Sutton Turner, the former executive pastor of Mars Hill Church who has written a series of blogs about his experiences there, has been asked by attorneys to stop writing and to remove blogs he has already posted.
Turner has so far written about the ResultSource controversy, which saw copies of the Driscolls' book Real Marriage bought by the church from small independent bookstores and resold in Mars Hill bookstores. The ResultSource campaign was designed to get Real Marriage on to the New York Times best-seller list, but was widely denounced as unethical when news of the contract broke and caused a major scandal.
However, yesterday he wrote: "Last night I received a call to explain that Mars Hill's former attorneys did not want me to post any more blogs and also to remove what has already been communicated this week."
Sutton defended his posts, saying: "If Mars Hill was still a church, I would not be discussing these things in a public way, but the church's epic implosion was historic ... Unless, we study the leadership, events, decisions, victories, and failures—the whole history of Mars Hill Church—it may very well be repeated."
He also stressed that his aim was constructive and that he had good relations with previous colleagues.
He concluded: "I do believe there are helpful lessons to be shared that might prevent what happened at Mars Hill from ever happening again. Consequently, I will not be able to fully comply with the request of Mars Hill's former attorneys. However, I will rework the Global blog post content this weekend and remove many of the financial numbers that people are so eager to know."
Commenting on the post, blogger Warren Throckmorton, who has written extensively about Mars Hill, said: "I'm impressed that Turner has not removed the prior posts and I appreciate Turner's motives for writing."
