The Irresistable Revolution, Shane Claiborne

"Many of us find ourselves caught somewhere between unbelieving activists and inactive believers. We can write a check to feed starving children or hold signs in the streets and feel like we've made a difference without ever encountering the faces of the suffering masses. In this book, Shane Claiborne describes an authentic faith rooted in belief, action, and love, inviting us into a movement of the Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world. Shane's faith led him to dress the wounds of lepers with Mother Teresa, visit families in Iraq amidst bombings, and dump $10,000 in coins and bills on Wall Street to redistribute wealth. Shane lives out this revolution each day in his local neighborhood, an impoverished community in North Philadelphia, by living among the homeless, helping local kids with homework, and "practicing resurrection" in the forgotten places of our world. Shane's message will comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable...but will also invite us into an irresistible revolution. His is a vision for ordinary radicals ready to change the world with little acts of love."


I read this over Christmas, so it's a long time coming, and in the meantime I actually got a chance to meet the author and hear him speak about the book, which is the kind of nice thing that doesn't often happen but which makes any book a little bit better. Even ones that don't need that, because this is a book that has more power and urgency in its shortest sentence that most books do between the first and last page.

It is a polemic in the best sense of the word. If Monbiot's writing stirs up a righteous anger, a head-shaking, secular call to action against the world as it stands, then Claiborne is ushering in a Christian alternative, a politically liberal, Jesus centred movement towards how the world should be.

Boy, is it exciting!

This is the book that I want to tell people about, in the way that when I first became a Christian the gospels felt fresh and unexpected, so now Claibornes explanation of why they felt so different, and why that seems so at odds with what mainstream Christianity is, feels so impactful. I want to tell my secular friends, and my Christian friends, and even people who aren't really my friends about an alternative way, a better way, a simple way.

This is, let's just be clear here, a call to actual, practical revolution. Non violent, non-judgemental, but based around a gospel of love that stands utterly at odds with the politics, economy and culture of the world. A revolution predicated on the idea that loving your enemies means not bombing them, that feeding the hungry and clothing the starving is more important than increasing GDP, and that being "pro-life" doesn't mean moving on when a baby is born.

Taking aim at a culture that anaesthatises the current Western church as well as the wider world, Claiborne's call to lay down arms and move in to the worst neighbourhoods and live with the least well off is startling for its selflessness. Centred around an idea that it's impossible to ignore the homeless guy on a Monday if you really worship a homeless guy on a Sunday, he has sought to live a life loving people and God, from the streets and leprosy colonies of Calcutta, to urban America, to Iraq.

More than just a poverty tourist, short-term missional consumer, or a white saviour, his book creates a narrative of demonstrate the love and compassion of God to the unloved and overlooked, wherever and whoever they are.

For all the lefty, compassionate and unconservative, anti-organised religion people, he's a certified bleeding heart liberal; anti-war, anti-consumerist, proto-anarchist and, yet, Christian.

And to all the Bible believing, saved by faith, seeking, searching, longing, Christians, he's a man who thinks you should probably sell everything everything and give it to the poor if you want to take God's word seriously.

This is a man of apparent contradictions, but one passion. A simpler way of life; a life built up in love; a love first given by God.

Also Try:
http://www.thesimpleway.org/