Why doesn’t Ed Dobson do something about Rob Bell?

Every time soon-to-be-former-pastor Rob Bell makes news I get hits on the older article with the title above, and I need to update this and be done with it.

Ed Dobson did at some point address the ruckus surrounding Love Wins in a brief blog post. The blog was associated with his book A Year of Living Jesusly, was apparently sponsored by his publisher, and went away some months ago, taking the response with it. I am attempting to reconstruct it from memory; it went a little like this:

1. Dobson said he hadn’t read Love Wins.
2. He referred readers to Mark 9:39-40 [NKJV].

I take this to be an act of professional courtesy rendered by Dobson to Bell; it’s a sort of non-answer answer that usually means that one pastor has better things to do than dirty his hands with the controversy surrounding another pastor. I don’t understand why pastors do this, but I haven’t e.g. been in Dobson’s shoes and can’t imagine what they’re like.

So I’m going to consider the matter closed unless and until. Thanks for asking.

I don’t really have anything to say at the moment about Bell’s departure from Mars Hill in Grand Rapids. I’m always puzzled when high-profile long-time scandal-free pastors leave the pulpit, and I haven’t collected enough case studies to make any sense of what I’ve seen.

Why doesn’t Ed Dobson do something about Rob Bell?

I have a very short list of spiritual heroes. Ed Dobson is one of them. Sources close to me who know this sent me a link to this rarely-watched YouTube clip promoting a movie by/about Dobson:

And I thought “Man that video looks really familiar. What does that remind me of?” It’s not just the color palette; the scene composition, the camera angles, the beats, the story-telling choices, etc. It’s almost as if the same person shot, produced, and edited another video I’ve seen recently.

I know what it was; it was the promo for that Rob Bell book everybody and his brother can’t stop talking about. If you haven’t already seen it I’ll spare you; if you have then you know what I’m talking about regarding the style.

I love Ed Dobson and there’s nothing he could do that would ever change that. I am grateful to him for being the pulpit speaker he was my first couple of years at Liberty University, and for having the good sense to leave Moral Majority and go back to the pulpit. I sorely missed him after he left. As most people know, Dobson left Liberty for Calvary Church, Grand Rapids, MI, and served there for about twenty years, until his condition (arterial lateral sclerosis) made it impossible for him to continue. During that time Calvary participated in the planting of Mars Hill Bible Church, now pastored by Rob Bell. Bell is the author of four books, is one of the public faces of the Emerging/Emergent Church movement, and may or may not be a universalist.

I have been puzzled why Ed Dobson has done some of the things he has done; his 2008 appearance on Good Morning America not least among them:

And I don’t understand why someone as solidly theologically conservative as Dobson, as close to Bell as he must be, and as special (for lack of a better term) as he has become during his illness doesn’t confront Bell in the manner appropriate: private, with witnesses, and if need be publicly, in that order. Perhaps his ongoing struggle with ALS makes that difficult-to-impossible. I don’t know.

The two are clearly close enough to use the same video producer, after all.

There are lots of things I can’t know about Dobson and Bell, obviously. But I am led to wonder if perhaps James White’s approach to Bell in a recent episode of The Dividing Line [link] isn’t close to the mark. White’s analysis, basically, is that Bell, having escaped from the fundamentalist fold, doesn’t know what to do exactly with his new-found freedom and in the process of taking it for a test drive has misapplied the theological concept of grace, etc. and ended up in the universalist ditch. I don’t know; I don’t much care; but it’s a helpful and cautionary explanation nonetheless.

This is a common problem; see e.g. Jason Hood’s recent analysis of grace misunderstood as antinomianism [link].

Regardless, I wish Dobson would take some of the precious time he has left and devote it to Bell. I’d hate to think he’d wandered off in a universalist direction too.

loving Jerry Falwell

One of my friends recently moved back to Lynchburg after about a decade away and described the relationship between Liberty and Lynchburg as follows: “nearly everyone in town either loves the ministry or hates it; if you mention it to someone you find out pretty quickly which side they’re on.” Unfortunately that’s something that was also true of Jerry; he wasn’t someone who invited a lot of nuance and ambivalence, and he was such a strong personality and so quotable that whichever side you were on he gave you frequent and ample reinforcement.

I guess that puts me in the small and mostly quiet minority of people who loved Jerry but occasionally found him difficult to love.

First of all Jerry was sort of a freak of nature. He apparently had a photographic memory; so far as I know he never used a teleprompter or spoke from notes. He was a larger than life personality and a natural politician. He had two characteristics that many successful politicians had: an encyclopedic memory for names, faces, and personal stories, and the ability to speak to one person and make them feel like they were the only person in the room. He was apparently a genuinely warm and happy person.

He had an eye for talent and apparently didn’t mind if people who worked for him succeeded. He was personally loyal to a fault and valued loyalty in others. He was personally genuine and sincere. See for example Larry Flynt’s comments about him here:

He was something of a natural in the pulpit; he had a great preaching voice and made good use of it. He had a good sense of what his audience would understand. He was without doubt a man of vision and not afraid of risk.

People who knew him personally say he was a man of great faith and a man of prayer. One of my spiritual heroes knew him personally and spent a lot of time around him, on the clock and off, throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, and said he learned a lot about prayer from watching Jerry. He was by all accounts faithful to his wife, and I have to believe after seeing many high-profile preachers raise children who were hellions that it’s to Jerry’s credit that none of his three children are divorced.

Finally, Jerry was on occasion willing to admit he was wrong. Maybe not as publicly and thoroughly as we all might have liked, but he wasn’t as strict an adherent to the “never apologize, never explain” as many of his peers.

In a later post I’ll take up the less comfortable topic of the things that made him difficult to love. This probably won’t happen tomorrow.

more about Elmer Towns

Elmer Towns has a bunch of the books he’s written on his website in PDF form, available for free download. Of the 76 items there, a handful are study guides, and he has Church Aflame available in two parts, leaving roughly 69 books. Of those, by my count 19 or 20, or about 28%, are devoted to various aspects of church growth: church growth techniques, Sunday School techniques, studies of fast-growing churches, historical revivals, etc. And it turns out I was wrong about him being outside the mainstream of the Church Growth Movement: his Practical Encyclopedia of Church Growth is replete with references to Donald McGavran, former missionary to India and founder of the movement. Oddly enough I didn’t find any references to management guru Peter Drucker; it’s entirely possible that I didn’t look in the right place, or it may be that Drucker’s influence in the movement has been overstated.

Regardless, Towns’s influence on Jerry Falwell, on Thomas Road, and on Liberty has been huge; he’s the head of the School of Religion (not the seminary; that’s another part of the organization chart), was one of the founders of the college, and was one of Jerry’s right-hand men for years. He was rumored (unconfirmed and probably false), along with Harold Willmington, to write Jerry’s sermons. During my time there in the Eighties, while Jerry Jr was in law school and Jonathan was still an undergraduate at Liberty, it was rumored (unconfirmed) that if Jerry had died suddenly the ministry would have passed into the hands of four people who would have acted as regents, more or less: Towns, Ed Dobson, singer Don Norman, and Harold Willmington. Of those four, Norman left in 1989 or so to return to singing gospel music with The Harvesters Quartet, and Dobson left in 1987 to follow M. R. DeHaan as pastor of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, MI. Towns and Willmington are still at Liberty.

I hesitate to use a term like “first-rate mind” to describe Towns or Willmington because I’m not in a position to judge, really, but in every anecdote I ever heard about either one of them they came off as smart, quick, well-prepared, etc. I don’t know how Jerry found them but they were great finds and have made huge contributions to the ministry over a period of more than forty years.

Liberty circa the mid-Eighties 2

The mid-Eighties was a great time to be at Liberty University. The school made the transition from being Liberty Baptist College during the summer of 1985, the Pastor’s Scholarships made the incoming freshman classes of 1985 and 1986 much bigger than the outgoing senior classes those years, the first floor of the Arthur DeMoss building opened, a bunch of new brick dorms were built on the south end of campus, and both North Campus and Liberty Broadcasting Network (LBN) came and went. The campus was still closed and watched over by the guard shack, and the Ericsson/GE complex still belong to either GE or Ericsson. Chandler’s Station and the Vines Center were still in the future, and LCA still stood for Lynchburg Christian Academy and was still located on Thomas Road. Oh, and the Old Time Gospel Hour was still a going concern and provided lots of mid-quality employment for Liberty students.

The dress code was a bit stricter than it is today; hair gel and mousse were still frowned on for men, mustaches and beards were very rare even among faculty, and it was against the rules to wear jeans to class. I dressed mostly off the Chess King discount rack and wore the same one or two ties day after day. My clothes weren’t just bad; they were bad Eighties bad.

Chapel was an hour and a half at 9:00 AM three days a week, and Jerry himself usually presided on Wednesdays, and he usually arrived with an impressive list of lieutenants in tow. Roughly once a semester Jerry gave us the history of TRBC/Liberty in brief, including the Donald Duck bottling plant, the size of his original Sunday School class, etc. As at least one person has pointed out to me, his own personal salvation story generally doesn’t figure in this story: it’s entirely a church-growth (or more accurately, ministry-growth) story. I would love to find a transcript or two of this story. At the time I started at Liberty it more or less ended with the “I Want That Mountain” days.

The other two chapels a week were kind of a mixed bag: sometimes we had guest speakers (I recall Bill Bennett, Steve Bell of ABC News, trucking magnate J. B. Hunt) but most of the time the speaker was someone from within the ministry: the campus pastor, whose name escapes me altogether, staff evangelist C. Sumner Wemp, Ed Dobson, or Gary Adridge. The only ones who made much of an impression on me were Wemp, who was an old school hit-and-run tract-and-handshake personal evangelist, and Dobson. Dobson left shortly after I arrived, and I would almost swear he single-handedly killed chapel when he left. In all the chapels I attended during the year I spent on campus Dobson is the only one who ever seemed to have anything to say. The rest of them made no impression whatsoever.

There was at least one and possibly two other chapel services on Monday and Friday; ministry chapel and School of Religion chapel. There was a persistent rumor that the speakers at ministry chapel were really good; I decided to devote my energy to finding a way to skip chapel altogether.