Mars Hill Just Wants to Be Friends

Okay, it’s crunch time.

Having spent the last few months completely enveloped in school work and church work, I have still only emailed a small handful of the churches on my list.  Admittedly, one reason for this has been the difficulty of finalizing my schedule in Chicago (the busiest city on the tour-- three churches).  I would hate to set up a meeting with a generous pastor or associate pastor and then have to reschedule because of a planning mix-up.  Of course, another reason for the delay in setting up meetings has been the utterly inaccessible nature of some of these churches’ websites.  So far, the worst culprit is Mars Hill of Grand Rapids, MI.

Rob Bell Remains Awesome

Rob Bell: the man, the myth, the legend.

The cult of personality surrounding Rob Bell is unbelievable.  If I were to make a music analogy, Rob Bell would be the pastoral equivalent of Modest Mouse-- the band that started out really independent and pushing the boundaries, but now everyone and their grandmother listens to them.  Don’t get me wrong: I love Modest Mouse, just like a love Rob Bell.  I’m just pointing out that maybe citing Rob Bell doesn’t make you quite the freethinking hipster that everyone seems to think it does, just like listening to Modest Mouse doesn’t make you an expert on the indie music scene.  My first exposure to Rob Bell came when a college minister friend of mine cited his Everything is Spiritual video, and when I watched the video myself later that summer with my buddy Harryson, I was amazed.  As someone who grew up surrounded by a very muscular Christianity, Rob Bell’s sheer nerdiness filled me with a giddy excitement.  In a world where Voddie Baucham and Mark Driscoll routinely threaten to punch people in the face, here is a witty intellectual spreading the love of God in a friendly, thoughtful, and nonabrasive way.  Sign me up.

 --- Sidebar: I have a major bone to pick with Voddie Baucham.  I’m pretty sure he’s grown up a good bit in the decade since my last run-in with him, but at some point in this whole pilgrimage, I’m sure I’ll write about the student conference in 2001 where Baucham almost singlehandedly made me give up on the church.  Thankfully, I had a very sympathetic youth minister at the time who reassured me that I would not be punched in the face for believing the things I do.  I need to get back to Rob Bell though.---

So yeah, I like Rob Bell.  I think that he takes ideas that appear throughout Christian history and restates them in very innovative and provocative ways.  I think that the mystical language with which he shrouds basic theology is poignant and effective and makes the Gospel feel radically personal in a world of cookie-cutter theology.  I think that he makes Christianity accessible and interesting to people who have been burned by a leave-your-brain-at-the-door church upbringing.  In short, he is someone who I am totally comfortable having as a spokesperson for postmodern Christianity.   I really don’t mind Rob Bell speaking for the church.  Now, I need to temper that by saying that I have not yet read Love Wins, and I am basing my assessment on Rob’s videos.  In fact, I’m actually still a little steamed over the whole Love Wins universalism controversy since I think it was all a publicity ploy, and that just doesn’t seem like a very Christian thing to do.  I mean, I’m all about pulling the rug out from under Calvinists, but I suspect that the whole debate was really a clever scheme by the publishers to cash in on a feud that Jesus probably would have relegated to the kids’ table.  That being said, on the whole, I still like Rob Bell.

Here’s the problem though: I’m not sure if I like his church so far.

My only contact with Mars Hill Bible Church has been through email and through a thorough perusal of their website.  Most megachurches have a little link down at the bottom of their main page in 8-point font that says “contact us,” and this link will take you to an email page (often with a character count limit) that will send an email to an info@whateverchurch.com address.  This email account will be checked periodically by an administrative assistant who may or may not send it to an associate minister who may or may not ever get back to you (depending on how much they have on their plate that week).  This is why I hate emailing megachurches for interviews.  Getting in touch with a senior pastor is about as easy as finding Brigadoon, and dealing with up-and-coming associates sort of feels like wading through quick-drying cement.

We’re Just Like Really Busy Right Now . . .

With this in mind, we come to Dave the Associate.  Dave is not his real name, but I’m going to have to skewer him a bit here, and I just don’t feel right revealing his identity (you know, just in case he’s having family problems that I don’t know about or something).  Back in mid-March, I emailed Mars Hill with a little spiel about my project and a heads-up about the sort of questions I was hoping to ask a staff member.  A few days later, an administrative assistant at Mars Hill informed me via email that my message had been sent along to Dave and that he could meet with me for one hour at 2:00PM on May 16th.  I was a little caught off guard by the rigid one-hour time limit, but I know that it’s a busy church (especially since I was emailing them right in the middle of the whole Love Wins/John Piper debacle).  I agreed to the meeting, thanked the assistant, and received no further response.  Maybe I’ve just gotten spoiled by Southern courtesy, but the curtness of all of this really resonated with me.  I heard nothing further from Mars Hill for a month.

A few days ago, I received a one-sentence email from Dave himself saying that he had to cancel our meeting because of some unexpected travel plans.  Now, I want to give Dave the benefit of the doubt: “unexpected travel plans” really sounds like code for some sort of family trouble or job problems or something serious, so I’m not going to fault him at all for cancelling our meeting.  Maybe the guy’s just burned out and taking a vacation-- whatever, that’s okay, and I fully understand.  Still, I was a little stunned by the email exchange that followed.  I asked Dave if I could still ask him a few questions via email or if he could refer me to someone else on staff, and Dave’s reply was that Mars Hill gets a lot of requests like mine and that they simply don’t have time to respond to them all.  He phrased it much more cordially than that and apologized for it, but still, wow.  I was in the student lounge at the divinity school when I received this email, and my face must have tipped a few people off.

“You alright, Tom?”  “I think Mars Hill just broke up with me.”

Dude, Carmen Sandiego is easier to find.

Sure, it’s a little hurtful to see your study lumped in with “a lot of requests from students,” but I’m actually not taking this personally.  If anything, this just means I can get out of Michigan a day earlier and have an extra 24 hours for all my activities in Chicago.  It’s also one less interview to transcribe, so I guess it’s kind of a favor really.  There’s only one thing that worries me about all this: If Mars Hill treats a visiting student researcher this way, what sort of treatment do members receive when they need to talk to a pastor?  In his lectures, Rob Bell tells all these great stories of personal encounters with people, and now I'm wondering how much of that still really happens at Mars Hill.  I've heard stories of people running into Rob Bell in an airport and having life-altering conversations as he treats them to lunch, but are his associates held to the same standard of concern for those around them?  With their system of administrative assistants and associates, how does this church handle individuals’ problems?  Do you need to click a box on the website to have someone visit you in the hospital?  Do you need to email the administrative assistant to have someone preach a loved one’s funeral?  Is there a card you have to turn in to have an associate talk you through your marital problems?  How does a church that large and that streamlined handle these sorts of things?  How does an organization that huge still fulfill its responsibilities to the individual church member?  I have a lot of questions to ask this summer.

Also, I’ve made an executive decision: If I don’t manage to sift through every church’s website and set up interviews (particularly in the case of the megachurches), that’s okay.  It seems that the only way to guarantee an interview at a lot of these places is to know someone, so I’m grateful for those Duke connections helping me make that happen.  Still, in the case of a church like Mars Hill (where I have no connections), maybe I’ll be better served by asking questions of the people around me when I visit.  The guy at the information desk at Summit was a wealth of information, and maybe I’ll find similar people at the other churches.  Am I dismayed by a church staff’s inability to answer my questions?  Yeah, a little, but I’ll find a way around it somehow.

On a more general note, I’ve been a little amazed by the evolution of this project lately.  This all started as a roadtrip to Seattle to visit my friend Mike, and then when I started adding churches along the way, it began to take on this peculiar shape.  Stephen Cooke (my pastor back in Memphis) had the idea of turning it into a directed study, and after collaboration with several friends and faculty at Duke, it developed into a study of these churches’ engagement of the local community, an issue to which I will likely devote much of my ministry after divinity school.  Church size and local outreach may very well be the two most pressing issues on my mind as I prepare for ordination as a minister this summer, and the ability to explore both in such a unique way is something for which I’m incredibly grateful.  The study has almost become a sort of pilgrimage at this point, so this blog is going to become increasingly important as I try to get my thoughts down in preparation for the ordination service at the culmination of the summer.  Am I a little disappointed that Rob Bell’s church will barely give me the time of day?  Yeah, sure, but look how much else I’ve got to look forward to this summer!

Detailed schedule and map coming soon.

Peace and Blessings,

Tom