The tireless Warren Throckmorton broke two pieces of Mars Hill news in the last twelve hours. The first is that Mars Hill has canceled this year's edition of their ongoing Resurgence conferences:

The Resurgence Conference has always been born out of our love of Jesus and the church, and the desire to support efforts to grow leaders to grow churches. Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel this year’s conference due to unforeseen changes to our speaker line-up and other challenges we believe would make it difficult to provide the quality of conference people have come to expect from Resurgence.

This of course is a very gentle allusion to the fact that Mars Hill has been removed from the Acts 29 Network of evangelical churches. Presumably, several of the speakers who were scheduled to speak at Resurgence at the end of October backed out of the conference when the Acts 29 news broke.

Similarly, the Gateway Conference is a large Christian assembly scheduled to happen the weekend of October 20th in Dallas. Mark Driscoll was scheduled to be the closing speaker for Gateway. He's not anymore. Throckmorton reached out to Gateway's organizers and was told that "Mark Driscoll has been scheduled to speak at the conference for about 6 months, but due to some recent complications he and his ministry are experiencing, he will no longer be able to be the closing speaker."

Can an evangelical church survive in a vacuum? Will Mars Hill become even more insular and Driscoll-centric, now that other churches seem to be giving them the cold shoulder? Mars Hill must be in permanent panic mode behind the scenes these days.