The Christian Post reports:

Oprah Winfrey will be touring the U.S. this fall to help "lead people to an empathy space… a gratitude space" in an effort to find their calling and fulfill their greatest potential. Helping Winfrey in the tour hitting cities on both coasts will be influential and controversial Christian author Rob Bell, and other "handpicked thought leaders and pop culture icons."
"All of my life I have wanted to lead people to an empathy space. To a gratitude space," said Winfrey in a press statement. "I want us all to fulfill our greatest potential. To find our calling, and summon the courage to live it."
Each stop on the national tour will run two days, with the first night featuring Winfrey "bringing her personal story and insights to life in a one of a kind intimate evening" and the following will have the media mogul and Bell, or another one of her handpicked guests, "lead a day-long gathering of thousands."

I'm not sure what gratitude spaces and empathy spaces are, but our culture could do with a good bit more of gratitude and empathy so if Oprah and Rob Bell can catalyze that kind of positive change, well, more power to them.

Of course, if you want to have your consciousness raised by folks like these, you need to have some skin in the game. Consciousness raising, as anyone who has attended a first-rate motivational seminar could tell you, costs more than a little coin. For those wishing to sit under Oprah and Bell's wisdom, tickets start at $100 a pop for nosebleed seating. If you want to sit up close (and maybe even get to meet Oprah herself!), you can pony up $1000.

How does prayer work into all this? Here's the thing: I'm not an expert on all things Rob Bell, but I would bet real money that ten years ago Rob Bell would've been very, very careful about partnering with Oprah on any project. He would've ensured that his ability to present the gospel was completely unimpeded, that his participation did not in any way give the appearance of supporting or lending credence to new-age sew-age, and would have unequivocally preached that Jesus was the only way, truth, or life, and the sole person in whom we find the ability to have true empathy and to whom we owe ultimate gratitude. I could be wrong, but my impressions of the kinds of "spiritual" leaders who usually partner with Oprah leads me to think little if any of this will be the case when Bell is touring and co-presenting with her.

Rob Bell didn't arrive at this stage in his ministry by happenstance. He began some years ago by thinking and writing some things that incited strong pushback from Evangelicals. Much of the pushback was warranted. The heat and evident pleasure with which many in the Evangelical camp rushed to excoriate and ostracize Bell, however, was not justifiable by any proper ethos of Christian love, patience, and forbearance. When Godly leaders could have reached out to Bell as spiritual fathers, too many instead chose to go on the attack. "Ha!", they proclaimed. "I've been warning you for years Bell is an apostate!", they seemed to say as they bid him farewell from the Christian fold.

I can only imagine what this kind of thing would do to a person with Bell's clearly tenderhearted and thoughtful temperament. If he was already, perhaps even unbeknownst to himself, straying from the path of orthodoxy, certainly the reaction he was receiving would wound him and send him even farther off the path if only to escape the pain and shame being rained down upon him by so-called Christian leaders.

Rob Bell has been written off by many Evangelicals, but now other Christian leaders are finding themselves under a microscope of scrutiny. The veil is being stripped away from the internal state of their ministries and their long-standing character deficiencies as their ethical failings are being brought to light. Will the Church and its leaders treat them with the same disdainful dismissal with which many of these same leaders treated Bell in his time of distress?

We have an opportunity as Christians to now do better. We can learn to offer firm correction with love rather than rancor. We can pray, hope, and strive for redemption and reconciliation. We shouldn't turn a blind eye when correction or accountability is required, but we can offer love and support for fallen brothers and sisters in ways that call them back to their better selves rather than driving them farther and farther away from their true heart-home among the people of God.

Pastors have extraordinarily hard jobs. The expectations are high, the criticisms often fierce and unloving, and the penalty for failure swift and retributive. Most of the time we expect pastors to pray for us. It's long past time we understood pastors need our prayers too.