Rob Bell Wants You to Take Communion More

Bo has posted about his recent interview with Rob Bell:

In the most recent episode of Homebrewed Christianity, I asked Rob Bell what he would do if he were starting from scratch again.  I was particularly intrigued for three main reasons:

1) I actually am starting a new gathering so I wanted to pick his brain.

2) Bell is so creative and innovative – who better to ask?

3) His answer was somewhat surprising:

“I would have Eucharist alot. And I would make it really clear to everybody that the Eucharist is our only hope. Because otherwise, there’s a thousand forces – the entropy is overwhelming…preferences and particularities…there are a thousand ways for a church to go in all these different directions – you end up just barely being able to hold it all together. But if you have the bread and the wine, and on a really regular basis, you put the bread and wine on the table and you say “Okay everybody – here you go: Body broken, blood poured out…”

I find this very intriguing. First because at Solomon’s Porch — and at just about every emergent church I know — the Lord’s Supper is practiced weekly, so why didn’t Rob implement this when he started Mars Hill?

Second, whenever I talked to the leadership of Mars Hill, they showed a great disdain for anything “religious,” which is why they didn’t recite a creed or the Lord’s Prayer or a weekly benediction. But there seems nothing more religious than the Eucharist.

And third, this seems a lot like the argument of Radical Orthodoxy, an extremely conservative vision of the church. I wonder if Rob has been influenced by that school of thought.