Mars Hill founding pastor to speak in Winnipeg

By Aaron Epp  |  Friday, July 24, 2009

WINNIPEG, MB—Rob Bell is willing to bet that the most significant moments in your life involved some element of suffering.

The popular author, speaker and mega-church pastor—once labeled "the next Billy Graham" by the Chicago Sun-Times—has written a new book on suffering called Drops Like Stars: A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering.

The release of the book this month coincides with a speaking tour that will bring Bell to Winnipeg's Burton Cummings Theatre on August 22.

"I'm not interested in why people suffer, because lots of people have written and spoken about that," Bell says in a phone interview from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rather, he's interested in what happens as a result of the suffering.

"We have our plan, we have our schemes, we've decided how life is supposed to go, and then it all falls apart," he says. "All of a sudden we have to imagine a new tomorrow because the one we were planning on is kind of gone. So, there's an element of imagination that is right there in the midst of suffering."

For the 38-year-old father of three, that moment came during his last year of college when he got viral meningitis and landed him in the hospital with an inflamed brain. At the time Bell was involved in a band with friends, and was hoping for a career in music. As he lay there "in extraordinary pain," that plan began to unravel.

"I had no idea what I was going to do with my life," he says. "It was out of that that I decided to study theology, and a sort of passion to preach, teach and share things with people came about."

The son of a U.S. District Court judge, Bell grew up in a family that valued intellectual rigour. After completing a degree in psychology at Wheaton College in Illinois, he went to Fuller Theological Seminary in California and then interned at a church where he soon was leading the hip Saturday night service.

It wasn't long before he got to thinking about starting his own church.

"I thought there was a whole generation of people hungry for Jesus, but unable to connect with the churches they had experienced," he told The Grand Rapids Press last year.

In 1999, Bell and his wife, Kristen, founded Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan. The first Sunday, 1,000 people showed up. Today, an estimated 11,000 people gather each Sunday at the church, which meets in an old mall.

Asking questions, engaging the wider culture and connecting with people are important aspects of his ministry, but the key, he says, is hope.

"There's nothing to fear," he told The Grand Rapids Press. "At the core of the Christian experience, there's resurrection. The story ends better than anything you can make up yourself."

Bell is also the creator of the NOOMA series—short videos that explore different aspects of the Christian faith. He is the author of Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality, and the co-author of Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.

Two previous speaking tours drew sold-out crowds.

Bell's appeal lies in his talents as a communicator, and in his ability to contextualize biblical stories, says Dale Friesen, youth pastor at Morden Mennonite Church. Friesen, who will begin studying for his Master of Divinity in September, first heard of Bell when he was a leader on Canadian Mennonite University's Outtatown discipleship program.

"He's opened up Scripture in a different way for a lot of people," Friesen says. "I think it's context that has been the big thing—he explains the background, contextual stuff that's not in the Bible that sheds new light on where these stories come out of."

Bell says he began working on the material for his new book three years ago while studying how some of the great pieces of art from the last three centuries were created. He draws on passages from Luke 15 and 2 Corinthians throughout the talk, as well as the story of Jesus Christ.

"The most powerful thing is when somebody joins us in our suffering," he says. "In some ways the gospel, or the story of Jesus, is like a cosmic act of solidarity. It's not a God who is detached and distant….It's a God who has come among us."

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