"Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display. To do this, the church must stop thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or not, believer or nonbeliever. Besides the fact that these terms are offensive to those who are the "un" and "non", they work against Jesus' teachings about how we are to treat each other. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, and our neighbor can be anybody. We are all created in the image of God, and we are all sacred, valuable creations of God. Everybody matters. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of God in everyone. As the book of James says, "God shows no favoritism." So we don't either."
— Rob Bell

"Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy.

Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful.

Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful."
— Rob Bell (Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality)

"'Christian' makes a poor adjective"
— Rob Bell

"Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it. "
— Rob Bell

"Love Wins"
— Rob Bell

"Everybody is following somebody. EVerybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.

This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures."
— Rob Bell (Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile)

"Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts."

The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.

The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.""
— Rob Bell