Blurring the Lines of Orthodox Christianity – Rob Bell, Love Wins, and Pastoral Firings

Blurring the Lines of Orthodox Christianity – Rob Bell, Love Wins, and Pastoral Firings


I finished reading Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins, on Saturday morning. I intend to share some thoughts on Bell’s book over the coming weeks – but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with such good intentions. Then again, according to Bell, there is no such hell for a road to lead to, except in a subjective, this-worldly sense. But I digress …

Today I wanted to share an interesting news story that my wife forwarded to me on Friday. Here is the link (http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/03/pastor_fired_for_backing_rob_b.html) to a story out of Grand Rapids. A Methodist pastor (Chad Holtz) in North Carolina was fired last week. The immediate precipitating cause was his expression of support for Rob Bell and the conclusions of his book, although the news story hints at deeper issues lurking under the surface. There are a couple of intriguing questions that are posed through this story.

(1) Is the Christian church intended to be, as the fired pastor intimates, “open hearts, open minds, open doors”? What does that mean, historically and presently?

(2) Is the church “threatened” by people who challenge “the way we’ve always thought”?

My short answer to both main questions is an emphatic NO – at least not in the way that pastor Holtz suggests.