Will The “Real” Rob Bell Please Stand Up

I’m sure you have seen all of the mess with the upcoming book from Rob Bell. An interesting facet of the whole thing is the Twitter handle of this Rob Bell is @realrobbell. John Piper, et. al. bid this Rob Bell (@robbell and web guy in the UK) farewell a couple of weeks ago!

First of all, let’s be nice, right? Second of all, if you are going to bid a man “farewell” from “the faith,” make sure you are talking to the right guy! Unbelievable.

Rachel Held Evans interviewed the web designer Rob Bell last week on her blog. What a picture of how late to the party the church has been in communicating the love and grace of God…WITH GRACE and LOVE!

Some of my favorite quotes are…

Q:  I’m just going to get right down to the question everyone’s asking. Rob Bell, are you a universalist?

A: Not entirely. I’m a web designer/marketer (@robbell). You must have me mistaken for the “real” Rob Bell (@realrobbell), the US preacher.

Oh. So if you’re not the “real” Rob Bell, then who are you?

I’m the unreal one, obviously! Having taken solid form to prove my “realness,” I live in the North of England where I help businesses grow through better use of the Internet. I do web design, cloud computing, mobile computing – all that nerdy exciting stuff that’s changing the physical world around us. I’m a real technophile, and I pretty much live online after I broke my back some years ago.

Do you know much about John Piper?

I know he denounced me accidentally, intending it to be other Rob, but that’s it. Someone asked me to fight him, but I’m non-violent, so I asked a UFC fighter to be my stand-in.

What is your religious affiliation? Do you have strong opinions about issues related to heaven and hell? I’m confirmed CofE (Church of England), but am not a practising Christian. I read a lot of stuff on other religions and spirituality, but my own belief system is very complex and personal, challenging and ever-developing. I stick to the tenet “it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you do good by people and do no harm.”

I believe in higher intelligences.  I’m not sure about heaven and hell, though. I was ‘lucky'(?) enough to die when I was 19 in a waterskiing accident, albeit only for a couple of minutes. No lights or tunnels, just blackness. That was my experience.

What, if anything, have you’ve learned about American evangelicalism through all of this?

They don’t look at Twitter profiles before sending out @ messages, and they come in droves… 🙂

This reminds me of one of my heroes who was my seminary professor. He mentioned one of the “leading” preachers of the day one day in class and said, “I know him personally…that legalistic poop! Don’t be like that guy!” Now, I don’t care who you are, that is funny!

Can’t we all just get along??

Read Rachel’s full interview with Rob Bell…the web designer.