Johnson, Jessica. "The Fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle: How Online
Johnson, Jessica. "The Fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle: How Online Counter-Narratives Catalyzed Change." The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate. By Michael Stausberg, Stuart A. Wright and Carole M. Cusack. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 119–134. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350162945.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 04:44 UTC. Copyright © Michael Stausberg, Stuart A. Wright, Carole M. Cusack, and contributors 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 7 The Fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle: How Online Counter-Narratives Catalyzed Change Jessica Johnson This chapter examines the organizational crisis that led to the demise of Mars Hill Church, an evangelical megachurch in Seattle led by Pastor Mark Driscoll that grew to 13,000 attendees at fifteen locations scattered throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond, before it collapsed in the midst of administrative and financial scandal at the end of 2014. Before Mars Hill’s dissolution, the controversies surrounding Driscoll and the church were rapidly mounting from 2013 to 2014 amid intense turnover in staff as pastors began steadily resigning, and attendance numbers dropped from roughly 13,000 to 7,000 in the summer of 2014. By August 2014, when a protest organized by former members was held outside Mars Hill’s main facility, evidence had surfaced online that supported several accusations against Driscoll, including: plagiarism; the surreptitious use of the marketing firm ResultSource to achieve bestselling author status on a variety of book lists; the misappropriation of “global fund” tithes for churches in Ethiopia and India; and formal charges of bullying and micromanagement lodged by twenty-one ex-pastors (Johnson 2018: 35).
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