Stories about ousted Mars Hill Church pastor Mark Driscoll are surfacing again, now that the former Seattle mega-church leader has resurfaced in Phoenix with a new church plant and no repentance toward the carnage left behind in the Pacific Northwest. Mars Hill, his now former church, has had to sell $25 million worth of property to make ends meet. 

Of all the outlets I’ve scanned, the Daily Beast thus far has come up with the best reporting about the matter. I should mention that Joel Connelly’s blog atseattlepi.com was first out of the blocks in December with the story of Driscoll’s move to Phoenix.

Connelly has been following Driscoll for years. If you need to bone up on his clips and some of Driscoll’s history, click here. Here's a brief summation of the latest news, which appeared Feb. 1 in The Seattle Times:

Mark Driscoll finally made it official: He’s starting a new church in Phoenix. The culmination of a comeback that has been gaining steam over the past year, the former Mars Hill pastor announced the news of The Trinity Church on Monday by email, Twitter and a new website.

In a folksy video on the site, which begins with a “howdy” from Driscoll, the pastor said he and his wife, Grace, sitting by his side, were “hoping, trusting, praying, planning and also a little” -- he made a jokey grimace -- “worrying about planting a church here.”

Driscoll also noted that he was “healin’ up” in his new home. And his bio on the site refers to the Driscolls recently facing “the most challenging year of their lives,” one that prompted the pastor to take a year off.

But aside from those remarks, there’s no reference to Driscoll’s troubled and controversial history at Mars Hill. Indeed, there’s no direct mention at all of the megachurch he presided over for 18 years in Seattle, until snowballing allegations of plagiarism, emotional abusiveness and misogyny led him to resign in October 2014.

 It does seem weird that Driscoll seems to have taken up a southern accent in his new digs.