Word: belled
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...Bell is striding toward the sanctuary of his Grandville, Mich., church, the barely improved husk of a former shopping mall, when he runs into one of his favorite congregants. They immediately address a topic close to both their hearts. "Man!" says Bell. "Can I hear it? Can I hear the demo?" The congregant, an affable young part-time musician named Joel, who dresses like a long-lost Ramone, mumbles bashfully, "I can burn you one." "Great!" exclaims Bell, whose geeky-hip glasses, black pants, black shirt and polyester white belt make their own statement. "Hey, man," he adds...
...Bell, 37, is guilty of none of the negatives. He is largely apolitical, thinks that only those with gay friends are positioned to judge homosexuality--and he tinkers marvelously. At 28, he founded a megachurch that threw out the conventional sermon-and-worship service and instantly drew thousands of attendees. He has sold hundreds of thousands of books with titles like Velvet Elvis and Sex God that find the sacred in the profane. And he has created a form of video message he calls Nooma (phonetic Greek for spirit or breath) that may make him to YouTube what Graham...
...Bell comes of faithful stock: his parents met at Wheaton College, known as the Evangelical Harvard. But his first ambition was to be David Letterman. ("The birth of irony," he jokes. "The Betamax was a portal to another world.") Next came rock. As a student at Wheaton, he fronted a band that seemed poised to break nationally. When it didn't, he attended Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and apprenticed at a megachurch before founding Mars Hill just outside Grand Rapids. The town is notoriously well churched, but Bell saw an untapped audience: some were his music fans, others...
...Watching Bell there, I found it easy to see his appeal to the young. He delivers stand-up-style monologues, not three-point sermons. Comic riffs alternate with seemingly naive questions--Letterman crossed with NPR'S Ira Glass--until Bell tightens the rhetorical noose and produces tears or thoughtful silence. His stagecraft is legendary. To illustrate a passage from Leviticus on sacrifice, Bell brought on a live goat, which he released--underlining Jesus' role as the last and greatest sin offering--intoning, "The goat has left the building...
Mostly, we wouldn't have it any other way. Which does not, perhaps, bode particularly well for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or The Savages, both of which take mortality seriously. In the former a successful man in his prime is struck down by a massive stroke. It leaves him able only to blink a single eye. And the capacity to conduct interior monologues with himself. In the latter, a cranky old crock named Lenny (Philip Bosco) surrenders to senile dementia, leaving his self-absorbed and obscurely damaged children, Wendy and Jon (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman...