• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

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As much as I dislike flying, I do love being able to read a book from start to finish in a round-trip. My trip this past week to Grand Rapids was no exception with The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne.

I grew up a good “Christian” boy. Church every week, sometimes twice a week. A student leader for youth gatherings. Mission trips to domestic and international places of need. I prayed and read my Bible. I obeyed my parents. I never did drugs. Unfortunately, I think I spent more time learning the Gospel than living the Gospel. And I continue to suffer with this despicable disease.

It seems as though Shane Claiborne can relate. Quoting from a letter he received sometime ago, Shane echoes that we’re living in days full of “unbelieving activists and inactive believers.” Fortunately for his readers, Shane Claiborne is not just another guy teaching us how to live, he’s showing us how to die.

This is a book for ordinary radicals. It’s for “a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.”

Shane lives in Philadelphia among a community of people called the “simple way.” Through his simple living, Shane is showing us what it means to make an impact by just being with people. This isn’t about taking a vow of poverty or giving for giving sake. This about being with the least and the last.

And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.

Although there were several things in the book that frustrated me–Shane’s somewhat utopian views offered little hope for the church as we know it–I was certainly moved and motivated. Reading this book exactly a week after John Wood’s was twice the kick in the butt for me.

I bumped into a great quote that Shane leans into from Dr. Martin Luther King:

“We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside… but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”

One of the antidotes that Shane suggests we need in response to our apathetic and aggressive culture is a good dose of imagination. When he went to Iraq recently, Shane remembers something an Iraqi doctor said: “Violence is for those who have lost their imagination. Has your country lost its imagination?”

Throughout his life, the God that Shane has come to know is good, but he is not at all safe. Following God is risky and dangerous. Perhaps this is why so many young “Christians” grow up looking for adventure elsewhere because we’ve done a pretty good job at taming the truth. “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.”

Shane is quick to point out that “we must not fall in love with the movement or the revolution,” because the moment we do that is when we stop doing what what the revolution or movement is all about. People.

Shane ends the book with an altar call of sorts. Although this time it’s not about coming forward and accepting a challenge or making another commitment to live radical. Been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt. On this altar is where “belief and action kissed, and extremists for love were born.”

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