There aren’t too many figures in the Christian world who are causing a stir right now. Some of us are probably relieved, having grown weary of personalities and ‘power ministries’. We don’t reach out to touch the screen of Christian TV, we reach out to turn it off.

It’s one reason I was reluctant to read Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis. For a start it’s a bestseller, and you should never believe the hype. And when someone is attracting 11,000 people a week to their services, it makes you wary. Especially when they star in their own chart-topping DVD series…

And yet. Refreshingly, it turns out that this thirtysomething pastor is something of an iconoclast. He baulks at being a ‘poster boy’ for a new generation and suggests that ‘success doesn’t fix anything.’ (Of course, we all need to work out what ‘success’ means today as followers of Christ.)

Better still, he avoids the clichéd rhetoric used by so many Christian writers and speakers, and instead presents a challenge to the Church – in both what he says and the artistry with which he expresses it – to integrate life and faith instead of perpetuating a separate, Christian subculture.

Bell urges us to become the people God created us to be in the first place. He’s been criticised for focusing on ‘original blessing’ rather than original sin and suggesting that we can all help to bring heaven down to earth. But how do we pray? ‘May your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…’

Our eyes are so often set on ‘things above’ that we forget that the new life has already started – that we are new creations, bringing eternity into the warmth of the present from the cold of the future. New life is to be lived and breathed, not just looked forward to.

Bell also challenges our idea of hell. We shouldn’t think of it as a far-off place awaiting those who don’t agree with us, he insists. After all, the sheep and the goats are judged on whether they’ve given help to others caught in a living hell on earth: the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the thirsty.

This is no self-help manual for the comfortably Christian numb – as Bell reminds us, the road is narrow and few people find it. Nonetheless, Velvet Elvis is a turn-on. Reach out and touch faith.

Brian Draper

additional resources

Rob Bell is pastor at Mars Hill, an independent free church in Grand Rapids in Michigan. Check out mhbcmi.org.

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith was published last year by Zondervan – see zondervan.com.

‘Centre Stage for a Pastor Where It’s Rock that Usually Rules’ – read a report from the New York Times about Bell’s ‘Everything is Spiritual’ tour last year, when he played music venues across the States.

Find out more about Bell’s beguiling DVD series, ‘Nooma’, at nooma.com. His latest DVD, Breathe, was unveiled this week when he came to speak in the British Isles.

Brian Draper has interviewed Rob Bell for a feature that will appear in Church Times shortly – go to churchtimes.org.uk.