Eutrusca
08-07-2006, 14:44
COMMENTARY: Is this the new face of Christianity? For many years now, I've maintained that there is no essential conflict between primitive Christianity and science. This preacher seems to be saying much the same thing, and saying it in such a way as to make people think, rather than the traditional way of TELLING people what they SHOULD think.
Your thoughts on this are humbly solicited.
Center Stage for a Pastor
Where It's Rock That Usually Rules (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/us/08minister.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin)
By JOHN LELAND
Published: July 8, 2006
CHICAGO — At the Logan Square Auditorium here one recent night, Rob Bell arrived in a rock band tour bus and strode past posters for Cheap Sex, a punk band performing at the hall later this summer. Following a T-shirted bouncer through the sold-out crowd of about 450, Mr. Bell hopped onto the stage.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and earth," he began, without introduction. "Now, it's a very old book."
This, Mr. Bell believes, is what church can look like. For the hall's bartenders, it was the start of a slow night.
Mr. Bell, 35, is the pastor and founder of Mars Hill Bible Church, an independent evangelical congregation in Grandville, Mich., outside Grand Rapids. The church has a weekly attendance of 10,000 and meets in a former mall.
His performance here was the first in a monthlong tour of 21 cities — joined by one roadie, a whiteboard and his wife and two sons — taking him to venues usually presenting rock bands. His 100-minute talk, billed as "Everything Is Spiritual," features no music or film clips, no sound other than his voice and the squeak of his marker, filling the board with Hebrew characters, diagrams, biblical interpretation and numbers.
He wore black pants and shirt, and spoke with the awed enthusiasm of someone describing a U2 concert, moving from a gee-whiz discussion of physics to questions of how God might move in other dimensions, like those discovered by mathematical string theorists.
"When you get to the subatomic level, everything we know about the basic makeup of the universe falls apart," he told the audience. "They use phrases like 'we don't know.' So high-end quantum physicists are starting to sound like ancient Jewish poets."
For Mr. Bell, who in past summers has spoken at giant Christian music festivals, the tour is an opportunity to talk at length to an audience that may not already be in the evangelical tent, about ideas too discursive for sermons.
"I just thought, What are the places my brother and I like to go to?" he explained. "And it's nightclubs and places where bands play. That's where people go to hear ideas in our culture."
The Chicago audience had come from throughout the Midwest to see a figure many knew from the new media of evangelical outreach. Though Mr. Bell does not preach on Christian television and radio, his innovative series of short films called Nooma (a phonetic spelling of the Greek "pneuma," or "spirit") has sold more than 500,000 DVD's in four years, and podcasts of his sermons are downloaded by 30,000 to 56,000 people a week. His book, "Velvet Elvis," which combines memoir with an exploration of the Jewish traditions in the New Testament, has sold 116,000 copies in hardcover since last July.
"Rob Bell is a central figure for his generation and for the way that evangelicals are likely to do church in the next 20 years," said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today magazine. "He occupies a centrist place that is very appealing, committed to the basic evangelical doctrines but incredibly creative in his reinterpretive style."
Eric Chapman, who had traveled to Chicago by car and train from Peoria, Ill., said he had learned about the show from his minister, who did not approve.
"He didn't think pastors should get this much publicity," Mr. Chapman said. "But I was like, 'He's going on tour? Cool. I got to see this guy.' I like how he takes huge ideas and says them in a new way that makes it seem obvious."
The tour, which is scheduled to stop at Symphony Space in Manhattan on July 25, sells tickets for about $10. (Mr. Bell's profits go to WaterAid, an antipoverty charity.)
The idea for the journey began with a conversation between Mr. Bell and a friend in the band Jimmy Eat World, which plays a style of alternative rock called emo. That conversation led to the band's booking agent, Tim Edwards, who says some venues declined to book Mr. Bell.
"I got some places who said they'd have protesters from the right, and some that said from the left," Mr. Edwards said.
Mr. Bell sang in a rock band while attending a Christian college in Wheaton, Ill. He then went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and entered the ministry through the nondenominational Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, which is conservative both theologically and politically. Ed Dobson, the church's senior pastor, helped write the agenda for the Moral Majority and was a personal assistant to Jerry Falwell.
At his own church and in his videos, Mr. Bell avoids controversial topics like same-sex marriage, abortion rights and school prayer, and in his talk here he offhandedly dismissed "any spiritual institution that says you should vote a certain way."
Explaining afterward, he said: "It's against what Jesus had in mind when it becomes about how much power we can have as a voting bloc. The way of Jesus is serving the voiceless."
Instead of politics, the talk bounced from the Book of Genesis and the Hebrew word "Elohim," meaning "God," to "This Is Spinal Tap," the World Cup and the value of turning your cellphone off one day a week in modern observance of the Sabbath. Mr. Bell argued at several points that science and faith were complementary, not contradictory systems of information.
"He's figured out how to convey basic Christian doctrine in a highly skeptical culture," said Quentin J. Schultze, a professor of communication at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, who has studied Mr. Bell. "He's very challenging in his sermons. There's no appeal for money. You get a sense of intellectual substance and depth of the faith."
At the Chicago performance, a middle-aged Tom Fell and his friends were left cold.
"I thought it was very creative, but if it was targeted at Christians, he missed the point," said Mr. Fell, who considers Mr. Bell a celebrity preacher. "When I was 18, we'd get high and talk about stuff like that."
His friend John Duval, 42, agreed. "He didn't tell us how to go out and be disciples," Mr. Duval said.
But Alex Beh, 23, who lined up an hour early for the performance, said it had left him exhilarated.
"It's more like Jesus' teaching than the church's teaching," said Mr. Beh, adding: "I loved that there was beer available. The church needs to go more in that direction, more culture-friendly rather than sectarian, or dividing people."
At 1 a.m., Mr. Bell boarded the bus for an overnight drive to Minneapolis. It had marble floors, a mirrored refrigerator and a laundry. "It's pretty pimped," he said apologetically. Stephen Stills gets the bus when Mr. Bell is done.
Mr. Bell said he hoped the tour would instill a sense of awe in his listeners.
"We've got everything material we could want, but there's a loss of innocence and wonder," he said. "I grew up on David Letterman, whose answer to everything is 'yeah, right.' But the people who really move us, like Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa, at the end of the day have this innocence."
Your thoughts on this are humbly solicited.
Center Stage for a Pastor
Where It's Rock That Usually Rules (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/08/us/08minister.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin)
By JOHN LELAND
Published: July 8, 2006
CHICAGO — At the Logan Square Auditorium here one recent night, Rob Bell arrived in a rock band tour bus and strode past posters for Cheap Sex, a punk band performing at the hall later this summer. Following a T-shirted bouncer through the sold-out crowd of about 450, Mr. Bell hopped onto the stage.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and earth," he began, without introduction. "Now, it's a very old book."
This, Mr. Bell believes, is what church can look like. For the hall's bartenders, it was the start of a slow night.
Mr. Bell, 35, is the pastor and founder of Mars Hill Bible Church, an independent evangelical congregation in Grandville, Mich., outside Grand Rapids. The church has a weekly attendance of 10,000 and meets in a former mall.
His performance here was the first in a monthlong tour of 21 cities — joined by one roadie, a whiteboard and his wife and two sons — taking him to venues usually presenting rock bands. His 100-minute talk, billed as "Everything Is Spiritual," features no music or film clips, no sound other than his voice and the squeak of his marker, filling the board with Hebrew characters, diagrams, biblical interpretation and numbers.
He wore black pants and shirt, and spoke with the awed enthusiasm of someone describing a U2 concert, moving from a gee-whiz discussion of physics to questions of how God might move in other dimensions, like those discovered by mathematical string theorists.
"When you get to the subatomic level, everything we know about the basic makeup of the universe falls apart," he told the audience. "They use phrases like 'we don't know.' So high-end quantum physicists are starting to sound like ancient Jewish poets."
For Mr. Bell, who in past summers has spoken at giant Christian music festivals, the tour is an opportunity to talk at length to an audience that may not already be in the evangelical tent, about ideas too discursive for sermons.
"I just thought, What are the places my brother and I like to go to?" he explained. "And it's nightclubs and places where bands play. That's where people go to hear ideas in our culture."
The Chicago audience had come from throughout the Midwest to see a figure many knew from the new media of evangelical outreach. Though Mr. Bell does not preach on Christian television and radio, his innovative series of short films called Nooma (a phonetic spelling of the Greek "pneuma," or "spirit") has sold more than 500,000 DVD's in four years, and podcasts of his sermons are downloaded by 30,000 to 56,000 people a week. His book, "Velvet Elvis," which combines memoir with an exploration of the Jewish traditions in the New Testament, has sold 116,000 copies in hardcover since last July.
"Rob Bell is a central figure for his generation and for the way that evangelicals are likely to do church in the next 20 years," said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today magazine. "He occupies a centrist place that is very appealing, committed to the basic evangelical doctrines but incredibly creative in his reinterpretive style."
Eric Chapman, who had traveled to Chicago by car and train from Peoria, Ill., said he had learned about the show from his minister, who did not approve.
"He didn't think pastors should get this much publicity," Mr. Chapman said. "But I was like, 'He's going on tour? Cool. I got to see this guy.' I like how he takes huge ideas and says them in a new way that makes it seem obvious."
The tour, which is scheduled to stop at Symphony Space in Manhattan on July 25, sells tickets for about $10. (Mr. Bell's profits go to WaterAid, an antipoverty charity.)
The idea for the journey began with a conversation between Mr. Bell and a friend in the band Jimmy Eat World, which plays a style of alternative rock called emo. That conversation led to the band's booking agent, Tim Edwards, who says some venues declined to book Mr. Bell.
"I got some places who said they'd have protesters from the right, and some that said from the left," Mr. Edwards said.
Mr. Bell sang in a rock band while attending a Christian college in Wheaton, Ill. He then went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and entered the ministry through the nondenominational Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, which is conservative both theologically and politically. Ed Dobson, the church's senior pastor, helped write the agenda for the Moral Majority and was a personal assistant to Jerry Falwell.
At his own church and in his videos, Mr. Bell avoids controversial topics like same-sex marriage, abortion rights and school prayer, and in his talk here he offhandedly dismissed "any spiritual institution that says you should vote a certain way."
Explaining afterward, he said: "It's against what Jesus had in mind when it becomes about how much power we can have as a voting bloc. The way of Jesus is serving the voiceless."
Instead of politics, the talk bounced from the Book of Genesis and the Hebrew word "Elohim," meaning "God," to "This Is Spinal Tap," the World Cup and the value of turning your cellphone off one day a week in modern observance of the Sabbath. Mr. Bell argued at several points that science and faith were complementary, not contradictory systems of information.
"He's figured out how to convey basic Christian doctrine in a highly skeptical culture," said Quentin J. Schultze, a professor of communication at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, who has studied Mr. Bell. "He's very challenging in his sermons. There's no appeal for money. You get a sense of intellectual substance and depth of the faith."
At the Chicago performance, a middle-aged Tom Fell and his friends were left cold.
"I thought it was very creative, but if it was targeted at Christians, he missed the point," said Mr. Fell, who considers Mr. Bell a celebrity preacher. "When I was 18, we'd get high and talk about stuff like that."
His friend John Duval, 42, agreed. "He didn't tell us how to go out and be disciples," Mr. Duval said.
But Alex Beh, 23, who lined up an hour early for the performance, said it had left him exhilarated.
"It's more like Jesus' teaching than the church's teaching," said Mr. Beh, adding: "I loved that there was beer available. The church needs to go more in that direction, more culture-friendly rather than sectarian, or dividing people."
At 1 a.m., Mr. Bell boarded the bus for an overnight drive to Minneapolis. It had marble floors, a mirrored refrigerator and a laundry. "It's pretty pimped," he said apologetically. Stephen Stills gets the bus when Mr. Bell is done.
Mr. Bell said he hoped the tour would instill a sense of awe in his listeners.
"We've got everything material we could want, but there's a loss of innocence and wonder," he said. "I grew up on David Letterman, whose answer to everything is 'yeah, right.' But the people who really move us, like Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa, at the end of the day have this innocence."