Shane Claiborne
Shane Claiborne
Shane Claiborneis a Christian activist and author who is a leading figure in the New Monasticism movement and one of the founding members of the intentional community, the Simple Way, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Claiborne is also a social activist, advocating for nonviolence and service to the poor. He is the author of the book, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth11 July 1975
CountryUnited States of America
I engage with local politics because it affects people I love. And I engage in national politics because it affects people I love.
We can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.
We are setting ourselves up for disappointment if our hope is built on anything less than Jesus.
Christians pretty much live like everybody else, they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way.
Mother Theresa always said, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.
There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.
There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular - a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.
We have to use our discontentment to engage rather than disengage - our hope has to be more powerful than our cynicism.
Charity is merely returning what we have stolen.
We can also cling to the treasures of our faith and get rid of the things that are cluttering that. It is a time we are seeing some trending away from the things that were cluttering our faith.
The greatest sin of political imagination: Thinking there is no other way except the filthy rotten system we have today.
The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.
Maybe we are a little crazy. After all, we believe in things we don't see. The Scriptures say that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). We believe poverty can end even though it is all around us. We believe in peace even though we hear only rumours of wars. And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.
The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter.