ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
April 14, 2026
In Sunday’s Sermon, I mentioned Rob Bell’s book, “Everything is Spiritual.” In the book, Rob gives a description of his first time giving a sermon. He wrote,
“I had heard people give messages and teachings and sermons over the years. I usually didn’t find them that compelling. But this, this SPIRITUAL TALK THING I had stumbled into—this was part guerrilla theater and part performance art and part recovery meeting and part poetry and part subversive rhetoric. I was captivated.”
For Rob, preaching isn’t just one thing. There is complexity, or at least there should be. All you need to do is read scripture, and in one moment you’re reading beautiful poetry and in the next you’re being smacked upside the head by a prophetic message. And then on the next page, it is something wildly different. Some people have found it strange that I have preached as a pirate, offered a sermon as a Distrustworthy Car Salesman, did one in the form of a letter like we had received something directly from the Apostle Paul, and there was even one I did while throwing a pot on a potter’s wheel. Maybe these were strange, but so is the Bible… in a really wonderful and transformative way. To share the Gospel with our wonderfully diverse and wacky world with only one approach and one voice would be a disservice to this world. The standard was given to us in scripture, and now we only need to think with the same level of creativity.
Continue to inspire us as we contemplate the different ways and unique voices by which we can share your Gospel with the world, O Lord Jesus. Amen.
