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A "Hipper-Than-Thou Pastor" ... Mr. Rob Bell

Rob Bell is pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and has now made TIME magazine headlines. He is, according to editor David Van Biema, the "Hipper-than-thou pastor." Bell has a few well-known works, Velvet Elvis and Sex God that find the sacred in the profane.

Van Biema noted this about Rob Bell:

At 28, he founded a megachurch that threw out the conventional sermon-and-worship service and instantly drew thousands of attendees.

Referring to the town of Grand Rapids:

The town is notoriously well churched, but Bell saw an untapped audience: some were his music fans, others Christians left cold by traditional services. "A hundred people a day were calling and saying, 'Dude! Give us the real thing.' I was like, If someone could speak to these people in their mother tongue, they'd be here in droves." Fifteen hundred people, alerted by word of mouth, came that first Sunday. Nine years later, Mars Hill tallies 11,000 weekly.

I am not sure what Bell refers to when he speaks of "the real thing" if that is excluding the preaching of the Word of God, which, of course, he is NOT doing. I am disturbed that this kind of publicity is going out to a guy who is trying with every fiber of his being to reach culture. I fear that he has left the authoritative expositional preaching of God's Word for a sheer monologue giving his thoughts, opinions and "cool comments" so people are met, satisfied and left "feeling better about themselves." This, however, is not what the Bible commands a preacher to be.
According to the Bible, we find a completely different potrait. The preacher must not be one who responds to "Dude, give us the real thing" (as if nonbelievers know what the true real thing is anyway), but rather:

1 Timothy 4:13 13 Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching.

May we as true and faithful expositor's of God's Word forget about being "cool" to the culture (which changes every day anyway) and be faithful to God's Word (which never changes). Soli Deo Gloria.

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