Rob Bell Reflecting on His Ministry by Rob Bell
We started Mars Hill in February of 1999 out of a desperate desire to build a new church that speaks a new languages for a new world. While we could endlessly discuss the challenges that come from being a witnessing community in the midst of this new world, I simply want to share what we have learned so far.
Words
We actually believe that the biblical text is a living and breathing Word. For the first year or so of our existence as a church, I preached through the Book of Leviticus, verse by verse.
Yes that’s right.
Menstrual blood, goat sacrifice, and no shell fish, please.
Every verse.
Now if you at this moment are smiling or laughing or thinking that is crazy, what have you just said about the biblical text? Do you have a canon with a canon? Either you believe that God speaks through his entire text, or you stick within the evangelically approved texts that are tamed down enough for the local congregation.
We have no desire to tame the text. We want to let it out of its cage and we want to see it prowl around our lives, devouring us and spitting out the bones. We don’t want to be detached, methodical scientists who stand over the subject and apply the proper rules, methods, and procedures so that we can achieve favorable results. The modern impulse is always to reduce it to simple principles and clever maxims. To continually insist that with enough work, it will all make sense and line up.
Life doesn’t always line up.
We love the Scriptures and we want them to sweep us off our feet.
In the new world, much of what is currently considered preaching and study will be rendered totally irrelevant. The Bible is not a nice book. It is not a clean book. It is not a guide to proper behavior. It does not even seem to care whether it is “relevant” or not.
I have asked the congregation to please never tell me that my message was “nice”.
The Bible is a revolutionary manifesto that could get you killed in many parts of the world. It is living, it is breathing, and it demands that we surrender to it unconditionally so that it can transform us.
There are several things about Leviticus that make it the ultimate postmodern book for preaching. The first thing is that it is visual – it is essentially a book of props and images. Instead of trying to describe an abstract concept like substituionary atonement, God instructs the worshiper to slit the throat of a lamb and place it on the altar.
This innocent, perfect lamb is getting what I deserve.
Instead of a philosophical treatise on the nature of the kingdom of death, God gives detailed instructions on how contact with a corpse will affect your ability to come into his presence.
God understand how we are wired and how we learn and what stirs us – images and metaphors and pictures. So in communicating to us the deepest spiritual truths about what it means to relate to him, he speaks to us in a visual language that we can understand.
Second, Leviticus is communal. What is the worst punishment you can receive? Having to live outside the community.
Everything revolves around the life of the assembly who belong to God. This Day of Atonement is a fascinating exercise in dealing with communal sin – a totally foreign concept in the modern world, this strikes a chord deep within post-moderns.
Thirdly, Leviticus is experiential. You butchered the bull. You handled the intestines. You said the prayers. You wernt through the procedures. It is visceral, bloody, and participatory. Rarely are they commanded to watch anything passively because most of the teachings center around what a person was to do.
Here’s a fourth theme: metanarrative. Much of Leviticus appears so random at first reading, one has to ask probing questions about context:
What is this doing in the Bible?
What we discovered is that every single chapter brought us to Jesus. It is almost as though there is a magnetic pull towards the cross in every chapter. Perhaps it should be retitled: The Gospel According To Leviticus. The confidence and faith that this inspired in our congregation was amazing. If that totally bizarre passage is a picture of Christ in some way, seemingly against all odds, then what does that say about the rest of Scripture? Is there more going on with the minor prophets than perhaps we are aware of? How about Lamentations? And what is the deal with the Book of Judges?
We have learned that the Scriptures speak and they speak now and they speak to all of us. It is not our responsibility to prove its relevance or usefulness. It is our privilege to enter into them and to be transformed by them.
To absorb them, and to let them absorb us.
To read them, and to let them read us.
To devour them, and to let them devour us.
By the way, I’m getting ready to preach through Numbers. Have you read 5:11-13? Oh, man.
Mystery
We believe that the goal of the church is to celebrate mystery, not conquer it. One of the greatest diseases to have infected the church in the modern era is the desire to reduce.
Seven steps to prayer.
Four steps to prayer.
Three ways to …
Methods, steps, programs – in a couple of sessions we can give you all of the answer to …
And yet we serve a God who constantly reminds us that his thoughts are not our thoughts.
We were baptizing believers in a nearby lake soon after the church began, and we came to the end of the list of those who had signed up. I had this sense that God wanted to do something more. So I asked if there was anybody in the crowd who had witnessed this event and as a follower of Christ knew that they needed to come down to the water right now in their street clothes and be baptized. A second later a woman in a dress came charging into the water. She had tears streaming down her face and she looked me square in the eyes and said, “I want to get baptized right now and I’m not even a part of this church.” After her countless people came streaming into the water. Families, single moms, drug addicts, spouses standing on shore sobbing while their lovers entered the water.
Can you figure that out?
How does that happen?
What is it that moves people to those defining moments in their spiritual journey?
At our last baptism celebration, I stood on the shore and talked with each person or family before they entered the water. I asked almost all of them why they were doing what they were about to do; 109 people later I was mystified. Every single one of them told me about promptings to follow Jesus in a variety of ways, yet none of them came from some nice, neat programs that the church offered.
We don’t do anything to promote or persuade people about baptism.
We just announce when and where the celebration will be. People ere drawn to these symbols in deep and profound ways. This cannot be programmed. A glossy brochure simply does not work in this case.
I need to be honest here. Hanging around a local church, I hear and see amazing stories all the time, literally every week, every day. Marriages healed, addicts cleaned up, people falling to their knees and confessing sins held inside for years. You cannot explain it outside of the working of God’s Spirit through his bride.
Honesty
We had an issue in the first few months of our existence as a church with people being rude in the parking lot. The traffic jams were causing people long delays…you know the drill. So I told the church that if you were not a follower of Jesus and you had been joining us, we were thrilled to have you in our midst. But if you were a follower of Jesus and you were being rude and mean in the parking lot, you needed to stop this behavior. And if you continued, then we would get your license plate number and treat this as an issue of church discipline. I made it clear that if we could not live up to our high calling in the parking lot, then we had no business going into the world. And besides, we could use your seat.
The entire place erupted in applause.
My spanking of the congregation, or at least some members of it, was met with such affirmation it was unnerving.
Why?
We have learned that people are starved for honesty. They want to be told the truth regarding money, leadership, sin, challenges facing the church – whatever it is they are desperate to know they are being given a straight dose. Even if it’s ugly.
When we outgrew our first building, we bought a nearby mall. After moving in we discovered that the roof leaked almost everywhere. There were buckets hanging from the ceiling and kiddie pools rigged into the beams in many rooms. We pointed out the buckets and told the body that we needed a new roof.
And if they got wet during a service or a meeting or a class, perhaps they could pay for the section of roof to be fixed.
Whether it is money, the personal weaknesses of the lead pastor, the struggles of the elders and staff in leadership, or people yelling at each other in the parking lot, we have discovered that in the new world people want to hear the truth no matter what it is.
I literally announced one Sunday that a particular message I recently preached wasn’t as faithful to the text as it could have been so I was going to preach it again.
So I preached the same exact text over again.
People still remind of that Sunday.
Numbers
Our gatherings on Sundays are huge. Somewhere around ten thousand people gather in the mall on any given Sunday. How in the world do you call people to lay down their lives in the midst of that kind of circus? It takes somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand VOLUNTEERS to run the children’s ministry, birth to fifth grade. How do you have any sense of sanity and mission when the church is bigger than many small towns?
The harder we push, the more clear we make the demands of the cross, the more we teach about self-denial and service and commitment and losing your life, the more people come. The higher we try and raise the bar, the more people join us. The greater emphasis we place on the fact that Jesus calls us to lay down our lives, the bigger the numbers.
We are learning that deep down people were wired for revolution. Nobody in this culture is calling them to anything worth dying for. They were created to live for massive, global purposes, and yet all day long they are bombarded with messages about how their life would be better with more products.
I know our church has a huge back door. I know that thousands have visited, felt lost in the crowd, not gotten connected, and left. I know that many have found our message to be irrelevant or boring or even offensive. I know that some are spectators at heart. I know that we have dropped the ball in a multitude of ways in being the authentic church that Jesus has called us to be. I know that we have reacted to abuses of the modern church by swinging the pendulum the other way too far. I know that anybody could observe our community for a period of time and a make a huge list of the things that were ineffective, destructive, or missing altogether.
What we have learned time and time again is that we are students.
Learners.
Figuring it out.
The spirit of God is messy.
And that is not heresy.
The Spirit moves in wild and unrestrained ways and demands that we run as fast as we can to keep up.
The most dangerous place to be in the universe is the center of God’s will.
That is where we want to be.
I hope we never think we’ve nailed it.
I hope we never believe that we have arrived.
I hope it is always dangerous.
Always chaotic.
Always flying by the seat of our pants.
Never settled.
Messy.
I hope that struggles keep us begging God for guidance.
I often hear Christian leaders tell what God has been saying to them in their times of meditation and study and prayer and I’m often amazed. He tells them the most profound, eloquent things.
All I seem to ever hear is: “Rob, get out of my way.”
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