Welcome to the first of a new series where I will be blogging pen portraits of some people I find interesting in this year’s Greenbelt festival line-up. The series will be irregular, unsystematic and heavily biased. I hope, however, you might also find it relatively interesting as a way of finding people to go and see at the festival.
Who is Rob Bell?
The first pen portrait is Rob Bell. Founding Pastor of the Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rob Bell is often best known for being a speaker, writer and producer of the Nooma series of short films, used by Christian groups up and down the country.
Mars Hill church has a good name for being a mega church that as much as possible tries not to feel like a mega church – it does some good stuff and tries to focus on simplicity and honesty in relationships.
Rob Bell himself is the author of numerous books, including ‘God wants to save Christians’, ‘Velvet Elvis’, ‘The God’s aren’t angry’ and most recently released the controversial new book, ‘Love Wins’, where he questions assumptions often held in Evangelical circles about the nature of heaven, hell, judgement and God.
Why should I go and see him?
Put simply, he is a brilliant communicator. Even if you go and find yourself disagreeing with everything he says, he is a master of the art of the sermon and engages the senses in a theatrical feast.
He also has a talent for coming from issues from different angles to normal, allowing him to bring intriguing and novel insights on what seems a familiar topic (in this way, he kind of reminds me of a less academic version of Rowan Williams).
I presume he will be speaking on ‘Love Wins’ during the course of the festival, and he will probably be around other parts of the festival joining in the craic. If rumour is to be believed (and it rarely ever is, but it makes for an interesting nugget to fill up this blog post!), he is a big fan of the idea of beer and hymns.
Finally, he is unbelievably tall. Well, 6′ 3”. But that is much taller than he seems on the Nooma DVDs.
How can I best get into Rob Bell’s work?
The best two books to read that sum up Rob Bell’s motivation and theology are ‘Velvet Elvis’ and ‘Love Wins’.
For something a little different, ‘Drops like stars‘ gives a great evangelical theology of suffering – though it is an insanely expensive book for something that is meant to be aimed at a popular level audience!