Thursday 75 of our staff and some spouses trekked up to Mars Hill Church to hang out with Rob Bell for the afternoon. I was pretty excited to see their "church in a mall" and it's always great to listen to Rob speak.
We arrived around 11am and ate some lunch before meeting Rob. One of the first things you'll notice is that except for wording on the doors there is no signage to indicate this once vacant mall is now a church. Rob is big on not advertising. There's no mistaking this was a mall...it still feels very much like a mall...and it's very plain. There's a small square stage in the middle of the "auditorium" where Rob preaches "in the round" surrounded by 3500 or so white plastic chairs. Someone was saying Mars Hill is running around 15,000 weekend attendance...though I can't verify that number yet.
After eating we went into a room with a bunch of round tables and shortly Rob Appeared. I was seated at the table right in front of Rob all of maybe 6 feet from him :-) Rob said hi and then said he'd like to start with Q&A from us. So for a good hour we just asked him all sorts of questions about everything from "what do you like to do in your spare time" to "do you believe in a literal hell" to "how did the Nooma project start" to "what new stuff have you learned". Rob was very real, open and I felt he was totally sincere...he's also got a sense of humor that is just hilarious.
My question was about the Nooma videos. If you've seen them you know they do looooong camera shots without ever cutting away from him. For instance in the video Trees there are really long shots of him digging a whole, wrestling a tree from off the back of a truck and placing it in the ground...all the time he's delivering an incredible message without missing a beat. So I asked him how many times he had to dig that hole before they called it a wrap. He said they have people that their job is to "reconstruct" scenes after a screwup. He said the whole he dug had to be filled many times before the day was over...along with other funny tidbits about what went wrong on that shoot. There is a Nooma bloppers video, but he said it will not be available for purchase :-) He did say though that they are in talks with Target and Wal-Mart(?) Best Buy to have the Nooma series available for purchase...AWESOME!
Someone asked if Rob was working on any new books. The answer is yes...but he requested we not share the details he gave us...sorry. But based on what he told us, they'll be instant hits.
When asked about new stuff he was learning Rob shared his recent discoveries with the "Good Samaritan" passage. Maybe someone else on staff will post about it much better than I can, but here's my attempt at the gist...we've missed the real message. It's not about the Priest and Levite being jerks for not helping the wounded guy...or the Samaritan being the hero...it's about the Jews racism against Samaritans. To Jesus' audience they would have expected the Priest and Levite to pass up the nearly dead guy. They had to pass him up for the greater good and they couldn't have touched the guy anyways as they would have become "unclean" (see Holiness Code) on their way to the Temple.
So Jesus' Jewish audience is trackin' with him so far..."Right, so get to the point Jesus...this is nothing out of the ordinary."
Then Jesus pulls out the whammy. A Samaritan helps out the guy left for dead. Jews hated Samaritans plain and simple. Today you might replace Samaritan with Atheist or maybe Muslim. Then Jesus asks who acted like a neighbor? The dislike or racism of Jews was so strong that they couldn't even say the words "the Samaritan" but instead said "the one who acted with compassion." To which Jesus replies, "Go then and do likewise."
So for Jesus' audience the lesson was a bit different from what I've grown up hearing. The lesson was about teaching the Jews to cast off their racism against the Samaritans and have compassion for them. Again, I can't unpack this like Rob can nor fill in all the gaps, but it was another classic Rob Bell moment where he opens up the Jewish backstory which reveals passages in a whole new light.
After the Q&A Rob then shared a great message directed to us. Basically he reminded us that we are not machines and our worth is not in what we accomplish...and brutha, I so need to hear that. It really spoke to me and I'm still working through it ... so more on this to come ...
After his message Rob served each of us communion ... that was pretty special. Then he said farewells and we packed up on 2 buses and headed home. About 40mins into the trip the bus I was on had a breakdown ... and thus we crammed onto the other bus. So for over an hour a bunch of us stood in the isle, but it passed pretty quick due to some good conversations thanks to Ed, Kem, Jami, and Jeff :-)
So a big thanks to our Senior Management Team for arranging this trip to hang with Rob Bell for the afternoon. I give it 2 big thumbs up!
