25 June 2008 5 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Rob Bell’s Everything Is Spiritual Tour sold out theaters, concert venues and auditoriums across the country last year. The 36-year-old Michigan preacher was armed only with a blackboard while teaching about spontaneous living, contemporary physics, Hebrew numerology and God’s imminent omnipresence. So why is Rob Bell such a draw? RELEVANT talked to Bell about his message: being the church in the 21st century.

Rob, how do you feel about church growth?

What do you mean?

The way it’s classically framed in ministry circles in terms of numerical growth as a sign of health.James said that true religion takes care of the widows and the orphans. Are our widows and orphans being taken care of? Are people who can’t make their rent having other people chip in to help? People with cancer, do they have someone to drive them to chemotherapy? Are people in the local jail getting letters written to them and someone to visit them? That’s exciting church growth right there. It’s not a phrase that we ever use at Mars Hill; it’s not something that we talk about. In interviews the past few years, you keep referring to your church as a church of 10,000. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s been that size for the past few years, hasn’t it? Has Mars Hill hit a plateau?

Well, there isn’t any room. We moved into a former mall, so I think that’s how we can fit in three services. Building a bigger building seems to me to be an abomination that causes desolation when so many people in the world don’t have food.

You make a good point about bigger buildings and global hunger. Do you think that church initiatives, government initiatives, celebrity initiatives (like the ONE Campaign) are doing a good job ending poverty? And how can we avoid making our “help” just another form of paternalistic colonialism?
If it gives voice to the suffering in the world, it’s a good thing. Often, it’s important to go back a year later and see what’s happening. For us, our passion is always to find those who are in a particular geographical setting with some credibility, who have been there for a while, who have a proven track record, people we can come in and partner with. In all humility we approach them and say, “Can we serve?” I think that some of the paternalistic colonialism comes with the assumption that we have the answers to others’ problems, and that’s not always true. So at first you have to chuck all results out the window and just listen. Find out if there is any clear and compelling action you can take. I think some of the negative effects of colonialism come simply from a posture of arrogance, which is probably rooted out of ignorance.

What readings of Scripture do you think can help us get the spiritual energy and resources to facilitate humble helping initiatives?

First off, in Genesis 1, we’re all created in the image of God. So every human being is created in the image of God, then you have gender, male and female. Next you have location, some moved east to the plains. You don’t really have the birth of religion for a good 12 chapters. So first and foremost, other human beings are fellow image-bearers. When Jesus is teaching people to love, it’s not love so that you can … or love because … it’s just love. Period. It’s reclaiming the divine image that’s equal on every human being. And often some of the dangers of past works have been a failure to respect the whole humanity of others. “This person is a convert, this person is a project, this person is a possible notch in the belt,” and in the process, the image of God in every person isn’t respected. And that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. First and foremost, we feed and robe and visit and serve. These are things we do because Jesus said to do them, not because they will get us something. Everything has become “they’re wrong, I’m right; they’re missing, I have …” That whole posture will get in the way of actually blessing people.

When we talk about a narrative understanding of redemption history, God’s story and our part in it, the critique is that this is humanism, that God’s sovereignty is being threatened in all of this. Do you ever run into the accusation of being humanistic in your efforts at Mars Hill?

Of course it’s humanistic; we’re humans. I don’t even know what that means. This is how God has worked for thousands of years. I have a high view of humanity because I have a high view of God. When people speak against humanity, they are speaking against God. The idea that our playing a real role in the divine/human story questions God’s sovereignty implies that humanity doing great things and God’s sovereignty are somehow either/or. This is an extremely limited and ultimately very narrow understanding of the world. The Bible did not drop out of the sky. People wrote it, people exerted a lot of sweat and toil. If you have a low view of humanity, then you must have a seriously low view of the Scriptures, because this is how we got the Bible. If you’re a Christian, the only reason you’re a Christian is because somebody told you about Christ, and someone told them, and someone told them. You must at some point acknowledge that humans are capable of passing this message along to each person who’s so critical of the narrative theology to even have heard the message of redemption in the first place!

There is so much of how we see God and God’s purposes rooted in how we look at one another. Why do you think that so many of today’s Christians think of themselves primarily as “sinners”?

In the New Testament that is not how people are identified. They’re identified as saints, as holy ones and as the bride of Christ. The whole premise of trusting Christ in the Scriptures is that you have a new identity. If you insist on calling yourself a sinner, you have to do it beyond the Bible. According to the Scriptures, you now are somebody new, you aren’t who you were. I understand the value of “I still sin, I still struggle. I still need to be reminded of my fallibility or my brokenness.” Yes, but you are a new creation. So your fundamental identity—and we all still struggle with this as it says in James—your fundamental identity has been radically altered in Christ. We’ll just call it eschatological realism … I’m being pulled into my true identity.

When you first started Mars Hill, you said you wanted a place stripped of the clutter. You wanted a place where God would be freed up to speak. What are some ways we can challenge harmful religious systems in a loving way?

I’m leery of challenging conventional practices. If the intent is simply to challenge or be controversial, that’s never a noble attempt. The attempt for me is always truth, an attempt for the community of people who are learning the way of Jesus as His disciples. So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a group of people gathering in a room to hear somebody talk; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a person in a church who gets a paycheck for their work in equipping the body to the work of the ministry. What’s dangerous is when we fail to call things what they are. On Sundays at Mars Hill, we would simply say this is just a gathering of the church, or churches. We gather throughout all the days of the week as communities, but we actually journey together in smaller networks of people. So, if you come here on Sunday, you come for an hour and a half for whatever teaching and singing, and get some information, but please don’t say you’re a part of this church. You went to a service this church put on. So to me, God can use all these different ways. The issue is whether we’re honest about what things are, and we call them what they are, and we don’t place expectations on things that can’t deliver. There are 19 “one anothers” in the New Testament that are repeated 43 times—love one another, pray for one another—you can only do a couple of those in a church service. So let’s just be clear when the Bible talks about that. Let’s give those services proper weight. They can be extremely important, and at the same time, it’s not the flow of how you live your life day in and day out. There’s always a group of people who say that churches can only be small to be authentic, churches can only be house churches to be authentic. The truth is that people can be fake in a room of 10 and they can be fake in a room of 1,000. We tend to have unbelievable moments of the presence of God, in rooms of 10 and in rooms of 1,000. Generally when somebody’s all against something, I ask, “So how did you get burned by that group?” The reaction is generally against a bad experience. The issue is whether we’re being honest about the current expression we’re in the midst of.

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