The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary Radical

by Shane Claiborne

I heard a preacher put it like this: “If you find yourself climbing the ladder of success, be careful or else on your way up you might pass Jesus on his way down.” And

Wesley’s old saying, “If I should die with more than ten pounds, may every man call me a liar and a thief,” for he would have betrayed the gospel.

At that moment, we decided to stop complaining about the church we saw, and we set our hearts on becoming the church we dreamed of.

[And he paused in the awkward silence.] But I guess that’s why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.” Ha! If Rich hadn’t died, he probably would’ve joined the list of notorious blacklisted chapel speakers.

Sometimes I was incredibly frustrated and angry, wondering how these extremes could exist in the same world, let alone in the same church. Sometimes I just got cynical. That was the easiest thing to feel, as cynicism takes very little energy.

In our culture of “seeker sensitivity” and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd.

I think this is why the disciples react as they do. They protest in awe, “Who then can be saved?” (“Why must you make it so hard? We need some rich folks here, Jesus, we’re trying to build a movement.”) And yet Jesus lets him walk away.

Jesus doesn’t exclude rich people; he just lets them know their rebirth will cost them everything they have. The story is not so much about whether rich folks are welcome as it is about the nature of the kingdom of God, which has an ethic and economy diametrically opposed to those of the world. Rather than accumulating stuff for oneself, followers of Jesus abandon everything, trusting in God alone for providence.

was convinced that what we do is not nearly as important as who we are. The question is not whether you will be a doctor or a lawyer but what kind of doctor or lawyer you will be.

I remembered Mother Teresa saying, “Do not worry about your career. Concern yourself with your vocation, and that is to be lovers of Jesus.”

knew what Cornell West meant when he said, “We’ve taken the blood at the foot of the cross and turned it into Kool-Aid” and marketed it all over the world.

Emile Durkheim, the classic forefather of sociology, wrote extensively about “totemism,” the human tendency to form our conception of God in our own image. He said that oftentimes what human beings do, whether aboriginal tribes in the jungle or sophisticated clans (or not-so-sophisticated Klans) in industrial countries, is take the values and traditions that we most admire about ourselves and project them onto a totem. Eventually, we stand in awe of that totem and end up worshiping an incarnation of the things we love about ourselves.

We create a Western conception of the Mediterranean peasant revolutionary who lived two thousand years ago, whom we can relate to and who cares about what we care about (eats at McDonald’s and votes Republican). Or as the punk-rock band Bad Religion puts it, “We’ve got the American Jesus; he helped build the president’s estate.”

We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.

Check out www.globalexchange.org and http://www.puravidacoffee.com.

As my teacher Tony Campolo used to ask, “Even if there were no heaven and there were no hell, would you still follow Jesus? Would you follow him for the life, joy, and fulfillment he gives you right now?” I am more and more convinced each day that I would.

Jesus says the kingdom is “within us,” “among us,” “at hand,” and we are to pray that it comes “on earth as it is in heaven.” No wonder the early Christian church was known as the Way. It was a way of life that stood in glaring contrast to the world. What gave the early Christians integrity was the fact that they could denounce the empire and in the same breath say, “And we have another way of living. If you are tired of what the empire has to offer, we invite you into the Way.”

The early Christians spoke about resurrection not just as a one-time event two thousand years ago but as something we are invited to participate in. So every time we bring dead space back to life or make ugly things beautiful, it is the work of Jesus.

celebrities, to arenas and megachurches. In the desert, Jesus was tempted by the spectacular—to throw himself from the temple so that people might believe—to shock and awe people, if you will. Today the church is tempted by the spectacular, to do big, miraculous things so people might believe, but Jesus has called us to littleness and compares our revolution to the little mustard seed, to yeast making

Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I’ve come to see that this is the difference between a career that is just about paying the bills, and a vocation that is about seeking first the kingdom of God.

The real question is not what are you going to do when you grow up but who are you becoming.

Many of us feel an inner collision between the old life and the new one.

Not everyone responds exactly the same way. Some will give up their houses and leave their fields. Others will offer their possessions to the community and form hospitality houses like Mary and Martha, and Peter’s family. Others will hold back from the common pool and lie to God, and they will be struck dead like Ananias and Sapphira.

There are the Matthews who encounter Jesus and sell everything. But then there are also the Zacchaeuses who meet Jesus and redefine their careers. So not everyone responds in the same way, but we must respond. We must seek our vocation listening to the voice of God and the voices of our suffering neighbors.

So missions is more about recognizing where God is at work and joining in. Places cannot be God forsaken, but they can be church forsaken.

We have never considered ourselves a “church plant.” There are congregations on nearly every corner. I’m not sure we need more churches. What we really need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular—a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: “We’ve got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he’s coming back for a bride, not a harem.” So we worship in our neighborhood.

The book Jesus for President is all about this idea that Christians are meant to be God’s holy counterculture, showing the world what a society of love can look like. It is about political imagination and what it means to be the peculiar people of God.

David Janzen has developed a team of elders called the Nurturing Communities Project, which helps new communities get going and helps old communities keep going: http://www.shalommissioncommunities.org/nurturing-communities.

Conversion is not an event but a process, a process of slowly tearing ourselves from the clutches of the culture.

We’ve all heard the saying, “Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they’ll eat for the rest of their life.” But our friend John Perkins challenges us to go farther. A few years after writing this book, Dr. Perkins and I wrote a book together called Follow Me to Freedom. He says, “The problem is that nobody is asking who owns the pond.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said during his age of injustice, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, but we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

New Jerusalem, which is made up of people recovering from addictions to drugs and alcohol. They have taught us so much about drug addiction, as well as our own addictions and recovery. They have taught us that we cannot look at the sick without looking at what is causing the sickness, that sin is both personal and social. (They teach about “the politics of drugs” and the complexity of the drug industry.) People are poor not just because of their sins; they are poor because of our sins (and people are rich because of our sins). On the wall of New Jerusalem is a sign that reads, “We cannot fully recover until we help the society that made us sick recover.”

There are more African-Americans in prison or under judicial constraint than there were slaves in 1850.

It costs four times more to keep a person in jail than to send a child to school. It costs $69 billion a year to maintain the prisons system. At the time Philadelphia schools were going bankrupt and closing dozens of schools with a $300 million dollar budget, a $400 million prison was being built just outside the city.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name show that slavery did not end—slavery evolved.

One of the more disturbing facts is that the military is one of the largest contractors of prison labor. Prisoners make war supplies, even parts for Patriot missiles (used in Iraq) and helmets, ammunition belts, uniforms, and—get this—even the vestments for chaplains. (A good book on this is Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration.)

When we are trying to teach kids not to hit each other and they see a government use violence to bring about change, we start to consider what it means to give witness to a peace that is not like the world gives (John 14:27). When we live in the wreckage of an old industrial neighborhood that has lost over two hundred thousand jobs and now has seven hundred abandoned factories, we start to ask questions about the corporate global economy, especially when we see the same companies abuse other “neighbors” overseas.

Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”

A few of my favorite groups working for corporate accountability and who suggest healthy alternatives are: Globalexchange.org, Sweatshopwatch.org, Corpwatch.org, Hrw.org (Human Rights Watch), Iccr.org (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility).

Not long ago, a few friends and I were talking with some very wealthy executives 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 sleeve to reveal a bracelet engraved with WWJD (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, bound up in the materialism of our culture, his distorted execution of that desire.

It is much more comfortable to depersonalize the poor so we don’t feel responsible for the catastrophic human failure that results in someone sleeping on the street while people have spare bedrooms in their homes. We can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing through organizations and never have to open up our homes, our beds, our dinner tables. When we get to heaven, we will be separated into those sheep and goats Jesus talks about in Matthew 25 based on how we cared for the least among us. I’m just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, “When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me,” or, “When I was naked, you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me.” Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He seeks concrete acts of love: “you fed me . . . you visited me in prison . . . you welcomed me into your home . . . you clothed me.”

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed.

I heard that Gandhi, when people asked him if he was a Christian, would often reply, “Ask the poor. They will tell you who the Christians are.” Mother Teresa once said, “It is fashionable to talk about the poor, but not as fashionable to talk to the poor.”

As we consider what it means to be “born again,” as the evangelical jargon goes, we must ask what it means to be born again into a family in which our sisters and brothers are starving to death. Then we begin to see why rebirth and redistribution are inextricably bound up in one another, as a growing number of evangelicals have come to proclaim. It also becomes scandalous for the church to spend money on windows and buildings when some family members don’t even have water.

“Was Jesus a Communist or a Capitalist?” You can read about it on CNN (http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/23/was-jesus-a-communist-or-a-capitalist/) and watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52nCgezeDjU. Don’t worry—Jesus was nothing that ends in -ist. He defies our categories and transcends our -ists and -isms. We’ve done that debate a few times and have a blast every time.

Popular culture has taught us to believe that charity is a virtue. But for Christians, it is only what is expected. True generosity is measured not by how much we give away but by how much we have left, especially when we look at the needs of our neighbors.

Gandhi put it well when he said, “There is enough for everyone’s need, but there is not enough for everyone’s greed.” One of the first commands given to our biblical ancestors (even before they had the Big 10) while they were stuck in the middle of the wilderness somewhere between Pharaoh’s empire and the Promised Land was this: each one was to gather only as much they needed (Exod. 16:16).

A heart-wrenching twist to the story is that the wife of the married couple is now very ill with multiple sclerosis, but now the nurse living in her home is caring for her, just as she had cared for the nurse. This is the divine gift of mystical providence and radical interdependence. The woman of the married couple who opened their home died shortly after the original release of this book. And yes, the formerly homeless mom was her nurse as she died.

I spoke at a military academy where they had a full-on procession of military vehicles and weaponry. They fired cannons and saluted the flag, and then I got up to speak. I felt compelled to speak on the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control), the things Scripture says God is like and we should hope to be more like. I talked about how the fruit of the Spirit take training and discipline and are not always cultivated by the culture around us. Afterword, one young soldier came up to me, nearly in tears, and told me that as he heard the list of the fruit of the Spirit, it became clear to him that these were not the things he was being trained to become. We prayed together, and I think of him often. I know that young man is not alone.