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
There are financial bankruptcies in many parts of the church. No question about that. But we see the possibility of reimagining and revitalizing the church.
We're not church planters. We are community planters and, as we work in our communities, we join local churches.
There is real value in these local congregations. For me, a lot of it is the value of the sacraments we share. In neighborhoods like ours, the churches provide stability.
This common prayer project has taken years of energy, but we see it not as a way to leave our individual churches, but as a movement we hope to see permeate the larger Church.
We know the Church wasn't born 200 years ago. It's encouraging to see some of the post-denominational churches actually wanting to reconnect with the story and the prayer life of the larger Church.
We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
There is one big misunderstanding of the monastics leaving society.
The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.
Certainly the institutional church is ill. It's hemorrhaging young people at an astronomical rate.
[People] need to find words that can reconnect them with each other. That is the gift of good liturgy, yeah. We're not talking about fluffy stuff. We're talking about real life for people around the world. Our prayers should be said like the daily breath that gives us life.
We've heard from people all around the world, telling us that this is their reality. People need a way to connect the sometimes really hard reality in which they wake up each morning with the movement of the Spirit.
We see God all the time here. People only hear bad things about our neighborhood. Kensington is known as the badlands. I always say you have to be careful when you call a place the badlands because that is exactly what they said about Nazareth. Nothing good can come from there. I think we see God in the margins.
I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.
If you have two coats you have stolen one. We have no right to have more than we need when someone else has less than they need.