“California. Surfing. Seeing God in all things, which is a line from a Jesuit. What could be better?”
That’s Rob Bell, one of America’s most influential – and controversial – Christian pastors, describing his new life in Orange County.
Bell, who just two years ago was on the cover of Time magazine igniting a religious firestorm by questioning the existence of hell, now spends his days making breakfast for his kids in Laguna Beach, walking his dog, writing – and checking the surf report.
“An hour in the water can change your whole day,” he said.
Bell, 42, moved to Orange County from Grandville, Mich., a little more than a year ago. Grandville was where Bell founded a megachurch and made a worldwide name for himself as pastor to an emerging generation of young evangelical Christians hungry for a fresher, brainier, hipper take on their faith.
The move to Orange County was both an escape and a homecoming.
Following publication of his 2011 best-seller “Love Wins,” which raised the possibility that God redeems all of humanity, not just Christians, Bell’s job as leader of Mars Hill, the church he founded in 1998, suddenly became untenable.
He was a lightning rod, called a heretic by evangelical leaders. His church was bombarded with demands for explanation. He submitted to grillings on national television.
In December 2011, he stepped down as pastor of Mars Hill, a move he made by choice and without pressure from the church. He then moved with his wife and three children to Laguna Beach, where several longtime friends already lived – and where the surf was good and practically no one knew who he was or what he looked like.
In Laguna, Bell took up a new life as a full-time writer, speaker and host of occasional leadership seminars he calls “Craftlabs.” At the seminars, up to 50 pastors and other Christian leaders pay $500 per person to spend a weekend with Bell at a beach motel honing whatever creative projects they happen to be working on at the time.
Then the pastors all go surfing.
Bell, who grew up in Michigan, had been enamored of California ever since childhood visits to Pasadena, where his mother was raised. He fell in love with surfing while a graduate student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.
Living near the water, he said, became almost a spiritual necessity.
“You try to put it into words, and you can’t,” he said of the divine presence he feels riding swells off Laguna Beach or San Onofre.
Actually, Bell has tried to put the feeling into words. He is stepping back into the limelight – and maybe the maelstrom – with a new book set for publication Tuesday.
The book, titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About God,” challenges conventional notions of God as an otherworldly divine being set apart from humanity, opposed to science and insistent on a conservative interpretation of the Bible.
Instead, Bell argues that God is more clearly perceived during moments like, well, surfing. One of the book’s most arresting passages describes an encounter Bell had with a whale a few hundred yards from the Orange County shoreline.
“You (become) aware of something else going on, something more, something just below the surface,” he writes. “Something you’d say was sublime or glorious or transcendent.”
Bell said he has “no idea” whether his new book will inspire the same backlash as “Love Wins.”
But there’s plenty of fodder for critics. Bell writes that the God offered in many churches these days comes across as “small, narrow, irrelevant, mean and sometimes just not that intelligent.”
The examples he cites of this “Oldsmobile” version of God (his term) all come from the same conservative evangelical circles that rejected “Love Wins.”
Bell writes about unnamed Christian leaders declaring that women can’t become pastors, that gays are going to hell and that the world was created in six days regardless of “what science says.”
In place of this depiction, Bell offers a God revealed in the wonders of quantum physics and, in the person of Jesus, embodying a radical love that challenges the complacency of religious institutions.
God, Bell writes, is “with, for and ahead” of humanity, even when the church, or at least some churches, hold humanity back.
Following publication of “Love Wins,” Bell professed to be taken aback by the vehemence of his critics.
This time, he said, he’s ready, especially for accusations that he strays from biblical orthodoxy. In fact, he said, it’s conservatives who substitute their own biases for what’s really in Scripture.
He says the people who quote the Bible have a thousand contradictions going on in their quotes. “But they say, ‘Take it exactly as it is.'”
Bell said he draws inspiration from Jewish rabbinical scholars, who regard Scripture “like a gem, and you turn the gem and you get a different light pattern as you turn it. It’s a playful thing. It’s this very probing, joyous, exploratory relationship with the world and things of the divine.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Bell’s own relationship with the divine these days has a lot less to do with church than it used to. Bell does not lead a congregation in Laguna Beach and he is not an official member of a church there.
“There’s a preacher around the corner I really like,” he said. “I have a tight community of friends here, and we live life together in a deeply meaningful way.”
In part, this arms-length relationship with his local church stems from a desire not to bring unwanted attention to a congregation. In part it reflects Bell’s evolving understanding of God.
“Jesus comes to help us see the divine in the here and now,” he said. “I was pastor of a megachurch and lots of people came, and there were book tours and interviews and films. That’s fine. But I’ll take seeing (the divine) every day, which is washing dishes with my kids and walking the dog and interacting with someone I just met.”
Bell is at work on a television talk show he described as “me and things I’ve done put into a blender. I’ll talk and interview people and interact with a crowd.” He and his wife, Kristen, are working together on a new book.
Through it all he surfs. He owns seven boards, some long, some short. Asked to name places he’s visited since moving to California, he listed five beaches.
His talk show might make it on the air, or it might not. (Another show Bell was working on, a drama co-written with the producer of the show “Lost,” is currently in limbo.) His book might ignite another firestorm, or it might not.
Bell voices little worry. “I couldn’t be happier,” he said. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”
Contact the writer: jhinch@ocregister.com or twitter.com/jimkhinch
