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The Irresistible Revolution: Part II

Note: This is the second part of my series on Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution. See Part I here.

I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor. (p.113)

Claiborne’s words hit home with me. Why? Because I know very few poor. I am part of this great disconnect. I don’t even know the American poor, let alone the poor of the third-world which are far worse off than most in the United States.

In church I was taught to care about the things of Jesus, but how much of me sitting in a pew was me taking up my cross and how much of it was just me admiring the sacrifice that Jesus had already made? I’d wager that most of my time was spent in adoration, not action.

One part of the problem could stem from how churches spend the money they’ve been given.

I did a ton of research on tithes and offerings in Scripture, and discovered they are unmistakably intended to be used for redistributing resources to the poor and not to go toward buildings and staff for the church. (p.326)

So historically, church offerings were part of God’s economy of redistribution, and over 90 percent was to be given to the poor. We live in an age when we have nearly reversed what God set in place. An average of 85 percent of the church offering is used internally, primarily for staff and buildings and stuff to meet our own needs. (p.331)

The economy of the American church is the biggest fault I find in her. The problem with America is we’re so caught up in capitalism, that anything that even remotely hints of socialism is evil. I think this is beginning to change with my generation — the first that grew up in a post cold war world (I was five when the Berlin Wall fell).

One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. (p.129)

A couple of closing passages:

And 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. (p.150)

Some of us have just caught a glimpse of the beauty of the promised land, and it is so dazzling that our eyes are forever fixed on it, never to look back at the ways of that old empire again. (p.344)

Tags: theology