I’m in the right place - there’s a big pile of flyers in the foyer of the church I’m loitering in for an event he’s preaching at that evening. Now, if I could only get hold of some of his people - maybe his PA, his intern or the person carrying his bags. Maybe his tour manager? But that’s not going to be an option. Those who know a little about Shane and his ministry won’t be surprised to hear that he’s come to the UK on his own, without any of the entourage you might expect from a best-selling Christian author and speaker. And it’d be no use trying to find him at his hotel: he doesn’t stay in hotels. Having lived and worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and spent time working for peace in Baghdad during the US-led war in Iraq, Shane is used to going without creature comforts. Instead, he likes to stay with families and people from the churches and organisations who host him.
I track Shane down at the house of the pastor whose church he’s speaking at later that evening and almost immediately I feel bad. I’ve woken him up... Despite his jetlag, Shane is in fine form. Always warm, welcoming and intrigued to hear more about other people and their passions, he’s a natural speaker at youth work events; it was the Youth Work Summit which brought him to Manchester in the first place.
Since the huge success of his first book, The Irresistible Revolution in 2006, Shane has become a well-known name in Christian circles. But his ministry started almost a decade before that, when he and some friends who were studying at university began sharing their lives with homeless and marginalised people in Philadelphia – a city with great history, but huge economic and social problems. Their community eventually became known as The Simple Way, and has gone from strength to strength. He still lives in the neighbourhood with his wife and tries to spend as little time away from the area as possible. But as his mentor and friend Tony Campolo begins to slow down in the approach to his 80th birthday, Shane has become one of America’s foremost Christian activists.
The so-called New Monastic movement, of which Shane is a part, has drawn young people from across America (and the UK as well) into more deprived areas, as generations of more traditional monastic communities had done before them. Those attracted to join movements like The Simple Way are often from evangelical backgrounds, and while many of them stay within the evangelical world, their horizons have been expanded by Catholic saints, Anabaptist movements and the lives and work of the desert fathers and mothers. The New Monastic movement has had critics, but it seems to hold an attraction to many in their 20s, 30s and even some teenagers. So, clutching a series of questions about youth work and young people, we start chatting. But a conversation with Shane is as unpredictable as it is engaging. I began by asking him about spending a bit of time in two of the UK’s great creative hubs – Manchester and East London...
Shane Claiborne: When I’ve been in the North, folks are really down to earth. It’s like where I’m from [Tennessee] - there’s not a whole lot of room for lofty pie-in-the-sky talk. The Parables were not pie in the sky theology – they were addressing real stuff in Jesus’ time. Part of what I love to see is conversations start. That’s one of the biggest things you can hope for when you’re coming in like I am – here today and gone tomorrow – you realise you’re coming into a conversation that’s already being had, so you hope you contribute something that lasts after you leave. It’s really beautiful to see folks connecting faith to the real world. That’s happening more and more in the States, but it’s surely been happening for a long time over here...
Andy Walton: Do you get the sense that youth leaders are excited about introducing young people to the scriptures and taking Jesus seriously for what he actually said?
SC: What has resonated is the simple question: ‘What if Jesus really meant the stuff he said?’ Folks are looking at Jesus and saying: this has got to be the lens through which we read the world and through which we read the rest of the Bible. This is God, with skin on. This is the one that we’re called to follow, and that we’re called to bounce our theology – and our lives - off! The world would look like a better place if Christians took Jesus seriously and if we really started reading the Gospels. The gospel is real life good news. When the gospel addresses the very concrete things of the world we live in, people begin to experience that. They taste and see that attraction.
AW: A lot of people in the UK have been inspired by the idea of putting some roots down and trying to get a big house and live in community. But the issue is they are so, so expensive!
SC: I don’t pretend to have the answers but convents have extra houses, churches have old rectories that can create new spaces. Some of it is just about designing our lives around community – sharing things like lawnmowers, washers and driers as a neighbourhood. There are baby steps we can take even though we may not end up in utopia!
AW: Lots of young people seem apathetic about faith and religion. But some of them are pretty passionate about justice and this is particularly evident on social media. What’s the challenge that’s thrown down by that?
SC: It’s exciting that the world has shrunk. People realise that to be silent is to be complicit. The danger is in just joining Facebook campaigns or virtual causes. I don’t want to knock those. I’m connected to the Afghan Peace Volunteers – a powerful youth movement in Afghanistan. They are organising themselves using technology, but they’re also doing real things in the streets and risking their lives. We can’t replace real activism with virtual activism, or real relationships with virtual partnerships. Mother Teresa said ‘It’s very fashionable to talk about the poor, but not as fashionable to talk to the poor.’ It’s very fashionable to be ‘virtually conscious’, but not to actually have any real relationships to the people who are directly affected by issues. Nothing can replace visiting people in prison or opening our homes to the homeless – those are things you don’t do with an iPhone.
AW: I’ve heard you say before that the Church will lose more and more young people not because it demands too much from them, but because it demands too little.
SC: It’s not just the Church that young people have lost a lot of confidence in; it’s the government, it’s institutions. But young people are acutely aware of hypocrisies and contradictions. One of my friends was speaking at a church where they had an argument about needing a heater for the baptismal [pool]. People are dying because they don’t have water and we’re wasting money because people don’t want to get into cold water to get baptised for a Jesus who died on the cross. They see these contradictions and what the Church does with its money and how much it asks for.
It’s fashionable to talk about the poor, but not to talk to the poor
Hypocrisy is solved when we get a little bit more honest and we say ’forgive us for the things we’ve done wrong.’ I don’t think young people are looking for Christians who are perfect but I think they’re looking for Christians who are honest and who say, ‘I’m not actually where I want to be but I’m working on it and I need your help.’ I was at a church the other day where the ushers had shirts on which said ‘no perfect people allowed’. That kind of stuff is good – it helps you realise that the Church isn’t a country club for saints, even though we have pretended to be for a long time.
We can also do tremendous damage by the decisions we make publicly. Like with the Evangelical Alliance and Steve Chalke [Chalke’s Oasis Trust was recently asked to leave the EA after a disagreement about sexuality, and how the Bible should be read]. I don’t know a lot about that situation, but Steve is a good friend. When we make public stands that are very exclusive, they have tremendous ripples. Especially on things like the gay issue; a part of our witness as a Church needs to be an ability to disagree well and have robust conversations about these things. When Jesus said ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’, he was talking about our own contradictions and trying to build the unity Jesus prayed for. The number one perception of Christians by non-Christians is ‘anti-gay’. When we’ve become known, number one, for something Jesus had very little to say about, while the thing that Jesus said Christians will be known by doesn’t even make the list, then we’ve done something really wrong.
AW: Maybe we need to engage with young people in areas where they are already passionate.
SC: People care about how we treat asylum seekers and immigrants - young people realise we live in a time of great inequality. When 85 people have the same amount as 3.5 billion people it’s absurd and it would be a tremendous loss to not engage those things – they are things that people care about.
AW: Do you sense young people are still drawn to living in a radical community like The Simple Way?
SC: The way that it manifests itself a lot of the time is young people wanting to do service. Part of why they want to do it is because they want to do something, rather than just saying ‘the politicians need to do more.’ They’re saying like [GK] Chesterton did: ‘What’s wrong with the world? I am!’ I think what is tricky is that young people want to do everything for six months - there’s a lot of instability, people move all the time. Growing roots in a real place with real people is very, very tricky.
AW: Big, gathered churches in city centres are a problem for that aren’t they? Even though they attract young people and keep them in the Church, they struggle to build a community.
SC: I think we’ll see more and more stuff like Eastern University where I graduated; they’ve encouraged all first year students to unplug from social networking, so you can focus on the real community. That’s where the old school spiritual disciplines will become salvific – fasting from things and spending real time with people, having rhythms of prayer and a Sabbath day where you don’t even look at a phone or a computer.
AW: But how realistic is that for a youth worker? And for young people?
SC: It’s got to be a choice. But it’s a choice that has value to it. There are some studies coming out that show the more virtual friends you have, the lonelier you become. If all you eat is virtual food, you’re going to be hungry. If Jesus, the son of God, felt it was worthwhile to sit by a woman at a well and listen instead of talk, then that has something to teach us.
