Rob Bell
Rob Bell
Robert Holmes "Rob" Bell Jr.is an American author, motivational speaker and former pastor. Bell was the founder of Mars Hill Bible Church located in Grandville, Michigan, which he pastored until 2012. Under his leadership Mars Hill was one of the fastest-growing churches in America. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Love Wins and the writer and narrator of a series of spiritual short films called NOOMA. In 2011 Time Magazine named Bell on its list...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionReligious Author
Date of Birth23 August 1970
CountryUnited States of America
I believe that God is love. I believe that Jesus came to show us this love, to give us this love, to teach us about this love, so that we could live in this love and extend it to others.
What we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like.
What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.
I believe God gives people the right to say no, to resist, to refuse, to reject, to cling to their sins, to cling to their version of their story.
For a lot of people in our world today, God has become about believing the right stuff so you don't get in trouble.
Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.
What is God like? Because millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message - the center of the Gospel of Jesus - is that God is going to send you to hell, unless you believe in Jesus. And so, what gets, subtlely, sort of caught and taught is that Jesus rescues you from God. But what kind of God is that; that we would need to be rescued from this God? How could that God ever be good; how could that God ever be trusted? And how could that ever be good news.
I believe that God is with you, that there is a presence. I believe this God is for you. I don't think the universe is a cold, dead place that is indifferent.
Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god, either.
I believe our world desperately needs Good News.
I have been told that I need to believe in Jesus. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that Jesus believes in me.
Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: "We don't discuss those things here." I believe the discussion itself is divine. Abraham does his best to bargain with God, most of the book of Job consists of arguments by Job and his friends about the deepest questions of human suffering, God is practically on trial in the book of Lamentations, and Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with...a question.
What we do comes out of who we believe we are.
I am for love, whether it's a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.