'Velvet Elvis' by Rob Bell

It's a while back now since I read this book.

I know it’s an odd title.

In fact there are a lot of odd things about it.

It’s got an odd cover, since you can choose for yourself which cover you buy: it’s got an odd layout: and it’s got some odd ideas as well, I suppose.

At least they can strike you as odd to start with. Mainly because you haven’t thought of things that way before.

But, odd or not, you need to read this book!

Not because it’s fast becoming a sort of ‘cult classic’ (which it probably is).

But because it’s a healthy and necessary corrective to what you always thought (and maybe feared) the whole business of being a Christian is about. Wrongly.

Yes, ‘wrongly’.

Most of us (self included) have a whole load of mixed-up notions as to what it is to be a follower of Jesus. Faithfully inherited, strongly held, fiercely defended.

But which miss the point with a frightening lack of accuracy.

So Velvet Elvis is, as I say, a healthy and refreshing corrective –

“for those,” as the writer says, “who need a fresh take on Jesus and what it means to live the kind of life he teaches us to live.”

The writer. Yes. I should tell you a bit about him.

He’s a down-to-earth pastor of a church called Mars Hill, in Michigan.

Now, I’m always a little bit wary of folk who are the pastors of some megachurch.

By and large, all such sort of superpastors just depress me. At least, their success stories do.

However, despite the fact the church he founded numbers now a good few thousand folk, this guy’s safe.

Because Rob Bell went out the back and simply killed superpastor!

Yes! Read it all for yourself and see. Like he says –

“I meet so many people who have superwhatever rattling around in their head.

They have this person they’re convinced they are supposed to be, and their superwhatever is killing them. ..

You have to kill your superwhatever.

And you have to do it right now.

Because your superwhatever will rob you of today and tomorrow and the next day until you take it out back and end its life.

Go do it.

The book will be here when you get back.”

This is the only serious Christian book that’s ever made me laugh, I have to say. Out loud!

And the only one that’s ever made the serious stuff of following Jesus Christ seem quite so simple, clear and workable: and so much fun!

Buy it for yourself. Or borrow it. I really don’t mind, just get a hold of it somehow yourself.

Then read it. It won’t take long.

You’ll laugh a lot. And you’ll learn a lot as well.

And I think you’ll start to live life more the way it’s meant to be.