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.