Church of the poor - Jesus Army

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For the past ten years Shane Claiborne has lived out a daily revolution against the American dream. Along with six others, he lives in a community home known as The Simple Way, in one of the poorest areas of Philadelphia, America. The community aim to be the best neighbours they can – distributing food from their kitchen, helping local children with their homework and renovating disused homes for the homeless to inhabit. In June this year The Simple Way saw disaster strike their community. A fire, thought to have been started by an arson attack on a local disused warehouse, destroyed their home and community centre. More than 100 houses were evacuated as the blaze spread to surrounding streets. Lucinda van der Hart, editor of Faithworks magazine, talked to Shane about his way of life and found out how members of The Simple Way are coping after the fire. Jesus Life One/2008 Page 14 www.jesus.org.uk
www.jesus.org.uk We have ended up the wealthiest, most medicated and depressed ” countries in the world “What’s the most challenging aspect of living in a shared community home? Oh boy, there’s lots of challenges! In some way, community is just a choice to live deeper than the dream of independence, which so often leads to loneliness. It’s a chance to laugh harder, but it also means you also cry harder because you feel what hurts each other deeper. But the hurt is triumphed by the sense of love and companionship that you have. What would you envisage happening if every Christian lived in community as you do? We would see the kingdom of God coming, the end of poverty, the end of aggression and violence in our neighbourhoods and across the world. Dorothy Day (the Catholic journalist and social activist) said if every neighbourhood had a hospitality house and every household a room for the stranger then we would end poverty. What’s exciting about what we see at The Simple Way is that people are not just serving in social service agencies that manage poverty, but they are connecting with the poor in a way that ends poverty. They are bringing folks into their home, figuring out how people can go to school and find waged jobs. At the beginning of your book you talk about how your first experiences of church were dominated by preachers calling you to ‘lay down your life’, but you were never told what to pick up instead. Is your reaction to this still central to your current spirituality? Without a doubt. I saw too many people bored with Christianity and they associated that with Jesus. That’s one of the great tragedies with the sort of Christianity we have become accustomed to – people have narrowed it down to a doctrine and a belief system. That’s not very invigorating or compelling, even if it is true. So I have surrounded myself with people who have challenged me to see how much there is to pick up. Tony Campolo always says that being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and doing something daring with your life. I like that because that’s what so many have done throughout history – taken up beautiful vocations not just for the sake of adventure but because the Gospel is a call to live in beautiful ways. When you surround yourself with other people that are risking their lives and loving deeply, it rubs off on you. Could people in developing nations use your model of community living? In some ways it is even more natural in poor countries – the people there often already have a deep sense of community and interdependence – in the sense of being a village, of each person using their gifts, of not compartmentalising your life in a nine-tofive routine that sucks the life out of you. A lot of these things are so counter-cultural in the West. It seems like you have quite a pessimistic view of contemporary Western culture. To what extent should we celebrate the hand that we’ve been dealt? I am very sceptical about the Western life and this package that we have been sold as the American dream. The people I know who have bought into it have only found it to be isolating and it does not satisfy our deepest spiritual hungers. We (the UK and US) have ended up the wealthiest, most medicated and depressed countries in the world – which should be indicative for us. But there is always something to celebrate about God’s gifts to us and to the world. One of the best ways to celebrate the best things in life is to give them away and to share them – there is something more fulfilling about sharing God’s blessings than keeping them. As we give our lives on behalf of others it brings us to life as well. It’s not just about how much the poor need us, but how much we really need each other. Isaiah 58 says when we spend ourselves on behalf of the poor, our healing comes – I love that. We don’t heal from spiritual poverty in a vacuum – we heal through living our lives for something bigger than ourselves. Was there a particular moment when you came to that realisation? Over and over I talk to people whose dreams have died – the routine of life has compromised what they feel God’s original dreams for them were. It’s such a hard thing to see that. We squeeze out of life the very place that Jesus lived – which was in interruptions and surprises and people tugging on His shirt and telling Him that they messed up. We have lives where we go to work, come home, watch TV, go work out… and there’s no space for the Spirit to move. What we do here is free ourselves of the clutter – by getting rid of the TV, by biking and by answering the door when neighbours come. Your community obviously has a strong affinity with traditional monastic living. Early on we were a little pretentious. We thought we were doing all this for the first time – and then we looked around and we saw that this is something that the Spirit has done over and over throughout history. Every few hundred years there is an identity crisis in the Church…and so there are groups of people who are cultural refugees – who pull out and try to re-think their lives as followers of Christ. For us St Francis has been someone we really resonate with – we started in an abandoned cathedral and mystically we have felt that call to repair the Church that is in ruins. Some people might level at Continued overleaf Jesus Life One/2008 Page 15
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Church of the poor - Jesus Army

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