Mars Hill Church is history.
Church leaders announced today they plan to break up the church into independent congregations, sell buildings whose loans aren’t assumed by congregations, and lay off the entire central office staff. While the plan contemplates that some of its branch churches may survive as stand-alone entities, the Mars Hill Church that has existed until now will disband and liquidate. In other words, it’s going out of business. Here’s an extract from the official announcement on their website:
“The board of Mars Hill has concluded that rather than remaining a centralized multisite church with video-led teaching distributed to multiple locations, the best future for each of our existing local churches is for them to become autonomous self-governed entities,” Pastor Dave Bruskas wrote on the church blog. “This means that each of our locations has an opportunity to become a new church, rooted in the best of what Mars Hill has been in the past, and independently led and run by its own local elder teams,” he wrote.
The story was reported by the Seattle Times here:
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024924221_marshilldisbandingxml.html