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.
The rabbis believe that the text is like a gem: the more you turn it the more the light refracts. I say, if it’s the living word, then turn the gem.
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.
How did you get turned on to rabbinic teachings?
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.
We need to reclaim the prophetic poetic preaching voice—that moment when a person speaks, and it’s the words of God, and everybody knows it.
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 are discussions about Torah. He’s not randomly pulling things out of the sky.
When Jesus becomes kind of an esoteric spiritual figure and not a real dude in a real place at a real time, the really subversive economic and political things he’s saying get lost in an effort to proclaim him as Son of God, which we do. But he’s also a Jewish rabbi who lived in a Jewish way in a Jewish time, and we have lot of information about what that world was like.
How does rabbinics connect with today’s young Christians?
I was just at a Christian college teaching on the rabbinical system, walking them through the educational system of the first century. At an early age, the kids would memorize Torah, but fewer and fewer make it to the next level. At the final level, the rabbi chooses as disciples only those he believes can be like the rabbi. Can this kid do what I do?
And Jesus keeps saying to his disciples, like, you can do it. “You didn’t choose me; I chose you.” This is rabbinical language. Most of Jesus’ frustration with the disciples is when they don’t think they can be like him. Jesus had faith in his disciples. Then he says to them, “Now you go and make more disciples. I’m out of here.” That’s how a rabbi worked. A rabbi only chose disciples he believed in.
That’s good news for people who doubt themselves. When you hear Jesus chose you, you believe you can fly.
What do you read for insights like that?
Right now I’m reading works on the Caesars. I could take passage after passage where the Gospel writers use the images of Caesar. Caesar came to power with an eight-stage coronation process. Mark organizes the Passion Week by the eight stages. Like Caesar, Jesus is crowned. Soldiers gather around him as they would Caesar. They place a crown on his head. They bow down to him. Mark’s Roman and Gentile audience knew exactly what a coronation of a king looked like. Mark is saying Jesus is King. Isn’t that awesome?
Those guys were so brilliant. You begin to think they had help. (laughter)
Your ministry is very contemporary, but you really value history.
Despite a tradition that prides itself on being Bible based, the Christian community knows very little of what’s going on historically in the Bible. And there are massive, amazing things. But some fear using anything other than the Bible to explain the Bible. I’ve been told, “We can’t use history. History is fallible.”
A preacher recently said to me that you cannot use history, because the more you learn about history, the more it will affect how you interpret the Scriptures. Yep. I hope so.
N.T. Wright says it this way, “Most people want to wake up in the morning with a general at the foot of their bed saying ‘Go do this.’ The problem is there’s somebody at the foot of their bed saying, ‘Once upon a time…'”
The “timeless truths” of Scripture emerge from real people in real places and a God who has all authority working in real time. So the more I know about the places and times, the more I understand God’s authority.
For example—
Artemis: the goddess of fertility. Her world center of worship was the city of Ephesus. It was believed that if you were pregnant and you brought an offering to her temple, she would protect you in childbirth. Now in the mid-first century, one out of two women was dying in childbirth. This is a real terror. So what does Paul say to Timothy? “By the way, women will be saved in childbirth.” But what about Artemis?
Paul, in a brilliant, subversive way, says Artemis doesn’t save women in childbirth. God does.
Now how on earth do you understand that verse without knowing some history?
How do you teach people to apply history to current situations?
Last fall I did a whole series on Ephesians. There are places where Paul is making reference to Artemis. Her temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Millions of people are coming to visit her temple and buy statues, believing Artemis is their source of economic wealth. So how does Paul begin Ephesians? “Praise be to God for every spiritual blessing.”
“Wait, wait, wait. No, Artemis. We bless Artemis for everything.”
In Ephesus, Paul’s words would be subversive teaching. It’s no wonder they had a riot.
But Paul doesn’t bash Artemis. When you tell the story well, you don’t have to bash. It’s clear. In fact, in Acts 19, the city clerk says to the rioting mob, “Paul has never blasphemed the goddess.” One of the distinctive things about the Jesus revolution is they never blasphemed the gods of the cities, and yet the whole city became Christian.
That has unbelievable implications for what Christians are doing right now—preachers bashing Hollywood—
When you tell the story well, you don’t have to. It’s clear. Not that there isn’t a time and a place when you have to call things what they are—
Do you ever stand up and say, “Thus saith the Lord”?
I think we need to reclaim the prophetic poetic preaching voice. We need to reclaim that moment when that person speaks, and it’s the words of God, and everybody knows it. It’s a beautiful thing. I want to reclaim it as a revolutionary art form that really does have power to transform communities and cultures.
How would you reclaim preaching?
I want to rescue preaching. I believe it’s an art form and I want to rescue it back from the scientists and the analysts. I want to see the poets and the prophets and the artists grab the microphone and say great things about God and the revolution. I think a whole art form has been lost that needs to be recaptured, a grand ambition for the art of preaching.
There’s a mystery to a man or a woman in a room, when the text has done something in them and then it’s coming out of them—whatever that looks like. It’s a parable; it’s silence; it’s a series of disparate images that don’t seem to have any connection, and yet somehow they do.
The engineers have dominated preaching for quite a while. What would the artists do differently?
A lot of Christian preaching isn’t really seriously about story. I don’t want to conquer mystery. I want to celebrate it. And in the modern era we have “Seven Steps to Prayer,” “Four Steps to Financial—whatever.” Those all, I assume, have their place.
But what often happens is God gets shrunk down in the process. In the effort to boil things down, God gets boiled down. And there have to be spaces where mystery is simply celebrated.
The true orthodox faith is deeply mysterious, and every question that’s answered leads to a new set of questions. A lot of preaching tries to answer everything. At the end of the sermon, people walk out with no more questions. But if it’s truly proclamation of truth rooted in God—
The rabbis believe that the text is like a gem: the more you turn it the more the light refracts. I heard a guy one time say, “Oh yeah, I got a sermon on that verse. I got it pretty much nailed.” What? Are you out of your mind? You have that nailed? I just endlessly turn it.
I did a six-month series on John 3:16. I did a sermon on the word that. You have to ask questions. Some Christian traditions think a text has a meaning and if you apply the right method, then you can pull out the correct meaning. That’s the ultimate in arrogance. If it’s a living Word, then turn the gem.
“And God so loved the world that he gave his Son—”
Why did God give his Son?
“Because he loved the world.”
Okay, why does God love the world? Does he love everybody? Everybody the same?
“Because God is love.”
Those are answers—answers I believe you can rest your life on—and yet they also plunge you deeper.
Isn’t the problem with answered-centered preaching that once the sermon has provided all of the answers, a person says, “I still have unresolved issues; therefore the answer is insufficient”?
Yes, exactly. Well said.
And so, how does your approach avoid that?
Kierkegaard talks about faith in fear and trembling as absolutely necessary for there to be real faith. It’s easy to say, “Just believe. You got all the facts.” But it doesn’t work that way.
Two weeks ago I sponsored a “Doubt Night.” I said, “I want to talk about my own doubts about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, faith. And if you have some, bring them. Write them down and pass them forward, we’ll read them and we’ll see what happens.” We had a huge box—you would not believe—and I just started going through them, reading them and discussing them. It was so awesome.
That’s stuff many pastors could get voted out for.
I’m trying to. (laughter) But a lot of pastors, if they did a doubt night, would be speaking to where their people actually live. I actually think people who have been Christians the longest often have the biggest doubts, because they’ve been living it, and yet there are still things unresolved. And that’s okay.
This is central to what it means to be a person of faith. A question implies there are things I don’t know. So bringing questions and doubts are a form of respect for God.
What set your life in this direction?
I grew up in a Christian home and was familiar with the basics of the faith, and yet my spirituality always seemed to not fit (which is true of many, many people). I was around good Christian people who didn’t speak my language. I had enough respect to listen, but the world I lived in didn’t.
After college I knew I was supposed to go to seminary. I was teaching water skiing and, for some freak-of-nature reason, volunteered to preach at a chapel service. I got up to do my little talk, and I took off my sandals because I knew I was on holy ground. It was like being born again, again.
And God told me, “If you teach this Book, I’ll take care of everything else.” Over the years it becomes more and more clear, yes, he did say that. So at that point all of my rebellion, restlessness, dissatisfaction, all of that became channeled. I had something to do. I have a reason for being here.
Your preaching blends styles and images. And people often laugh. Do you intend to be so, well, entertaining?
In college my friends and I started a band right when music was starting to be called “alternative”—pre-Nirvana, right in there. We were writing our own material. People would listen, and if they liked it, they’d buy the cassette. (That dates me. We made cassettes in our dorm rooms.) My understanding is if you go to see a band, and you don’t like it, you leave. You don’t stand around for a band you don’t like.
So my understanding in communication is you engage people right where they are; if you don’t, they leave.
Sometimes I hear people say, “The church isn’t here to entertain.” To entertain means to hold people’s attention, which is clearly something teachers throughout the Scriptures are doing. They engage and capture attention.
But we’re not here to amuse. To “a-muse” means to “not think.” And it’s wrong to prevent people from pondering or distract them from thinking. I’m not here to amuse. But of course I want to engage people. I have something to say.
So what you say is important, but just as much the way you say it.
In class a history teacher can be lecturing, and it’s just insanely boring. She plays a three-minute clip of The Patriot, and every kid from the back row to the front is totally engaged. Then she hits stop and the screen goes blue and every kid in the class goes “Oooooooaww.”
There’s an art, and the kids got sucked in. The story is going somewhere, but the writer knows where to place tension, where to resolve, where not to resolve. The screenwriter knows to introduce something at the 28- to 32-minute mark, then leave it unresolved for the next hour.
Even the most exegetical teaching can have an art: we’re going somewhere, and the tension may be resolved—or it may not.
Like the cell phone you used in the sermon we heard last night. It rang for, what, two minutes?
I wanted everyone to experience great anxiety at that moment. I wanted it to come out of nowhere. If people are like, “Oh, he’s on the second of three points,” then I’ve lost them. I want them going, “I don’t understand. Is he ever going to answer that phone? Where is this going?”
I use a lot of props and visuals. People are like, “You use your props and stuff. I’m just into biblical preaching.” Well, find me a person in the Scriptures who doesn’t use visuals. Jesus said, “Look at those birds, look at the tree.”
Why are visuals critical in preaching today?
The world of the Scriptures is full of pictures. Jesus says, “Spirit is like wind.” The Eastern mind thinks in terms of pictures, the Western mind in words. The Eastern thinks, “God is a rock.” The Western mind makes a statement of faith—more comfortable with definitions and precision. Those are good, but when you gain something, you also lose something.
Today you have a culture that thinks in images. I’m a child of television, part of a whole generation that’s imagebased in its thinking.
But—props can never be a substitute for having something to say. It’s easy to become Prop Guy or Video Clip Woman, but not have said anything. It has to start with something to say.
We saw you preach using a Jew-ish prayer shawl. What do you want to accomplish with props?
The shawl becomes a hinge that the whole thing turns on. It’s a reference point. Later when you’re remembering the teaching, the shawl helps you recall what the point was. Also we learn by touch, taste, sight, hearing. If I stand behind a podium and read, I’m pretty much going for auditory learning and recollection, period. But if I appeal to different senses, I am getting in through other gates.
I’ve handed out modeling clay when people came in and told them to make something. If I can get you touching something and doing something, seeing something and hearing something, it’s much more likely to have an impact.
And at the end of sermon, you laid the shawl out. People came and knelt and prayed. The use of props is tactile and memorable. But in this case it was also very spiritual.
God is the God of props. The whole sacrificial system is props. That’s how God explains atonement, substitutionary sacrifice, reconciliation. These are abstract. So what does God say? “Take a goat. Slit its throat. See the blood? That’s your blood. Clear?”
The covenant. “Okay, cut some animal in half. Walk down the middle. Say to the person, ‘I’ll be like these animals if I don’t keep my end of the deal.'”
God takes these concepts and puts them in dirt and blood and flesh and bones and wood and steel. I would say the props are not just how you reach the kids. It’s a larger issue of the material of being spiritual.
Tell us about the scapegoat message. Did you actually have a goat?
I preached that sermon one time at Willow Creek and the goat pooped right on the stage. A great moment in that fine church’s history.
The spiritual does become physical, doesn’t it?
I feel like I helped them go to a whole new level of ministry in the Chicago suburbs. The same thing happened here at Mars Hill—I guess it’s a theme in my preaching. (laughter)
I brought in a sheep one time at Christmas. We walked through the appearance of the angels to the shepherds. I think you can argue that the shepherds were kids serving in menial positions.
Migdal Eder was the place of Rachel’s tomb, near Bethlehem, but it was also the place where they would keep the sheep for Passover. So these kids were temple shepherds who kept the thousands of sheep that had to be brought up to Jerusalem. Their job was to inspect the sheep to make sure they were perfect and appropriate for the sacrifice. So Migdal Eder happens to be next to the little village where Jesus is born. And the shepherds nearby come inspect the Lamb to see if it’s worthy and then go out proclaiming.
So I had a shepherd and a sheep on stage, and I brought all the kids down. Then I wanted them to run all over the building, all over the place shouting, “Glory to God in the highest.” And at that moment the sheep is pooping on stage. So I’m trying to tell the kids to go, and they’re all staring at the sheep. It was a great moment.
Did that turn you against the use of live props?
No. Eventually I got the kids to do it. They were shouting, “Mom, you won’t believe what the sheep did. It was awesome!” Not what I expected, but they remember it.
Animals, whatever. Whatever it takes. No rules.
Rob Bell is one of the featured speakers on the Leadership-sponsored satellite telecast “Subversive Preaching” on June 3, 2004. For more information on how to bring this event to your church, click here.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
