Blogging the "Irresistible Revolution": Chapter 1, "When Christianity Was Still Safe"

Continuing my series responding to Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution...

Chapter 1 chronicles Claiborne's personal discovery of Jesus at work -from jaded Southern Methodist teen to Christian college student experiencing God in the streets of Philly. This arc involves some significant 'awakenings' or turning points for Claiborne, and also sheds some light on his personality as well.

Claiborne first narrates his early teen conversion experience, which is similar to the experience of many. However, he notes that "I came to realize that preachers were telling me to lay my life at the foot fo the cross and weren't giving me anything to pick up." Unfortunately, for him as well as many, after conversion, nobody offered the young convert the path of the spiritual disciplines - just do's and don'ts. Nobody explained that communing with God and becoming like Jesus takes training and mentorship, at least not apparently.

So, then Claiborne, like all to many Christians experienced what he calls (rightly) "spiritual bulimia" - gorging on Christian material then regurgitating it all back up but not really experiencing the truths in redemptive living. His point is well-taken here, and often made these days - the Christian life is not about inputting, or even absorbing, information. It's about LIVING the life of faith in Jesus. Claiborne gets jaded - until he meets the charismatics.

He calls this the "Jesus Freak" period, and it's a turn for the better, but unfortunately, going deeper into the faith in this context meant that he became a salesman-style evangelist (eh, not so good) and a stauncher Republican partisan (not good). He says, "Sometimes when we evangelized, I felt like I was selling Jesus like a used-car salesman, like people's salvation depended on how well I articulated thaings. And that's a lot of pressure... But I wasn't sure I was selling them the real thing." Well, no, the Gospel is so much more. It is not only the individual receiving forgiveness of sins, it's transformation with societal impact, it must result in a community of God living out His love. Claiborne's book rests on this (or a similar) premise; we can agree on this. But it still does start with awareness of sin, repentance, and trust in Jesus - remember what Jesus' first words (called the Gospel) in Mark are: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe..." (Mark 1:15, ESV). My question to Claiborne is this: can we agree that it does start there? (Or rather with God's initative - Rom. 5:8.)

Claiborne goes to Eastern College and, getting involved with everything, finds that he is experiecning the reality of God's love and power among the homeless and destitute of Philadelphia. His point (or rather his professor's point) that we don't experience miracles because "we no longer live with such reckless faith that we need them" is well-taken, and a good word to anyone who wants to follow Jesus. Finally, he sees humans giving grace to each other, even when they have little, and he understands Mother Teresa to be true when she says, "In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises." The arc is essenitally complete; now Claiborne is truly awake (perhaps now truly "born again"?).

I think about two things: 1) Claiborne definitely is a 'cutting edge' guy... he's not just extremely smart but he also has a drive to be on the very edge. When he does something, he's "all in." I admire people who can live like that; I'm more cautious by nature. However, this tendency can manifest itself in a bit of "I'm the farthest the fastest": he had a drive to be cool, then to be successful financially, then to be a zealous soul-winner, and now he's driven to be radical, totally "on the edge". No doubt this drive is now tempered by wisdom, understanding, compassion, and humility -- that really is apparent as we keep reading. However, it puts me at a distance; I'm slower-paced by nature and have a hard time relating to "grab the bull by the horns" types (but with God's help, I can take the risks he' calling me to take, I hope).

2) The other thing I think about is this: what if Claiborne had grown up in central New Hampshire, like I did - in a climate where it was NOT cool to be a Christian and to go to church, where simply holding on to the faith could not be taken for granted? It's true that believing churches in such a climate tend to get insular, but it's still not necessarily "safe". How would that experience have shaped him? Granted, our churches still were not trained in disciple-making, but the Campus Cruade movement at UNH (my alma mater) was. Christianity was most certainly not safe there. My guess is he would have ended up in the same place, doing the same thing, but it might have taken longer, as us "Yankee" secular-environment Christians have to fight upstream a lot. (And he acknowledges us that we are different, that we mess with Southerner minds, but that maybe that's a good thing.)