Finding the Simple Way

Shane Claiborne

By Becky Garrison

Philly is a tough town. Big guys, big attitudes, big cheese steaks. It takes a tough guy to make a difference. Meet Shane Claiborne.
     His vision for ordinary radicals ready to change the world with little acts of love is really catching on. You know something is up when even an Episcopal book group called the Peppy Ladies (Church of the Good Samaritan in Paoli, Penn.) are reading his book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Zondervan). Granted, Paoli isn't as tough as Philadelphia ...
     Shane is the face of the new monasticism, which includes a very strong solidarity of living with the poor a.k.a. Catholic Worker Movement. He walks the walks and lives in the most "transitional" neighborhood in Philadelphia. Plus he's a big fan of the circus. What's not to like? Here's what happens when you hang out with Shane at the Simple Way for a day.

WITTENBURG DOOR: How do you go from becoming high school prom king to becoming an ordinary radical?

SHANE CLAIBORNE: I did a dangerous thing of reading the Bible, and asking what if Jesus meant this stuff He said. And found a group of people that sort of allowed me to think that maybe He did. I'm still recovering from all the sexism, and racism, and everything I grew up with.

DOOR: We can't think of a single prophet that went "Yippee" when they were called by God.

CLAIBORNE: That's definitely been the case for us. The way that I've chosen only seems sacrificial because of where I've come from, but I don't think that what we're doing is anything other than what ordinary Christianity has looked like throughout history starting with Mary and Martha.

DOOR: You've done work with Mother Teresa, right?

CLAIBORNE: We wanted to volunteer, so we just called and she picked up the phone. To me that was Mother Teresa. The kids that I knew who were orphans, when they called her "Mother Teresa," they weren't saying she was some saint, they were saying she is mom. That was beautiful. In fact a lot of people ask, "Oh, you met Mother Teresa..." like she glows in the dark or something.

DOOR: Um, she doesn't?

CLAIBORNE: Someone asked me after she died, "Is her work going to live on?" I actually think Mother Teresa died a long time ago when she submitted herself to Christ, and the thing that everyone loves about her was her work, that's Jesus. That's going to live forever. I've been to Calcutta since Mother Teresa died, and there were more people there than were ever there when she was alive. She's sort of like the seed that dies, and fruit is born.

DOOR: What was your take on interning at Willow Creek?

CLAIBORNE: One of the things I remember hearing at Willow Creek is [that] you reproduce who you are for better or worse. I'm really careful not to reproduce the Simple Way because I know all our goofiness and we want people to try to figure out community but not copycat what we're doing.

DOOR: Seems every megachurch is modeled after Willow Creek, though.

CLAIBORNE: I think the problem with folks kind of copycatting Willow Creek is they began where Willow Creek has ended up. So you end up copying the drums and drama but not the disenchantment with the Church that gave birth to Willow Creek. They started out as a bunch of teenagers who were pretty ticked off with the Church and went door to door selling tomatoes and getting to know their neighbors. So if you want to follow the Willow Creek model, I'd say go door to door selling tomatoes getting to know your neighbors.

DOOR: They're selling a lot more than tomatoes these days.

CLAIBORNE: Bill Hybels and I wrestled ten years over this $50 million building project. I was encouraging them to do a Jubilee Campaign so they would redistribute as much money as they were putting into the building.

DOOR: Why do you think so many churches can't be as inclusive as Jesus was?

CLAIBORNE: What I've seen is a self-righteousness that we've got it all together on both sides. It's, "Thank you that we're not like people that listen to secular music or are homosexuals" or, on the other side it's, "Thank you that we're not like those people that don't eat organic or are Bush lovers." I see a lot of hope, though, because I think there are a lot of younger folks who are marked by humility, and post-modernity gives a chance to sort of go, "Hey, we don't really fit into any of those categories."

DOOR: So the desire is to fuse the best of the old with the best of the new, and then create something else?

CLAIBORNE: I think what we settle for a lot of the time is contextualization of the medium so we use the matrix, candles, and all these things. But the real hope is that we can begin to see the life of the scriptures inform what it means to live in the middle of our culture and our empire. I think a lot of people are starting to talk about this in a healthy way.

DOOR: You made the cover of Christianity Today as the face of this new monasticism.

CLAIBORNE: When people want to talk about the new monasticism I'm like, "No, no. I'm not really interested in that. I want to talk about community, church history, and things like that." I feel like it's one thing to say life happens like we're doing here, talking in a diner. It's another thing to say, "Let's have a conference about talking in diners." Now we have book deals and stuff, so it gets really complicated.
     Also, from reading a lot of the buzz around all of this, you get the sense that God is very, very hard at work among male white evangelicals. That puts a tremendous responsibility on those of us who find ourselves in places where we're more visible because there is a whole lot happening in the Church all over the world that doesn't make the magazine covers.

DOOR: We're sensing there is a longing for Jesus and people don't know quite what to do with it.

CLAIBORNE: Yes, it's a good longing. I really think that the courage a lot of folks have to speak out in those areas and to actually be a voice that reconciles attracts the kind of people that Jesus attracted.

DOOR: So, are you guys just some hippie freaks?

CLAIBORNE: I think with the Jesus Movement there was this sort of pretension that we're going to do church better than other people are. We see our discontent with the Church is the very reason that we engage rather than pull out. Within the brokenness of the Church is our own brokenness. That's why we are active in local congregations.

DOOR: Why did you go to Iraq?

CLAIBORNE: I needed a sabbatical.

DOOR: ????

CLAIBORNE: I'm just kidding.

DOOR: How about if you let us tell the jokes ...

CLAIBORNE: I ended up going there for a lot of reasons. On the one hand, it was a deep contemplation and message of the cross. To me, that message is that there is something worth dying for but there is nothing worth killing for. I saw a lot of people willing to go to Iraq for an allegiance that I felt was a little bit different from mine.

DOOR: Meaning the soldiers or Cheney's buds from Halliburton?

CLAIBORNE: Either one. As Dan Berrigan says, "Until we are ready to have the courage for peace that people have for war, nothing is going to change." I really felt like most of my passive friends were just against war, and we really weren't doing too much else. I always said that if evangelicals believe that even the most wicked terrorist is beyond redemption, then we could rip out the half of our New Testament that was written by terrorists.

DOOR: Ah, good ol' Paul ...

CLAIBORNE: Saul of Tarsus went door to door trying to annihilate the followers of Jesus, and then he'd speak so beautifully about grace. Also, I knew I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without speaking against the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, my government. Also, I began to hear a lot of voices of reconciliation from people that had lost their loved ones in September 11th, and had gone over to Iraq to meet families. The families in Iraq would bring them presents to bring back to their loved ones.

DOOR: What do you remember most from that experience?

CLAIBORNE: Probably the most powerful thing I experienced was the vitality of the Iraqi Christian church. The collaboration between Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peacemakers was a dual sponsored delegation that was known as the Iraq Peace Team. They had tons of integrity because Voices in the Wilderness had sent over sixty delegates into Iraq. It wasn't the idealism of going and standing in front of a tank, and putting a flower in the end or something. We were meeting with families that some people had known for ten years and been building relationships with them. What's interesting was when I first got back from Iraq, one of the first people that called me wasn't Willow Creek but a Muslim friend.

DOOR: Do tell.

CLAIBORNE: He wanted me to come speak to his group because as he said, "We need to hear a Christian speaking the sort of gospel that you're speaking. Don't try to be like universalistic but talk about Jesus and your heart." I think that's a beautiful place to meet. On the flip side of that, he's got to come speak to as many Christian evangelicals that allow him to get into their congregations because they need to hear a Muslim talking about reconciliation. If we really go to the heart of our faith, there are places we can work together without compromising who we are as Christians.

DOOR: On a practical note, how does this community of six to ten members work? You've got to pay rent, electricity, food and so on.

CLAIBORNE: Our community has layers. A few of us are partners, a few are novices like one to two years, then guests for three months, and then visitors and supporters. While we get a lot of donations for stuff like school supplies, we pay our bills by working part-time jobs. The reason we work part-time jobs is because of all the stuff we do in the neighborhoods.

DOOR: How do you respond when people ask if you're a cult?

CLAIBORNE: Cult comes from the same word as culture or cultivate, and we are kind of like cultivating a different environment. So that's why we do crazy things, like we don't watch TV or we have times when we pray together or sing together. People aren't just attracted to the Simple Way but they're very attracted to an alternative culture that's not even just counter-cultural but it sort of has imagination and alternatives for this fragile world our parents have left us.

DOOR: What do you do with the royalties from your book?

CLAIBORNE: In the back of the book, I list ordinary radicals and local revolutions. We're spreading that money out to a lot of other groups that are doing beautiful work. To me, that's the only logical way that I would know to have integrity with that. Right now, I'm still trying to figure it out because I believe in trying to live in this post-oil era where we are no longer dependent on oil economy and all these things that are creating wars.
     We've got two communities that are running entirely off of vegetable oil. It's great. We go dumpster diving, and we get the oil. You don't want McDonald's oil, though, it's all gross.

DOOR: Contrast all of this to the fact that the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world is also the most depressed and medicated.

CLAIBORNE: I believe that salvation in the sense of a salve or a healing balm comes through community and relationship. It's almost impossible for that healing to happen in isolation. That's where I would say Jesus loved and cared about the rich and powerful and that's why He invited them to the margins to live and see love at work. I see lonely rich people over and over, who are in these compartmentalized worlds, come to life in the city, as they play with fire hydrants, go to block parties, meet folks who are homeless, and give of themselves. I think there is a secret hunch that if Jesus loves these people like that then He must love me, too.

DOOR: You guys have been called theological pranksters.

CLAIBORNE: I think there are ways of stirring up good questions around things that are happening without confronting it directly head on. That's what Jesus was brilliant at doing. They ask him, "Hey, do you pay your taxes?" He pulled the coin out of a fish's mouth. Also, he didn't ride a donkey in the Passover because He was a Democrat. He was showing everybody that He was a different kind of king. It's so weird, but He's always transcending those categories and questions.

DOOR: Some folks who preach that kind of tolerance, love and justice are so durn angry.

CLAIBORNE: I've been arrested fifteen or twenty times but it's always been amid people who were marked by gentleness and doing things that reflected Christ. The police officers that arrested us feeding people in Love Park in Philly said, "You have such a gentle spirit." They came to court to argue the charges they charged us with be dropped. That's the place I really want to be where we celebrate something different rather than just protesting.

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