Leadership Journal

Rob Bell will tell you his style is unorthodox. He planted a church by preaching through Leviticus. His teaching is a mix of images and personal stories and exegesis and some perspectives you probably haven't heard in church before. The message, however, is orthodox, biblical, and well informed by history. The whole package, Bell says, is subversive. Like Jesus.

Whatever it is, it works. It connects with crowds totaling 10,000 most weekends at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, the church 33-year-old Bell founded five years ago. It connects, we've seen, with students at his alma mater, Wheaton College, and emerging church leaders at national conferences, where Bell is likely to teach using a big chair, Jewish prayer shawl, or a live goat. "Animals, whatever. Whatever it takes," he says. "No rules." These days he's talking a lot about the rabbis.

Ed Dobson says of Bell, "Rob is driven by a passion to teach the Bible, shaped by understanding the Bible in its context, then applying the Bible to where people live. At the core, he's about the Bible." It was with Dobson, at Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, that Bell served as associate pastor for three years before Calvary supported the launch of Bell's postmodern congregation. Today Bell is also heading Nooma (think pneuma), a ministry producing short dramatic videos of Bell's talks, shot MTV-style amid city streets, airports, and forests (www.nooma.com).

Our conversation with him darts from topic to topic ("My friends tell me that I'm, like, classic ADD. That, of course, was already obvious," he says), but in the seemingly random thoughts and rabbi-chases, Bell is making a point. He is as intentional in our exploration of preaching as he is in alerting his generation to the real, historical, present, and revolutionary Christ.

I have a couple of Jewish friends who became Christians. They kept saying about things in the Bible, "You know what that's about?"

"No."

"Seder."

"What?"

"Four promises in Exodus 6, the four cups. When Jesus says, 'This is my cup,' there are four of them. He's picking the fourth one. Do you know why?"

"No." I didn't know the Jewish background of Scripture.

Jesus is Jewish. I thought he was Christian. So then I started reading. Jesus taught about himself with Moses—the Torah—and the Prophets. It drove me crazy. I thought, There must be a whole world of stuff in there that I'm missing. And there was. There are thousands and thousands of pages of ancient writings that Christians are oblivious to.

The rabbis have an ancient ceremony called the Akedat—the binding of Isaac where they celebrate Isaac's action. Christians celebrate Abraham's faith; Jews the action. Isaac went. So this whole Akedat is a ceremony of the binding of Isaac.

Baptism, the mikvah, all throughout Leviticus, all that stuff. It didn't come out of nowhere.

Everything Jesus said—the Good Samaritan is commentary on Leviticus 15—those things ...