I, geekrevThe closest you want to get to looking inside the mind of Shawn Coons.

I started blogging Shane Claiborne’s book “The Irresistible Revolution.”  It’s a great book that is very challenging, and my hope was that by blogging it I could begin to figure out how to live the gospel that it witnesses to.  But I haven’t kept up with this endeavor and I don’t think I’m going to continue with it.

As much as I wish it was true, blogging and talking about Shane’s book isn’t going to help me live it.  In fact, it just reminds me how sucky I am at living like an ordinary radical. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up wrestling with what’s in the book, or trying to figure out how to live more faithfully.  It just means that I don’t want to use writing about living as Jesus did, as an excuse or substitute to actually living like Jesus did.

I’m blogging through Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution.  You can check out my first post about the book here. I’m doing this in an attempt to:

• figure out what the irresistible revolution means for me and what I am going to do with it.
• share this book with others.
• create something (conversation/action/community) around the ideas that Shane presents.

Chapter 1 is entitled “When Christianity Was Still Safe” and in it Shane gives us some of his story growing up as a popular, trendy, youth group-going Christian. “Church was a place where there were cute girls, free junk food, and cheap snowboarding trips…quirky songs and velcro walls.” At that point he was born again…and again and again on a yearly basis at a Christian youth festival - “it was so good the first time…I must have gotten born again six or eight times, and it was great every time. (I highly recommend it).”

Out of this Shane develops a common illness to Western Christianity, what he calls “spiritual bulimia.” Devouring all sorts of stuff - devotions, Christian T-shirts, Christian music, and Christian books, but never really digesting it before he vomited it up to friends and fellow Christians. In his words, “I was marked by an overconsumptive but malnourished spirituality.” Shane was a part of varied Christian churches in high school and college - from non-denominational Charismatic to traditional Methodist, but he found them all lacking. I am part of a mainline Protestant denomination, so I found what he said about his Methodist church hitting a little too close to home.

“A solemn deadness haunted the place. I learned in confirmation classes about the fiery beginnings of the Methodist Church and its signature symbol of the cross wrapped in the flame of the Spirit. Where had the fire gone? I learned about John Wesley, who said that if the didn’t kick him out of town after he spoke, he wondered if he had really preached the gospel. I remember 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. Then I watched as one of the Methodist congregations I attended built a $120,000 stained-glass window.”*

But then Jesus wrecked Shane’s life.

“I know there are people out there who say, ‘My life was such a mess…and then I met Jesus and my whole life came together.’ God bless those people. But me, I had it together. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside-down. I am still recovering from my conversion.”

Shane went to school at Eastern College (where my good friends from Pittsburgh, Dave and Todd, also went.) While he was there he started hanging out with some other students who would routinely go into Philadelphia to hang out with their “homeless friends.” Shane started doing this regularly. He got over his nervousness about the dangerous city, and he became friends with the incredible people he met on the streets. Then, after one of Shane’s friends from school was reading Mother Theresa, they decided to begin sleeping on the street with their homeless friends.

Shane says that that’s when the Bible came alive, he saw miracles, angels, demons and Scripture being lived right before his eyes. And Shane came to know people in poverty in a way that very few of us comfortable folks ever will. There was a homeless woman who struggled to get a meal from a late-night food van so she could bring it to an elderly woman “who can’t fight for a meal.” A homeless man who put a pack of cigarettes in the offering plate because he had no money.

A blind street musician who had Lysol sprayed in her eyes as a “practical joke.” After that she was told, “There are a lot of bad folks in the world.” To which she responded, “Oh, but there are a lot of good ones too. And the bad ones make you, the good ones, seem even sweeter.” There was a seven year old girl who was homeless and who wanted to own a grocery store when she grew up so that she could give out food to hungry people.

Shane concludes the chapter with these words.

“Mother Theresa used to say, ‘In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises.’ Now I knew what she meant…I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.”

Question for thought/discussion: When do you spend time with the poor - not serving them but knowing them? When does your church?

*The church I serve isn’t Methodist, but I hate to think of what Wesley would think of our upcoming two million dollar pipe organ.

Shane Claiborne gets it. Not only does he get it, he lives it. Which puts someone like me to shame. Because I want it get it, and sometimes I say I get it, but I really don’t live it. What is “it?” “It” is how we are called to live and be as Christians. It is being an ordinary radical.

Shane* has written a book called The Irresistible Revolution and I’ve decided to blog the book chapter by chapter. I’m doing this partially as a review but more for myself. It is such an incredible book, that I need to wrestle with it some more. Hopefully, this isn’t the kind of book that you just read. It’s the kind of book that you do. So blogging the book is going to be a part of my discernment of where to go from here. Practically speaking this means that I’ll be writing for me as much (if not more) than for you. So if the writing seems choppy or doesn’t flow well, just imagine that you are reading some notes I scribbled on a piece of paper, rather than a two-page, typed, double-spaced book report for freshmen Rhetoric.

Let’s start with Shane’s words from the Introduction to the book.

“My activist friends call me conservative, and my religious friends call me liberal. What I often get branded is “radical.” I’ve never really minded that, for as my urban-farming friends remind me, the word radical itself means root. It’s from the Latin word radix, which, just like a rad-ish, has to do with getting to the root of things. But radical is not something reserved for saints and martyrs, which is why I like to complement it with ordinary. Ordinary does not mean normal…So this is a book for ordinary radicals, not for saints who think they have a monopoly on radical and not for normal people who are satisfied with the way things are.” [p. 20]

The life of an ordinary radical as described and lived by Shane is a foolish life, a life of “interdependence and sacrificial sharing” as opposed to the “mirage of independence and materialism.” Shane lives in an intentional community (shared living space, resources, chores, etc.) in a poorer neighborhood in Philadelphia. He makes his own clothes and is giving away any money he makes from this book. He hangs out with homeless people and has spent time with lepers in Calcutta and Iraqi citizens in the warzone. He is trying to show a different way to those of us who fall into the categories of “unbelieving activists” or “inactive believers.”

Stories are at the heart of this book. Shane uses stories because they compel people in a way that doctrine and ideology don’t (even when they are true). Jesus used lots of stories, maybe because they disarm people and loosen people up. Shane uses mainly his own stories not to hold himself forth as a shining example but because the stories of his life may “exemplify and caricature the struggles and ironies that are close to many of our hearts.”

At the end of the Introduction, Shane offers this hope: “The time has come for a new kind of conversation, a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution.”

I leave you with this question for thought/discussion: Are you a radical? Is the church radical?

*I’m going to refer to Shane Claiborne by his first name as opposed to the more common practice of using the last name. I don’t know Shane, but he just seems like the kind of guy that would want that. And chances are at some point I will type Shawn instead of Shane. I’ve done it a number of times already but have caught and corrected it, but eventually I’ll miss one or two.