Hillsong, Rob Bell, etc.

Over the last few days I’ve been perusing the websites of Rob Bell and his Mars Hill Church, and Hillsong Church and all the various spin-offs from Hillsong (like Hillsong United and I-Heart), because these have been mentioned favorably by some of my students. So I thought I would post a few of my thoughts here.

First, I can never look (or be) as cool as Rob Bell. His presentation is catchy. But what about content? It’s here that I found his sermons and Nooma videos to be a bit lacking. Some of his sermons have material that is outright wrong (like getting 1st Century history wrong), but the main problem I see is that issues are dealt with rather shallowly. I kept having questions about issues that weren’t addressed. I found the Nooma video on women to be particularly unsatisfying because there was so much that was left unsaid. But this really doesn’t matter because the important thing is that we DO – do good things and not worry so much about doctrine and belief. You can have correct beliefs and still not be obedient to God.

Second, I can never be as hip as the Hillsong United group. Again, they present themselves in such a way that many find them attractive. But what are they actually saying? They seem to be coming from a place similar to Rob Bell. There’s lots of beautiful people doing beautiful things like saving the planet, fighting AIDS, and guaranteeing health care. And they’re doing this because God would have us to do this.

Now how could anyone be against young, attractive people trying to do good things because God said so?

A good example of this is on the I-heart.org website. It’s a list of top 20 things wrong in the world. The thing that’s wrong with the list is that it looks like it’s been written by a bunch of liberal politicians looking for votes. There are at least three major things left off this list – abortion, Islamic terrorism, and the continuing threat of Communism/Atheism. Fix any one of these problems and you’ll take maybe half of the items off I-heart’s list. In other words, this list is politically naive.

Or you could knock off the whole list by preaching the gospel, but that apparently isn’t considered.

But politics aside, this sort of thing is what religious liberals have been pushing since the early 1900′s. They ignore the major threat to all people on the face of the earth – an eternity spent suffering the wrath of God – and concentrate on relieving earthly stresses. Except they usually don’t do a very good job of relieving earthly stresses, because their theology doesn’t seem to take God very seriously. If we ignore the only thing that will save both body and soul from hell, it will not matter one bit whether we gave to some United Nations agency to stop global warming. Compassion is not measured by how many programs you have at church. True compassion consists in relieving people of their truly greatest burden – sin.

As a side note, I signed up for some Bible Study group on one of the Hillsong sites (which I can’t find now because the sites are so poorly organized) and sent in a couple of questions. Over a week has gone by and still no response.

To summarize, here’s what I found. I’m not young and cool. Rob Bell and all the various Hillsong manifestations are very cool. Both Rob Bell and Hillsong are light on Scripture and heavy on “doing something.” Both verge towards liberalism, with its denial of Scripture in act, if not in fact. There’s a lot of talk about God, but not much about Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Because of this, I can’t recommend either Rob Bell or Hillsong for those who want to take Jesus Christ and Scripture seriously.