The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne. Michigan: Zondervan Press, 2006.
reviewed by Jennifer deGroot
He is evangelical to the core and his story is all about love. His is not the kind of book I usually read. But this one worked for me, in part because I had the chance to chat with the author last summer about a shared interest – sewing one’s own clothes. His were baggy, earth-toned and practical. He told me sewing was how he bonded with his mother. Not bad for a young male Bible Belter from Tennessee.
Shane Claiborne’s book is a personal, honest and compelling account of a journey from church youth group (“cute girls, free junk food, and cheap snowboarding trips”) to one of America’s premiere mega-churches to one of his country’s poorest neighbourhoods, where he now lives. Though the book is autobiographical, it somehow avoids the arrogance usual in such works.
Claiborne left the Bible Belt for college “up North” in Philadelphia where he did a simultaneous degree in the theology of classroom and street. He and his fellow students did things like sleep in cardboard boxes in downtown parks, squat alongside homeless mothers and their children in an empty church, and, my personal favourite, “[clean] the entire campus so that the staff could have a paid day off and know that they were celebrated and loved.”
Claiborne returned home from a summer working with Mother Theresa in Calcutta knowing that his Calcutta is the U.S.A. “I knew that we could not end poverty until we took a careful look at wealth.” During an internship year at Willow Creek Community Church – the archetypal mega-church outside Chicago – Claiborne came 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.”
So he sought to live differently. Claiborne is now a member of The Simple Way, a communal house in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Philadelphia. Along with his housemates, he juggles and plays in fire hydrants with neighbourhood kids, responds to needs that arrive on their door step, and comes up with mischievous ways to challenge the nonsense of the world (for example, dumping $10,000 worth of change on Wall Street and prophesying at a Republican convention).
He also spends time on the road, speaking alongside popular Christian leaders like Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. His challenge is clear: Christians need to find ways to love and we need to respond to the awfulness of this world with love.
So am I converted? Sort of. If the book has a drawback it’s his dichotomous offering of one’s life options as living in a wealthy suburb or selling all you have and giving to the poor. Personally I like to think there is a middle ground. I live in a household of three in the inner-city where my partner and I earn our keep and nurture our spirits through an unorthodox combination of paid, underpaid, and unpaid work.
Claiborne also writes to a mostly American audience with a fairly American tone. He challenges Christians to use tithing as a way to redistribute wealth. Personally, as a Canadian and a Calvinist, I still have hopes for a tax system that will do that.
More than anything Claiborne is convinced that “little acts of love are taking over the world like mustard spreads through the garden.” (And he’s got a lovely retelling of the mustard seed parable that focuses not on the small seed that can become a big tree but on the pungent smelling noxious weed notorious for taking over gardens and which was banned by Jewish law.)
His call to live joyfully and in the belief that the kingdom of God is alive right here and now through thousands of ordinary radicals is one that all of us who call ourselves justice seekers can stand to hear.
