Posted on 03/19/2013 6:18:28 AM PDT by Gamecock
GRAND RAPIDS, MI – When Rob Bell signed copies of his latest book March 10 at Schuler Books & Music, two Flint women who came out to see him said the Mars Hill Bible Church founder's teaching had opened their minds about God and made them question whether their same-sex relationship would damn them to hell.
Bell, who followed his visit to Grand Rapids with other public promotions of "What We Talk About When We Talk About God," told an audience Sunday, March 17, in San Francisco that he supports same-sex marriage. You can hear it at about the 42:30-mark of this podcast.
“I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it’s a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man,” Bell said. “And I think the ship has sailed. This is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.”
Bell talks about a variety of topics in the 55-minute Q&A including his upbringing, his college band, the Rev. Ed Dobson, his time as pastor of Mars Hill, quantum physics (to which his latest book devotes several pages) and how “Baptists are people who love God and don’t really like fun.”
Bell also talks around the 38-minute mark about what he sees as the death of Evangelical Christianity in the sense of it being “a very narrow, politically intertwined, culturally ghettoized Evangelical subculture.” He says Evangelicals have “turned away lots of people” from the church by talking about God in ways that “don't actually shape people into more loving, compassionate people,” adding that Evangelicals “have supported policies and ways of viewing the world that are actually destructive, and we've done it in the name of God and we need to repent."
Bell urges people to embrace a difference sense of the term, “Evangelical.”
“The beautiful thing would be if ‘Evangelical’ came to mean buoyant, joyful, honest announcement about all of us receiving the grace of God and then together giving back to the make the world the kind of place God always dreamed it could be,” Bell said. “Let’s reclaim it, all of us.”
The conversation at Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal church, finishes with Bell talking more about the television show he’s working on with "Lost" producer Carlton Cuse in California:
“In our culture the two things that get discussion started the quickest at Thanksgiving are religion and politics, or get you sent to the kids’ table,” he said. “And in politics we have every sort of discussion possible under the sun, Rachel Maddow to Fox News to everything in between. And in spiritual faith and religion we have next to nothing, and if you say ‘Touched by an Angel’ I will laugh in your face.
“We are working to create a space, a funny, subversive, welcoming, interesting space somewhere between my Noomas (short films) and sermons and interviews like this, throw in a TED talk, (David) Letterman (show), Ellen (DeGeneres show) and a little bit of ‘Lost’ and put it in a blender. He and I are really, really excited because we think we could create a space that doesn’t exist.”
While I’m not a big fan of mega-churches, or TV preachers, I’m not aware that any of: Bill Hybels, Robert Schuller, Perry Noble, Ed Young Jr, Rick Warren support gay marriage, or have unorthodox (counter-Nicene-creed) doctrines (denying hell, the virgin birth, the resurrection, etc.)—as Rob Bell and the Emergent people do.
How exactly are Bill Hybels, Robert Schuller, Perry Noble, Ed Young Jr, & Rick Warren, apostate?
This is a good one for this post.
Saints Tossed To and Fro
“In this message, Dr. Stanley talks about the importance of having a faith that is doctrinally sound and spiritually mature. When we can explain what we believe and why we believe it, we won’t be carried away by false doctrine. We’ll also be able to use our biblical knowledge and spiritual giftedness to build up the church and bring people together.”
http://www.intouch.org/broadcast/today-on-radio/content.aspx?topic=Saints_Tossed_To_and_Fro_radio
I knew this was your post before I got to the name. I award you the “BlackElk Prize for Vehemently Vivid Verbiage,” with the caveat that you simply must alliterate more.
Great tagline! God bless Rashputin and you and all of each of yours!
Thank you.
There were some good men and women who were attacked when they stood up and objected to LoveWins.
They are owed an apology.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3000081/posts?q=1&;page=96
Key items include these:
Bell is the recently-resigned founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, a megachurch in a suburb of my hometown of Grand Rapids. He's a Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary graduate. He managed to plant a megachurch in the center of the Dutch Reformed world by advocating styles of worship and doctrinal beliefs at radical variation from the historic beliefs of the people among whom he pastors, while bringing a veneer of evangelicalism to the mix.
How did such radical views gain traction in a place like Grand Rapids?...
The theological collapse of the Dutch Reformed world in Grand Rapids has resulted in people fleeing the CRC and RCA in all sorts of directions...
What Rob Bell managed to create in Grand Rapids was something new. Mars Hill Bible Church combined the attractions of the externals of evangelical Christianity with the attractions of a liberal faith.
Bell was an early warning sign of a type of so-called evangelical Christianity which is growing in America, and which is not evangelical at all. It is merely a re-creation of an older type of liberalism, one which unlike the major forms of liberalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s, claimed to be “spiritual” rather than having the anti-supernatural focus of mainstream classical liberalism...
More on this mess, with Rob Bell speaking on Oprah:
Rob Bell on gay marriage: ‘We’re moments away’ from church embracing it
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