"Velvet Elvis"-DAY NINE

"People who are starting churches, or want to someday, often ask me when I knew it was time to do it. And I actually have a coherent answer: I knew it was time when I no longer cared if it was successful."

The above statement made by Rob Bell had to be one of my favorite quotes of Chapter 4 of "Velvet Elvis". In this chapter, he opens up a lot about how Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan got its start, along with the successes and pitfalls that went with it. I really appreciated his openness in this chapter.

Bell says the idea for planting a church started when his family was living in Los Angeles. They visited a church they heard about called Christian Assembly. It turned out to be an extremely rewarding experience.

"It was like nothing I had experienced before. This community was exploding with creativity and life-it was like people woke up on Sunday morning and asked themselves, 'What would I like to do today more than anything else? How about going to a church service?' I could not get my mind around this at first. This concept was so new and fresh-people who gathered because they wanted to."

While attending Christian Assembly on a regular basis, Bell concluded that this was the church should be about...a group of people desperate to experience God...a group of people who wanted to connect and grow closer to God without all the fluff and hype. Using this idea, Bell planted a church with his wife Kristin.

Bell describes the shock at having over 1,000 people attend the first service at Mars Hill with NO promotion. Over the next couple of years, the congregation grew to over 10,000 people. They eventually had to purchase an abandoned mall to fit all the people in.

Unfortunately, the more the church grew, Bell started to feel overwhelmed. It felt like he had to be a "superpastor" and please as many people as possible. It got to the point where he hid in a storage closet between services one Sunday and didn't want to continue!

He decided he needed to get help and find out what the source of the problem was. He started seeing a therapist with his wife. The therapist told him, "Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it." It was at that point Bell realized that he was trying too hard to please other people instead of working on who God made him to be.

I repeat...I admire his honesty!!

Bell applies his story to our lives, because all of us deal with something like this. "I meet so many people who have superwhatever rattling around in their head. They have this person they are convinced they are supposed to be, and their superwhatever is killing them. They have this image they picked up over the years of how they are supposed to look and act and work and play and talk, and it's like a voice that never stops shouting in their ear. And the only way to not be killed by it is to shoot first. Yes, that is what I meant to write. You have to kill your superwhatever. And you have to do it right now. Because your superwhatever will rob you of today and tomorrow and the next day until you take it out back and end its life."

Bell refers to the story in Luke 8:43-48 about the woman who had an illness for 12 years and touched Jesus' cloak to be healed. Jesus told her to go in peace. Bell says that most of us think peace means an "absence of conflict", but there's much more to it than that.

"Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It's the presence of the wholeness, completeness. So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is placing the blessing of God on ALL of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God's presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or soul-it involves all of you. God's desire is for us to live in harmony with him-body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions-every inch of our being."

The bottom line is Jesus wants to heal us of what is ailing us...not just physical healing, but spiritual as well. In order for us to be healed, we need to be willing to open up to Him about the junk in our lives and let Him restore us.

Thanks for reading!