Over the years, a lot of leaders have been gracious to make deposits in my life, our family’s, and our church family’s. I am constantly humbled by all the godly and gifted people who have given us wisdom, counsel, correction, and love in vital seasons of life and ministry.
That same heart of helping is, by the Spirit’s work, part of Mars Hill Church. Since our inception, we have been by God’s grace a church that loves churches and their pastors. In addition to informally coaching and serving, we have started entire organizations such as Acts 29 and Resurgence to help serve ministry leaders. We genuinely love helping churches and their leaders and families.
In recent years, I have had the great honor to help informally coach pastors with growing churches struggling under the weight of caring for a growing number of people. So, the executive elders of Mars Hill (Pastors Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas) proposed formalizing a handful of these relationships into something we are calling the Mars Hill Network (MHN).
The MHN is intentionally starting with just a handful of churches we will have the honor to serve in a formal capacity for one year. The first churches remain independent churches in the Acts 29 Network along with us. Each church was invited to the network as it is growing quickly and is led by pastors we have close friendships with, who are helping serve a lot of church planters and were asking for help from the leadership at Mars Hill to deal with their growing complexities. Our hope is to lovingly serve these churches and their leaders as they pursue Jesus’ calling for them. And, our hope is to also learn from them as they ask us hard questions and surface weaknesses we also need to mature in.
We’d appreciate your prayers as we are committing ourselves to a very serious investment in these churches with a great deal of time and energy devoted to them. Admittedly, this is a bit of an experiment. If all goes well, the MHN may expand in future years to other churches we sense a loving partnership with and can help by God’s grace.
—Pastor Mark Driscoll
