Zondervan's best-selling Velvet Elvis,/i> and Sex God author and "Nooma" DVD series presenter Rob Bell is not entirely comfortable with his success, according to Time magazine.

In a profile in this week's issue titled "The Hipper-Than-Thou Pastor," the newsweekly said that Bell's DVD mini-sermons epitomize his "trademark combination of deep cultural savviness and deeper piety," and notes that he has just completed a second national speaking tour.

Bell acknowledged that "the exertions aimed at 'large crowds and good book sales can be at odds' with the creativity he associates with 'the Eucharist, the breaking yourself open and pouring yourself out,' "Time reported.

At the church he pastors in Grand Rapids, Mich., where weekly attendance is 11,000, Bell "delivers stand-up monologues, not three-point sermons" in which "comic riffs alternate with seemingly naïve questions ... until (he) tightens the rhetorical noose and produces tears or thoughtful silence," the magazine said.

Bell's books "find the sacred in the profane," Time commented, while his "Nooma" work "may make him to YouTube what (Billy) Graham was to the arena."