Mars Hill Church Defends Edits to Mark Driscoll's Sermon on Acts 6:1-7

In an exclusive statement to Christian Post, Mars Hill Church denies that the edits to Mark Driscoll’s recent sermon on Acts 6:1-7 were anything unusual. They also stand in support of the content of the edited portion.
According to the CP article, sermons are evaluated and then edited on a routine basis. In one sense, this is certainly true. Many people have access to the sermon prior to finished product and can make various suggestions. According to my sources, most editing is for the sake of time. Sometimes editing is done to remove content the leaders don’t want the congregation to hear or know. For instance, older sermon transcripts have been edited to remove mention of Leif Moi, one of the founders of Mars Hill. Other former leaders have been scrubbed from the website, as was Mark Driscoll’s naturopathic physician when the doctor lost his license.
In this case, sources from Mars Hill tell me that some staff took Driscoll’s references to the mistakes of Jesus as thinly veiled self-defense, using the life of Jesus to do it. Others had few concerns about the content but were worried that Driscoll would be perceived as comparing himself to Jesus in order to minimize the concerns of former members. These varied concerns led to the edits, according to my sources.
Without naming the sermon, at least one former Mars Hill pastor, Dave Kraft, raised concerns about making an analogy from Jesus’s actions to human mistakes. Kraft is one of the pastors leading 20 former Mars Hill pastors to request mediation with Driscoll and the other executive elders.
CP’s Alex Murashko said I didn’t return an email by press time. All Murashko wanted to know was where I got the video. I wrote back to ask how that information would be relevant to his story.