I was in Australia when I first discovered the writing of Shane Claiborne, a Christian writer, activist, and member of a group called the New Monastics. Someone had left a copy of his book The Irresistible Revolution on the toilet, so over the course of a couple weeks, I had finished it across daily visits to the throne. If you were to summarize Claiborne’s writings, mirrored and upheld by his own lifestyle, in one word, it would be along the lines of ‘radical’.
In short, Claiborne lived and studied under Mother Teresa (Yes, that Mother Teresa) and worked in several other impoverished countries around the world after receiving his degrees from Wheaton College and Eastern University. He moved to Philadelphia a number of years ago where he founded The Simple Way, an intentional living community for people living in poverty.
Shane is a dude who practices what he preaches.
So if I were to summarize The Irresistible Revolution in one sentence, it would be, Live as Jesus lived and do what He did, literally.
But that’s a lot easier said than done, as highlighted by passages like this from Revolution:
“I asked participants who claimed to be ‘strong followers of Jesus’ whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”
or,
“I’m just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, “When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me.”
I recall one argument built over the course of a few chapters which expound on Christians who are happy to give to the poor or give to organizations which are helping the poor, yet none of that is in the same ballpark of what Jesus taught or modeled.
Jesus didn’t merely give to the poor, He joined them.
