Subscribers have the opportunity to participate in discussion forums, post sermons and offer helpful critique to others. Archived feature articles will also be available to subscribers.
A six-month free subscription is available through a key that can be found on the CD bundled with Kent Anderson's Choosing to Preach. >>
This is not a book on preaching. This is a book that describes the substance of our preaching. Rob Bell, key figure behind the successful Nooma film series, is an outstanding preacher. This is the man who spent the first couple of years planting his church preaching through the book of Leviticus. The church immediately grew to thousands. That takes courage, and not a small amount of skill.
Bell’s preaching, and his writing, display an avid interest in the historical backgrounds of the biblical text, surprising given his avowed interest in finding new ways to “paint” the Christian faith for a new generation. The “paint” metaphor is not by accident as Bell believes that preaching is at least as much art as it is science. The title of the book is a reference to an old black velvet painting that he remembered from his parent’s basement. As far as Bell is concerned, art is never finished. Like the painting of Elvis that betrays its age and has now become a kitschy curiosity, contemporary Christianity risks the same irrelevancy.
Bell is looking for new ways to describe and to express the faith, which is what sometimes gets him into trouble – at least with his critics. The customer reviews section on amazon.com feature many who want to praise him and not a few that find difficulty with his postmodern leanings. The challenge is, as ever, to find fresh ways of expressing truth without destroying the very truth we claim to preach, and in this, Bell succeeds.
Two matters are of particular interest to preachers, his approach to Scripture and his understanding of evangelism. The Bible is a difficult book and it require interpretation and interpretation happens best in community, he says. “I don’t think any of the writers of the Bible ever intended people to read their letters alone (53).” We need each other in order to help us overcome our bias. We bring our baggage to the Bible and we make our decisions and therefore we had better do it humbly. We may yet have things worth learning as God speaks to us through his Word. The task of evangelism, he writes, “isn’t so much taking Jesus to people who don’t have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people there the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst (88).” Bell never compromises either the authority of Scripture or the uniqueness of the gospel and the imperative of proclaiming Christ. He just wants to do it with a more respectful tone.
The book is breezy without ever seeming trite. It is graphically unique and visually appealing as befits a book with artistic implications. Preachers might find it useful as a new language for the message we proclaim.
Excerpt: I don’t follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is. When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me”, he was saying that his way, his words, his life is our connection to how things truly are at the deepest levels of existence. For Jesus then, the point of religion is to help us connect with ultimate reality, God. I love the way Paul puts it in the book of Colossians: These religious acts and rituals are shadows of the reality. “The reality . . . is found in Christ.” (83)