Find the Big Jesus: An Interview with Rob Bell
Chances are you haven’t heard of Rob Bell. You will. In 1999, he, his wife Kristen, and a group of friends started Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan because they wanted to create a community where God could be experienced in a non-traditional way. They didn’t know how to do it or what would happen. They just knew that they wanted to be part of a community where people loved coming, questions were welcomed and love abounded. The church grew from zero to 10,000 in less than two years and Rob Bell has become a phenomenon. He is also the man behind the exciting and innovative Nooma DVD series'It's a giant thing that God is doing—and not just the forgiveness of individuals. It is the reconciliation of all things.'
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Beliefnet spoke with him on the first day of his vacation, which also happened to be the day after his book was officially published.
As different as the pure white cover with small orange-and-gray lettering may be to book publishing, much of what is inside "Velvet Elvis" seems just as radical. You seem to suggest that Christians need to be open in their understanding of the virgin birth or even praying before meals. What’s behind this?
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Well, I affirm orthodox Christian faith. I affirm the Nicene Creed. I don’t think I’m doing anything terribly new. Central to authentic, historic Christian faith has been the searching and struggling and doubting... the people who are considered the heroes of the Bible have deep, kind of ache-of-the-soul questions before God.
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When friends are together generally late at night you get to talking about what you are really wrestling with. I don’t think I’m saying anything that people aren’t talking about or discussing.
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You talk in the book about the "big Jesus." Tell me about the big Jesus that you know and how that differs from "small" or "smaller Jesus" or even "eentsy, beentsy, microscopic, teeny, weeny, little Jesus" out there.
For many people the message of Jesus was presented as an individual message of salvation for their own individual sin: "Jesus died for you." I affirm that wholeheartedly, but in the scriptures, its scope goes in the opposite direction. It begins with the Jesus who dies on the cross and rises from the dead. But as the New Testament progresses, you have writers saying that "by his shed blood he is reconciling everything in heaven and on earth." Peter says in Acts, "He will return to restore everything."
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So it is a giant thing that God is doing here and not just the forgiveness of individuals. It is the reconciliation of all things. It is the putting back together of the whole universe how God originally intended it to be. One way to look at it is that the message is an invitation into God’s giant, global universal purposes that "I" actually get to be a part of.
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I’m trying to get the focus where the first Christians seem to have had the focus. It is easy for it to become a very selfish thing—"look what I’ve got"—as opposed to "by the grace of God look at this amazing thing that he’s been inviting people into for thousands of years." And that is quite an awe-inspiring, amazing thing.
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What is at the heart of what you do?
Hope. There is the perspective of the person who pretends th