Shane Claiborne: An Irresistably Missional Revolution

By Amy Sondova Since the wild success of his book, The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne has become the poster child for missional living; however, Claiborne would humbly argue that he’s just following Jesus. Delighting emergent circles with his no-nonsense talks full of wit, Claiborne is causing people to reimagine how they do ministry and missions. “One of the greatest tragedies that we’ve done to missions is allowing people to see it as a short-term experience rather than a way of living. We’ve carefully compartmentalized it—it’s trips you go on, it’s experiences you have.” He pauses and then adds, “The exciting thing is that a lot of people are seeing missions as something we do with our lives—we live missionally.” Living missionally is just what Claiborne, among other things, does. He is one of the founding members of The Simple Way, a faith community located in the one of the most economically disadvantaged areas of Philadelphia. Through their simple faith and love, the group seeks to build relationships with their neighbors citing that Jesus often spent time with the poor, downcast, and homeless.

For Claiborne and the rest of The Simple Way, “missional living” isn’t a simple buzz word thrown around to be hip or trendy; it’s a call on their lives. But it all began with a simple call says Claiborne who admits, “I had all kinds of mixed motivations when I started doing work in the city. I don’t know that we ever get fully pure motives. The truth is that a lot of people come into the city and think they’re bringing the gospel to the poor folks, but they find that the poor folks are bringing the gospel to them.”

Claiborne is calling (white) middle class Christians out of their comfort zones and into the uncomfortable. He cites the parable Jesus told in the gospels about the rich man, who built a wall around his property, to keep out the poor, like Lazarus. “The point of the story is unmistakable. We build these gates up, we build walls around our country, and we build fences around our suburban homes. We do that thinking that we’re creating a life of security and prosperity, but we’re actually creating a life that is very lonely and compartmentalized. We don’t know people and have relationships and that’s the very things we’re made for.”

Building relationships with “outsiders” has always been risky business for Christians, especially with our Christian alternatives to secular institutions. Many youth leaders are longing for more than mountaintop experiences and exotic summer missions—they want to learn to live and teach their youth to live missional lives. Claiborne says, “The beginning point is to bust through those gates and walls and fences and all those things we build up that insulate us, especially from the poor and people who are suffering. Everything in our world is teaching us to distance ourselves from suffering and to live lives that are safe, secure, and comfortable.”

By encouraging people to see God’s image in everyone they meet, they can start breaking down the walls that divide, but first they have to start building bridges to their neighbors. According to Claiborne, “This is a point where we begin to see the poor not as a project. Jesus says, ‘I no longer call you strangers, I call you friends.’ Jesus was a friend to the poor, not a missionary to the poor. He entered into their struggle.”

While Claiborne’s heart is clearly for the poor and disenfranchised worldwide, he also passionately believes that missional work must start in the neighborhoods where individuals are already living. While exposing groups to different types of people is important, it is also important to teach youth how to love their next door neighbors, “There’s an element of Mother Theresa that I quote in my book, ‘Calcuttas are everywhere, if only we have eyes to see them.’ We have to have eyes to see the people who are lonely around us, migrant workers, people who are having a hard time making it, and old people who don’t have family,” shares Claiborne.

Missional living, then, is encouraging others to spend time chatting with their elderly neighbors, talking to the kids who get picked on in class, and to intentionally reach out to those who are in need of the love of Christ. Claiborne adds, “We need to invite young people to use some imagination with their gifts and creativity saying, ‘Just don’t use your gifts to make money for your family, use them to transform the world.’” He also says that we are called to feed and clothe the poor, “Jesus isn’t saying to the poor, ‘Come find the church.’ He’s saying, ‘Go into the world.’ We need young people to do that, to take that step of discomfort, to begin moving beyond those walls that divide us.”

However, Claiborne is the first to admit that there is always an element of danger involved when Christians, especially youth, begin to interact with their world. He recommends that youth get involved in organizations already at work in the city, if they’re interested in urban missions. “Programs like MissionYear provide an opportunity to explore vocations and reach out to neighbors who are struggling. So it’s not like you’ve got to move into Kensington and buy a house—I don’t think that’s the wisest decision for a young 18 year-old who doesn’t know anyone in Kensington.”

While Kensington can be a creepy place to visit for some, Claiborne shares that often danger comes in places where he least expects. “One of the scariest times I can ever remember is when there was a sting operation in our neighborhood that went wrong. The police raided our house and they threw our women on the floor and ripped one of our woman’s shirts off. It was very, very violent. And, what do you do? Call the police to come?” He laughs at the irony, and then adds, “Security lies not in guns for us, but in relationships and friendships with neighbors and people here. We protect each other.”

As scared as some churches may be of urban ministry, Claiborne finds irony, “We are not nearly as scared of the overt dangers of the city as we are of the subtle dangers of the suburbs, of raising our kids in an environment with people who look like them and the implicit fear of the city. Those are a few of the things, as Jesus says, that can do damage to the soul. We are careful of our lives, but we understand that there are things more dangerous than guns and knives.”

Everyone is not called to move to the inner city, yet every Christian is called to advocate for the poor. Instead of trips that allow youth to pop into urban environments now and then, Claiborne says, “We need to interact with people not as machines and computers that effectively allow us to live the lives that we do.” To do so, he suggests, “We need to ask crazy questions like—who makes our clothes? Who grows our coffee? Where did this food come from? Who are the invisible people who clean our toilets at school?” Youth workers need to start these conversations with their youth groups and continue them so that youth understand that their school custodian, a child laborer in Indonesia, and the coffee bean picker in South America are all individuals made in the image of God.

There is no how-to guide on how to start living missionally (outside of the Bible) and missional living can look different for everyone from pastor to youth worker to church member to student. “There’s not a cookie cutter model of the call, but it is a call to live in closer proximity to the poor and to have imagination with the way we live,” says Claiborne.

The biggest thing that Christians can do to help youth live more missional lives is to encourage others to look for areas of commonality with those who are different. By finding common ground, we can build relationships that will last while also agree to disagree. “One of our greatest witnesses to the outside world is our ability to disagree well. I think that’s especially important around issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality—that we really call people to the best of who we are meant to be and we celebrate the wisdom that each person has because of the tradition which they are a part,” says Claiborne, also acknowledging the value of learning things from those who disagree with us.

Plenty of people disagree with Claiborne as he has been turning the heads of secular media, church leaders, and politicians for the past few years. So while some call him a radical, a hippie, a peace-loving tree hugger, and a liberal fascist. Others call him a prophet, a Jesus freak, an author, a hero, and a theologian. But the folks on the 3200 block of Potter Street in Kensington call Shane Claiborne their friend.

And Claiborne encourages others to join his irresistible revolution, so that everyone can all find the community for which each person is so desperately longing. Maybe, just maybe, that toothless beggar on the street or the restroom attendant at McDonald’s will be teaching youth and youth workers more about what it means to follow Jesus than they could ever imagine.

Print copy of article.