It's 8 p.m. on a Monday night in Rocketown, Michael W. Smith's Christian Nightclub/Skatepark in downtown Nashville. The club is packed, sold out with a line snaking around the corner. The show was supposed to start an hour ago but the audience is well-behaved church kids—though they look like the casting call for a MTV reality show—hip, happy, shiny beautiful people with trendy haircuts, smart eyeglass frames and perfect airbrushed tans.
They say there's a "revolution" and, sure enough, somehow the youth group has become the cool kids. To quote youth movement author Lauren Sandler: "If you want to feel startlingly uncool, forget rock clubs or art galleries—just find your nearest hipster church."
The flock are not here to see Smitty or the Christian version of Fall Out Boy or even Carman's latest Nash Vegas extravaganza. No, more than one thousand people have paid $10 each to see a preacher—Rob Bell. (Number 25 on the 50 Most Influential Christians in America list. Five notches above Benny Hinn!)
In fact the "Everything is Spiritual" tour will go on to sell out 24 cities in 31 days, raising more than $65,000 for WaterAid.org, a charity to bring clean water to third world countries. Far as we know, Brother Bell hasn't waved his Armani coat at anyone yet.
Rob has brought new levels of quality and artistic direction with the powerful short sermon film series NOOMA and is founding pastor of Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Number 17 on the 50 Most Influential Churches list.) He also is the author of the acclaimed Velvet Elvis and his new bestseller SexGod is a scintillating, unauthorized biography of Tom Jones.
Actually, more scandalous than that, SexGod asserts that not only did the Lord God Jehovah invent sex but that the very act can be a spiritual thing itself.
An enormous white marker board spans the stage. Ambient lights and music surge and bubble, building anticipation. Clad in black, he emerges to spirited applause and in the first of many odd but charming moments, smirks and begins to clap along. Frankly, Rob Bell seems like a big kid. Awkward, a bit goofy, clearly attention-deficit and yet so super Bible school smart with the Torah and the Greek and the Hebrew that he often comes off as both brilliant and bewildered in the same breath.
He begins his message with "In the beginning ..." and starts to mark up the board, which by the end of the night will be filled with symbols and pictures and languages that would rival any divinity school professor. Or at least Gene Scott.
Bell possesses a sort of Taoist "doing by not doing, knowing by not knowing" quality that is entirely endearing and refreshing, balancing the profound with the silliness of surfer Zen and although The Chicago Sun-Times called him a 21st century Billy Graham, he is more like the un-preacher many have waited for so long now.
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