Friday, April 4, 2014

Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church Face Possible Litigation

Today, Warren Cole Smith, who writes for World Magazine wrote the following in his post Mars Hill Church moves to destroy documents:

"A group of 16 former Mars Hill members delivered a letter to the church earlier today, asking Mars Hill to delay or rescind the implementation of this policy. In the letter, obtained by WORLD, the group’s attorney, Brian Fahling, asked the church to “preserve electronically stored information that may contain evidence.” Fahling wrote that his clients anticipate legal action in which the church, Driscoll, and others in church leadership “will be named as defendants.” The letter lists anticipated litigation in the areas of “RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act], Fraud, Conspiracy, Libel, Slander, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.”
(emphasis added)

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Mars Hill's Brand New Email Policy

Today April 4th, Mars Hill will be deleting each and every email in their system older than 90 days.

Warren Throckmorton at Patheos has an excellent post on the matter:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/04/02/megachurch-methods-mars-hill-email-retention-policy/

They state that it is in order to be "good stewards" and reduce the risk of storing old emails unnecessarily.

Just so there is no confusion... there is little to any risk in storing emails for long periods of time. Storage is cheap these days. I work at a company with well over 200 employees and the company policy is a good faith policy where they ask us to be conscientious about reviewing our Inbox every few months and removing unnecessary ones.

It is reckless as an organization to have such an aggressive blanket policy where emails are deleted at the 90 day mark when projects, campaigns, issues, etc... often have a much longer shelf life than 90 days... any organization will be deleting possibly important correspondence on matters that may still be pertinent, not to mention it is an outstanding historical record for new issues that may come up.

Let me be clear here... This is a cover up, plain and simple.