Only purpose?

I was reading an article in Time Magazine yesterday about Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins.
There are so many things I could blog about, that started me thinking, but for today’s post, I’ll share one.

Read this quote from the article (R. Albert Mohler Jr. is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary):

The traditionalist reaction is understandable, for Bell's arguments about heaven and hell raise doubts about the core of the Evangelical worldview, changing the common understanding of salvation so much that Christianity becomes more of an ethical habit of mind than a faith based on divine revelation. "When you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world," says Mohler, "then you don't need the church, and you don't need Christ, and you don't need the cross. This is the tragedy of nonjudgmental mainline liberalism, and it's Rob Bell's tragedy in this book too."

It seems very strange to me that we would see the only purpose of the church to convince people of the coming judgment and the necessity of conversion. I can see where a universal salvation theology would of necessity change some of what we do in the church, especially churches whose focus is primarily on this aspect of faith. I just don’t understand, though, how anyone could believe that conversion is the only purpose for the church or even more so, the only purpose for faith in Christ and his love as expressed through the cross.