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The Subversive Art

Drawing from the prophets, the rabbis, and Jesus to confront the culture.
Interview with Rob Bell

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.

Ed Dobson says of Bell, "Rob is driven by a passion

to teach the Bible, shaped by understanding the The rabbis believe that the text
Bible in its context, then applying the Bible to where is like a gem: the more you
people live. At the core, he's about the Bible." It was turn it the more the light
with Dobson, at Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, refracts. I say, if it's the living
that Bell served as associate pastor for three years word, then turn the gem.
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.

Jesus is Jewish. I thought he was Christian. So then I

We need to reclaim the started reading. Jesus taught about himself with
prophetic poetic preaching Moses—the Torah—and the Prophets. It drove me
voice—that moment when a crazy. I thought, There must be a whole world of
stuff in there that I'm missing. And there was. There

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person speaks, and it's the are thousands and thousands of pages of ancient
words of God, and everybody writings that Christians are oblivious to.
knows it.
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

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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.

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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

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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?

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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

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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 International/Leadership Journal.

Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.

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