bell

Rob Bell is the founding pastor at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, MI (not Seattle). I just read some brief Q&A with him and was impressed.

Asked about the war ("Why do you think this has become so politically divisive?"):

I think that ... a lot of the American way was life, liberty, freedom and democracy ... But when the American way becomes addicted to comfort, and this comfort is dependent on a particular natural resource which we cannot provide enough of, we literally wage war to support our comfort and addiction.

When asked about his alternative:

There is an absolutely mind-blowing passage in Isaiah 19 where God calls Egypt His son and Assyria His beloved. Egypt and Assyira were the arch-enemies of Israel. Today, that passage would literally be "Taliban My son, Al-Qaeda My beloved." There's also this amazing metaphor where Joshua's going into battle, and he meets an angel of the Lord. Joshua asks whose side the angel is on, and the angel says, "Neither."

So should Christians be politically active?

We refer to ourselves as aggressively nonpartisan ... I don't know if you would say that's political or not, but if Jesus comes to town and things don't get better, then we have to ask some hard questions.

About the western Church:

I think the problem is that when people say "church," many mean religious goods and services where you come and there's a nice inspiring talk, good coffee in the back, snappy music and everything ends up fine. For us, if you can resolve the sermon in the course of the church service, then the sermon has failed. The only way to resolve the church service you just experienced, and specifically the sermon, is that you're going to have to go and wrestle with it and then live it out.

"By being innovative you face critics. How do you deal with this?"

There are around a billion people in the world who don't have clean drinking water, and 46 million Americans don't have health care. That means if they get sick, they don't have anywhere to go. Half of the world, 3 billion people, live on less than two American dollars a day, so the world is an emergency. It's an absolute crisis, and when followers of Jesus can think of nothing better to do with their time than to pick apart and shred to pieces the work of other followers of Jesus who are trying to do something about the world, that's tragic, and I don't owe those people anything.

Well said.