Author Rob Bell: 'What We Talk About When We Talk About God'

my name is Mark or stir I am the University chaplain director of religious life University and this is our first-ever chaplains speaker series kickoff this was an event that was endowed through former Chancellor Harvey brands CIM when he died he left an endowment forbidden chapel for the support as it is said quote of non-sectarian religious services admitted Benton Chapel and for religious and ceremonial festivities that we can celebrate from year to year from this most generous gift I would like to thank a few people before I introduce our choir for tonight first of all Provost Richard McCarty who gave us the the go-ahead in conceiving this this series and is a very big supporter it could not be here tonight but we certainly do appreciate the support that has come from him and those in Kirkland Hall I would like to thank the office of the Dean of Students is in particular of our Dean of Students Mark bandhas and associate dean Pat Helen Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Cal Turner program for moral leadership in the professions which earlier today at western United Methodist Church sponsored a an area clergy conversation with our speaker Rob Bell I'd like to thank all of you area churches ministerial associations alumni associations the community at large I am just new into this position but as a two and three weeks ago we were getting calls every day from people around the southeast inquiring about this event so from wherever you came we thank you last I would like to thank our program director Mike Zimmerman our graduate assistant Jay Boozman and members of our interfaith council who have done so much of just the groundwork that has helped make this happen I really feel like I need give an extra shout out to Mike who is the king of logistics and he is the man behind the curtain who has helped make things happen time and time again now I'd like to introduce victory acapella who will have two selections for us and then we will get to the main event again thank you for being here you you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hi [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] no no stormy there to all the glory um no no Gastonia to all the glory non nobis domine heir to all the glory no no be stormy day to all the glory no no he's gone me to for the sake of no no Gastonia - OH - Claudia don't know he's gone a to the song [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] nice doggie then all copies Tommy they know [Music] bloody hell no [Music] no bees call me dami they go Moby's Tommy main goal - oh me me - nobody's told me there - all the glory of non nobis domine heir to all the glory unnoticed or me there - all the glory no no be stormy met you all the glory no nobody's going to know me stormy there - or the glorious call me Eddie show me that you are the glory doggies oh me too [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] go bees call me I know Oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] if you'll pardon me for just two more housekeeping matters and I'll get with our introduction one is that we will have question and answer after our speaker is concluded as talked for tonight in these microphones these cordless mics will be floating around the house so I ask you to stand up clearly indicate that you'd like to pose a question and make sure that it is a question and not a narrative or dissertation secondly we're going to have a book signing and some refreshments if you just make it through the nave here to the back through the center door down the hall to the left it'll be about the third door on your left so we invite you for a book signing at that time when we've concluded as I prayed and contemplated who our first speaker for this chaplain speakers series should be there are many individuals who came to mind but for some reason rob bell kept coming more to mind for some strange reason maybe it's just good timing in that we had heard that a new book was on the horizon possibly it's because at a university such as this that there are many different expressions of religion and theology and spirituality at play and we do have a fairly strong Christians presence here but also very much interfaith and growing in beautiful ways as we learn to appreciate the different kind of traditions that are lived in our midst in this community and I thought back to the very first time that I had actually read and learned about Rob Bell it had to been at least six or seven years ago when Jennifer fouls are at that time Presbyterian campus minister told me about Velvet Elvis and I think that was one of the first books that Rob Bell had published and I read it and it really was indeed a repainting of the Christian faith there have been several other books that he has written the one that really has in some respects catapult him catapulted him into national notoriety it was Love Wins I look about heaven hell and the fate of every person who ever lived and again as as I sort of sifted the contents of that book through my thinking a lot of it was not new but it was set in a very new way too obviously a very new national audience and it is inspiring still a lot of talk and a lot of controversy in the best possible ways I also think when I think of Rob Bell as a pastor certainly a great preacher and an artist with all the work that he has done with these numa spiritual films he has really learned the art of mass communication enabled and is able to articulate the Gospel message in image and in new fresh ideas that still tell the old old story and so it was settled Rob would come to be with us and we can't be more delighted to have him here tonight at the very beginning of a national book tour the book is entitled what we talk about when we talk about God and so at this time Rob we want to hear you talk to us about what you talk about when you talk about God [Applause] all right what's going on how you doing how far can I walk into the crowd before that thing starts making that high-pitched sound that makes me have to put my lightsaber away I can come this far excellent work now where are you who are you people where are you from you from here Nashville yeah Birmingham Birmingham Alabama Kentucky Kentucky Knoxville Florida you didn't come to Florida just for this you did alright that's really inspiring or kind of stalkerish I'm not sure okay we'll talk about that a little bit all right Wow alright uh it's great to be with you my name is Rob and I live in California which is to the left and I met my wife freshman year first or second week of school on a tennis court in college we were both 18 just saying and I've been married for 18 years and it's just amazing and I have a 14 year old son who is a rapper and I have a 12 year old son who is a skater and then I have a 3 year old daughter who is a princess I actually think she's a princess like there's some sort of developmental stage where you haven't yet got irony so you're like no seriously I'm a princess and you just sort of excellent whatever you'd like and so I write books and make films and come to Nashville and it's a third thing I do with my life I visit Nashville and in that order and I have a new book out called what we talk about when we talk about God a couple of years ago my fifth book was called Love Wins and that came out this week and a version for like junior high and high school students because we got to shape them early and then my friend Carlton he wrote and produced a show called lost are there any lost fans and he and I are developing a show and it's really amazing it's coming along and hopefully in the next little while you'll get to see what we've been cooking on but if you sort of take lost and you take some of the work I've done with sermons and books and films and live events and Q&A and you put all in a blender and threw in a little maybe of some TED Talks Peter Rollins may be some Letterman and some Colbert you put it a blender hopefully you'd come out with a thing that we're working on and we're really really excited about it and then most importantly I try to surf every day and I have not served today because I've been in Nashville so if I start twitching part way through the talk it's because my gills are drying up so that's a bit about me and then there's you and so I'd like to talk a bit to you about God and we'll see where that takes us and I kind of know where we're headed and I kind of don't and that's when it gets interesting you know what I mean and then maybe we'll take some time for questions at the end and then we'll see where that takes us when my wife was 15 she went on her first date guy came to her house picked her up took her to a movie and then took her home there driving home and she lived in the desert up in the foothills and the roads out there it's way above Scottsdale Arizona are these long straight desert roads and she and her date are coming home and a drunk driver coming the other way somewhere between 50 and 60 miles an hour crossed over and hit them head-on absolutely demolished the car she was riding on the drunk driver then spun around and hit another car and everybody had to be rushed to the hospital my wife's parents get a call that their daughter has just been head-on by a drunk driver going between 50 and 60 miles an hour and they need to get to the hospital and so they jump in the car and they take off they're driving as fast as they can to the hospital down one of these long straight desert roads and they realize there's a commotion up ahead in the road they realize as they get closer that they are coming upon the spot where the accident was and they have not yet removed the car their daughter was riding in from the road and so they have to drive right by the car that their daughter had been riding in moments earlier when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver my mother-in-law Judy says that as Kristin's dad Doug drove by for the first time Judy had ever seen Doug had tears pouring down his cheeks now you have to understand my father-in-law my father-in-law is just he's how many people in their late 60's do you know lift every day and have a six pack one of these six packs not like these dude six packs he runs every morning at like 5:00 a.m. he's just like built like a tank he's totally bald like shiny see your reflection bald and for years he had a large red mustache with no irony and he's kind of like a cross between mr. clean and g gordon liddy almost terrified i ever have been was asking him for his daughter's hand in marriage because i was like man this could this could go south on me fast stay strong and stay strong and as he drives by this car that his only daughter was riding in moments early my mother-in-law says for the first time there's tears streaming down his face there is this sacred holy value to life the things that weigh the most can't be weighed are you with me there is this gift if you're breathing which includes most of us here just pushing you to see like is that a joke if you're breathing you are at the most profound basic level of existence a recipient of a gift we all share that race creed lifestyle perspective we all have this gift of breath life interesting enough and pretty much every ancient religion the word for breath and the word for spirit are the same word the ancient Hebrews had this word kavod regionally kavod was a business term kavod referred to how something actually weighs and so when you were doing business transactions and you were using scales the actual weight of something was really crucial for fairness and all that sort of thing but over time the word kavod came to not just mean the literal weight of something that came to refer to the figurative weight the sense of something having depth or significance the sense that it weighs something at some level way beyond just flesh and skin and bone we are all recipients of this profound fragile precious sacred holy gift we call life now I started out I've been a pastor for a number of years and one of the things you do as a pastor is people bring you their babies because they want to show you their new babies and you learn how to say wow that's a really cute baby and if it's not you learn to say things like wow only you could have had that child or Wow I totally know whose baby this is parentheses your baby is funny-looking but we were all kind of funny-looking so but what I didn't really realize over time is that whenever I would see the bat I would always face some line because you never just go oh wow you got a baby right oh look more human population no you say something like oh and then what do you do I always found myself instinctually I would look for the hand and then I would always you like grab the hand and those little fingers and you hold it up and you go oh it's so small right like you're surprised that it's small like you don't hold it up but it's like this giant yeah you time you marvel every time at the smallness of that hand every time and I realized doing this year after year after year I'm not just marveling at the smallness of the baby's hand new life is profoundly moving and mysterious because all of life is profoundly moving and mysterious and so when you notice the baby's hand and you're making conversation about this oh my word this David you are at the same time reflecting upon new life as new moving because your own life is a profound mystery and you are deeply connected with this new life we have this intuitive sense whether you're religious or not or whether you believe what we have the sense that life matters that we are connected with each other in some profound ways the Sandy Hook school shooting a couple of months ago how many do you have this profound sense that that shooting had something to do with you and us that it somehow doesn't exist isolated that we are at some profound level all connected last year I went to the TED Conference in Long Beach anybody watch TED talks from time to time and TED talk by the way Ted is fascinating when you're there because you're sitting there and you're like dude that guy looks just like Peter Gabriel because it is all right and at one point they asked the people how many of you are religious and and I would a friend of mine said what guest 2% of the people raised their hand and said they were religious see there's the smart people and yet that's a whole other talk by the way and yet during one of the day's talks and you hear talk after talk to talk this brilliant lawyer named Brian Stevenson got up and he works in the court system to bring justice to those who don't have proper representation and he talked about what it's like to represent young men who have had no father and no sort of community structure and he talked about the injustice they receive at the hands of the courts and his work to make sure that they were treated fairly and it was an absolutely unbelievably inspiring talk and at the end of the talk he quoted at the end Martin Luther King who was quoting someone else and he said the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice it was just a moment like and then the crowd gave him a standing ovation and the next day all the people who attended Ted pitched in to give his organization a million dollars the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice so a roomful of people who 2 to 3 percent of them say there are religious when somebody talks to them about the moral arc of the universe give him a standing ovation something within them says this thing is headed somewhere correct it's like we are hardwired to believe that this isn't the whole show that lights aren't turned off and it's over that somehow this is going somewhere there is an arc there is a trajectory we have this intuitive sense that life matters if you've ever tried to talk somebody out of suicide you know exactly what I'm talking about because you're talking to them and you keep saying things like no it matters and you're looking for like really technical articulate fresh ways of saying it but you end up saying no it it matters and you're trying to find language for it but you're begging and pleading with them because you have some sense very hard to articulate that they should not take their life because at some level beyond words it matters we are all connected and it's heading somewhere Jane Fonda was asked and when you're going to write a book about God always quote Jane Fonda because that just takes the whole thing to a whole new place Jane Fonda was asked why she became a Christian and she said I became a Christian because I could feel reverence humming in me I could feel reverence how many did me and I would present to you and I believe we're at a key moment in sort of culture and in where we all are at that we have a large number of us who have this sense of reverence coming within us we hear a piece of music we hold a baby we have a meal with friends we're out somewhere hiking or by a lake or catching a wave come on now and we're overwhelmed with this sense of this reverence humming within us and so there are very very popular voices many of them extremely intelligent articulate and sometimes just quite funny who essentially argue that that's all an illusion that we need to outgrow that sort of thing that we are simply a complex arrangement of neurons and synapses firing like we do and that when we're dead the lights are turned off in the show is over but the problem is this denial with anything more going on here leaves many people cold bored and uninspired just can't do it and so we go looking for explanations for this reverence and the word that often gets pulled into the conversation is God but a lot of times the God that will go looking for is a bit like Oldsmobile it's like they shut the factory down and they don't make them anymore it's like Oldsmobile was for then not now how many of you have ever bumped into an explanation about God that felt to you like you just want to say wait it's 2013 do I actually have to do all the hat like do I take the whole package because do I have to oppress women and deny science do I have to really I got and so I wrote this book because I have a sense as a growing number of us so we need some new ways of talking about this reverence coming within us and God is the word you can try to use like a different word but here's what happens people go so you're like talking about God when I first started sure a church when I was 28 I got into this whole like Church is so loaded with baggage we're going to use different words we're a community of faith man we're just a team of disciples we're just a gathering of the faithful and people be like you mean Church right then I got on a small kick whereas like the word Christian needs we need to leave that word Christian it's so loaded down with all sorts of nonsense and people are so that word has so much just garbage attached to it so we use needham and we're disciples I was all about we're disciples man we're students were followers are you a Christian what do you mean because I'm actually a follower I'm trying to do it and I'm a disciple I mean people be like what's like so you're like a Christian like uh and then somebody said actually what's really interesting is if you insist on using the word and you insist on embracing the word with such power and passion and conviction that you force people to readjust their definitions mm-hmm get friends like that by the way because things go to a whole new place so the God is the word we use for that when you talk about God it drags up all sorts of things so I just want to explore a couple ideas when it comes to God because often when you talk to God the first question to talk about God the first question is what kind of world are we living in which interestingly enough was a question the Greeks had roughly 2,500 years ago Greek philosophers had this idea there must be some thing that is the build basic building block of the universe and if you could identify that thing that cosmic Lego that's my term for it if you could identify that smallest thing upon which everything else is merely a variation of that smallest thing added together well then you could explain everything you could explain why we're here and how we got here and where we're going and all that and the Greeks had this word Kemna which means to divide or to cut so they said there must be something that you can't divide it anymore it's the small thing never see something that's 8m no there must be an apt 'm that is the smallest thing that everything is made of and so for literally thousands of years there was all sorts of fascinating speculation about wow if we could just find one of these atoms and then in the late 1800s they developed the kind of technology that allowed them to actually 1897 discover atoms and what they realized is that atoms are small they realize that 1 million atoms lined up side by side by side are about as wide as a human hair they learn that a grain of sand contains 20 roughly when you're dealing with hundreds of billions you know roughly you could be off like a billion or so they realize that a grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms which is 22 with 18 zeros after it they realized that an atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Planet Earth atoms are small thank you very much I'll be here all week now so the assumption was what we haven't Adam and so apparently this is essentially the building block that will help explain why everything is the way it is and obviously if you could figure out what the thing is that makes everything else and then you would need no other outside explanation are you with me there but then they discovered all the way way we wait and Adam actually has some smaller components it actually has a center that it actually has some protons and neutrons and electrons actually you can take apart an atom and there's some smaller things that make up an atom smaller than an atom but then they develop some new technology and realize that those smaller particles you can actually split them and then they discovered actually those smaller pieces you can split them and then they develop some more technology and realize those tiny tiny tiny little pieces you can actually those are actually made of smaller pieces and so you have bosons Hadron smooth sounds leptons Taos quarks you have up and down quarks you have strange and charmed quarks you have different tiny tiny tiny little sub atomic particles that are actually turns out made up other ones so for years there was that whole what I would refer to as the Truman Show question how far out does the universe go is there a door out there somewhere but then the haunting question came out not just how big or far does it go but how far does it go in to its smallness can you take the smallest smallest smallest thing and are there actually smaller things that comprise it at this point they have identified roughly a hundred and fifty sub atomic particles and they're still discovering more you promote the Higgs boson which sounds like a southern politician didn't his brother John Villa farm and the Higgs boson was essentially well there there must be this one essentially there's a theoretical frame there must be a smaller one than that that does this particular thing and then they discovered it which was like and then it was like oh but that raises all sorts of new questions and so smaller and smaller and smaller weights now when they got down to the sub atomic realm that's when things got really funky my scientific term because they realize that things don't work like they do in the rest of the world what they discovered is that subatomic particles because originally like from the 50s there's that atom logo that you've seen before the idea was well there must be a center to the atom and then all those particles which are all flying all around the atom and coming and going those particles must be like little planets orbiting a solar system and they must be like our solar system just a very small thing but then they realized wait wait wait doesn't really work that way what happens at a subatomic level is a particle disappears in one place and then it appears in another place without traveling the distance in between then they realize well oh wait actually a subatomic particle disappears in one space we don't know why it disappears there and we don't know why it appears here and it doesn't travel the distance in between they begin to realize wait wait what it actually does is it travels every single possible path it could from point A to point B and it only reveals which path it actually took when you observe it some of you are like put that away yeah actually niels bohr a friend of einstein said if you study quantum physics and you aren't outraged then you aren't studying quantum physics they then discovered while we were wait a subatomic particle that has been bonded with another particle when those two particles are separated actually communicate with each other and demonstrate an awareness of where the particle is without any communication between the two so they said 1949 because Bell's Theorem a particular favorite of mine they said that if you take an atom and you cut it in half and you put half in New Jersey in half in San Francisco and you change the rotational spin of the half in New Jersey the half in San Francisco will reverse its spin at the exact same moment now a lot of you have the Apple rainbow death wheel right now like when your computer freezes and it's just doing this here like right yeah so it this is because you and I were trained in a Western world and we were deeply influenced by Newton's book principle which was essentially an outline of what's called mechanical physics see we were taught that there are rules that govern how the universe works if you and your friends are launching water balloons at that guy on a motorcycle and you have the proper velocity weight and trajectory you will hit him and make him quite upset I have a friend who did this in college you will not have expected that guy to turn his motorcycle and drive across the soccer field towards you at which point you will soil your drawers as you run as fast you can to a direction which might explain my grade point in college we were trained in a particular system that told us there are predictable laws about how the universe works an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force flashbacks to ninth grade but what happened with the quantum revolution is these quantum physicists came along and said well actually it doesn't work that way at the smallest level the universe is way weirder than any of us thought we can take probabilities we can guess where the particle is going to end up and we can guess with enough certainty to put a thousand songs in your pocket and to microwave your food and to x-ray your broken bone so quantum physics has brought us all sorts of unbelievable luxuries and breakthroughs but also at the basic basic basic level and the universe is way way weirder they also discovered that an atom is 99.9 percent empty space and so if you were to take all the empty space out of all of the atoms in the universe the universe would fit in a sugar cube I can't do that without laughy yeah and this is science this is not you know JJ Abrams this is science yeah many of us deeply engrained in our psyche mostly through education was a simple idea that there's a line and on this side is the physical material world you and I know to be sweaters and dogs and burritos I don't know why I use those three examples but it just felt right so many of us were taught that there's this line and there's the physical hard world that you can test and you can get evidence and you can tweak your theories correct and then there's this other realm of the unseen you know the sort of like you know love and spirit and religious sort of whatever but this world this is the hard cold tangible world that actually exists but what we've learned from science is the hard cold floor of tile wood polyester that is actually at its core endless frenetic movements particles coming and going so you're sitting in a chair that chair is supporting your way you trust that chair to hold you up for the next few moments for to take apart that pew that you're seeing it's made of wood and so I have wood to make a bunch of molecules that are bonded together and those molecules are made of atoms and those atoms are essentially patterns and relationships of energy that happen to be bonded as they are right now but those atoms and those particles will be leaving those atoms and particles and relationships to make other things and so even you yourself are in essence a pattern of energy that the world at its core is energy and the flow of energy in relationship and then in the middle of it all is you you on average lose 50 to 150 hairs a day some of you apparently more than others you shed somewhere around 10 billion flakes of skin a day so please vacuum or you get new skin your body renews its skin every 28 days and your body renews its entire self every nine years so if I would met you 10 years ago I am today interacting with a different you even though it's the same you so the very atoms molecules and cells that make you you are dying leaving you and making up other things like Ohio or share or whatever I don't know what they're making but they might have made something or there I send you so that is you yeah imagine if your uncle gave you a boat you got in the the will was red and you were given a boat so you went out and you looked at this boat you put this boat in the water and you're like this boat needs a new deck and so you ripped one summer all the planks off the deck of the boat and you put new planks in but then as you put up the planks in you realize well the hardware is kind of bad and I don't know under like a big wind I might rip some of the hard from the hardware might break so the next summer you replace all the hardware but then you realize this boat leaks which makes it no fun so the next you took all of the boards on the hull of the boat and you tore them off and you replace them and put new boards and you realize I'm going to need some new tar and sealer so it doesn't leak so if you kept this up at some point you would have replaced every element of the boat yet if you took us all out for a ride you would say this is the boat my uncle gave me because the boat is in the pattern not the planks you are a pattern of planks moving through space in time with strong opinions about chocolate and Taylor Swift we cannot locate the you that makes you you in your elbow if we were to take you apart which different image how about if we were to take you apart bone by bones wait back up if we were to analyze your physicality would we be able to locate in your physicality how you feel about Jim Carrey movies or whether you're going to call me maybe no so the essence of what makes you you is not able to be identified in your physical yes you have DNA your DNA you share 60% of your DNA roughly with fruit flies 90% of your DNA with mice 96% of your DNA with a large ape you are made of sort of basic elements nitrogen oxygen really basic carbon-based life-form that shares much of your essential makeup with lots of other things and yet there is something about you that you hear a piece of music in your sole source you find out that your friend's dad has cancer and your heart becomes as wide as the ocean and so you are not present in any sense in your physicality and yet none of us have a problem acknowledging that you actually exist there is this mystery to what it means to be a human being I would call it a miracle it is not something we can prove and yet we would all agree it exists so I simply choose to believe that we aren't here by accident that we aren't random that somehow all of this matters and we're connected to each other and this is all headed somewhere now sometimes people talk about people of faith which I don't think is a terribly accurate phrase to refer to some people as people of faith we're all people of faith everybody believes something I choose to believe that you are a sacred holy divine gift mystery and miracle and that you matter and that your story is headed somewhere and that we whether we've met it not met or not are all at some level deeply connected to each other I believe this because I choose to believe a particular understanding of who God is and what God is up to so real quickly three central ideas about who God is number one I believe God is with us I believe God is for us and I actually believe God is ahead of us now God with us for many people in the modern world the conception they have of God is God is somewhere else apparently riding on a cloud electrically operated of course with a long beard robe and he's quite cranky until Jesus comes then he gets happy at least for a little bit towards certain people but ultimately wants to make sure you don't get left behind a great idea for a series of crappy novels anyway now and so what happens then the God who's somewhere else is then what you end up with his endless series of discussions about and then this God for some reason comes here from time to time people even say man and then God showed up which I always respond because I have enough cynicism to be you know American where was God until then and it would have been lovely if God would have shown up at the Holocaust and so essentially this view if this is your only conception of God as God is somewhere else and if we pray enough or if we're good enough or if we just repeat the chorus of that worships art for the 17th time in a row this time without the drums leather wristband here then ever seriously that's fun right there you look like I just did something really naughty she's littering the front we're all going it's okay they're not here or and this is fine but think about think about the come here God please be with us apparently God is somewhere else I need to get God here which raises a thousand questions because once again if this is your only conception of God if this is the case then this world apparently can go on whether that God is real or not and so you end up having to prove that that God even exists now the ancient Hebrews had this word rule this word rule that they had was a word they spoke up that spoke of the of the energy and electricity that surges through all things why do flowers grow up through the concrete why does the Sun rise and set why do waves come in the way that they do why do certain pieces of music just fill us with explosive life why do certain people the way they tell a joke we laugh so hard and we realize it in some strange way when this person enters the room it's a celebration of life you have those people right when they show up it's like okay this is this is going to be fun this is going to be good this person gives me life this person is so unbelievably affirming this person when they speak or when they take us on those adventures if they cook up I don't know where they come up with this stuff it's just now the ancient Hebrews had this word rule and Ruis spoke of that energy that pulses through all things rule was the source of it essentially like the universe is plugged into a socket and rule is the energy now this word rule is often translated in the Hebrew Scriptures spirit but for many of us spirit refers to the stuff that's sort of esoteric afraid ephemera role sort of not physical real but for them Rula was this life in all of its fullness the psalmist group of prayers in middle of Bible Psalms the writer says where can I go from your rule where can I go from life itself it surrounds me everywhere I go I go up here I go down here I make my bed here I soar here you your spirit so they believe that God and the presence of God that God is present here now among us upon us that when we talk not about a world that keeps going on and then maybe there's a God who exists somewhere else who comes here from time to time they talked about the God who is the source of the going on this of everything if that's a phrase I can use but I just used it so it's good it's legit well you will go with it the going on this of things so when your friend who says man I am an atheist and I do not believe in God but this is wrong that 800 million people don't have access to clean drinking water what is the impulse within them that says that is wrong as somebody should do something about that where does it come from other than the divine rule which speaks and is present in all people places and things in the poem that begins the Bible the Bible does not begin with a scientific textbook it begins with a poem and it's a soaring lyrical beautiful poem about how we all are created in the image of this God I believe you are experiencing God in all sorts of ways every day like Jacob the book of Genesis there's a fascinating story where he falls asleep by the side of the road using a rock as a pillow some technology is good and he wakes up and he says surely God was in this place and I I wasn't aware of it he speaks to the divine presence the rule that surrounds us sustains us that is the singular source of life itself it comes from somewhere it flows from somebody it is a gift we have received and has been given to us from God so I believe God is with us now I believe God is for us God is for human floor machine sometimes God is not only somewhere else but God has conceived whatever God is it's not here and however God is God is quite cranky and so human flourishing because something other than God's highest desires for us and I don't mean that in a sort of like God as a Ferrari and wants you to drive it these sort of images aren't helpful what I'm speaking of a God who is for us I'm speaking of the God who we meet in the full spectrum of human experience when I started out as a pastor I was a my first job I was 24 and after one of my first sermons this man named George came up to me he's in his 60s and I'll never forget he comes up and he says hi Rob I'm George and I think you should go to a a comma site I'm not aware that I have a problem with alcohol and he says that's that it doesn't matter you need to go to AAA because everything you need to learn about being a pastor you're going to learn an AAA and he said when they come to you just say hi I'm Rob and I pass so I started going to a 80s and I'd sit on the uncomfortable plastic folding chair and I'd smell the bad coffee and they'd go around the room and when they get to me I would say hi hi I'm Rob and I pass and I know the leader after a couple weeks was like man this guy's it this guy's bad shape he just comes here he's just not ready he's not ready it's okay but already ready at first but I was trying to figure out what it was because the first meeting I could not I never experienced anything like it the air was like electric in some way I'd never experienced and I was trying you know that feeling when you're experiencing something and you're desperately trying to find the language for it like what is this what is this and all of a sudden I realized this is a free zone here's why everybody in this room has stopped pretending you're only at an AAA meeting if you're done pretending the everything's fine all you drag into an a a meeting is your primal materiality you bring who you actually are because if you bring any pretense any pretending any no seriously I'm fine if anything is airbrushed they will Banksy it out of you so fast AAA is what happens when you come in your raw broken flawed ugly messy face flat in the gutter essence and what I discovered is that it was as powerful or I might argue more powerful than a church service I'd ever been to that God was there in some profound way now see for many people the deal with God is you get things together and God goes well done nice come on in but Jesus came along and Jesus offered something called gospel he announced something called gospel and gospel is fundamentally counterintuitive and when I say counterintuitive what I mean is Jesus said blessed are the poor in spirit well the poor in spirit the great writer Dallas Willard talks about the zeroes the pathetic the lame that nobodies blessed are the people who are the zeros the pathetic s' the nobodies now blessed some people say is an ancient the ancient word they believe the best way to translate it is God is on your side now here's how you and I know understand things oh yeah I mean like blessed it blessed are all the humble people who know how much they need God but actually knowing how much you need God is a favorable state correct if that's the case blessed are all the people who know much who are who are humble yeah I've just been given the gift of humility and it's just been lovely if it's blessed are all the people who are humble will humble is a good thing and you and I know how that works all the disciplined people all the people who actually eat green vegetables every meal all the people who wake up early all the people get up and they've been praying before the Sun comes up seriously all the people who work hard and take extra AP classes we get how the world works the disciplined righteous smart people who do all the extra work they're the ones who get ahead they earn it they deserve it that's how it works and the rest of us sort of go I wish I had that when Jesus comes along he speaks of Gospel Gospels fundamentally counterintuitive what he says essentially is God blessed are the zeros that nobodies the pathetic s' the lane God is on your side in exactly the moment in which you are most acutely aware of how much you don't have it all together this God does not wait this God announces this blessing in favor of this God in exactly your place of most having it not together 'no severe and i discovered at a very early age in an a a meeting that god was upstairs in the sanctuary a man god was on fire in the basement with the bad coffee because there in the moment of absolute pathetic my life is unmanageable and I have lost all power I found the God who is for us see many people have a very binary understanding of God God is good which raises all sorts of questions about well then what do we do about the bad but Jesus comes along and Jesus shows us a divine who is in the good but a divine who also hangs on a cross which is about as bad as it gets correct Jesus shows us a God who's present in the absence it's one thing for God to be present in the presence it's another thing to find God in the absence see for many of us we are so attuned to well God's all the good stuff and I don't quite know what to do with all of this giant steaming-hot stack of rubbish Estate mistakes and sins and fears and addictions and secrets and so we live with this giant shadow we carry around and shadow can be very powerful if you're running a religious institution and you don't want to deal with it because you simply name the enemy over there and it's fantastic for fundraising here's who's wrong but oftentimes it's simply an exercise in shadow management we are so terrified of that which lurks within ourselves that we project it on the others because as long as we're talking about how wrong liberal heretical or misguided they are we don't have to talk about our own deepest fears worries secrets and anxieties are you with me but here's what happens when you go into those places when you go into the deepest darkest most terrifying thing that might be true about you you find that God has been there the whole time because God is with us I believe and I choose to believe that God is for us one more thought I believe God is ahead of a couple years ago I did an event with well they called they said here's what we'd like to do we'd like to put you and the Dalai Lama in Bishop tutu and Roshi Joan Halifax who's leading Buddhist nun in the country and Ingrid Marsden the leading Islamic scholar we like to put you on a stage and then people can ask any questions they want I was like oh I'm there so I go to Seattle and they say before the big main event in this sort of arena the basketball reading at the University of Washington they said we want to do an early morning breakfast and Dali Lama and Bishop tutu are going to sit on just two chairs I have a conversation and a couple of us are going to sit around and we're going to listen in and so I'm sitting there I'm standing right here and Dalai Lama comes in the room from this place and Bishop tutu comes in from this place and they meet and by the way you know what they do when they meet they're there they've been friends for a long time when when Dalai Lama and Bishop tutu meet they hug and then they start tickling each other in giggling who knew who knew and so I'm standing here Dalai Lama standing here Bishop tutu saying here and there hugging and tickling each other and giggling what by the way what exactly is protocol in that situation like y'all come on you guys actually not idea I mean it's like right there you know I did I was like man forget it I pulled out my camera and I just it was amazing Oh at one point so people are asking Dalai Lama questions at one point he gets a question and he he pauses looks up he pauses some more he takes forever and he goes I don't know at one point he looks over at Bishop tutu and he says you gain weight so beautiful and inspiring in some way it was amazing absolutely I can't even explain what it was like and I'm sitting there and there are people the gathering was a seeds of compassion event it was people from every religion from religions I didn't know where religions there were no Jedi's but it was like that sort of like wow from all across the spectrum when it was so powerful and all these people would gather because the theme was promoting compassion and peacemaking in younger generations and you're in this room and people have come from the four corners of the earth to talk about how to make the world more peaceful and a guy leans over to me he says there hey do you know there are protestors out front I'm like who who protests that's like being against puppies or something I do protest and he said out a bunch of Christians I believe God is ahead of us pulling us all of us into greater peace justice compassion love love of enemy and I believe this divine pull has been acting across human history pulling all of us wherever we're at whatever place and time and country and nation and perspective we come from I believe God has always been calling all of us into a better future and you can resist that poll our sins and stagg nations and fears and secrets you can resist that as an individual as a tribe as a church as a group you you can in the name of God the outside on the sidewalk missing out on the pole that's happening inside now meeting we talk about the god that's ahead there's always somebody who's like well I was in a hotel room and I read the Old Testament by Gideon in the Gideon's Bible Old Testament my god what about that Old Testament well here's an example there's a phrase we often use her here in culture about something that's primitive and barbaric people will say you know what's that whole Old Testament eye-for-an-eye thing now here's this interesting it comes from the book of Exodus I for an eye tooth for a tooth at that time if somebody injured your donkey you could go after them and you can injure their donkey you could take out their cow you could kill their horse you could you could do all kinds of things to them and so when I for an eye tooth for a tooth was given it was actually given so that if you injure my donkey you owe me a healthy donkey the punishment must fit the crime so I'm not allowed to go on a donkey killing rampage you simply owe me however you wronged me and Latin is called Lex italianness it's the essentially the model for our it's the structure for our modern justice system I for an eye tooth for a tooth was a giant click forward towards more peace civility and justice in that day so when people talk about that primitive barbaric iPhone eye tooth for tooth when that command was given it was actually a step forward so the Bible was if you begin to look at how the world was at that time those were actually phenomenally progressive radical ideas the story of Jonah which often becomes a debate about whether or not dudes get swallowed by fish now the Assyrians were major persecutors of the Israelites they made the Jewish life like a living hell they were this massive superpower and they crushed the Hebrews and just made them miserable year after year after year tormented them and then this story comes of a God who says to this man Jonah I want you to go to Nineveh parenthesis Assyria and I want to show you to show them my redeeming love I want you to go to the Taliban and show them what my radical forgiving love looks like you know that stories about stories about what are we going to do about the people who have wronged us and made our lives miserable are we going to hope and pray that God gives them what they deserve or are we can allow God to use us to show them what the redeeming forgiving upside-down mysterious revolutionary love of God looks like are you with me that's actually a radical step forward a God who's with us present right here right now who's for you who desires your flourishing and thriving who's ahead of each of us pulling us into a better and better and better future one greater than we could ever imagine one story and then maybe we'll chat three weeks ago I was with my friend Carlton and we were working in his office second floor of an office building on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City and we're sitting up there we're seeing as desk we're actually looking at something on a computer monitor and all of a sudden you know that thing when you see something out of your eye and by the time you've turned you see sort of the outline of it but I I saw something and I turned and I watched a girl on a bike get hit by a car it happened like that like what is it well well but she had gotten knocked down and so I had like sitting there I was like I think I just saw a girl got hit by cars hit by car so I get out of my seat and I walk around the desk and the wall was all glass I go over to the wall and I'm like walking along the wall trying to see because there's a pickup in the way and I get down here and he's like we talking about weight talk I was like look at look at look at and then I get to the point where I could see and I see there's a girl laying in the intersection there's there's a body in the intersection so I run out of his office and through the sort of lobby area where people are sitting and it was like they're like a slow motion like call 9-1-1 even though i have a phone on me i don't know at that point i run out of the office across the parking structure and then down the short little street and this sort of those little tiny street ends at Ventura Boulevard and I get there and there's a yellow exterminator truck that's at a stop sign and it was about to turn right on a venture and a car was coming off a venture onto the side street I guess making a left turn and didn't see this girl crossing on a bike and hit the girl and knocked her across the street and she landed with her head about I'd say six or eight inches in front of the front tire of this pickup truck and the guy in the exterminator truck is moving the bike out of the street and she's just laying there so I get down on the concrete and I get up to her and this is what she is she can barely breathe so she sort of but what she's saying in between gasps is she's repeating will somebody please tell me that I'm going to be all right will somebody please tell me that I'm going to be all the way somebody please tell me that I'm going to be all right will somebody please tell me that I'm going to be all right so I just placed my hand on her shoulder and I just said there's a bunch of us here you're going to be alright okay now I want you to grab my hand and I want you to just take a deep breath take a little deeper breath and you just took okay good good good now just try to take an even deeper breath okay now can you take it even deeper breath I said now do you feel any pain she says yes I feel my leg and I look down and her leg is like flat on the pavement it's one of those like wow I wish I hadn't seen that and so I said okay once you take my hand I here's I want you to do when you feel the pain just grab my hand even tighter just grab it as tight as you can whenever you feel the pain I'll squeeze show me you can squeeze it so she squeezes it and she says I said okay now now keep breathing stay we're you're gonna be okay you're gonna be all right and I'll breathe now squeeze my hand as hard as you can whenever you feel a pain and she starts squeezing it and so we're just doing this we're just you're gonna be okay just breathe just breathe okay next time try a little bigger little deeper breath and she says will you please call my boyfriend and tell him I got hit by a car I said well okay where's your phone and she says it's in my pocket so I take her phone out of her back pocket which is legal I guess in that situation and I say okay isn't here is he in your favorite she's like no in context and she gives me his name and so I flipped through when I find him and I call him and I just say hi my name is Rob Susanna your girlfriend's just been hit by a car she's going to be I start telling him and you can he's all of a sudden like I'm like 12 seconds into my thing and all of a sudden he realizes I think about later he Rises he's not being Punk'd he said call my word what and so I like okay so we'd like to count four four zero zero that you're a Boulevard will wait here she'd like you to come as fast as you can ex cetera et cetera and then I put the phone back in her backpack and she uh she was going to be oh okay she later when I realized that she was going to be okay and they came and eventually the people came apart with him like I wonder where Carl where Carlton go and I look up Carlton is in the intersection directing traffic director mm-hmm directing traffic later I thought about it when they then they put this huge cast and like within like seven or ten minutes everybody in a red truck was there and was amazing the saw the pros took over and later I thought about it like now that you know now that I know she's going to be okay like I totally thought it would be brilliant to like call the boyfriend to be like okay here's the deal your girlfriend just got hit by a car but that's not your real problem dude your real problem you're not in her favourites you know so yeah dude she's gonna be fine but I don't know about you man so we're down there we're sort of in the pavement we're sort of on the pavement when I'm holding her hand and and her hair is sort of splayed out on the concrete and just breathe and the guy who hit her comes gets out of his car he pulled over and he comes over and he says to Carlton is she gonna be okay is she okay and Carlton says no she's not okay obviously and the guy says guy who hit her probably 70 70 he says I was just coming home from cancer treatment is that our world or what now here's what happened to me I don't know her I don't know the other woman who came and got down on her knees I don't know the turbinate exterminator truck guy guy who is coming home from cancer treatment Carlton's directing traffic we got sirens in the background but here's what I was like it's really really holy like things became very still became very quiet actually there was this inexplicable sense that we were on holy ground and she matters that he matters we matter and this is a gift and this gift can be taken from you at any moment see for many people in our world especially religious people and especially religious people in the south I just added that last part God and when you talk about God generally veers into you have to do or believe or say the right stuff or it's going to get ugly and so God becomes who's right who's wrong who's in who's out who's with us who's not and I think we are at a moment where that has taken us down a bunch of roads that don't help and don't bring life and actually have made the world at times a much worse place Jesus I think that what's happening it's one thing to have the furniture in your brain arranged properly which is nice and helpful and very life-giving and important and crucial but it's another thing to see there are people who can quote Bible verses all day long and yet they do not see that which has been right in front of them the whole time and I guarantee the people you most respect who you most want to be like our people they see and when you're with them something about their presence you slow down something about the way he or she cooks a meal it slows you down and you find yourself reminded of certain things they see that which is right here right now it's one thing to be right it's not a thing to be a holy woman who finds God in all sorts of everyday routine mundane tasks I met a man the other day I was introduced in by a friend someone was out in the street thing and you meet somebody you know somebody I asked the guy what he doesn't he cleans houses for a living he's wearing a crisp white polo shirt I said really he says yes I clean houses I said well tell me about that and he says I am invited into people's homes to help make their home more clean and orderly and I can a high honor I said wow they must be fortunate to have somebody who cleans their house with that sense of sort of importance and he says oh no no I'm the one who's blessed that people will invite me in and let me try and help them have a better life and a more organized clean home and I'm listening to a man who cleans houses for who knows how many dollars an hour and I realize I'm in the presence of somebody who sees and he turns cleaning houses into something more beautiful than an orchestra or a sunset this is our invitation this is our invitation our invitation is to see the God who's with us right here right now who is for us and who is ahead of us calling me and you and you and you and you and you into a future better than we could ever imagine and that my brothers and sisters is what I'm talking about when I talk about God so you have time for a couple questions okay a might have a question just stand up and shout it out because if we give you a microphone you might go on forever if you stand up in keep it short anybody yes hi I'll repeat it maybe what was it like to meet with area pastors today in Nashville it was great and what's interesting to me is when you meet with pastors they always want to talk about the same things the same exact things pastors need to be reminded that that they sometimes what happens is a pastor ends up taking a paycheck to be a punching bag the congregation so it's important that pastors have boundaries and don't have 17 email exchanges with somebody about their interpretation of Revelation 15 because it's a drain a pastor is actually a sacred resource and pastors have to have voices that say to them listen there are certain ridiculous conversations you don't have to have do you know anything like you are lots of pastors spend an extraordinary amount of their energy dealing with complete nonsense and it actually helps people stay a little bit crazy instead of saying this is how we behave here this is how we honor each other and this is how we're going to do it but what I pastors are fascinating like even today they have questions about how do we tell the best story how do we tell this Jesus story in the new world we find ourselves in with passion and conviction and new and fresh ways I always want to talk to them about Sabbath I often asked them what days of the week they don't respond to emails because there's this sort of weird warp thing the devil doesn't take a vacation so we don't either and in our culture at least when I was growing up a pastor's kid sometimes meant oh you mean screwed up so I often talk to them about giving your family and your kids your best energies instead of giving your family and your kids the table scraps that are left over you know I mean once you've given them to the church Mike hit my kids my kids couldn't care less how many books I sell are you gonna be home to skate or not are we going surfing Sunday or not so generally those are the kinds of things we talk about but I met all sorts of fascinating people people are very interesting by the way by the way people who are interesting are always the same people who find the world interesting are you with me they're like if you find the world interesting and you find people interesting and you meet with people and when you meet with somebody who you ask them what they do and they tell you something and you have no idea what they're talking about that can either end the discussion or it can start it but my experience is then people have absolutely fascinating stories to tell many people don't get asked on a regular basis tell me more about that tell me more about that I met a guy who's an insurance adjuster recently who get that party started and so I was like wow that's a man okay so what do you how do you adjust a shirt insurance sir he said actually people call me when something breaks or collapses or falls apart which we all know what a hassle that is correct and here's what he's been trying to figure out what is the most how can I best help people when they call me with a claim and he's realized that some people just need to hear listen before we get to the claim I want you to know I can only imagine what a hassle this has been it's like people just go you know what I mean it's like releasing a valve and then everything just so to me that's the really compelling thing is what does it look like to find the depth and the kavod in everyday life which is the job what's one of the things pastors do is help people find the kavod in the everyday that's a good question yeah yeah yes all right what's your name DJ that's one of my mini nicknames okay thank you for that added detail that was kind of irrelevant but interesting okay great ministry not too dissimilar from yours but my question is is that what do you think you yourself or what we could do either individually or the people that we know to create that non zone I love it like I use that phrase that sort of no BS zone sort of like my own thing and you're like what can we do to create a know like like your gonna like I'm gonna see like a pamphlet with like four points and I good that's funny you spoke of it like it's a legitimate idea like it's like scholars have been talking about this for a while and I've just sort of you don't even need that was great that's the secret to public speaking just say it with authority and people be like oh okay yeah I mean okay here's the deal the stories that we tell shape us so if I visit your church and I hear stories about real people who are finding healing marriages in which there's been infidelity and they somehow managed to work through it the stories that you all tell will send me messages I'll pick it up I actually think that you have your brain you have the way in which you analyze things and pick them apart and the filter that you run things through but then there's what's called subcortical awareness which is all the radar in your body so how come a lot of women know when they're not safe my wife knows when she's not safe and she can't tell you how you know when somebody's lying correctly correct you know when this person who's talking you know when they're when they're actually talking about something they've experienced I've always said the whole church knows how the pastor's marriage is even if they never talk about it we just pick all this stuff it's like your body one of things I'm on the your body is a highly highly tuned radar system actually this is the power of you to is your brain for so many people the brain is the dominant filter through which they decide what's true or not and then bono comes along and goes oh and everybody goes oh and somehow like what did that one of those lyrics mean I have no idea but it was real and true and awesome Abbi why one of the powers of what bono does is he speaks to the rest of your being and some things you know and you can't explain how you know them but you still know they're true correct some things are true at a heart level so how do you create a kind of church like that people tell you you have people tell the kinds of stories where after a while we begin to realize wow this is a place where you can be who you are and we just pick that up in a thousand ways we pick up whether this gospel is an announcement of what we have to do to get in with God or an announcement of who we truly are like the Apostle Paul says at one point let us live up to what we've already attained well what you realize what's happening there is he saying the gospel is an announcement of who you actually are and you are invited to live in to your true self which is very different from Christians don't read their Bible and Christians don't evangelize and Christians like that's shame and guilt and manipulation that's trying to get you to do things or else God will come bring the heat which is very different than announcement which are you more motivated by or let's put it in parental terms when I'm with my kids there are two ways to parent my kids one is when they do something completely squirrely or nuts or in our case right now with the 12 and 14 year old boys showering regularly is somewhat crucial unbelievable like there are two ways from your parent when they do something how come you're always doing that or okay you're a bell we don't roll like that how come you're always doing that you know what that is that is a statement of identity how come this is who you are why are you this person which is very different from this is who you are and I want you to remind you who you are I guarantee the people who have most spoken to you and inspired you and shaped you where people who announced to you who they believe you are and it did it awakens something those words created a new world maybe I could be a teacher or scientist or whatever right you might know what I'm talking about interesting by the way when the ancient Hebrews talked about how God creates new world what is the method by which God creates speaks words create new worlds you hear something spoken about you and something bursts forth in you like that's who you see me I never saw myself like that maybe I am how many of you have had something affirmed about your gifting and talents that you hadn't even thought of and when enough people named it you began to actually see it in some way and it actually shapes sometimes the course of our whole lives so one of the so quick number one the kinds of stories that you tell over time you pick up what the stories are like and then is this a word about who we actually are or is this one more sort of guilt condemnation why aren't you which doesn't really actually shape us you can sure get a big crowd with that sort of thing because you can sort of slap people around and they go you can build whole giant ministries with lots of podcasts by just telling people how nasty their and how much God hates them and people get sort of a yeah tell it like it is doesn't care what people think but it doesn't actually shape your heart into an actual kind of person doing it for other reasons that's my best with that one my good man yes it this song okay if I could I'd like just to make a quick comment segue into a question yes there are no such things as quick comments putting like go on very true I was given Love Wins by Minister and yes at the time he said please do not tell anyone I gave you this because I may lose my job okay wait wait wait this Minister gave you porn or a book about God's love this is work it's really cool a pastor gave you one of my books and says don't tell anybody I gave this to you because I might get fired from my job exactly that's incorrect it's been 10 years literally by the way there's a shop in England I was doing a Q&A in England at central hall which is across the street from where Will and Kate were married and it's like like it's just packed to the rafters and I do this open Q&A with 2,000 people and the Brits when they ask questions they ask really long questions but their accents are so great and they're so intelligent as a friend of mine says the English still enjoy language and this one guy tells the story about going to buy my book somewhere and they don't have it anywhere in the store and he can't find it and he goes up to the front to ask about where he can find it and the cashier goes behind on the shelf and my books are in brown paper bags I love it I love it I'll have Velvet Elvis and some Jack Daniels oh so great I love it okay so anyway so anyway I I'm a preacher son Church of Christ my father wasn't the the radical you know you're going to hell because you're not Church of Christ but in the fourth grade the elder did tell me that my grandfather was going to hell because he did not attend church because he did not confess that quote/unquote Jesus was the son of God and in a certain ceremony and from there I spent 10 years putting heroin tomorrow and spent 10 years I'm going to rehab and spending all of my parents money and I sing hell in people's lives yeah yeah and I got to a point to where when Love Wins came out it articulated Rob hmm every question that I had and affirmed it and it gave me the courage to be able to say I'm not the only one who's thinking this and it led me to start my own spiritual base to rehab in which awesome it's a choice ok I'm getting out of the way and God's going to do the work here we're going to expand this all stars aren't here just for looks they start of a purpose we're all connected price level wins read this ok and you just tell me what you think because it's nothing but questions forget what you've heard and I guess my question to you is is I've evolved spiritually over the last 7 years I found myself becoming what I hated about the church I'm judging them because they won't change and open their minds and now I'm becoming bitter and I'm like well hold on a second that's what I despise about them so how do I raise my family in a church where my wife needs community she needs to be surrounded by people on Wednesdays and on Sundays were me I get my meat I get my Jesus time with people every single day I get Church with me and my best friend doing life together right I don't have to have that structure time but it doesn't meet her needs but by me those are quick questions about your wife no how do you raise a family with family when you're hearing a preacher talk okay universalism and this and that you're going to hell if you don't do this this and this I don't believe that then why you're there well because it creates a huge conflict because me and my wife are on to spiritual different levels okay and I don't need to be there but I'm not being the spiritual leader of my family if I'm not standing up and showing up you're a preacher's son yes no way yeah um okay okay okay by the way if you want to mentor something I'm ready to rock and roll dude I will pack my stuff up get on the bus and let's go rock and roll okay what's your name Bryan Perkins Bryan yeah Bryan Perkins there's like a thousand things in your question yeah you may need if it serves your wife well you may for a season need to go and just bring something to read you railing against the church isn't interesting it's not compelling you have work to do in the world helping people get clean from heroin cocaine drugs alcohol etcetera you have work to do and you need to do this work are we are we dialed in on that so here's the deal there will be a million ways to be distracted from the work that you have to do I have a friend who's been criticized a fair bit and you could spend all your time sort of it has nothing to do with the work I have to do I want to take care of my family I have a three-year-old daughter I want to spend time with my daughter my wife and kids we have these great friends and we have these long meals with lots of wine and we grill out and we live near the ocean so we all go surfing and then we have fish tacos and it's a beautiful life and I love it and then I have books I got to write and then I got to go come to Nashville and so I got stuff I got to do so I can spend all my time wandering and getting angry with the people who don't like what I do but it's absolutely irrelevant I don't google my name I don't go looking for blog fights because it's boring and irrelevant I met a couple four days ago in their late 20s early 30s and they came up to me in the woman the wife said I just found out that I have stage four cancer and as she says this her husband puts his arm on her and I his eyes are like clouded with tears and she said would you pray for us so this is where we actually live people who are trying to find God in the midst of stage four cancer with a woman in her late 20s and I was trained as a pastor so I was trying to try and help people find God and find resurrection from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and everything in between including stage 4 cancer so that's what I'm trying to do and I got like 4 books in my head and got this TV show we're working on I got this novel I got some other things I'd like to do so I try to do that so for you you got to stay absolutely honed in on this Kierkegaard said that a saint is the person who can will the one thing is the person there's a thousand things you could be doing but if you have this calling to work with special needs middle school students or if you have this calling to make landscapes really beautiful and sustainable or whatever it is then you have to go after that and you have to be RAZR folk laser focused on that now you have a family and you're trying to sort of Shepherd them along and if that brings your wife life then you and your wife have to work that one through the two of you have to work that one through and you may need to go for a season because it serves her well and you may need to just suck it up and decide I am gonna listen I am somehow not going to listen or I'm gonna check or I'm going to think about other things or I'm just going to honor what this person's voice does in her life but I am NOT going to just moan about it every Sunday afternoon at lunch or you know what honey I'm so glad you're doing that I am going to go fishing or build a raft or I don't know what you do in your spare time just making stuff up but like you just say you know once you go for a season and always speak of seasons because sometimes what happens is people like is it always going to be like this for a reason for a season so what we're doing right now this is what's working for us right now this is what season of life we're in right now it may last six weeks it may last six years it may last forever it may last for two weeks but the so it may involve all sorts of things but the really interesting thing for you and your wife is to explore what does this look like for this season and just say to your wife here's where I'm at and I just can't do that for a while I just I just can't and I think if you take the first move and say I need you to help me out here because this is where I'm at and this isn't bringing me life you may be surprised at how she responds but that's the really interesting compelling thing and but whatever you do if you become the guy who's angry with fundamentalists it's not interesting it's just kind of boring actually but you telling us about the latest person who's gotten clean from heroin now that's interesting and we'll give you the mic all night for that yeah yes hi back there with the hand way up okay Michael hi Michael oh there's a mic okay oh my name is Michael I'm from Kentucky I love everything that you've ever written I found Christ on Easter with Velvet Elvis so it was awesome Wow and my question to you Rob is you know you have been the forefront of this movement in this generation for us young people to find Christ and you talked about in your book Velvet Elvis about repainting the faith about yeah argh you are wrestling with the truths of this ancient text and my question to you is what would you recommend for someone like myself or other young students you are aspiring to go into the ministry who want to do that such thing yeah okay first off get a job in a place where you're the only Christian whether you're cleaning toilets or it's a bar or it's an accounting firm I don't know what it is get a job where you're around people who have no idea what you're talking about because otherwise you may end up in a talking about a bunch of things that no one cares about so the goal is you always have you are in at honest authentic friendships with people who you are actually hearing the kinds of things your interactions to everyday real people otherwise you run the risk of veering off into a little subculture that has its own little heroes and songs and books and doesn't really have anything to say to how the world really is secondly I would become a student of culture so why does People magazine sell millions of copies there are three or four arcs to every People magazine story she's either found love had her heart broken losing weight gaining weight finding a new love gaining weight for a baby having baby showing baby pictures how fast can she get the way there's only a couple of arts are you with me and actually it's in the pop and the trivial that you see where humanity really lives does that make sense and so you want to become a student of what it means to be human for example for roughly ten years starting in 2001 the US could not find a man in a cave the greatest military superpower the world has ever seen could not find Osama bin Laden who was responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Americans correct could not bring this man to justice during this time this 10-year stretch what was the most popular television show that came out of nowhere and they had to expand it into multiple cities CSI New York Miami LA and what is the plot of every single CSI episode they find a body and then what happens for the rest of the show highly competent trained professionals bring the killer to justice and this show is so popular that they have to have other cities where the same plot unfolds so the exact moment like really I wonder if they're gonna find him this what what was that like looks like this killer struck a little late or whatever okay so you can call Bible verses and that's very powerful and really and it can do a really amazing thing but when you become a student of the human condition and you connect those two and you realize there is a need for justice that is built into who we are as human beings and if we can't find justice in a particular area in the real world and that story we can't hear told we will make up that story to RIA form it's important to us correct so that that you are now becoming a student of how people actually live and how we're wired and if you can call those things out now you're onto something so when you meet people I would learn to be a student of people and ask them questions and find out all sorts of things where do they where do they come from how do they know why are they doing what they're doing what do they love what do they hate who are they related to how do they think about family religion politics geography how do they think about when you become a student of the world you begin to actually maybe have something to say to people and then thirdly I would find a community and I would find somebody who's doing what you want to do and I would beg them to let you follow them around and I would just say man I will take out the trash in order to be around maybe wherever you live there is somebody in the neighborhood who's a pastor who you have like I want to do that and just say to them could I follow you around on Sundays and the best thing you can do is just get a front row seat and just watch and observe and and then remember that there's no such thing as failure that's like six things when in doubt just go fourthly there's no seeing as failure but yeah there's a couple pots great question yes hi Knoxville at UT um really love that you challenge them a whole bunch they're ready go we're great you're goin Lee um I'm interested in how in you and how you came to this point like how do you go from Wheaton and fuller to LA and Love Wins is there was there someone in your life that saw something different it was it just life experience how do you move from what from the outside seems like a really closed culture of angelical ISM and that sort of thing - not at all like how does that work it's funny you should ask in my new video series your best day oh wait that's taken I don't know okay when I was in college my friends and I were in a band called ton bundle but we put a blank line in front of the ton so people could put their own name so one gig we were we had this picture of us dressed up as nuns with shotguns and we were nun ton bundle but I happened to go but there was this whole scene that exploded when I was in college and my roommate started a an improv comedy group called seafood rodeo in which they would reenact scenes from Vijay in the bear with folding chairs and funkin Harrod where musicians that had a bunch of albums out my college roommate was Ian s : who's from a band called all-star United he's now a producer here in Nashville but it was like an egg making stuff and it was like humming with let's try this let's try that can we actually fit all the furniture from the lobby of the dorm in the elevator so so so to meet so my experience of like in a Christian my first Christian commune I was really a part of was at college and it was alive and people were doing art exhibits and they were doing this one guy named Charley Mason was doing like 20 foot wide oil paintings of monsters eyeballs and so we convinced them to let us use them to cover the walls of our apartment and it was all about there's something that there's stuff to make let's make some more stuff so it didn't feel repressive and confined to me and then one summer I spent two months and I backpacked through Europe on five dollars a day and like slept out under like when I couldn't find a place I convinced people let me sleep in their closets slept out on the roof of castles for free I'm the turret part because they would let us up there although they didn't know it so I was just interested in the world so I just tried to explore so I've always just found things interesting and always just sort of gone where the neck there's never been a plan it was always just what's the next thing we have to try and I always at a young age probably the real answer your question at a young age I had a series of experiences in which I became deeply aware of a resurrected Jesus who was real and that I was loved and I was going to be okay so I early didn't come in through a catechism or a doctrine or a dogma I came through this this very very simple child like God loves you and Jesus came to show you that love and in Jesus world doesn't matter if you're not the best athlete or the best student there's some stuff for you to do so when people talk about your doctrine or your theology or whatever I I didn't come into it through that door I came into it through a very real experience that life is worth living and you ought to unfurl your energies in the world so like some idea of what people might not like that or the institution or the system or you might it's always been to be honest with you totally irrelevant just doesn't I got stuff that I find interesting and when I discovered that other people found this interesting it was like no I thought I'd like I seriously feel like I still like I've won a lot like the fact that you all will come out here tonight I don't even have words for it and the fact that I would like give they give me like a microphone and I get to talk and you all listen Abraham Joshua Heschel said he said I didn't ask for success I asked for wonder so I don't like like set like books or New York Times bestseller stuff or all that that's nice but I get to make things and then share them with people like you and you all have in a very real way made an amazing life possible for me and so I get to do that so I actually think the question behind the question behind the question suffering raises lots of questions when you go through something car wrecks and cancer raises lots of questions you know as a pastor blessing raises just as many questions and so does Grace when really good things happen it can be just as traumatizing why do I get to do this so for a while there I was really I just couldn't make sense of it I don't understand why I get this great of a life and then I decided to stop wondering and just enjoy so that's really the life more joy than ever and your question those of you who are like what about the critics what can you say about me now like I'm a heretic here's the thing about criticism here's the thing if you just keep at it you just keep doing the thing you need to do you wake up one day and you realize that you're still here and whoever has a hundred thousand Twitter followers and they said whatever and so-and-so blogged about whatever and so-and-so is it not going to support you anymore and you're still here you're still here and what it does when you realize that when you realize wow you can say that about me well that's creative I don't interview their day and they're like your social such critic says this I was like you know that is that's a nerf bullet seriously seriously and what it does it's hard to explain if you're willing to go all the way into the center of it and the trick is to keep a thick skin but a soft heart that's the art of it but if you're if you do that sort of work you you come out with this lightness and you come out with this sense of like man it's suddenly now starting to get starting to get fun so I have no idea how I got there and I know I knew where we're headed but um man it's a good time to do one more a couple more oh okay like I'm gonna wrap it up the only question that I have well I have many but one is why can't we continue with these many questions in the next room because the people from Barnes & Noble or want to know why you're not selling books and so I'm not buying my books so let me just say a couple things to wrap it up sure I'm so glad you came tonight my experience has been that people want to talk about the things that matter most and I don't know what sort of stuff you dragged through the door about God but if you're part of a church or a community or religion or you consider yourself devoted to something if it doesn't give you life if it doesn't free you if it doesn't open you up if it doesn't make you more and more aware of the holiness and the sanctity of every moment then leave it behind and find something that does life is short and it does matter and you matter and we all desperately need each other I can't begin to say to you what it is like for me to come miles from home and have you all show up it I can't even put it into words so thank you for giving me a great life peace okay go this way you

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 141,731

Rating: 4.4946003 out of 5

Keywords: Vanderbilt University, rob bell, religion

Id: xNo6ZyiglAY

Length: 110min 48sec (6648 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2013