A few brief observations.
First, while Throckmorton links to an update in the following way:
"The video of Driscoll has now been made private (not viewable) and Bogardus’ update has been scrubbed from the site. However, you can read it via the Internet Archive."
Well, no, not now. You see this link
https://web.archive.org/web/20120528185351/http://marshill.com/2012/05/26/update-on-mars-hill-orange-countys-building
Doesn't work. Why? Because robots.txt is in effect.
Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt.
See marshill.com robots.txt page. Learn more about robots.txt.
So there you go. Mars Hill seems to have introduced robots.txt to marshill.com so that not even The WayBack Machine can be used to get to some stuff. It's curious that both theresurgence.com and marshill.com have now introduced robots.txt to limit WayBack Machine crawls. Wenatchee The Hatchet has been noting over the last month or so that Mars Hill Church purged all the sermon content prior to the 2008 Doctrine series and that Mars Hill also purged the 1 & 2 Peter sermon materials, too. Additionally, Mars Hill Church purged 2008 Peasant Princess material which, alert readers may recall, was material that was considered to have handled the Song of Solomon in a better way than the retracted 2007 Scotland sermon that came under criticism from John MacArthur. But let's get to the Christian Post link
Murashko's coverage mentioned that Driscoll said in a video update that since the Galaxy/Observatory venue was a concert venue it didn't exactly make sense what the eviction was about. Precisely what distinguishes between permitting music concerts and arts events at a venue but not a church gathering does seem like a fair question, actually.
But when Driscoll mentioned that Mars Hill was retaining legal counsel and would stick up for itself if it seemed there was religious discrimination afoot that doesn't seem to have been what happened. After all, the Mars Hill website features a Mars Hill Huntington Beach now, not Mars Hill Orange County.
But if Mars Hill Church had legal counsel at the time of the eviction that was apparently no longer going to be Chris Pledger, at least in terms of being a legal officer of the organization.
http://twitter.com/ChrisPledger/status/206934500599537664
Chris Pledger@ChrisPledger
Last church service @MarsHill. Very thankful for the ministry and mission of Mars Hill and the privilege to
have been part of it.
7:26 PM - 27 May 2012 via HootSuite ·
Chris Pledger@ChrisPledger
Last church service @MarsHill. Very thankful for the ministry and mission of Mars Hill and the privilege to
have been part of it.
7:26 PM - 27 May 2012 via HootSuite ·
And of note, even if the link is dead and the video has been made private the date stamp is right in the url.
We'll never know why Pledger's last church service at Mars Hill seemed to be the same weekend the eviction notice became a news item Driscoll addressed via video. It might just be a coincidence.
Now if Mars Hill had reason to believe that the City of Santa Ana maybe that was, well, a rookie mistake. Past coverage suggested that Bogardus told the Christian Post
The city made it clear from the outset that the church could not stay long term, Bogardus said.
So it seems there's virtually no basis from which to propose that elders at any level were completely unaware of what the likelihood was of a zoning problem coming up. Conversely, why didn't Mars Hill opt to fight to stay at the real estate once the zoning/eviction issue became news? If they had a solid case to defend being able to meet in the Galaxy/Observatory couldn't they have opted to have done that? There's a lot of claims and counterclaims so it's impossible to be entirely certain what was going on but if Mars Hill were in a position to have actually gone to bat for the opportunity to meet at the site they were evicted from couldn't that have been a battle that would set a precedent for other churches in the region?
It's all moot since that's clearly not what Mars Hill Church opted to do. Because Driscoll was willing to raise the topic that perhaps Mars Hill could have faced some religious discrimination and that legal counsel was retained it seems moot to suggest that after the eviction made headlines and Driscoll made a video announcement that it was private
Throckmorton has more correspondence and documents that suggests that the elders of MH at multiple levels knew they were moving Mars Hill into a venue that was going to land them some trouble and that it's alleged some leaders believed this trouble wouldn't happen because the City of Santa Ana wouldn't risk the PR problems of evicting a church.
Maybe, as someone remarked in a track on a Frank Zappa album, "If we'd all been living in California things would be different".(paraphrase).
It makes it difficult, looking back on things, to be certain that Mars Hill had much of a case for claiming religious discrimination (even if that might have been the case, for instance) if they just pulled up stakes and went to Huntington Beach.
