Shane Claiborne, arguably the most prominent representative of the new monasticism movement, was the opening presenter for Bethany Seminary’s sixth annual Presidential Forum on Friday, April 4. Author of the popular book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical and one of the founding members of The Simple Way intentional community in Philadelphia, PA, Claiborne spoke to a packed audience in Nicarry Chapel on the topic of “Another Way of Doing Life.” Now if you’ve read Claiborne’s book, which was published in 2006, and came to this presentation expecting to hear something new or hoped for any deeper reflection since he wrote the book, you may have been disappointed. Or if you were looking for more detail on how this whole intentional community thing works, well, you probably didn’t find what you were looking for either. But if you were looking for inspiration presented with great personality, funny anecdotes and a lot of aw-shucks genuine down-home humor, you were probably pleased. Shane Claiborne is very funny, personable and engaging. His radical challenge to status quo Christianity is compelling. But I had a difficult time reconciling that his book was published eight years ago and this talk was basically a re-hash of the same stories . . . maybe my expectations were too high. I’ll let it go at that . . . if you happened to miss Shane’s talk, you can catch the gist of his message here:
“We’re good at worshiping Jesus – not so good at following Jesus.” ~ Shane Claiborne
“The Simple Way is a web of subversive friends conspiring to spread the vision of ‘Loving God, Loving People, and Following Jesus’ in our neighborhoods and in our world.” ~ Simple Way website
Public Theology 