Chandra is reading… The Irresistible Revolution Part 1

Don’t worry, I have no intention of cataloguing everything that I read on this blog, only commenting on books that I read that touch in some way on public justice or offer insight into the issues that CPJ works on.

The first book I’m reviewing is The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, by Shane Claiborne. This book was reviewed for CPJ before by Jennifer deGroot, but I want to deal with a couple different themes arising from the book. I’ll divide the review in two parts for the sake of simplicity.

Shane Claiborne is gaining in prominence as a speaker promoting the Simple Way, now a non-profit organization promoting faith, community and love. The Irresistible Revolution describes Claiborne’s journey from a teenager unsure how he felt about the faith he grew up with to an ordinary radical, living in intentional community and practicing love, hospitality and simplicity.

The development of Claiborne’s beliefs and activism will be interesting to anyone who feels that sainthood (he even visits Mother Theresa!) is out of reach for ordinary Christians.

At its core, the book is a challenge to embrace faith in radical but simple way: living out God’s commands to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves in every aspect of our lives. This is putting faith into action in a very immediate way. It is not only seeing what God can do to “create beauty from the messes we make of our world,” but being willing to be used by God to that end. Or, as Claiborne puts it, finding out where God is at work and joining in.

In addition to intentional community, Claiborne focuses on love for and life with the poor. We need to love our brothers and sisters experiencing poverty (and often a whole host of other problems and injustices) in very practical, relational ways: spending time with them, feeding them, caring for them, fighting for their rights.

We also need redistribution, leaving behind our economy of selfish profit to enter a new economy of abundance (and as my priest, Gary Hauch, would add “an economy of enough”). Church tithes should not be understood as money for the church, argues Claiborne, but money for the poor. The church is the mechanism for redistribution, not an institution for self-perpetuation.

Claiborne also notes the paucity of so much Christianity, which offers self-righteousness, but no “life, joy or celebration.” “We can be moral but not alive,” he remarks. Real faith and real action must be born of relationships that offer liberation for both the oppressed and the oppressor.

This theme of Claiborne’s book offers a radical challenge to many Christians. It stretches us out of our comfort zones. I know I felt challenged many times while reading this book, and at my October workshop in Ancaster, several participants said they felt the same way. Nonetheless, they felt this book was a good place to start in understanding our Christian responsibility to the poor, and I agree.

Claiborne’s book echoes the words of 1 John 3:17-18 “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother and sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” When it comes down to it, God’s directions to us are pretty simple: love your neighbour in concrete ways. A simple – but radical – challenge for all of us.