a few years ago, and my understanding is that some fences were mended, or bridges mended, I suppose, if there were bridges that were in disarray.

I know some of these other guys have talked to him since 2018, but there was a moment, and some of you may not remember this because of time. I'm not going to play the clip, but you can go on YouTube and find it if you want, and it's from the Shepard's Conference Q &A in 2018, and I believe it was 2018.

I always confuse that. I was like, was it 2018 or 2019? It was pre -2020, right? It's all a blur pre -2020. I believe it was 2018, but either way, it was before 2020, and it was when the social justice movement was at a high pitch.

Things were just in the evangelical world. You had the MLK 50. You had the T4G Conference where Lincoln Duncan got up there and started weeping and saying that he had been complicit in racial discrimination of some kind because of the way he was taught, and you had

I was at Southeastern. I was actually in seminary when this was going on, and you had the Shepard's Conference, and that was the clarifying moment. The question was on everyone's mind at that time, okay, we know that there's a problem.

We know Russell Moore is a big part of this problem. We know Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary is a part of this problem. I remember they gave credit to students who would go to the MLK 50 Conference.

We know the Gospel Coalition is a problem. We know that the ERLC is a problem. We know David Platt's a problem. We can see all this clearly. We knew at that point that Ted Tripp was a problem, that these guys were saying things that were not orthodox.

Ted Tripp even saying that there's a gospel of God's grace, and there's the gospel of his justice. What does that even mean? We thought, many of us, or we hoped, that the big boys, the adults, the grown-up table was going to take care of business, and Shepard's Conference was going to be the place.

That was where you had Sinclair Ferguson, John MacArthur, Phil Johnson, Mark Dever, Lincoln Duncan, and Al Mohler, and they were all sitting up there. There was a lot of confusion because the Dallas

This must have been 2019 because I think the Dallas statement was 2018. The Dallas statement had just come out, and John MacArthur, it was a few months previous, had signed the Dallas statement on social justice.

You can still sign it, I believe. The website's still active, I think. John MacArthur was becoming bullish about this. In fact, I think it was after the Q &A. It was right around the same time. He even said it was the greatest threat, meaning social justice, it was the greatest threat to the gospel that he had ever encountered in his ministry.

That is quite the statement from a man who had been battling heretics of all kinds of stripes. Social justice, though, he thought, this is the worst. Of all the threats, that's the worst one to the gospel.

That happens.

There's confusion because Al Mohler doesn't sign it, and he gives some weird answer about.

It.

I played it on the podcast at the time. I've played it since then, but essentially he says he doesn't want to send the wrong message. Tim Keller says, well, it's speech act theory to sign this. There's this thing called speech act theory.

It suggests that it's not the meaning in the text that's the problem, it's the impression it would give. I don't want to give the wrong impression like I'm somehow, I guess, for racism. Al Mohler gave a very similar response to that.

Racism is such a problem. I guess if you sign the Dallas Statement, you must be winking and nodding at racism. You had Mark Dever who didn't sign it. You had John Piper who didn't sign it. You had all these guys.

You had Lincoln Duncan who didn't sign it. The clarifying moment comes, and Phil Johnson asked Al Mohler, do you not see what's happening? Al Mohler becomes irate. He becomes frustrated, and you see a flash of anger.

It was clear to everyone at that point, oh, there is a difference. They're not all together. Lincoln Duncan gave some weird response about why he didn't I remember this also clear.

As day.

He talked about how he didn't want his grandkids to be funneled into the LGBTQ plus lobby. He didn't want them to go to them and see them as favorable. He had to prove to them somehow that he was advanced and progressive on the topic of race, or else they would just go, they would see Christians as hypocrites, and they'd go to the LGBTQ direction.

Mark Dever told a story about a young black man needing to have the talk about police officers. That prevented him somehow from signing the Dallas Statement on social justice. The insinuation from all of those men was that if you are John MacArthur, you're kind of being soft on racism.

That's the most favorable, charitable way to read that. The very worst, you are actually pro-racism of some variety. At that time, of course, the term racism itself was being redefined, and people didn't know exactly what was meant by that, but we knew it was bad.

John MacArthur's for something bad. As things progressed, you could see the riff getting wider. You saw when the COVID stuff happened in 2020, there was a church shutdown. John MacArthur opens up his church, and who countersignals him?

Jonathan Lehman from Nine Marks Ministries. Who decides to sponsor, or at least to promote a BLM-style march in Washington, D .C., while their church is closed? Guys from Nine Marks. When the Beth Moore go-home controversy starts, which was, I think, right before that, John MacArthur is against women pastors, and that was really the context.

Beth Moore should go home. She shouldn't be preaching to mixed audiences. That's against the New Testament. Lincoln Duncan goes out there, and I remember this.

Clear as day.

I did a whole podcast. I think it's still the most popular podcast I've done, and Lincoln Duncan countersignals John MacArthur. He makes some kind of sanctimonious kind of tweet about how there's this doctrinal rigidity out there that it sees itself as doctrinally correct, but it's missing the big picture,.

Essentially.

It was right at the same moment, and I'm like, there's no mistaking what he was countersignaling at the time. Sure enough, those guys are not back at Shepard's Conference. Not since that time have they been back at Shepard's Conference, and John MacArthur makes that statement in a chapel at the Master's Seminary.

I think it was after the Q &A. It was within the year or so. It was not long after, maybe a year after. Maybe it was 2020, but it wasn't that long after, and he doesn't name any names, but I remember I went out on my podcast.

I said, this sounds awfully like the guys who abandoned him on the Dallas statement, and then, of course, it's a chapel that, for some reason, gets scrubbed from YouTube. I understand it is available in other places.

I downloaded the full thing because I thought it was such a great message from John MacArthur, but that one gets scrubbed.

Okay.

I don't know why. I don't pretend to know why, exactly, but I thought it was a significant moment when he said what you heard at the beginning of this podcast. The question that I've received is, John, did my signing the Dallas statement mean anything?

Did acknowledging and agreeing with John MacArthur that social justice is the greatest threat to the gospel, and one of them, it is a threat, and those guys not going along with it, not putting shields up to deflect that threat, in fact, going the extra mile, Ligon Duncan went the extra mile and wrote the foreword to Woke Church, a book that claims that Africa's anti-apartheid program and denazification program in Germany, that these things are programs that can teach Christians how to apply the gospel.

I'm sorry. A bunch of pagans, well, a bunch of people who aren't Christian, they're not doing it in Jesus' name. It's an ethical thing. These are the people that are going to teach you how to apply, there's works involved, and I guess people who aren't Christian can be involved with the gospel.

I'm like, what are we talking about here, exactly? But Ligon Duncan thought it was great, goes the extra step. During John MacArthur's lifetime, these guys weren't around. And I don't know, and I haven't asked, and I'm not going to, and part of the problem with it is, can you even believe, I don't know who to believe.

I don't know, I don't even know where to start with trying to figure out why would they invite these guys, and I don't even think it's that big of a deal as far as my personal plans. I'm not going to Shepard's Conference.

I have many friends who are, and that's fine if you want to go to Shepard's Conference, no problem with that. I just, I know how neoevangelicalism works, and I'll put it this way, I would not be surprised,.

Okay?

So this is John's opinion. I would not be surprised if it's harder to attract people when you don't have John MacArthur and you don't have Votie Bauckham anymore, and you don't have Steve Lawson because he's disqualified.

Who are your A-listers now in the Reformed evangelical world? How do you sell tickets? And the answer to that is, I don't know exactly, I don't. These were some of the former A-listers who have not been at Shepard's Conference, and now they're back.

Now, you make of that what you will. I think the ranks are thin. I think this is a problem. The ranks are thin at the higher levels, and we have been used to, in Reformed evangelical circles at least, having guys who are able to draw a crowd.

Those guys aren't around as much anymore. If you want to attract anywhere from seven to, or six to 12 ,000 people, how are you going to do it anymore? It's a different environment. Things are very fractured.

People have fractured over social issues. What do you do? Well, I think this is my personal opinion. I don't think this is very respectful to the legacy of John MacArthur, to be quite frank, especially to have Ligon Duncan, Albert Mueller, and Mark Dever there.

Why weren't they there during John MacArthur's lifetime? They had been consistently there, and then all of a sudden, they weren't after the Shepard's Conference Q &A. And then you see all the circumstantial things that I just pointed to.

So who's inviting them now? Why invite them now? Is this an opportunity for them to repent, to say that John MacArthur was right, we were wrong on these things? That would be nice, but why wait for the conference to do that, right?

Someone suggested that, that, you know, John, hold on, maybe that's what this is. Now there's another conference that has also been getting some attention, and I'll address that, the Clear Truth Conference, Clear Truth Media Conference, which, and I've had, I think, one or two articles published with Clear Truth, and I like a lot of the guys there, nothing personal against any of those guys.

Really what has happened, and this is what I told some people, I think that this is more of an opportunity for those who really don't like Mark Driscoll to kind of seize the moment while he's in the spotlight for replacing Bode Bauckham at the upcoming conference, and to say, let's draw a line, let's redraw a line, really.

No Mark Driscoll in our circles, right? Because he's coming in, in some avenues, and it's really not hard to figure out why. He's better, and he's good on many social issues that other guys who are theologically more correct and have proven themselves to have much more virtue, and in some ways, they just haven't been maybe as vocal or as good on some of these social issues, and a lot of the lines now are more political.

That's true. That's one of the things that's happening. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here, but I will take you on a trip down memory lane, and I will introduce you to a few things that I've believed for a long time about Mark Driscoll, because this isn't a new thing to me.

I will reveal some of the things that I was taught in 2011 at Master's Seminary concerning Mark Driscoll as well, and how that particular crowd more or less saw him, and why they had objections to him.

I actually share some of those objections, although I did not share them to the extent that I heard them at that time, but I think many of the critiques that even MacArthur had of Mark Driscoll have been fleshed out.

They have been validated to some extent, so where do you go from here? That's the question. Where do you do with someone like Mark Driscoll? What do you do in an environment where you can reinvent yourself very easily?

No time in history, you have access to equipment that gives you a studio that looks as good as a professional studio. You can do it in your home. You can do it in your bedroom. I mean, how do you show that, no, what we're doing is more official?

We've actually gone through the ranks or through the process of peer review and all the things, the stopgap measures that are supposed to make sure that you're qualified. You can look qualified so easily today, and I'm going to say this is a problem.

The democratization of the narratives and truth and all that, that does have some challenges. There's some advantages because when you have the wrong people that are into lies, controlling that narrative, then you have a problem and the truth can't get out there.

But once you open up the floodgates and everyone has access to the social media levers, then you can get very bad actors who can reinvent themselves. They can be like the main character in the Music Man and just kind of get everyone kind of whooped up into a frenzy about their marketing plans and all of that, and they're a fraud.

That's very easy. Well, is that Mark Driscoll? The answer to that is I don't completely know. I'm not going to actually go beyond what I do know, but I will tell you what I know. I won't go beyond what I know, but I will tell you what I do know.

And I think that I would be very cautious personally about Mark Driscoll.

And I will tell you why.

I'll tell you why as we get through this. But here's the Clear Truth Conference. This is March 6th through March 5th through 6th. Actually, is that the same? So you can either go to the Shepherds Conference or the Clear Truth Conference.

I guess you have an option. And Mark Driscoll's replacing Bode Bauckham. You have Doug Wilson. Actually, what does it say here? It says Stephen Whitlow, who I've had some pretty good exchanges with him.

I think he was the one actually published some of my stuff with Clear Truth. David Englehardt, Megan Basham and Rob McCoy, Charlie Kirk's pastor. They're all going to be there. So I wouldn't dissuade you from trying to go to this conference at all.

But Mark Mark Driscoll, I think, does present an issue. And the issue is this is the real question. What are the standards for when you have failures, ministry failures? What are the what do we require?

What standard or what failure is too far that you can come back? And then if you can't come back, what do we require? Where are the standards? And I can tell you where standards more or less have been right.

An affair takes you out. Now, that's not true anymore, by the way. That's not true. That's changing. Guys like Thule and Tavitian can come back and build a platform. You can say, you know, I'm going to keep preaching and you'll have an audience.

That wasn't something that used to happen. But affairs took people out. Other kinds of sexual indiscretions would take people out. They still do. In many circles, at least, but that is changing. Financial indiscretions would take people out.

You manipulate finances, you steal people's money. You play with your church's finances for personal reasons and so forth that you break laws when it comes to finances, you get in trouble. And and I'm not talking about, you know, minor tax things that, you know, the IRS has an immense.

I'm talking about like premeditated. You were trying to skim. That gets you in trouble as well. Those were the two main things. Now, there is a third thing. If you had a severe temper, anger and violent issues, that would also take you out if it was severe enough, it definitely would.

You as a pastor, you have to be self-controlled. Now, where does Mark Driscoll fit into all of this? It's probably the third one more than anything else. But I want to remind you of some things. Mark Driscoll has become.

Somewhat famous, at least the narrative, the Christianity Today has on him from the Rise and Fall of Mark Thule's podcast, which I haven't even listened to. I just don't care enough. I knew enough about it at the time it happened, it was it was enough for me to say, OK, there's some bad stuff here.

Maybe it's not all as it was portrayed, but there's enough there for me to say, yeah, not good. Well. During in 2007 is 2007, yeah, Christianity Today was singing a different tune, the pastor provocateur by Colin Hansen, love him or hate him.

Mark Driscoll is helping people meet Jesus in one of America's least church cities. Mark Driscoll looks no different than he does any other day, so it goes on, let's see, and then we can't access the whole article.

I was frustrated because there's a number of Christianity articles I wanted to show you from this era and I could not show them all to you. But. This was more or less a favorable article about Mark Driscoll and Colin Hansen actually wrote a book on the young reform movement.

He included Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll. Those are two of the major churches he focused on, and two of the major things he focused on were the contextualization issue that Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller were both doing something.

They were giving you a model for how to do church, and it was different than the previous models. Now, you already know me. If you listen to this podcast, innovation is I'm very careful with innovation.

I'm I like tradition and innovation. You got to tread carefully. I'm not saying all change is bad. I'm just saying you got to really think through it. I remember I was there. I was I was there 3000 years ago, whatever.

I was there when the emergent church was kind of like. People like Doug Page and Brian McLaren and Rob Bell and these guys, they were making their inroads. And at the same time, you had John Piper and Tim Keller and sort of a more popular John MacArthur and Francis Chan and Tim Chalise, and all these guys were becoming popular.

And Mark Driscoll was in that mix, and Tim Keller was in that mix, and there was a resurgence of reform theology. There was also, though, a focus on contextualization. Taking the gospel and going into a community and trying to, quote, unquote, meet the people where they were at.

When in Rome, right, becoming all things to all men, it was the word that was used at the time, it was missional, it was missional. And Mark Driscoll was one of the guys who used the term quite a bit, and it was applied to him.

He was missional. And he broke from the emergent guys, even though he had their style on many things. He did wear the casual style of dress.

He still does.

I mean, he'll preach with a baseball cap on, you know. This is something that the older generations did not appreciate that. But he was doing so in, was it Seattle, outside of Seattle, I guess. And he, or right, I think it was right near Seattle or in Seattle.

It was like right there. And it was an unchurched area, and this was kind of a new method, and it seemed to be working. He was doing the satellite thing, innovative. You would pipe him in to local churches.

Now, this is personal for me, because a little bit, I had a cousin who was attending one of the satellite campuses, and when everything fell apart, because it's all contingent on one man, I saw the personal fallout.

I saw what that did. I saw how that affected real people. And it was bad. It was a crater. It was bad. And that's something that doesn't get talked about often, is all the people who were kind of let down by this, and because their faith was, yeah, it's okay.

It's in Jesus for some of them, but it's also in this guy. And when the, it's like dominoes. The one falls, it all falls. So, he's bringing in these methods, and one of the things he did for contextualization was, well, you know, the pagan secular people, they're really into, you know, pornography.

They're into, they're sexually loose. They're casual. You can't do church as usual. So, what you need to do is do a different thing for them. You got to meet them where they're at. And so, that's where you find his Song of Solomon series.

I don't recommend, if you have children, reading that to them at all. It's pornographic. I mean, it's not a good interpretation of Song of Solomon at all, in my opinion. It comes from someone with a pornographic mindset, in my opinion, to come to some of the conclusions he does.

And he creates laws out of it, basically. He creates directives for marriages, and what wives should be doing for their husbands, and this kind of thing, based on the Song of Solomon. These are commands from Jesus to engage in certain sexual things.

He has his book on marriage. He had some good things. I read it. But his stuff on sexual positions and all of that, it was unnecessary. You could have given principles without getting graphic, right? And he gets known for being kind of like the cussing pastor, saying things that are off.

Color.

This becomes part of his reputation. And this is something that he champions. He defends that. He says, no, it's good. I'm right. People are coming to church because of it. I got a man who's coming to church because his wife heard that I told, and this was in public, I think this was on a Sunday service, that she should be doing a certain act to.

Him.

And this attracted him to church. This is now why people are coming, because they want to know what this pastor is saying. And you remember he did these night services where you could text in any question, no matter how off color, and he would answer it.

So this is how he did church. And at the time, so I'm at, I go to master's seminary for a semester and I'm there and I'm in a class, I'm in a discipleship class, and it was, it was probably one, it was my least favorite class because we weren't really learning anything.

It was, it was a lot of, it was just like getting together in the morning and talking about this kind of stuff, right? The inside scoop on Francis Chan or the inside scoop on Mark Driscoll. And so I was there one morning, I, that was actually the class I missed the most.

Cause I was just like, I think the lowest grade I got in seminary because I just didn't show up half the time, probably not a good model to follow, go to class. But I was just like, yeah, I'm here to study the Bible.

And I just didn't like it. But I do remember that we had a class, we were talking about Mark Driscoll and it was like all the ins and outs about Mark Driscoll. And the main, but I'll just summarize it.

The main objection to him was actually what was behind. It wasn't just that, oh, he cusses. Oh, he's got profanity. It was what was behind it, the philosophy behind it. Why is he doing these things? And I think I agree with the objection.

He's doing it because he thinks it makes him popular. He's doing it because he thinks it's what people want to hear and they'll hear the gospel if they hear that. He's doing it because it sets him apart.

He's doing it because that's how you're supposed to do church in a deep blue area, which Seattle was. Meanwhile, simultaneous, there was another man in New York City who was also doing contextualization.

And he was in a very deep blue area also. And this was Tim Keller. And at the time, both Keller and Driscoll had, there was a big overlap between the people who followed both of them. They were both doing contextualization.

They were doing it slightly differently, though. Driscoll was kind of like shouting at men. I mean, his most famous clip is how dare you mistreat a woman, right? And it's very different, by the way, than the Manisphere Red Pill guys today.

There's a lot of comparisons made, but it's actually very different because a lot of the Manisphere Red Pill guys are going the direction of kind of like toxic empathy and kind of being more maternal, to be quite honest, like you're a victim of your circumstances and maybe you can't even get out of them and it never be hard on men, right?

Because men have had it hard enough, right? Mark Driscoll was the opposite of that. He was hard on men all the time. And some people said even too hard, but it was a very much, you know, pull yourself up, be a man, take responsibility.

Some of it was good.

And then kind of dressing like the working class, kind of like the MAGA style, you know, the trucker hat kind of goes to church before MAGA. Very populist level stuff, trying to reach the common man, the man who's been left behind because he doesn't understand the worship songs that are being sung or too emotional.

And he just, you know, really, he wants to be there, but he's got to have a masculine church, right? This is Mark Driscoll. Now, you could look at him now and say, well, maybe not a lot has changed in that regard.

I think he still does that to some extent. Maybe that is authentically kind of how he is. Tim Keller was different. Tim Keller was more, we're going to attract, we're not going for the middle class kind of working class kind of guy.

We're going for the public radio listener, the PBS watcher, the TED talk consumer. We're going for the more sophisticated urbanite. And we're going to do so, and we're going to do so by appealing to them by quoting the New York Times and talking about the things that they're reading, meeting them where they're.

At.

So we got to go a little more kind of progressive to get there. We're going to be soft pedaling some things, and we're going to be downplaying some things, upplaying other things. And it's like that. Was it Samantha?

I don't remember her last name, but the journalist who wrote about she was a member of Tim Keller's church, and she thought this is great until she realized what Christians believed about abortion. And she's like, well, I never heard that at Tim Keller's church.

So I know it wasn't confronted with it, right? This was the way to grow your church. And these two models were they weren't in like avid competition. They were somewhat complimentary, but they were different.

And guys who wanted to do contextualization who were looking for the key, how do we kind of make this reform theology work in these areas? This was the initial objection to Mark Driscoll. It was like, why do you have to change the style?

Why do you have to change the focus and go profane and go vulgar? Why don't you just go preach the gospel, preach the Bible, have a higher standard? Don't wear a baseball cap when you're preaching. That's disrespectful, like uphold some of the standards.

And there's nothing wrong with meeting people where they're at in their brokenness and their sin and addressing their sin problems. But you don't have to like bend over backwards to appeal to these people by talking about the perversions that they're into in graphic detail, right?

That was basically the objection. Well, then a few other things happened, and one of them was Mark Driscoll ends up there. There's sort of a scandal that happens. This is for the basis for the Rise and Fall of Marcel podcast.

And you can go online, you can still read the 40 charges signed by all these elders against Mark Driscoll. I will spare you all the details. I mean, some of the names in here are names you would recognize from people who are who have talked about this, who are basically on the progressive left on many issues.

And I think that arouses a lot of suspicion.

Now, I'll say this.

That should arouse some suspicion, but you should also not just discount something because someone on the left necessarily said it. There is good reporting that does happen sometimes by people who might be your left.

Doesn't mean that you should check it out, you should do your homework and all of that. But I don't just throw it out because of that. I want to assess what do we know? What are the primary sources? All that kind of thing.

This is the kind of thing that elders at Mark Driscoll's church were saying about him during that time.

I'm about to rip your head off and excrete down your neck. In my role, all of the central staff reported to me. So everybody, we had 200 some odd employees in the central staff, resurgence, all of those things, Marcel books, Marcel music, everything like that reported up through me.

And then I reported directly to Mark. He was my boss. I also sat on the board with Dave and Mark. So we were the three that were on the board and we had four board members that were outside. And anytime that Mark went to speak, I was there.

I lived down the street from Mark. I would typically meet him at his house and his executive assistant, and we would drive to wherever he was preaching. I'd be with him the whole time there, wherever we were preaching, and then I would come back.

So I mean, you could say during that time period between 2011 and 2014, nobody spent more time with Driscoll than I did. Dave and I were the only ones to have one-on-one meetings with Mark during those three-year period of time.

We had to isolate him because he was so harsh on staff members that we had to literally relocate an office to house Mark. And then Dave and I would go there as well on the days that we met. So yeah, I saw a lot of that.

So yes, there was a lot of accusations that were during, and it really started in 2013. But the formal charges, the 25 formal charges are listed, and I've actually in my notes that I published, pulled some of those items when the investigating elders literally asked Mark about each one of those charges.