About 9 years ago I found myself undergoing a crisis of... well.. many things.

A personal crisis in that I had many bad habits, negative views of my self, and a poor outlook on what my future could be.

A family crisis in that someone very close to me had just died, rather tragically.

A faith crisis in that I was questioning my entire faith, notably my Calvinism, and seeing the web of my theology untangle, not sure what would be left with the rubble.

A Church Crisis in that my Church could no longer accommodate what I had learned about the Scriptures, and who I had found Jesus to be.

All of this... Untangling and deconstructing... All mid-way through my sophomore year.

In that moment, coming out of a very rigid theological framework in which I felt like God didn’t really much like me, and actively disliked some people to the point of creating them for the express and singular purpose of being damned.

 I needed a resurrection.

I needed to like Jesus again.

It was then that I discovered The Work of Rob Bell.

His use of words and symbols that were relatable paired with things about The Bible seemed fresh, eye-opening, and... well.. beautiful.

It was enchanting, and for the first time in a while, it all seemed to come back to me again.

So I did what we all do. I binged everything he’d written. I tore through it. And Fast.

I personally re-lived the Rob Bell Saga, from the beginning, with Velvet Elvis, through Love Wins, into his new books he wrote after his “fall from grace” in the evangelical mega-church world.

It felt like, in many ways, his journey was a larger, more volatile version of my journey. 

What he went through externally, I was going through internally.

And really, truly, I am grateful for that. For feeling heard and seen, and rediscovering a new, albeit quirky, enchantment with Jesus.

At one point, I even signed up for his full-day event for his book “How to be Here”, when it came to Phoenix. And I plopped myself on a stool right near his stool. I was so close it was like being out to lunch with the guy, and for eight hours he chatted with us.

It felt like a club, a secret club of evangelicals on their way to being “ex-vangelicals”. People enchanted with this great mystery of life, and this person we call Jesus, and his teaching; yet disenchanted by the harsh reality of the Churches we went to.

Disenchanted by the rigidities of our inherited theological frameworks.

Disenchanted by how much division there was. How much shame. How much pain.

When this was all supposed to be about healing.

I ended up leaving my current church as a result of all this newfound excitement, and this new path.

Ironically, even though no one knew I was reading Rob Bell, one of the last sermons I heard was from our Youth pastor, and he shared about how this heretic Rob Bell was twisting scripture.

The really funny part is that he twisted Rob’s words from the passages he quoted to further dig the knife in and make his point strike home with those listening.

What distrust I already had boiled over, and I quietly and peacefully left (much to the confusion of many).

A few years after that this church blew up. Their leader leader caused a huge scandal due to financial mismanagement. And my local congregation from that same church body had a ton of issues as well.

The congregation I had fled to lasted only a few months before the head pastor who was based in the Pacific North West had his own fall from grace, due to abuse of power and character issues, which caused my new community to blow up.

All around me, a trail of blood from churches that grew, then festered something bad deep within, then exploded, leaving hundreds of people scarred in their mess.

So Rob Bell was refreshing. It gave me hope in a post-evangelical world.

And yet...

I knew this path, his path, was also a fall of sorts. It wasn’t the harsh fall into blatant heresy he was accused of.

But it was a slow, meandering, fall, where slowly one finds themselves far from where they started.

In many ways, his work is bigger than his journey. In the same way his journey was similar to what I was going through, it’s representative of a whole cultural movement in the west.

A slow, meandering, departure from where we came from.

In one of Rob’s recent episodes, he is discussing a new direction he’s going, and talks about how his old work was about “separating of babies from bathwater”.

Which we knew from his work was what was happening.

Velvet Elvis, though it wasn’t the book that landed him in the hot seat, questioned the virgin birth. 

Love Wins was truly just posing questions, but really controversial questions around the doctrine of hell.

All these slow departures, as a good evangelical, I knew were supposed to feel bad.

Yet, I was amazed at how good it felt to hear Rob speak.

It felt like everything was looking up, and that soon we’d turn a corner, and see this sort of new community embodying what Jesus really meant, and we’d all be OK.

It was as if this whole Jesus thing was about to really get started in a fresh new way, leaving behind the baggage from before.

Eventually, his podcast furthered this direction.

“I am more enamored with Jesus than ever...” He would say many times...

And yet... The things he was enamored about were part of Jesus, and also part of something else. Something modern. Something secular. Something new.

And it became clear that this new vision was not new. It was not as unique as I thought it was.

It was a creative man’s musings through his own deconstruction.

What I started to feel deep down was that this vision of Jesus, whatever it is, just doesn’t work.

And yet... The BEST parts of The Work of Rob Bell did work. And those parts were ideas he mined from Jewish Tradition, the Church Fathers, and a deep reading of the stories of Scripture.

The conclusion of these references to the vast array of Christian and Jewish tradition wasn’t necessarily to dive deeper and return to those and those alone...

It was rather to imply “well, if that is OK, then maybe I can expand the boundaries even further.

On the face of things, this seemed good, noble, open-minded, and progressive.

After all, we are making progress, aren’t we? New technology, longer lifespans, more mutual understanding on a global sphere.

It was becoming tempting to say that because of our progress, it’s becoming apparent that “we’re all just staring at the same diamond from different angles”.

And it’s as if to say “well these evangelicals, these Christians are not helpful, loving, kind, or accepting of me. But the world at large, the secular world, is accepting.”

And to say “well, we can view Jesus through this particular lens, and accommodate the new direction of culture, and we don’t have to disagree with people, or challenge them.”

Sadly, It just doesn’t work.

We haven’t innovated into utopia. We haven’t “progressed” past disagreement. We are not living in a “post-historical era”.

In all honesty, if we can just be blunt, it seems that for all of our “progress” and “open-mindedness” that reality is folding in on itself and we don’t even know how to say what is real any more.

You might be saying... “So what does this have to do with Rob Bell?”

Well, in some ways, I’m not talking about Rob Bell. Not directly at least, not as an individual.

As I mentioned before, Rob Bell, in many ways, is a symbol for all of us in the post-Christian west.

A hopeful man in a crazy world, trying to make sense of his experiences, trying to integrate it all.

Trying to fit into the optimism of the age, and be a part of it all, while reconciling that with some of the tradition he grew up with.

Separating “babies” from “bathwater”, what works with this cultural moment from what doesn’t. Keeping what is useful in this age, and discarding what is uncomfortable or disagreeable.

And Rob Bell, like our entire western culture... Is slowly, but surely, re-processing and deconstructing “this Jesus thing” to be more and more palatable with the changes of the age.

Until someday, it feels OK to just let go.

And if his recent podcast episodes are any indication, he gave himself permission to let all the way go.

In one episode, he recollects a dream, saying, “I saw Jesus The Christ, and he said ‘Rob you’ve been telling my stories for over 30 years, and it’s getting awkward... it’s time to tell your stories’”.

Genuinely, for him, that was a sweet moment. It was humorous in his telling of it. It was enjoyable to listen to him recount it. And truly, I’m glad he enjoyed writing a new book which is venturing into a new genre for his work.

But, in a way, to me, this seems symbolic for a much deeper reality, one I see in our whole culture...

Slowly shifting and changing, and slowly letting our vision of who Christ was slip, re-wording it, paraphrasing it, challenging it, and questioning it, dissecting it, until we finally can just “move on” to “something else”.

In his episode, he moves on from telling the stories of Jesus to telling his own stories.

How is our story going? The one we’re writing about ourselves?

By all accounts, it’s a dumpster fire. And here’s the secret: it always has been with human beings.

Everything noteworthy we had was not from us. It was from Christ. It was His vision for life. His teaching about who we are. His proclamation about who God is, Who He is, and who we are. His commandments about how we’re designed to live, how we ought to operate in the world. How we ought to direct our most important aspirations and desires, and how we ought to worship.

So truly, if we’re going to separate any babies from bath water... Let’s take the Child Jesus, as He fully is, and leave Him completely untouched.

And the bath water? Well it’s the same dirty water we’ve had the whole time.  

Our ancestors learned these lessons the hard way. In fact, they had to receive divine revelation to know the way forward...

And here we are, on the precipice of choosing to throw it all out. 

To start “fresh”.

And this seems mystic, new, good, and beautiful.

But, as we’re seeing in real time, it is likely to be destructive and painful... With no fruit to show for it.

So then...

What do we make of all this? What do I make of my experiences with the Work of Rob Bell?

Firstly, I’m grateful. I’m better off for having had my mind opened by his writings. It helped this bitter calvinist break free and learn something new about Jesus.

And also... I’m so very glad that in the process of opening my mind, I sought to find something better, and more real.

In that space, I started praying “God, I am not able to figure this all out on my own, but I want to follow you fully. Please guide my theology. Guide my belief. Show me the way”.

And I prayed that for years and years. Through two or three more churches. An evangelical. Then a charismatic. Then anglican...

And finally, through prayer, research, and personal discernment, I came home to the Catholic Church.

It’s not bad to deconstruct. To question. To ponder. To step outside the boundaries.

It can be good, it can be fruitful.

Yet, the point of all that is not to drift away. It’s to come closer. 

Not to obscure, but to clarify.

Or, to put it as Chesterton once said:

“Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
― G.K. Chesterton