EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE
Rob Bell - *ON LOCATION
*Los Angeles, California
“Joy contains the full spectrum of human experience.” - Rob Bell
Rob Bell was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential people in the world in 2011; a global list that included the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Beyoncé, The Koch Brothers, Oprah, Ai Wei Wei, Michelle Obama, Larry Page from Google, and Julian Assange of Wikileaks among others. If that’s not enough, Rob’s also toured with Oprah and has been profiled in the New Yorker.
And to really set the stage for this episode I have to take you back to before this podcast started earlier this year. I had begun to imagine a wish-list of people I wanted to talk to as potential guests. A crazy variety of names would flash across my mind. Most of the early names that I came up with seemed entirely plausible; mostly people local to Grand Rapids like my friends, artists I knew or a whole host of interesting people that I’ve crossed paths with as a photographer over the last 20+ years.
Eventually, right next to the “plausible” list, I started another column of names that seemed like a complete stretch…or at least really IM-plausible people to have on as guests. As both of these lists grew, this exercise of filling the “implausible” list seemed more and more silly to me. I mean, I didn’t even technically HAVE a podcast yet. And at that point I could have written ANYBODY’s name down because absolutely NOTHING was at stake. And I remember saying to myself, “yeah, right” immediately after I wrote the name “Rob Bell” down on the page.
Rob founded one of the largest mega-churches in Michigan in Mars Hill. He had written internationally best selling books while a pastor there. But eventually Rob left the church he started and moved to Los Angeles to pursue “other opportunities” after elders began challenging that his teachings were no longer “biblical” enough for fundamentalists to stomach. He was labeled a “heretic” when his book “Love Wins” came out and was more or less unanimously ostracized by Christian leadership across the country.
Rob is a complicated figure where I come from. For some people he’d become an iconic spiritual hero and renegade. And for others he symbolized a cautionary tale of someone who had lost their way in Christianity.
Roughly eight months after writing Rob’s name down on my list, I found myself in Los Angeles shaking hands with him on the sidewalk in front of his home. And it felt a bit surreal. We talked for just over an hour and then we made some portraits together in his backyard.
Stream this episode in the player above, or watch select video excerpts of our conversation under the portrait gallery below.
“THE HERETIC” Official Trailer - Documentary by Andrew Morgan
This *ON LOCATION episode is exclusively sponsored by:
Metro Health | University of Michigan Health and Dr. Peter Hahn
VIDEO EXCERPTS OF BRIAN AND ROB IN LOS ANGELES
