In 2021, Christianity Today released a two-and-a-half-hour episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill called “The Tempest.” Somewhere in the middle of it, Mike Cosper tells the story of three nerds who recovered 140 pages of Mark Driscoll’s old internet posts:

Dwayne Forehand found them buried in the internet archive, Adam Wygle assembled it as a PDF, and Zach posted them.

Well, they spelled my name wrong in the original transcript. I emailed them, and they fixed it online. That’s how I ended up with the transcript files.

The summary is accurate, but it compresses a strange, exhausting part of my life into a single sentence. Dwayne found them. Adam assembled them. Zach posted them.

That makes it sound so clean.

It was not clean.

The civil war

For me, the final battle over Mars Hill began in March 2014, when it became public that the church had spent more than $200,000 on a campaign designed to put Mark and Grace Driscoll’s Real Marriage on The New York Times Best Seller list.

That revelation wasn’t the whole story. It was the starting gun.

For the next seven months, Mars Hill was in a kind of civil war. Former members, former pastors, current members, elders, bloggers, journalists, and an increasingly alarmed evangelical world were all trying to understand what had happened inside the church and whether anyone could bring Mark to account.

I spent a lot of those months at work focused on it.

At the time, I was working from Impact Hub in Seattle, a coworking space where we traded video services—and a little money—for office space. Even the guy running the place had some connection to Mars Hill. Everyone did at that point in my life. One of my employees still attended the church. We tried to establish a boundary around discussing it at work, but I wasn’t very good at filtering myself yet. Mars Hill seeped into everything because, for a while, it consumed me.

Community still meant Christians. Nearly all my friends were connected to churches, usually Mars Hill or the churches surrounding it. My work, friendships, family history, theology, and online life were tangled together in the same network.

I occasionally tried to step away from my phone and stop checking Facebook. I took a trip with the kids and spent time with Aunt Donna. Her house always helped me relax. Unfortunately, Theo discovered during that trip that he was allergic to nearly everything in the woods. We spent hours at an urgent care facility in Port Angeles while he was too itchy to do much of anything. We later learned that poplar trees were a particular cause of the problem.

It wasn’t exactly the peaceful wilderness retreat I had imagined, but by the time I returned, I was ready to get back to work.

And the fight was still waiting.

The old internet leaves evidence

Before Facebook groups and podcast documentaries, Mars Hill had Midrash.

Midrash was an internet message board used by people around the young church. Around 2000, Mark posted there under the name “William Wallace II.” Those posts had become legendary among people who remembered early Mars Hill: misogynistic and homophobic rants, crude jokes, rage, fear, and a version of Mark’s theology without the polish that came later.

The posts eventually disappeared from the live web. For years, people wondered whether copies still existed.

They did.

Jeremiah Lawson had surfaced the material in a Facebook group. From there, the sequence gets wibbly-wobbly. My best reconstruction now is that Zach found Jeremiah’s post and shared the material in BOAA Constrictors Meetup. BOAA was an early formation of what would become You Fucked With the Wrong Nerds: some of the same people, instincts, and purpose, before the later group had its name.

Dwayne, Zach, and I started digging.

Dwayne found the old pages inside the Wayback Machine. Once we knew where they were, I figured out how to extract the archived pages and turn them into PDFs. I assembled the recovered posts into a document that ran for 140 pages.

We knew it was big.

We had been working for months to find something damning enough that Mark and the church could no longer dismiss everyone calling for accountability. We weren’t trying to destroy Mars Hill. We wanted an independent investigation, meaningful structural change, repentance, and some willingness from Mark to step aside and allow other people to lead.

But the Midrash archive felt like a silver bullet.

On July 29, Zach posted the PDF, first inside a private group and then in “Dear Pastor Mark & Mars Hill: We Are Not Anonymous.” It spread to Matthew Paul Turner, Rachel Held Evans, Warren Throckmorton, and other writers covering Mars Hill.

The next day, Paul Tripp resigned from the church’s Board of Advisors and Accountability. James MacDonald followed. On August 8, Acts 29 removed Mark and Mars Hill from the church-planting network Mark had helped create.

The archive didn’t single-handedly bring down Mars Hill. Nothing did. It was one event in a cascade of events.

But it caused dominoes to fall.

You Fucked With the Wrong Nerds

The Facebook group called You Fucked With the Wrong Nerds—or YFWTWN—came together later, on August 25.

It included me, Zach Malm, Dwayne Forehand, Luke Abrams, and Drew Pickard. The name was a joke, but it described what we had become surprisingly well: a little group of people with different skills, old relationships, internet instincts, and a shared determination to keep digging.

We knew how to search archives, preserve material, route information, compare stories, and get evidence in front of the right people. Zach helped the archive become public. Dwayne helped the work stay human. The rest of us brought sources, context, research, jokes, anger, and whatever energy we had left.

The group became a war room.

The surviving Facebook archive records 3,222 messages in October 2014 alone. There were 467 in November and 205 in December. We were talking constantly because something new seemed to happen every day.

I don’t know what I missed in the rest of my life during those months.

I know I spent a tremendous amount of time at work focused on Mars Hill. I know I sometimes had to put my phone down and disappear because I couldn’t stop checking the group. I knew Zach, Luke, Dwayne, and Drew would bring me up to speed when I returned.

I wasn’t worried.

Mark wasn’t going anywhere.

Until he did.

He ran

Mark submitted his resignation on October 14, 2014.

I don’t completely trust my memory of how I felt in that moment. Time has changed it. I remember being surprised. I remember disappointment. I remember thinking Mark was a coward for running instead of facing the accusations and seeking repentance.

At the very least, he owed people an apology.

He owed signs of repentance and a willingness to seek justice with the people he had hurt. I don’t think any human could have met personally with everyone harmed by Mars Hill. There were too many people and too many stories. But Paul Petry and Bent Meyer would have been a place to start.

Those two men had been removed from leadership years earlier during the restructuring that concentrated power around Mark and Mars Hill’s executive leadership. If Mark had been willing to sit with them, own what happened, and seek reconciliation, it would have meant that mountains had moved.

I think I would have been willing to see that as a beginning.

Instead, he left.

There was nothing left to fight for. His departure didn’t only remove a pastor. It brought down an entire church system. Campuses closed or became independent churches. Thousands of people abruptly lost the communities that had organized their lives.

Some of those churches still exist. There’s one a few blocks from my house. I still get a little bit of the ick when I walk past it.

By the time Mark was gone, I was exhausted.

Seven months of civil war were over.

My exit from Mars Hill’s world did not happen all at once.

After Mars Hill, my family landed at Anchor Church for a while. It had some of the same kinds of drama we had just escaped. The scale was smaller, but the patterns felt familiar enough that we eventually knew we needed to leave.

I’m not ready to open that door in this post. For now, it’s enough to say that we left.

Somewhere safe

We eventually found our way to Ascension Presbyterian Church.

The fact that it was Presbyterian mattered. Mars Hill and Anchor were largely self-governed. Acts 29 might exist above churches like them, but it did not operate within their daily leadership structures. A Presbyterian church had governance built around and above its local pastor. There were systems designed to prevent one charismatic man from becoming the whole institution.

After Mars Hill and Anchor, that structure made us feel safe.

We liked the preaching.

The music sucked so hard.

At one point, we met with the main pastor and told him our story: Mars Hill, then Anchor, and how burned out we felt. We told him that we wanted to attend on Sundays and exist. We did not want to be pushed immediately into community groups, ministry, volunteering, or another system waiting to swallow our lives.

He agreed.

I don’t remember exactly what he said. I only remember that he honored our terms.

We attended off and on until we moved to Tacoma the following spring. Later, we attended Trinity Presbyterian for a while. I became quieter about church in public. Those churches gave me somewhere safe enough to sit still, and eventually enough room to begin loosening my grip on the God of the Bible, Jesus, and everything else I had assumed was immovable.

The room empties

The YFWTWN archive shows the group slowly becoming quiet.

After the 3,222 messages in October came 467 in November, 205 in December, and only 29 in January. There were occasional bursts when some fresh piece of Mars Hill news appeared, but mostly we were learning how to think about something else.

In February 2015, Luke wrote that there was more to life still.

Zach talked about how crazy it seemed that he had devoted so much time and energy to Mars Hill. Dwayne said he was enjoying the long stretches when he didn’t think about it.

The messages don’t record a dramatic breakup. There was no final explosion where everyone stormed out of the room. The crisis ended, the messages slowed, and the people inside the room began returning to their lives.

But for me, it wasn’t entirely passive.

Eventually, I developed a No Mars Hill policy.

I needed to be cut off from everything I had gone through during those months. I didn’t want to talk about Mars Hill. I didn’t want to run into people from Mars Hill. I didn’t want to make awkward small talk with people who carried pieces of that world.

That boundary eventually included some of my closest friends.

It included Dwayne.

Distance

Dwayne had been my best friend for years. For a long time, he was almost my only friend.

Our friendship had already survived one Mars Hill rupture. When Paul Petry and Bent Meyer were removed in 2007, Dwayne sided with them and left. I stayed and moved deeper into the church. In March 2008, he asked if we could spend time together without talking about Mars Hill.

“I just need friends is all,” he wrote.

We managed to keep the friendship alive. We raised children alongside each other. We talked theology and technology. We made jokes, helped each other with houses, and built strange internet projects together. Years later, we worked side by side again during the final Mars Hill crisis.

Then I made a conscious decision to get away from everything connected to Mars Hill.

I didn’t cut Dwayne off hard. It was a softer cut, and distance made it easy. He lived in Everett. I eventually lived in Tacoma. Even without traffic, that is a substantial drive. In rush hour, it can become three hours or longer.

Messages became occasional signals.

“Miss you.”

“You still alive?”

“I miss you man.”

I think I had to create that distance to get through what I needed to survive.

I also regret it.

Both things are true.

Years later, during residential treatment in Southern California, I wrote a scathing letter to Mark Driscoll and burned it in a bonfire ceremony on the beach. I don’t remember what I wrote. That was the point. I burned it and allowed the words and some of the anger to leave with it.

I’m clearly not the same angry person who wrote that letter.

I think I’m ready for people in my life again, even if they’re more like satellites: people in orbit who communicate now and then to make sure we’re both alive. We get together a few times each year, catch up, and laugh.

The hardest part is the distance.

In time, in geography.

It’s the distance.

Old friend

In July 2026, while using ChatGPT to dig through old Google Chats, Facebook messages, Instagram conversations, and text messages, I kept finding Dwayne.

Our friendship was everywhere in the archive.

So I wrote to him:

Hey old friend. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Meaning I’ve been using ChatGPT to scan all my old gchat, Facebook, Instagram, text messages and I’ve been reliving all our old friendship and missing you greatly.

He answered:

We used to be really good friends. I’d enjoy trying to be again Adam 🥹

“Fuck, me too!” I wrote back.

We started talking about old projects almost immediately. BBS games. TweetFight. Artificial intelligence. New experiments we might build together. It was the same rhythm we had always shared: conversation happening beside some weird project neither of us could resist poking.

We made a plan for him to visit Tacoma, stay the night, and work from my couch the following day.

That only sort of happened.

He came over and we spent several hours together, but he forgot his laptop and had to drive back to Everett instead of staying. It didn’t matter. We sat and caught up. He told me about his divorce. I told him about mine.

You know, what grown men talk about.

I explained the No Mars Hill policy. I told him what had happened during The Break and everything he hadn’t known while we were apart. I didn’t need to apologize. There wasn’t a dramatic injury between us that required one. Explaining the missing years painted the whole picture.

He understood. A lot of former Mars Hill people had lost contact with nearly everyone from that part of their lives. I may have been unusual only because I made the separation a conscious policy.

When he left, we hugged.

It was a great hug.

We’ve started talking about what comes next: projects, camping, time to sit around and shoot the shit, and maybe finally going to a Rainbow Gathering together.

Dwayne has invited me for years.

It’s time I go with him.

But that is a new story, not an attempt to reclaim the invitation I missed while my life was collapsing. We aren’t trying to reconstruct the friendship we had twenty years ago. We’re discovering what this one can become.

For two divorced men, more than a decade after You Fucked With the Wrong Nerds, the ability to relax and laugh while stuffing our faces with absurdly good Burger Seoul burgers was such a perfect way to end this post.

So I’m ending it there: faces full, laughing at ourselves.