by shane claiborne

Something sort of mystical and magical happened after a 19 year old kid named Papito was killed on our block a few weeks ago.  As our neighborhood ached and grieved and cried with his family, we began to create a memorial for Papito where he died, a familiar ritual in the inner city.  Those who knew and loved him brought photos and flowers.  Kids on our block brought stuffed animals or whatever they had and laid them on the sidewalk memorial.  And everyone brought candles.  But here’s where the magic happened.  It was the next day that the east coast was to be hammered with one of the worst snowstorms since we’ve kept records.  As the snow showered down, I thought the little candles, sheltered only beneath a little shanty of soggy cardboard, would not stand a chance in the blizzard.  But on they burned. Hour after hour, even through the night they burned.  And the warmth of the fire melted down the snow as it fell.  Flake by flake melted from the warmth of the fire.  The next morning I went out to find the candles still burning, on a little patch of wet sidewalk like an oasis of warmth glowing in the middle of 2 feet of snow encroaching on all sides. 

The next week we held a prayer vigil at the local gunshop, praying for an end to violence… and specifically asking and praying that the owner of “The Shooter Shop” would agree to a voluntary “Code of Conduct” drafted by Mayors from all over the country who agree that these ten simple steps would prevent deaths like Papito’s.  So on February 13, we walked in silence with friends and neighbors from the candle memorial where Papito died three blocks to The Shooter Shop down the street.  And we carried candles.  It was there that I remembered the candles gentle warmth as it faced the coldness of a winter storm.

As we gathered with dozens of other Christians from around Philadelphia to pray for peace, we were met by a counter-demonstration that had been organized by guns-rights groups.  They shouted some of the meanest things I have ever heard.  I didn’t mind them calling me a “scumbag”, and I even concede on the “you need a shower” comment… but then the insults shot like bullets – racial, economic, angry insults… some of them to kids from our block…  some of them whispered just loud enough to hear, “stupid immigrant”.  As we started a sacred moment of silence to remember Papito and the other kids killed with illegal guns… the silence was pierced with insults and meanness.  As we prayed the Lord’s Prayer it was interrupted with the singing of “God Bless America.”  A deep theological cagematch was happening in the heavens it seems.

While I do not believe the folks we met reflect the character or views of most gun owners or even NRA members (heck I’ve shot some squirrels for dinner back in TN)… the ugly counterprotest was organized by folks who started off by saying things like this:  

Be advised that Shooter’s Shop is located in a dicey neighborhood. You should have no problem in daylight, and I doubt the local neighborhood folks are going to mess with a bunch of NRA members, but carry your gun with you, do not leave it unattended in a vehicle if you go where someone could break into your car and steal it!

(from the website “Snowflakes in Hell”… which incidently may flow with my candle metaphor!)

So the fact that they are not from the neighborhood may explain some of the behavior we saw and inability to lament the bloodshed we see on these streets from guns sold to straw buyers at gunshops like the Shooter Shop (not many folks are buying hunting rifles from a gunshop in Kensington… we don’t have many deer here).  

There is no doubt that my grandmother was right when she used to say, “God doesn’t like ugly.”  And the Scriptures speak clearly that we are not fighting against people but against principalities and powers – ugly, filthy, sick principalities and powers.  When we look at Jesus’s cross we see what love looks like when it stares evil in the face.  It is nonviolent, it is forgiving, it is steady and courageous.  It is this courageous love that exposes evil by making it so uncomfortable that it has to be dealt with.  Colossians is correct when it says that as Jesus rose from the dead he made a spectacle of the cross.  As he listened to insults, had people spit in his face, curse him and kill him… he knew full well that he was exposing the ugliness… and in the end love wins over hatred. 

When we came back to the house we got a chance to unpack things with some of the teenagers from the block who were at the vigil.  They shared about how powerful it was to see us return meanness with kindness.  We remembered how Martin Luther King said to those who were so mean to him:  “To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘Throw us in jail and we will still love you.  Bomb our houses and we will still love you.  Beat us and leave us half dead, and we will still love you… but be ye assured that we will wear you down with our love.”  As the early Christian martyrs said:  “Grace dulls even the sharpest sword.” 

We will continue to hold vigil and to pray for a conversion of heart from the gunshop owner.  In fact, the steady witness is growing… over 100 pastors and Church leaders have drafted letters (like this one) to the gunshop owner urging him to seize this opportunity to lead with integrity and show irresponsible gunshop owners a better way.  Please light your candle and send your letter to Mr. Haney.  When he signs the Code of Conduct we will alert the press and have a huge celebration outside The Shooter Shop (I might even buy a new bb-gun from him). 

This morning I woke up and saw the snow falling again, and the candles still burning (they’ve been burning for almost 3 weeks now)… they are still melting the snow.  As I thought about the vigil last week, I had once thought we were sheep among wolves… but now I’m thinking we were just candles in the middle of a blizzard.  And snow melts, but the light keeps glowing.  We are to be the light, to be the salt… both of which can melt the toughest ice or the coldest heart. 

photo credit: Jamie Moffett

Jamie Moffett setup a live stream of the gun shop vigil through his phone.

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Shane Claiborne interviews Tony Campolo for an article in Cross Currents Magazine.

Tony Campolo is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church and professor emeritus of Sociology at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. Shane Claiborne is a founder of the Simple Way Community in Philadelphia and a prominent Christian activist.

Introductory Remarks (Shane Claiborne)

I grew up around people who looked like me and thought like me, insulated from anyone that made me uncomfortable or challenged my assumptions. I cannot remember meeting anyone Jewish or Muslim growing up, and distinctly remember (much to my chagrin) being swayed from dating a lovely Catholic girl because she prayed to Mary. And then I went to Eastern College. I studied sociology with Tony. I met Jesus on the streets of Philadelphia, in his most distressing disguises. I was surrounded by people who stretched my vision of what it means to be Christian. In one of the evening sociology classes (which, as usual, flowed over until nearly midnight), I can remember hearing Tony say, "Being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and doing something incredibly daring with your life." Since then the Christian adventure has taken me to the extremes of wealth and poverty, from a ten-week stint in Calcutta working alongside Mother Teresa to a year spent in the verdant Chicago suburbs at the evangelical mega-church, Willow Creek. Most recently, I was led to Iraq as part of an interfaith peace team during the war. So I hold Tony responsible for much of this, as the Lover he has introduced me to and the Gospel he has taught me have wrecked my life and gotten me in a lot of trouble.

When a devout Muslim brother asked Tony and I to have this cross-generational dialogue about interreligious cooperation for an interfaith publication, we jumped on it. In an age when religious extremists of all faiths have perverted the conceptions of what our traditions teach, there seems to be another thing stirring. Many of us are refusing to allow the media and twisted images of our faith to define us. And though words like "evangelical" are up for grabs, we still consider it an important adjective to reclaim and an important community to restructure. Tony tackles many of these issues in more detail in his newest book Speaking My Mind.

Before we get started it seems critical to note that the word "evangelion" from which we derive our words "evangelical" and "evangelism" are ancient words that predated Jesus. They were words Jesus takes from the imperial lexicon and spins on their head. For instance, in 6 BC there was a saying inscribed around the Roman Empire that read: "Augustus has been sent to us as Savior. . . the birthday of the god Augustus has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel" ("evangelion"). The early evangelists were announcing another Gospel, proclaiming an allegiance to another Emperor and another Kingdom. When people ask me if I am an evangelical, I must make sure we have a proper understanding of the word. If by evangelical we mean one who spreads the Good News that there is another Kingdom and another Emperor, another economy and peace than Rome's, another Savior than Caesar . . . then, yes I am an evangelical." So here we sit down together and have a cross-generational conversation on inter-religious cooperation, as evangelical Christians.

Shane Claiborne: Well, we've been asked to consider the possibility of evangelical Christians cooperating with people of different faiths. The place to begin seems to properly define what we mean by "evangelical." I offered my definition above. What's yours?

Tony Campolo: An evangelical is someone who believes the doctrines of the Apostle's Creed. That outlines exactly what we believe in detail. Secondly, an evangelical has a very high view of scripture though not necessarily inerrancy. And the third thing—we believe that salvation comes by being personally involved with a living resurrected Jesus. So I've defined evangelical in those three terms. There is a doctrinal statement, so that there is some content to what we believe. There is a source of truth, Scripture. And there is a personal relationship with Jesus.

SC: There are many evangelicals who find themselves lost amidst the current political climate. They find themselves outside the narrow issues that define conservatives and estranged from the shallow spirituality that marks liberals. Many seem to be thirsty for Christian social justice and peacemaking but cannot find a Christian community that is consistently pro-life, or that looks at war and injustice as spiritual issues.

TC: As we think about all of this we have to be aware of what has happened in this last election. Evangelicalism getting wedded to the any political party is like ice cream mixing with horse manure. It's not going to hurt the horse manure (i.e. the republican party, and I would say the Democrat Party is also horse manure so don't get the wrong idea), but it sure will mess up the ice cream.

SC: President Bush uses political and spiritual language interchangeably, referring to the ideals of America as the Light of the world that the darkness cannot overcome. He invokes God's blessing on a nation that has stepped far from the things that God blesses in the Beatitudes. I've met many evangelicals, particularly military families, who find their national and spiritual allegiance in conflict. I have met parents who lost their kids speak their anger that their children died thinking this was God's will. I have met soldiers who have knelt at the altar to ask forgiveness for what they did in Iraq. Recently I was talking to a woman who was very upset as I spoke about Iraq. She said she just wanted Muslim people to come to know the grace and love of Jesus. I told her I want the same thing. The question is how does that happen, and are we getting closer to that? What can we learn from the blood-stained pages of history—Constantine, the crusades, the Inquisition, the martyrs. Do you see evangelicals getting closer or further from interfaith dialogue?

TC: Evangelicalism is heading for a split. I think that the last election aggravated a significant minority of the evangelical community, believing that they did not want to come across as anti-gay, anti-women, anti-environment, pro war, pro capital punishment, and anti-Islam. There is going to be one segment of evangelicalism, just like there is one segment in Islam that is not going to be interested in dialogue. But there are other evangelicals who will want to talk and establish a common commitment to a goodness with Islamic people and Jewish people particularly.

SC: When I was in Iraq, I heard folks call our leaders "Christian extremists", mirroring the language we hear of "Muslim extremists". One woman said, "Everyone is declaring war in the name of God and asking God's blessing. What kind of God is this?" What became clear, is that what is at stake here is not just the reputation of America, but the reputation and identity of Christians, and that is dangerous.

TC: What has happened now is that evangelicals have emerged from this election with an incredible triumphalism in the life of the Christian evangelical community. They think they have a right to control America. God won. They won and they are now going to make this into the Christian nation they think it was supposed to be. Then you get Jerry Falwell making that statement about 'The only answer is to bomb all the terrorists off the face of the earth in the name of the Lord.'

It's scary. Because if this is defined as a Christian nation, than the Muslims have every right to assume that what is happening in Iraq is Christian, and this is a regeneration of the crusades. And it's being broadcast that way by Al Jazeera and media networks in other parts of the world. That's why I am saying that evangelicalism has to be challenged. That triumphalism has to be challenged, we cannot allow that to go unchecked. And right now they own the microphone. They have the radio stations. They have the television stations. They are in fact saying this is the agenda. And we have to fight against that.

SC: Both Muslims and Christians are very evangelical in the sense of desiring others to come to faith in their God. When we talk about inter-religious cooperation, does that mean that we need to stop trying to convert each other?

TC: We don't have to give up trying to convert each other. What we have to do is show respect to one another. And to speak to each other with a sense that even if people don't convert, they are God's people, God loves them, and we do not make the judgment of who is going to heaven and who is going to hell.

I think that what we all have to do is leave judgment up to God. The Muslim community is very evangelistic, however what Muslims will not do is condemn Jews and Christians to Hell if in fact they do not accept Islam.

SC: That seems like a healthy distinction—between converting and condemning. One of the barriers seems to be the assumption that we have the truth and folks who experience things differently will all go to Hell. How do we unashamedly maintain a healthy desire for others to experience the love of God as we have experienced it without condemning others who experience God differently?

TC: Islam is much more gracious towards evangelical Christians who are faithful to the New Testament, than Christians are towards Islamic people who are faithful to the Koran. The Islamic faith will ask, "Are you faithful to the book that you have?" Mohammad was very understanding that there was great truth in Christianity. He differed with us in that he felt he had a more complete truth, and Islam would hold to that, but Mohammad contended that we would ultimately be judged in terms of the truth that we had at our disposal.

I think there are Muslim brothers and sisters who are willing to say, "You live up to the truth as you understand it. I will live up to the truth as I understand it, and we will leave it up to God on judgment day."

There is much in Christianity that would suggest exactly the same thing, particularly Romans the 2^nd chapter, where the apostle Paul says "What do we say of those who do not accept the law of God," and I would add "as we understand it," "and are faithful to all the things that God calls us to do—will God not have to make room for them?" He asks that as a rhetorical question, leaving the reader with the obvious sense—"but of course." So I think that the apostle Paul would be a lot more generous towards Islamic people than most of my evangelical brothers and sisters are. If both sides are willing to live up to the truth as they perceive it and if both sides are willing to say we are not going to compromise what we believe but we are convinced that in the end the other side will have a chance to respond in a positive manner to what we believe. I think we can live together in peace and without attacking each other and without condemning each other.

Catholicism would say that at the moment of death every person is confronted in that split moment with Christ and is given the opportunity of saying yes or no. To say otherwise is to say God has got to be a pretty unfair deity, to condemn three quarters of the human race to hell without them ever having a chance.

I've got to believe that Jesus is the only Savior but being a Christian is not the only way to be saved. A student at Princeton once asked Protestant theologian Karl Barth, "Do you think that other religions can be valid avenues to God and His salvation?" Barth answered, "No! No religion can provide a valid avenue to God and His salvation. Not even the Christian religion. Only Jesus Christ can serve as mediator to God."

SC: When it comes to living out the Biblical vision of justice and peace, there are times when I feel like I have more in common with folks of other religions than I do with some other evangelicals. I have often found that while we may not agree theologically, we have a similar vision for how God calls us to live. Can we work together in service and action, even though we disagree theologically?

TC: I used to do this television show "Hashing It Out" with Steve Brown. One day a friend in his seminary said, "How can you be friends with people like the Campolos, especially Peggy, when you know what she believes about homosexuality?" Steve's answer was, "Peggy is wrong in the head but right in the heart. You on the other hand are right in the head and wrong in the heart. And if I have to make a choice I would much rather prefer someone who is right in the heart and wrong in the head."

That's a powerful statement but I think that's where most of us would go. Now Muslims do not believe that Jesus died on the cross. So we have a difference there. We kid ourselves if we pretend that we all believe the same thing. What we have to do is say that we believe different things. But there is so much goodness in the Islamic community, it cannot be ignored. Those who write off Islamic people are making a serious mistake. And vice-versa, Islamic people who write off Christians are making a serious mistake. But I would have to say they are less inclined to do that than we are to write them off.

SC: When I was in India working in Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying, there was a young man who had been there volunteering for quite some time. He rarely talked, just went from bed to bed caring for the dying men. One day on the train ride home he gently said to me that he wanted to share a confession. He went on to explain that he was not a Christian, and often had a tendency to question the mixed motives of evangelical Christians who came to volunteer. He said he was never sure why they were there, if it was because they truly loved the dying, or because they were commanded to, or because they wanted to convert the dying . . . Then he asked me, "When you care for the dying is it because you love them, or because you love God?" A good question. I thought for a while, and then I replied, “Yes, both. In fact, they are indistinguishable to me. I cannot tell where the one begins and the other ends. As I love the dying I am loving Christ, and how I love God is by loving my neighbor." He smiled. As I thought afterward, I wondered about the difference between how this atheist so gently touches and cares for the dying, and the way I cared for them. Could he be caring for Christ without knowing it? Dorothy Day said, "The only true atheist is the one who denies God's image in the face of the poor." Were both our hands the hands of God?

TC: When it comes to what is ultimately important, the Muslim community's sense of commitment to the poor is exactly in tune with where Jesus is in the 25^th chapter of Matthew. That is the description of judgment day. And if that is the description of judgment day what can I say to an Islamic brother who has fed the hungry, and clothed the naked? You say, "But he hasn't a personal relationship with Christ." I would argue with that. And I would say from a Christian perspective, in as much as you did it to the least of these you did it unto Christ. You did have a personal relationship with Christ, you just didn't know it. And Jesus himself says: "On that day there will be many people who will say, when did we have this wonderful relationship with you, we don't even know who you are. . . " "Well, you didn't know it was me, but when you did it to the least of these it was doing it to me."

SC: The Scriptures are filled with God choosing the most unlikely places to dwell. God uses the brothel owner Rahab, the pagan nation of Assyria, the adulteress king David, the zealots and tax collectors, even old Balaam's donkey as instruments of the Kingdom. It seems that Jesus is constantly extending the boundaries of grace and enlarging our vision of the Family of God, telling stories where Samaritan heretics and Syro-phoenician outsiders are invited into the Kingdom. We can see this in Peter's second conversion when he realized that God's grace is even extended to the Gentiles. Jesus' own image of the eternal banquet says that the guests the King invited are all preoccupied with the concerns of this world, and commands the servant to go into the alleys and margins to bring in whoever will come. How do we leave room for the surprises that could await us in the afterlife, without compromising our beliefs?

TC: I don't think you have to compromise as a Christian the belief that Jesus is the only Savior but what I do think we have to say is that the grace of God extends way beyond the limitations of my religious group. And I think that the Muslims have to say, as they do say, that the grace of Allah extends beyond the Islamic community. The community is supposed to be faithful to its beliefs and convictions or else it has no core. On the other hand it has got to be more loving towards those who are outside.

Our Muslim brothers and sisters can say Islam is the only true faith but we are not convinced that only Muslims enjoy salvation. I contend that there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ, but I am not convinced that the grace of God does not go further than the Christian community.

SC: There is a discomfort when I hear Gandhi's whisper that the religions are one tree with many branches, and I can appreciate the fact that our faiths trace their roots back to the same dysfunctional family of Abraham and Sarah. But in many interreligious gatherings I have experienced the feeling that we are forced to walk on eggshells in a shallow murky spirituality that does not honor the distinctiveness of each tradition. This universalism, in its attempt to honor every tradition I often merely creates a culture where their beauty and distinctiveness are lost.

TC: I think we have to maintain our theological differences. We don't have any integrity if we don't. We end up with this mishmash in which we say, 'Well, in the end, we all believe in the same God'. Maybe we do, but we don't define God in the same way. We don't come to God in the same manner. And each of us makes exclusivist claims, and we have to recognize that. We cannot allow our theologies to separate us, and we cannot allow our theologies to get watered down lest we lose our integrity.

SC: Can you share a recent example of where we have seen inter-religious cooperation at its best, with evangelicals at the table?

TC: Jimmy Carter, who is certainly evangelical, wrote a book called The Seed of Abraham, pointing out that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all trace back to Abraham and have a certain commonality between them. I look at how Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin were able to cross the line. You should know that what led up to the Camp David accord was that fact that Jimmy Carter knew the Bible very well. And he was able to bring Sadat and Begin into agreement by showing that the Sinai was never promised to Abraham in the Hebrew Scriptures. They could agree on that. He was able to point out things in the Koran that called for peace with the Jews. That whole Camp David Accord was built on Biblical and Quranic teaching. It should be noted that Anwar Sadat had hoped that there might be on Mt. Zion three places of worship: a Jewish place, Islamic place, and a Christian place. My wife sent him a letter saying that is what we need, here's a ten dollar contribution—let it be the first towards the establishment of this new foundation. He wrote back a lovely letter which she has framed.

SC: Community seems to form most naturally during times of struggle. Most of the times I have felt deeply connected to people of other faiths were during times where our survival required interdependence. I remember when our peace team was leaving Iraq, in the middle of the bombing. The car I was in had a bad accident, all of us were injured, planes were still flying over. And the first car of Iraqi civilians stopped. Waving a white sheet at the planes overhead, risking their lives, they drove us into the nearest town called Rutba. The doctors and townspeople gathered. One of the doctors was pleading, "Why, why, why is your country doing this?" He said that they could not take us into the hospital, because three days before the bombs hit their hospital, the children's ward. In the same breath he said, "But we will take care of you. Because here, in Rutba, it does not matter if you are American or Iraqi, Christian or Muslim. We take care of you as our friends." And they did, they set up a little shanty clinic outside the bombed out hospital, and they literally saved my friend's life. These are the times when I think cooperation and community are inevitable.

TC: Peter Arnett used to be with CNN. I know him and I met him in an airport in Chicago, and I said, "Peter so glad to see you, I'm running out of stories. Tell me a story." He said, "I've got one . . . I'm in the West bank, a bomb goes off and bodies are blown through the air. The Israeli troops seal off the whole area. A man comes running up to me with a bloody little girl in his arms, and says, 'You are press, you can get us out of here. If I don't get her into a hospital then immediately she's going to die. You can get us out of here. You are press'. Peter said, "I put them in the back seat and threw a blanket over them."

And I did get through the lines. As I rushed towards Tel Aviv in the car, I could hear him in the back seat, as he rocked this little girl in his arms whispering, "Go faster, oh God help him to go faster. God help him to go faster. Then he starts moaning, I'm losing her! I'm losing her! Oh God I'm losing her, I'm losing her!" Peter said by the time I got to the hospital I was emotionally drained. They took the little girl into the operating room, and the two of us sat down on a bench in the waiting room, exhausted. We must have sat there a half hour, silent, exhausted from the emotion. The doctor came out and said, "I'm sorry. She's dead." This man dissolved in tears. I put my arm around him and said, I'm not married. I don't have any children. I don't know what it's like to lose a daughter. The man snapped his head back and said, "My daughter? That little girl is not my child. I'm an Israeli settler, she's a Muslim girl. But maybe the time has come for us to recognize every child as our child."

What can we learn about that kind of spirituality that can help us find common ground? No theological statements were made, no compromising beliefs, no attempts to come to a common denominator. And yet, a kind of spiritual oneness.

That's the place where we come together, in common need and common suffering, as we reach out to one another in love, leaving judgment in the hands of God, sharing out of our own faith. I mean the last thing we are asking in those times is—is your theology the same as mine?—and vice-versa. All of the sudden in the hour of suffering there is a commonality. And that's where we meet. It's in mystical spirituality and in communal mutuality that's where we come together.

SC: You also note in your book the encounter of Francis of Assisi and the Muslim Sultan during the thirteenth century, again in a moment of crisis, when they came together across major religious divides and had a mystical unity; the Sultan became known for his kindness and Francis used the Muslim horn given him to call the Christian brothers to prayer. These are human encounters that we do not naturally have when we are conditioned to see each other as enemies or outsiders. As you mention in the book, MacDonald says, “Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries." Rarely are people converted by force or words, but through intimate encounters. Perhaps one of the best things we can do is stop talking with our mouths and cross the chasm between us with our lives. Maybe we will even find a mystical union of the Spirit as Francis did.

TC: Speaking of Francis, here's a wonderful story. I got to meet the head of the Franciscan order. I met him in Washington. He said let me tell you an interesting story. He told me about one of their gatherings, where they bring the brothers of the Franciscan order together for a time of fellowship. About eight years ago they held it in Thailand and out of courtesy, they really felt they needed to show some graciousness to the Buddhists, because they were in a Buddhist country. So they got Buddhist theologians together and Franciscan theologians together and sent them off for three days to talk and see if they could find common ground. They also took Buddhist and Franciscan monastics and sent them off together to pray with each other. On the fourth day they all reassembled. The theologians were fighting with each other, arguing with each other, contending there was no common ground between them. The monastics that had gone off praying together, came back hugging each other. In a mystical relationship with God, there is a coming together of people where theology is left behind and in this spirituality they found a commonality.

It seems to me that when we listen to the Muslim mystics as they talk about Jesus and their love for Jesus, I must say, it's a lot closer to New Testament Christianity than a lot of the Christians that I hear. In other words if we are looking for common ground, can we find it in mystical spirituality, even if we cannot theologically agree, Can we pray together in such a way that we connect with a God that transcends our theological differences?

So we make sure we don't compromise what we believe. But we also make sure that in mystical spirituality we find a kind of oneness that we leave judgment of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell in the hands of God and just preach the truth as we understand it.

SC: And that is very liberating, to trust that the work of conversion is not up to us but to the Spirit, and not contingent on our own persistence, technological ingenuity, or church growth tactics. It really is liberating to leave that in the hands of the Spirit, and continue to live in a way that magnetizes people to God. Rabbi Michael Lerner says that we not only need to decode some of the violent threads of Christian thought, but we also must re-credit the ancient Jewishness of Jesus. He points to the many places that our faith traditions intersect, namely in calling us to work for justice and peace and reconciliation. Lerner says, "People of all faiths need to shape a political and social movement that reaffirms the most generous, peace-oriented, social justice-committed, and loving truths of the spiritual heritage of the human race. It is only this resurrection of hope that can save us from a new wave of global hatred."

TC: Michael and I got arrested together. A few years back, Jim Wallis organized this demonstration in opposition to the welfare bill that was passed, and forty of us got arrested. Michael Lerner chose to get arrested with us. Were you there?

SC: No, back then I still thought good Christians didn't go to jail. Now I know better.

TC: So we got arrested, and they put us all on a bus and they took us to the police station. We're all on the bus at the police station for quite a while, because they are processing us one by one. We are all giving testimonies of how this works into our Christian faith. Finally John Engel from a missionary organization called Beyond Borders looks over and says, "Michael how do you feel about all this highly evangelical talk?" Michael says, "Oh, I don't like it when I am with liberals who just compromise everything they believe to make me feel good. I think that the way we are going to have peace and brotherhood is if you go to the core of what you believe, and I go to the core of what I believe. And when we get to the core and live it with true love and true peace, there will be a coming together in spite of our differences." That is a very powerful statement. He did not feel the least offended. What offended him was liberals who try to say there are no differences between us.

SC: Mother Teresa used to say, "It is very fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not so fashionable to talk to the poor." I think the same could be said today of inter-religious cooperation. Many of us talk about Jewish and Muslim folks but few of us talk to them, or have friends that do not share our faith. The fellow who asked us to do this interview is a Muslim whose friendship has been such a gift, to hear how his Muslim faith drives him to love, and to share how my faith has driven me. And I must say, the Muslims I know are very interested in seeing another face of Christianity than that which they have encountered in the popular media. And that makes for a safer world, when we remove the layers that separate us from seeing the sacredness in every person, the image of God in them. We may still want them to experience the love and grace of Jesus, but how else will that happen but from seeing it in our lives? And it makes it harder for us to simply condemn them to Hell.

TC: Rather than making theological statements, we need to tell each other our stories. Jesus would tell stories and then say, "what do you make of this story?" One more story.

In the city of Toledo, right in the middle of Spain in the year 1000, when the Inquisition was in high gear. Jews, Catholics, and Muslims in this little city had learned to live together and respect one another and love one another, and protect one another. And the Catholics would not let the Inquisition come in and hurt their Muslim or Jewish brothers and vice-versa the Muslims would not let the invading Muslim troops do anything to hurt the Catholics and Jews. They had found among each other a commonality and a common spirituality that was really quite remarkable. There is a book written on Toledo holding it up as the fact that here was a place where it happened. So let it never be forgotten that there was once a spot in Toledo.

You might conclude with the that little song we always sang at communion:

Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above. . .

There is a fellowship of kindred minds and you can't deny it. And this is why C.S. Lewis asks the question, "Once I am connected with such a person in love: Could I possible enjoy heaven without him?"

SC: That's a good word. TC: Yes, a real good word.

Jamie Moffett streamed the vigil live from his phone, we are going to put together a recap for you, in the meantime, you can browse through Jamie's archives.

At about midnight we heard the shots ring out.   My friend ran to the door and I heard him yell, “Shane, a kid has been shot, come down.”  As we looked down the street we could see a young man staggering as he walked down our block.  Then his knees gave out and he fell to the ground.  We called for an ambulance, and ran outside to be with the boy.  My friend talked to him tenderly, looking into his eyes as they struggled to stay alert.  We could see the wounds in his chest, torn by bullets.  I grabbed his hand and held it as we prayed… and as we hoped.  The ambulance came and drove him off.  The next morning we heard that 19-year old Papito died that night from the gunshot wounds, on February 5, 2010.  Papito was the fourth shooting in the last few months within walking distance from our house. 

Right now in Philadelphia there is a homicide every 48 hours.  A few years ago it was one a day.  One a year is too many.  I remember Dr. King saying something to the effect, “We are all called to be the good Samaritan, and lift our injured neighbor from the ditch on the Jericho road… but after you lift so many people from the ditch, you start to say, ‘Maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be reimagined… so folks don’t keep ending up in the ditch.’”

After you see so many kids shoot each other, you start to ask where are they getting the guns?  In our neighborhood, one of the answers to that question is, “The Shooter Shop”.  The Shooter Shop is a gunshop located a few blocks from our house here in Kensington, and it has statistically been one of the worst gunshops in the country – for having guns sold there later tracked to violent crimes on the streets.  A group of local clergy and community organizers have now approached the owner of The Shooter Shop (as we did Colosimo’s gunshop, and we are urging him to sign a Code of Conduct, a 10-point covenant created by a national association of Mayors committed to decreasing violence on the streets.

We will also be starting to vigil outside his gunshop Saturday, February 20, two weeks after this latest shooting.  We will walk from the spot where Papito was killed to the gunshop 3 blocks away.  There are 3 things I want to invite you to do, if you are one of those folks who doesn’t just like pontificating but likes acting. 

1. Pick up the phone and give the owner of The Shooter Shop a call – (215) 426-2215.  His name is Mr. Haney, and we are in a respectful conversation with him.  Stress to him how urgent the issue is, and that he genuinely has an opportunity lead with integrity and set a precedent for other gunshops in this country.  We really hope that he will sign the Code of Conduct.  And when he does, we will have a celebration outside his gunshop instead of a protest.
2. Come to the vigil if you are in the Philadelphia area.  We will be at The Shooter Shop (2001 E. Allegheny Ave) at noon this Saturday.  If you are not in the area, start a conversation with your local gunshop and encourage them to commit to the 10 point Code of Conduct. 
3. Write or Call the members of Congress and encourage them to pass legislation that will decrease gun violence on our streets.  One such law we are pursuing in Pennsylvania would limit the number of guns to “One Handgun a Month”.  Part of the problem is that there are no limitations to how many guns folks can buy which is why the end up being resold on the streets by “straw purchasers.”  We are not even trying to stop the “right to bear arms”, we’re just saying maybe one handgun a month is enough.  And for those of us who are Christians, Jesus sure didn’t have a much to say about the right to bear arms but had a heck of a lot to say about loving our enemies… so we hope Christians of conscience can help lead this important struggle for peace. 

Keep our neighborhood in your prayers.  Pray for Papito’s family, for those who killed him, and for the arms dealers in our world (both gunshops like The Shooter Shop and gunshops like Lockheed Martin).  We had a powerful memorial for Papito this week, where about 100 of us gathered as a neighborhood with Papito’s family.  We prayed.  We cried.  We read Scripture.  We ached for an end to the bloodshed.

Rest in Peace, Papito my brother.  And we will do our best to make sure that other lives are not taken the way that yours was.

May God continue to heal all that is broken in our hearts, in our streets, and in our world.

For more information, see:
Heeding God's Call
Responsible Firearms Retailer Partnership: A 10-Point Voluntary Code 
Vigil & Rally information 

Shane, Jamie, & Logan went to Iraq. Shane was previously there with Christian Peacemaking Teams, Logan served in the US Army and was stationed in Iraq & Afghanistan, and this was Jamie's first time.  Along with 7 others, they are the first unarmed civilians to visit Rutba since the war began in 2003. Revisit Shane's 2003 Iraq Journal and standby for more stories.

This is what Jamie writes:

Brian, it was amazing.  We have an amazing story to share.  Love from the other side of the pond.  Be back in a few.

And Shane has a few words:

In March 2003, I spent a month in Iraq as a Christian peacemaker and wrote many of my reasons for going to Iraq. I just had a chance to look over them again. Unfortunately, not too much has changed in the world over the past 7 years, and many of my reasons for going then are exactly the same now. I am convinced as much as ever before that we must embark on new adventures of grace and reconciliation as a witness to Christ and his scandalous love on the cross. Otherwise we should confess that we have never believed the cross is truly an alternative to the sword. So that is why I am going.

There are a few new reasons I am going to Iraq. As we were leaving Baghdad at the end of March in 2003, we had a bad car accident on the desert road out of Baghdad, a few hours from the border, near a little town named Rutba. With each of us suffering injuries, from minor to life-threatening, --we were welcomed by this town in spite of the fact that their city had suffered deeply from the war and bombing. The managers of the hospital greeted us with warm smiles, but quickly told us with tears in their eyes that our government was dropping bombs on them, one of which hit their hospital. It fell on the children’s ward. But the doctors insisted: “We will still take care of you. We do not see Iraqi or American. We welcome you here as sisters and brothers. We want you to know we love you.” And they set up a shanty clinic with a bed for each of us.

As some of you know… the story ends with them offering the most moving and marvelous act of hospitality we have ever seen. They would not take any money, but insisted that it was all simply because they love us… and they told us to share the story of Rutba with the world. Some of us on that trip started a community named after the town (Rutba House in Durham, NC). Others of us have now returned to Iraq to connect with old friends in Rutba and to say thank you to those who saved our lives and touched our souls. It’s the next chapter of the story of Rutba. The latest word is that the people of Rutba are glad to have us return to their magical town. It sounds like we will be welcomed by the Mayor, and that one of the doctors from 2003 (no longer living in Rutba) will drive many hours to meet us at the hospital in Rutba, where we will will be staying while there.

We hope to listen to the stories, both brilliant and tragic, from the people of Rutba. We will continue to trust, as always… that love wins, and that mercy triumphs.

Photography by Jamie Moffett for the feature documentary, The Gospel of Rutbah

Our partner Yes! And... is putting on their annual winter show, A Winter Sort of Thing, Jan 28 - 31. Be sure to check out their website for more information and check it out! See you there!

Father Time has a problem. And when Father Time has a problem, we all have a problem. The Future is nowhere to be found, and without him Time is caught in a vicious loop. The world is trapped in the same seven minutes, reliving the good, bad and boring over and over. Father Time is relying on his faithful, if reluctant, cuckoo (from his cosmic cuckoo clock) to solve the mystery of The Future missing in action. Can the kids of Cooper County, and everyone else on earth, be saved from chronic déjà vu? Take a journey through the back halls of time in a mad dash to get time ticking again.

For a third year, Yes! And..., in collaboration withEastern University Theatre, has gathered children from all over the Philadelphia area along with professional actors to create and produce a Winter Sort of Thing, a wild, fun and magical musical for and by young people.

Reserve your tickets

If you haven’t reserved your tickets yet, what are you waiting for? Yes! And…’s Winter Sort of Thing only plays one weekend every January and we don’t want you to miss out on all the fun!

You can reserve tickets two ways:

The easiest way is to go to www.wintersortofthing.com and enter your information into the form provided. It is necessary to enter all your info so that we can contact you in case of a problem. In general, the form will be taken down approximately 3 hours before a performance.

The second way to reserve tickets is to call our office at 215-951-0330 x2117. Either leave your info on the voice mail or leave it with whomever answers the phone.

If you are bringing a group and are interested in group discounts, please email Michael at michael@yesandcamp.org.

The 13^th Month Campaign is an experiment initiated by Relational Tithe in partnership with TURN, The Simple Way, YesAnd!, The Ooze TV, Jamie Moffett Media Design & Production, and The Work of the People to creatively assist groups that you are interested in and passionate about to raise funds needed to continue and/or expand their reach.

The 13^th Month Campaign is a challenge to either begin or to even more fully express our support for things we believe in, causes that share our same values and dreams of what the world ought to be.  It is an invitation, an appeal, and an opportunity to not only help support but partner with the things that we get excited about, works we would love to see thrive, things we recognize that without additional funding would likely cease to exist.

Participants in The 13^th Month Campaign speak their support of a local and/or global organization or cause by contributing the equivalent of an additional 10% of one month’s income, above and beyond their planned tithe for the month (either to the same or a different cause).

If you are part of a group and would also like to participate in this experiment feel free to contact us at getinvolved@13thmonth.org.

Please feel free to share ideas on how this opportunity could be enhanced. It is new to all of us.

Get all of the details and get involved at http://13thmonth.org/

Our friend and co-founder Jamie Moffett put together a video of our neighborhood during the recent snow

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn's Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn't quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don't know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, "God is not a monster." Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, "I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ." A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That's the ugly stuff. And that's why I begin by saying that I'm sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not [for] the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth.

One of Jesus' most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan... you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I'm sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine... but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David... at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you." And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about "dirty theology" — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man's eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay "out there" but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, "Nothing good could come." It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society's rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, "I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you." If those of us who believe in God do not believe God's grace is big enough to save the whole world... well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

Eastern Trip update! We took a few kids from our neighborhood to hear about the school and other opportunities to get them excited for college. Hear what they had to say.

One of the houses was a house being used for drug activity. Here’s what happened. We talked to some of the folks involved in the drug trafficking, many of them are kids we know and love dearly, and we let them know that we cared about everyone living in this house which is the very reason we needed to see something different happen in it. We offered to help anyone who wanted off the streets get into a recovery community and help through detox. Then we informed everyone that we would not call the police, but we would board up the house in 6 days. As we walked through the needle-strewn house we had a deep sense that this was the right thing to do. So we did it, and left a note for the owner. Within a few days he called us, and we gently but assertively told him this was not the kind of environment we wanted to cultivate in the neighborhood and that we were willing to offer him fair market value for the drug house. To cut to the chase… after lots of conversations and meetings, not only did we acquire the drug house, but all 3 of the houses he owns on the block which we will be renovating and stabilizing with solid neighbors here. It’s one of those things we just could not NOT do – so thanks for making it possible to respond to crises like this one. Take a look at some of the pictures (before and during) the clean-out process.

We were able to purchase 3 houses on our block here on Potter street that belonged to an absentee landlord in New York. One of them was a house being used for drug activity. We are gutting the house to start from scratch in renovating it and making much needed repairs to the other houses (which have folks living in them!). If you would like to be a part of the restoration process, you can sign up here and we’ll contact you with more details about your specific area.

Philadelphia City Paper wrote an extensive cover story about us. You can read it on their website.

They started out as good Christians. They thumbed through their Bibles, were concerned with sex and feared God. Then they started taking Christianity seriously.

“This thing Jesus called the Kingdom of God is emerging across the globe in the most unexpected places, a gentle whisper amid the chaos,” writes The Simple Way co-founder Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution, his manifesto on the movement. “The truth is that much stands in the way of God’s will for our world, beasts like what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the giant triplets of evil: racism, militarism and materialism.”

But in a broken down, post-industrial neighborhood in Philadelphia, a group of young people are attempting to pave the way for that Kingdom of God.

A Look Inside the House

Founded eight years ago in an abandoned row house on a block known for drug dealing and prostitution, The Simple Way is an alternative Christian community with six semi-permanent members and a few dozen others who have passed through its doors. Members live and pray together, dedicate themselves to work with their poor neighbors, contribute part of their outside incomes (everybody has a part-time regular job) to maintain the house and generally aspire to upset the established order through acts of radical Christian love. Those acts of Christian resistance have included running an art camp for their inner city neighbors, opening the door to prostitutes in crisis and visiting Iraq to perform circuses for war-battered kids. These acts are equal parts punk rock and monastic.

The house has the laid back but frenetic vibe of a college share. The emphasis in the kitchen is on ease of use, not design, with open shelves for ready access and a massive dry erase board for keeping track of schedules. Posters and art are plastered everywhere and anywhere on the walls: Che Guevara’s iconic visage with a quote about love, an enlarged newspaper clipping about the homeless in Philadelphia, protest placards denouncing war, a prayer from Mother Teresa. On the roof they are growing lettuce and basil and tomatoes. In the basement someone is silkscreening T-shirts and fashioning the stark stencils one sees on blank walls in hip neighborhoods and at anti-World Bank rallies.

Like a Religious Order, but Not Quite

What distinguishes the house from other locales where cool, politically minded denizens split the rent is that these young adults gather expressly to share in each others’ religious lives and to follow Christ together. While members do not take vows and can stay for as long as forever or as little as a month, the best way to understand The Simple Way may be as a religious order, albeit an anarchist one with no Mother Superior and no dress code (although dread locks and piercings seem to be de rigeur). Living in community means conscientious dedication to each other’s spiritual journey. On the staircase, a diagram that looks like a brainstorming exercise from grade school features residents’ names connected with arrows and lines. This is the check-in chart, a system members devised to ensure no one got lost in the shuffle of work and life. In a religious order people have confessors or spiritual directors to advocate for them. Like everything else they do, the folks at The Simple Way are finding a way to do this in radical democracy, without soul-negating power relationships.

The Simple Way was inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, St. Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa. Mostly though, they model themselves on the early church, a church before hierarchy, dogma and the truce Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, made with worldly power. Their Christianity is radical, calling members to live in communion with the poor and in obstinate opposition to consumerism and violence.

The Simple Way is part of a growing movement of mostly young evangelical Christians and Catholics who are dedicated to taking the Gospel—not Genesis— literally. The group makes common cause with Catholic Worker houses of hospitality and dozens of other alternative communities that operate below the radar of American Christianity. In 2004 two community members took a year-long trip across the United States visiting many of those groups. Some are animated primarily by environmental activism, or anti-war activities, or inner city challenges. All of them strive to build a City of God on earth, according to the values of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles.

They call themselves the New Monastics and they take their cues from the Desert Mothers and Fathers—fifth century mystics who searched for a truer Christianity when the early church was being co-opted by Rome. For founder Shane Claiborne, the comparison is apt. An evangelical Christian who attended Bible college and interned at a megachurch, he sees Christians seduced by the new Rome: the American Empire.

Taking Jesus’ Message Seriously

“I was attracted to The Simple Way because I wanted to see what it could be like to live as a Christian. What if we took Jesus seriously?” said Amber Christis, a 24-year–old community member with a pixie haircut who has lived at the house for four years. Christis’ path to The Simple Way is unique in that she wasn’t raised Christian, she says as she lounges on a battered sofa. She was a feminist and anti-globalization activist first, but felt a lack of spiritual nourishment. Her first encounter with Christianity was beautiful, she said, but without a social context. “Everything was a very pie in the sky when you die sort of theology,” she said. Then she discovered The Simple Way.

“As I’ve tried to study a little bit and looked at the New Testament, a lot of it has to do with economics. When you look at what Jesus said, you’ll see a lot of things about economics and how you treat your neighbor.”

In a typical week at The Simple Way members pack bags of donated groceries for their hungry neighbors, tutor kids in an after school program they run from a rehabbed squat down the street, tend a community garden on a vacant lot and worship together in morning prayer or alone in a chapel in the basement. On a recent Saturday, the thrift shop they operate out of the corner of their ramshackle row house was open more for barter than commerce, members prepared for a camping jamboree that was to include dozens of similar communities, and a visitor was getting an orientation on the work and prayer that animates the community’s life.

The Founder’s Tale

Claiborne recounts the founding of The Simple Way in The Irresistible Revolution. As a student at Eastern University, a Christian college outside Philadelphia, Claiborne began visiting the city to spend time with homeless people. Sometimes he and his friends drove into the city with backpacks full of sandwiches to distribute. Sometimes they simply sat with people on the street, listening to their stories and sharing friendship. When homeless families and their supporters set up camp in an abandoned Catholic church to draw attention to the lack of affordable housing and to keep out of the cold, Claiborne and his friends joined them. The scales fell away from Claiborne’s eyes when he saw that the Catholic diocese was summoning its power not to house the people, but to evict them. It was the beginning of a truly engaged Christianity, he says in The Irresistible Revolution. From that radicalizing experience, Claiborne linked up with homeless advocates—Christian, Catholic and secular—who were involved in the fight for the abandoned cathedral. A few years later, after a detour to Mother Teresa’s Calcutta hospice and after finishing college elsewhere, Claiborne and friends wanted to continue their adventure following Christ into the most forgotten places. Philadelphia felt like home.

Putting Down Philly Roots

The Simple Way originators found an abandoned row house which they bought outright, putting the mortgage on one member’s credit card and soliciting donations from friends. Later, they took over another house down the block, this time buying it from the city through a homesteading program designed to free abandoned homes from city control and place them into the hands of homeowners, Christis explained.

The second home was a squat. Simple Way members walked across rooftops from their own house and climbed in the squat’s ceiling. The house was filled with debris, drug refuse and tragedy. Two addicts had died inside. Over several years The Simple Way reclaimed it, putting up walls, painting murals, installing safe electricity and converting the ground floor into an arts center for local kids.

As the community continues to find its path, its message of truly life-changing Christianity is finding followers. The Simple Way has been deluged with requests from individuals and groups requesting a visit. And Claiborne’s book, which reads as a manifesto of the New Monasticism movement and a disarming memoir of his own spiritual development, ranks 50th on Amazon’s Christian booklist.

Read the original article online at Busted Halo.

The vision of Jesus is not spread through organizational structures, but through touch, breath, shared life. It is spread through people who have discovered love. 

Not long ago, I sat and talked with some very wealthy Christians about what it means to be the church and to follow Jesus. One businessman confided, "I, too, have been thinking about following Christ and what that means … so I had this made." He pulled up his shirt-sleeve to reveal a bracelet, engraved with W.W.J.D (What Would Jesus Do?). It was custom-made of twenty-four karat gold. 

Maybe each of us can relate to this man — both his earnest desire to follow Jesus and his distorted execution of that desire, so bound up in the materialism of our culture. It is difficult to learn to live the downward mobility of the gospel in this age of wealth. For the most part, those of us who are rich never meet those of us who are poor. Instead, nonprofit organizations serve as brokers between the two in a booming business of poverty management. 

I believe that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor, but that they do not know the poor. Yet if we are called to live the new community for which Christ was crucified, we cannot remain strangers to one another. Jesus demands that we live in a very different way. 

I recently surveyed people who said they were "strong followers of Jesus." Over 80 percent agreed with the statement, "Jesus spent much time with the poor." Yet only 1 percent said that they themselves spent time with the poor. We believe we are following the God of the poor — yet we never truly encounter the poor. 

About five years ago, I became part of a community called the simple way, a group of Christians literally born out of the wreckage of the church. Dozens of homeless families and children had moved into St. Edward's, a cavernous, abandoned Catholic church in one of the most struggling neighborhoods of Philadelphia. A small group of us who were students at Eastern College, a suburban Christian school, decided to move in with them as a gesture of solidarity. From that initial step, one miracle followed another as those families mentored us in community, worship, and love. 

Eventually, we settled in a rowhouse in Kensington, a few blocks from St. Edward's. It is the poorest (but most beautiful!) district in Pennsylvania. There is no place we'd rather call home. Here, we play and dance. We plant gardens. We feed people. We cry. We have a community store. We help kids with homework. We live, and we spend our lives joining folks in poverty as they struggle to end it. Because we know that we cannot end poverty without ending wealth, we also spend time talking with Christian communities about our work and hosting visitors. 

Before moving to St. Edward's and then Kensington, I had worked in Calcutta, India, first at Mother Teresa's home for the destitute dying and then in a leper colony. A week after returning to the United States, I began a year at Willow Creek Community Church, one of the largest, wealthiest congregations in the world — where a food court graces their worship center. Talk about culture shock! 

This contrast brought me face to face with Christ's radical love, a love strong enough to bring us together across chasms of difference. I longed for the two worlds to meet, for the lepers to know the landowners. I committed my life to trying to make that a reality. 

Over the years I have come to see how charity fits into — and legitimizes — our system of wealth and poverty. Charity assures that the rich will feel good while the poor will remain with us. It is important that the poor remain with us, because our capitalist system hinges on it. Without someone on the bottom, there is no American dream and no hope for upward mobility. 

Charity also functions to keep the wealthy sane. Tithes, tax-exempt donations, and short-term mission trips, while they accomplish some good, also function as outlets that allow wealthy Christians to pay off their consciences while avoiding a revolution of lifestyle. People do their time in a social program or distribute food and clothes through organizations which take their excess. That way, they never actually have to face the poor and give their clothes, their food, their beds. Wealthy Christians never actually have to be with poor people, with Christ in disguise. 

If charity did not provide these carefully sanctioned outlets, Christians might be forced to live the reckless Gospel of Jesus by abandoning the stuff of earth. Instead, thanks to charity, we can live out a comfortable, privatized discipleship. 

But when we get to heaven and are separated into sheep and goats (Matt. 25), I don't believe Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me" or "When I was naked, you donated to the Salvation Army and they clothed me." Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He is seeking concrete actions: "You fed me, … you visited me, … you welcomed me in, ... you clothed me.…" 

If we are to truly be the church, poverty must become a face we recognize as our own kin. 

Several years ago, I attended a protest against sweatshops where the organizers had not invited the typical rally speakers — lawyers, activists, advocates. Instead, they brought kids from the sweatshops. A child from Indonesia pointed to his face. "I got this scar when my master lashed me for not working hard enough. When it bled, he did not want me to stop working or to ruin the cloth, so he took a lighter and burned it shut. I got this scar making stuff for you." 

I was suddenly consumed with the overwhelming reality of the suffering body of Christ. Jesus now bore not just nail marks and scars from thorns, but a gash down his face. How could I possibly follow Jesus and buy anything from that master? 

If we are content with discipleship that ends merely with generosity, we still serve money. Generosity is a beautiful response, but we should not confuse it with love. Generosity is merely what is expected; what is required is to return that which has been stolen. God did not create some of us rich and others of us poor. 

Basil the Great, writing in the fourth century, put it this way: "When someone strips a man of his clothes, we call him a thief. And one who might clothe the naked and does not — should not he be given the same name? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute." Or, in the words of Dorothy Day, "If you have two coats, one of them belongs to the poor." Should we not, then, return our stolen goods with humility, like a child returning a stolen candy bar to the grocery store clerk? Should we not cry out, in the words of St. Vincent de Paul: "May the poor man forgive me the bread I give him"? 

Often wealthy folks ask me what they can do for the simple way. I could ask them for a few thousand dollars, but that would be too easy for both of us. Instead, I ask them to come visit. Writing a check makes us feel good and can fool us into thinking that we have loved the poor. But seeing the squat houses and tent cities and hungry children will wreck our lives. We will never again be the same. 

As we have done this work and have accompanied others new to it, we've come to see a pattern. People join us with the idea of "saving the poor." Later, they say instead that "the poor saved me." But both comments have one thing in common. They revolve around me — what I have to give poor people and what they can give me. God wants us to move beyond ourselves to join all of creation in groaning for liberation. There we face, perhaps for the first time, the reality that we, too, are poor. 

I believe the church has forgotten its identity. The church is not an institution, a meeting, or a building. It is not something we go to. The church is something we are — an organism, not an organization. 

Instead of living out this alternative vision, the church has been content to be a broker between the rich and the poor. Both those trapped in poverty and those trapped in riches view the church as a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. No radical new community is formed. 

In this model, both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get fed) — but neither goes away transformed. They do not join together to discover a new way of living. 

In ministering in this way, the church has adopted the model of many of our nonprofit organizations. Functionally, many nonprofits act as brokers between the rich and the poor. They facilitate the exchange of goods and services, putting plenty of professionals in the middle to guarantee that the rich do not have to face the poor and that power does not shift. Rich and poor are kept in separate worlds. Charity does not feed fundamental change. 

Brokering poverty also seduces Christians into being gatekeepers to power. Our progressive movements are haunted by the temptation to facilitate power. If anything, the recent dismantling of the welfare system and the corresponding public praise of small attempts by churches, nonprofits, and other faith-based institutions to take up the slack has increased this pressure. Policies like charitable choice (where churches compete for federal funding to run social programs) allow our government to pat churches on the back: "You do a better job at managing poverty than we do, so we'll just discontinue our social supports and let you do the job!" And our churches, flattered and uncritical, scramble for the new state money like a prize. 

In that model, the power structure has not budged. The power has merely changed hands. But power does not trickle down. Just as trickle-down economics has failed, trickle-down politics does not bring change. 

Many beautiful Christians working for social change in a range of movements believe we can bring about fundamental change by using power benevolently rather than reworking the power equation. We see ourselves as the good guys who will use our influence for justice — and perhaps, in these terms, we succeed in getting our candidate on the ballot or elected. But the Christ we follow has a different, harder path--one of downward mobility, of struggling to become the least, of joining those at the bottom. 

Several years ago, I was at a meeting where a new movement to end poverty was announced. I looked around. The only poor people in sight were the handful of people I had come with. Launching a movement to end poverty without poor people in critical roles is like launching a civil rights movement without Black people, or a feminist movement without women. As long as the poor are not present and intricately involved in the process, ending poverty will remain an intellectual, political concept. It will not convert us. 

The church needs to stop talking about ending the pain of the poor and instead join the poor. All around us, the poor are crying out. They can no longer be silenced. Wherever that outcry is heard, the church must be present. 

All this does not mean that social-service organizations do not do a great deal of good. I am not calling for all these organizations to be dismantled. But I am calling Christians to ask critical questions about their relationshito God's poor people. 

I believe all our "programs" should have their genesis in true relationship. At our house, we tutor — but we did not start by deciding to do a tutoring program. We simply fell in love with kids who needed help with their homework. We feed people — but we did not begin with a decision to start a feeding program. We simply fell in love with our neighbors, and they were hungry. 

We have now established a nonprofit organization ourselves, but we did this in order for the organization to serve us. We are not committed to the organization, but rather to our fellowship together. 

I see many communities doing amazing things through established organizations. God can — and does — work through these organizations. But the reign of God dwells in people. 

Those of us who yearn for the kingdom of God must follow in the steps of Jesus. Jesus was not "in charge" of the poor. He was poor. The message of Christ from the manger to the cross is that the world is conquered through weakness, through leastness, through struggle--not from the top, but from the bottom. 

The people wanted a mighty Messiah. They got a baby refugee. They wanted a powerful king to take over Rome. They got a wandering homeless man. He could have saved the world with his mighty power, but he did it through his ridiculous love. The power of God lies in the brokenness of Jesus: naked, cursed, spit upon, with birds picking at his flesh as he died the rotten death of a criminal. 

The great temptation of the church, and of every believer, is the offer Satan made to Jesus in the desert: to win the world with power. But power will not end poverty. We must discover another way of living. 

Jesus did not set up a program, but rather modeled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God. That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread through touch, through breath, through life. It spread through people who discovered love.

I am haunted by the command of Jesus to love our neighbor as ourselves. I struggle because I sleep in a house while my neighbor sleeps in a cardboard box; I eat twice a day while my neighbor hasn't eaten once. I draw strength from following Jesus in community. I live with people who, if they pass someone with a worse pair of shoes, have taken their shoes off and switched; people who have quietly handed over winter jackets to someone they met on the street without a coat.

This is the reckless love of Jesus, which teaches us to see the connections between our wealth and our neighbor's poverty. The love of Jesus will teach us another way of doing life, a way that will bring God's reign to earth as it is in heaven. The reign of God is not for the future. It is something we live today.

Jesus reminds us that it is easy to love people who are just like us: "Even idolators do that" (Matt. 5:47). We are called to love those who hate us. Love those who create poverty, and love those who are trapped in it. See in each of them yourself — the same blood and tears We are all capable of the same evil, and we have potential for the same good. As one believer said, "In the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands." From addicts I learn of my addiction, and from the saints I learn of my holiness. 

The God of love and the love of God know no bounds. The unending love of Jesus teaches revolutionaries to love police officers, anarchists to love politicians, vegetarians to love meat eaters, peacemakers to love soldiers. This is the love that makes us the church. 

Ultimately, only this radical love of Jesus can end the poverty-wealth dichotomy. When the rich meet the poor, together they will end wealth. When the poor meet the rich, together they will end poverty. 

People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them. 

Recommended

Few pastoral and practical guides help conscientized Christians to move beyond guilt, charity fatigue, or paralysis when they finally confront privilege that insulates. In Beyond Guilt (Adventure Publications, 2000), George Johnson addresses the struggles common to Christians as their social consciousness changes, moving through the natural emotional cycles of reflection, denial, and feelings of frustration and disempowerment to develop a commitment to justice that can be sustained. Though it sometimes diverts from its focus (moving privileged people into liberated, constructive engagement) to talk about the issues themselves, this is a good resource for individuals and groups who wish to make their privilege a tool of empowerment for themselves and others. 

This article was first published in the November 1, 2000 issue of The Other Side.