Urban Forum #2: Claiborne

Areopagus #12

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et’s stop complaining about the church we’ve experienced and let’s become the church that we dream of. Shane Claiborne takes us from sit-ins to jail cells, from India to inner city hovels as he wonders how we can worship a homeless man on Sunday… and ignore one on Monday? From the second bi-annual Urban Forum in Atlanta, Claiborne calls us to rethink what it means to be Christian and to be set-apart.

To listen to the audio click on the arrow (runs: 45:48):

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Speaker: Shane Claiborne

With tears and laughter, Shane unveils the tragic messes we’ve made of our world and the tangible hope that another world is possible. Shane graduated from Eastern University, and did graduate work at Princeton Seminary. His ministry experience is varied, from a 10-week stint working alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta, to a year spent serving a wealthy mega-congregation at Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago.

During the recent war in Iraq, Shane spent three weeks in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team (a project of Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peacemaker Teams). Shane was witness to the military bombardment of Baghdad as well as the militarized areas between Baghdad and Amman. As a member of IPT, Shane took daily trips to sites where there had been bombings, visited hospitals and families, and attended worship services during the war.

Shane is a founding partner of The Simple Way, a faith community in inner city Philadelphia that has helped to birth and connect radical faith communities around the world, many of whom have become known as a “new monasticism”, which produced the book Schools for Conversion. These communities seek to follow Jesus, to rediscover the spirit of the early Church, and to incarnate the “Kingdom of God” — a way of life standing in stark contrast to the world of militarism and materialism. At the Simple Way, their little revolution is lived out locally, as days are spent feeding hungry folks, doing collaborative arts with children, running a community store, hanging out with neighbors, and reclaiming trash-strewn lots by planting gardens. Shane and The Simple Way do much work to expose the fundamental structures that create poverty and to imagine alternatives to them.

Shane serves on the Board of Directors for The Christian Community Development Association, one of the largest national associations of faith-based organizations whose pillars are Redistribution, Relocation, and Reconciliation. Shane writes and travels extensively speaking about peacemaking, social justice, and Jesus. He is featured in the DVD series “Another World Is Possible” and is the author of the book The Irresistible Revolution.

1 Comment to Urban Forum #2: Claiborne

1. Thanks for posting this. I was unfortunate enough to not be able to attend Atlanta (once again) and was most disappointed when I heard Shane Claiborne was going to be there and I was not. Having read his book I would have been interested in meeting him. Being able to listen to what he shared has made the ’sting’ of missing-out a little less irritating.
Heather on March 25th, 2007

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