The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne

Normally I’d wait until I finished reading a book to recommend it, but I’m gonna jump the gun on this one. I’m 2 chapters into The Irresistible Revolution and just can’t help but suggest it’s worth reading – even if the remainder of the book is a bunch of crap. [Update: It’s not. It’s a very important book.]

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shane, the book should be a pretty good intro to him. He grew up in east Tennessee – that’s probably enough said. I don’t mean that’s bad – he just seemed to fit most southern/Bible-belt stereotypes – and that’s really funny if you see a picture of him now. He now lives in a missional community in Philadelphia with a collection of folks from various backgrounds who have decided to live together and share what they have with each other and those nearby (thesimpleway.org). He’s an interesting guy. If you’re interested in more, beyond or instead of the book, Drew Marshall has interviewed him at least once – at drewmarshall.ca.

Shane is a bit radical, but it’s the kind of radical that makes you think, “Why am I not like that?” He makes me uncomfortable, but I’ve been wondering how much of the “comfort” in my life keeps me from knowing Christ. I’m not sure I agree with Shane on everything, but his life makes a lot of sense to me - and the more time passes, the more I find myself agreeing with him. I’m just not sure how I’d apply what he lives in my life.

Some of what I’ve loved about the 1st 2 chapters of Irresistible Revolution is that he breaks down so much of what we find distasteful about contemporary Christian culture here in the west (and why we’ve taken a few steps back). I don’t think his approach is insulting (but, hey, I agree with him). But I find it hard not to agree with seeing a problem in a church spending $120,000 on a stained glass window (or a gymnasium or building addition, for that matter) or a church evicting homeless families. He writes from a personal perspective, explaining the transition in his life, so I think that takes any potential bite out of his critique. I was going to include some quotes here, but when I started typing them, I realized that I’d have to quote nearly all of the 1st 2 chapters. Below you’ll find a few quotes I typed before quitting - perhaps they’ll whet your appetite (I’m sure Jim would be happy to order this one by the case). [UPDATE: Having read a few more chapters today, the quotes only get better. The ones below seem so shallow now. Perhaps I’ll share some in the days to come. This book makes me hurt... like I’ve been kicked in the stomach (and, ya, there too).]

By the way, in critiquing Christian culture, I’m not suggesting that you quit going to church. I don’t intend to do that in anything I write. Rather, I would like to show how Western contemporary Christianity (and therefore many of our churches) might be missing something – or missing a lot. My hope is that this would cause us to rethink the way we live our lives and perhaps rethink our concepts of church (beyond how we make the music and preaching more entertaining). Those who have a passion for church to continue (as we know it) must consider how to make church real and relevant to my generation – because, in its common expressions (no matter how many guitars you have), it’s not achieving much of that. That is just my opinion. But the statistics are out there – it’s an easy case to make. That’s a sad reality because my generation has a hunger for the spiritual, the mystical, and the unexplainable unlike the generation prior.

Perhaps my short life’s experience has left me with too much pessimism. However, my pessimism regarding church is not pessimism regarding God. I believe that God is doing some remarkable things in our generation – I’m just wondering if His work is outside the places we’ve traditionally expected Him to work. And when you consider the virgin, the manger, and the cross – that is the way He rolls…


Quotes - Chapters 1 & 2:
I came to realize that preachers were telling me to lay my life at the foot of the cross and weren’t giving me anything to pick up. A lot of us were hearing “don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t sleep around” and naturally started asking, “Okay, well that was pretty much my life, so what do I do now?” Where were the do’s? And nobody seemed to have much to offer us. Handing out tracts at the mall just didn’t seem like the fullness of Christian discipleship, not to mention it just wasn’t as fun as making out at the movies. I was just another believer. I believed all the right stuff - that Jesus is the Son of God, died and rose again. I had become a “believer”, but I had no idea what it means to be a follower. People had told me what Christians believe, but no one told me how Christians live.

It was Mark Twain who said, “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that scare me, but the parts I do understand.” I don’t know if you’ve read the Bible, and if you haven’t, I think you might be in a better place than those of us who have read it so much that it has become stale... For me it became hard to read the Bible and walk away as if I had just watched a nice movie. Jesus never seemed to do anything normal... Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God’s blessing on the poor, rather than on the rich and would insist that it’s not enough to just love your friends. I began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said. I thought if we stopped and asked, “what if he really meant it?” it could turn the world upside down. It was a shame Christians had become so normal.

But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn’t fit together. As I read the Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first.

There were plenty of people talking about the gospel or writing books about it, but as far as I could tell, living out the gospel had yet to be tried in recent days. So youth group got a little old - the songs got boring, the games grew stale, and I found other ways to meet fine women. I wasn’t sure the church had much to offer.

I saw the messiness of church politics and egotism... I wondered if Jesus had anything to say about this world, and I began to question how much he cared whether I listened to Metallica. 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 things...I even heard a pastor explain that he used to work in the corporate world and now he was in a “different kind of business” with the “best product in the world”. But I wasn’t even sure I was selling them the real thing.

I remember hearing about an old comic stip... Two guys are talking and one of them says he has a question for God. He wants to ask why God allows all this poverty and war and suffering to exist in the world. And his friend asks, “Well, why don’t you ask?” The fellow shakes his head and says he is scared. “I’m scared God will ask me the same question.” Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, “You tell me why you allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.”

I saw one woman in a crowd as she struggled to get a meal from one of the late-night food vans. When we asked her if the meals were worth the fight, “Oh yes, but I don’t eat them myself. I get them for another homeless lady, an elderly woman around the corner who can’t fight for meal”... I saw a street kid get $20 and immediately run inside to share it with his friends... We saw a homeless man put a pack of cigarettes in the offering plate because it was all he had... We met a seven-year-old girl who was homeless, and we asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She paused pensively and then replied, “I want to own a grocery store.” We asked her why and she replied, “So I can give food to all the hungry people”... Mother Theresa used to say, “In the poor we meet Jesus in the most distressing disguises.” Now I knew what she meant. I found that I was just as likely to meet God in the sewers of the ghetto as in the halls of academia. I learned more about God from the tears of the homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.