Don’t Try to Be Shane Claiborne

Don’t Try To Be Shane Claiborne

Yesterday, I posted the second look into my new book, Portable Faith, which captures exercises I developed ten years ago while working full time as a staff person at a church (Get the book here). This was back in the day when I spearheaded a ministry called Reach that attempted to help our church develop relationships with the people groups beyond the building’s four walls.

One of the comments (actually the first comment) on this blog post came from a straight shooter. He kept his critique short and direct and left a real email address rather than hiding behind the easy anonymity of the internet.

I can respect that. all. day. long.

He read the post about a specific exercise (involving the use of stations in a worship or other service) that could be used to help nurture a focus on the larger community. And this was his take:

Hi Sarah,

I’m sorry to tell you this. It feels just like a system to follow to get results to get more people into church.

I don’t get it…

Discouraged

Yeah, I immediately thought, You don’t have to be sorry. I get that.

You probably do too, right?

The book takes a stab at living and being church, rather than seeing church as just a once-a-week service you can attend. So we’re almost talking about “un-outreach” (if we wanted to be all roll-our-eyes-out-of-our-heads post-modern and deconstruction-y about it), or, a whole different way of … being.

Throw an “exercise” into the mix, especially if it seems at all to be positioned as the cure-all for lackadaisical, inward-turned faith communities, and all we can hear is more mechanics. Systems. Things to do. Check, check, check.

Organic promptings inside us get swept away in procedural slush.

Man oh man do I get that.

So why write a book that offers 33 exercises that help raise people’s awareness and responsiveness toward others in the community then?

Here’s why.

I don’t think everyone in every church–think especially every suburban church, every mega-church, every middle-to-upper class, upper-stratified church–is ready to become Shane Claiborne tomorrow.

That’s not a jab at these congregations (really, it’s not) or a jab at my friend Shane, an inspirational young leader who lives a life of “new monasticism” in an intentional community in Philadelphia called the Simple Way.

Shane has lobbied for the rights of the homeless for more than twelve years now. He’s had some landmark battles (he touches on those here) and ended up with the dreds and hemp clothing that turn him into a bit of a modern day Jesus-replica (he talks about looking like Jesus here). Shane, by the way, graciously endorsed this book.

I’m just saying the two sets–the people who show up in comfortable churches like the one I was at and Shane, who lives amidst the country’s deepest needs–are sometimes worlds apart.

I’m not even sounding off to blame anyone for that (there are plenty of opinions on who to blame elsewhere).

That’s just how things are. We’re all raised in our own niches where we experience the world the only way we can: through the two eyes we were born with. We initially define home and family the way our parents do, using the only models we know. And we develop takes on a whole lot of other things–education, religion, politics, race, social issues, class, what have you–based on the experience and information available to us at the time.

But here’s what I, and I bet a lot of you, have observed.

Sometimes people in one echelon or group have an experience that jars them enough they begin to look at the world and need from a different angle.

Think mission trips, church friends.

You know what I mean, right? Someone spends a month in a developing country immersed in extreme poverty, malnutrition, disease, disaster recovery and the like. They strike upon other humans who’ve inherited an entirely different station in life, but who have some remarkable qualities and assets about them. And suddenly, the mission trip member is having to sift a whole lot of how they saw middle-class suburbia against a lot of new information and experiences.

It inevitably changes them.

Maybe they don’t go live off in another country (which isn’t the point, anyways), but it does what it should: it develops them a bit. They come back with a deeper sense of gratitude, a healthier sense of connectedness, perhaps a stronger desire to humanize and befriend and even equalize those in need.

Maybe they start reading books by people like my friend Shane Claiborne.

But I’ll bet you bazillions of dollars that most of these churched people won’t grow out dreds and start wearing hemp and move into a faith-inspired commune in the inner city.

(And I would argue, that’s not a natural outcome for most of them anyways.)

My hope in writing this book, then, is not to give people a playbook on how to become Shane Claiborne or Mother Teresa, how to live a counter-cultural life at the bottom of societal hierarchy. I think that’s noble. But I don’t know a lot about that.

And it’s not to transform everything about people’s insides, to present some secret to a kind of one-shot spiritual renewal that arrests the way we approach life and church and outreach.

My hope is a little smaller, and yes, less idealistic these days.

My hope is this book will create a few first steps.

That it will present some ideas and exercises (just some, not all) that people in your church could engage to raise their awareness about who else is sharing their larger community. Because I’m assuming not all of them are going to go spend a month serving in an orphanage in South Africa or go work with someone like Mother Teresa like Shane did.

I’m hoping Portable Faith provides some intentional local footholds to climb up on and look at the world from a different angle…from wherever you happen to live.

I hope someone will write the book that goes deeper than this one when it comes to heart change and fighting oppression and many other related issues. But for this book, I’m just hoping it will give a couple first steps to those who aren’t ready to dive into the deep end. And I’m trusting that first steps will lead them to the right outcome for them…to maybe having some more of God’s heart for their world just like Shane does…whether they ever look like Shane or not.

The message here: You aren’t Shane Claiborne. You’re you. Maybe you don’t want dreds or a shared urban dwelling. But don’t let that keep you, or your churches, from taking some first steps right where you are.

So what about it? Do you get where I’m coming from? Do some first steps seem like something that might be useful to you or the churches you frequent? Or are you way beyond that already? Would love to hear your opinion. Just hit the comment link by the title of this blog post to tell me your story.