Jesus Wrecked My Life (Part Two)
by Shane Claiborne
I know there are people out there who say: “My life was such a mess. I was drinking, partying, sleeping around … and then I met Jesus and my whole life came together.” God bless those people. But for me, I had it together. I used to be cool (I was prom-king for heavens sake). And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the Gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside-down… I am still recovering from my conversion.
I ended up at Eastern University outside Philadelphia, studying Youth Ministry with Duffy Robbins and Sociology with Tony Campolo, a strange combo that got me in some trouble. I ended up doing things like having homeless folks preach at outreach events. On one mission trip serving in homeless shelters, our students started joking about how easy it would be to live on the streets, so that night we locked them all out of the building to sleep on the streets. Needless to say, my youth ministry career was short-lived.
Too often we just try to help our youth choose a good career track, asking what they want to do when they grow up. What would a teenage Jesus have said if they asked him, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” I don’t know, maybe something like, “I’m going to turn the world upside down… I’m going to hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors until people kill me.” Or what would Peter have said: “Well I was going to be a fisherman, and then I met this dude and he messed all that up.” So I started calling myself a vocational “lover.” My high school reunion handbook back in TN just listed me as a career “Lover”. I’m okay with that. I dream of the day when people here the word Christian and the only thing they can think of is Love.
What if youth ministry had a prophetic imagination that did not conform to the patterns of our culture that has strayed from the Beatitudes of our Lord and bowed to a market built upon the seven deadly sins? What if youth groups began to sew clothes together as a way of protestifying against the groanings of “least of these” laboring in sweatshops overseas? What if missionaries were students who went to law school to defend folks who are on death row because they are black or poor? What if Jesus-freaks were kids who ate lunch with their janitors?
My friend Jim Wallis met this radio DJ down in Nashville. He was a secular Jewish guy with some discontent with the embarrassing things done in the name of God, but then he said: “But the Bible’s got some good things to say, especially the stuff in red… and you all seem to take that stuff seriously… you should call yourself ‘red-letter Christians’.” So we did, a bunch of us including Jim and Tony and a bunch of other folks around the country have started calling ourselves red-letter Christians, and have set out to take the commands of Jesus seriously, and the commission of our DJ friend. We need red-letter Christians that will once again read the words of Jesus and ask, “What if he meant this stuff?”
[Shane Claiborne is a founding partner of The Simple Way, and will be a main session speaker at Shift 2008. Used with permission of YouthWorker Journal.]
I know there are people out there who say: “My life was such a mess. I was drinking, partying, sleeping around … and then I met Jesus and my whole life came together.” God bless those people. But for me, I had it together. I used to be cool (I was prom-king for heavens sake). And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the Gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside-down… I am still recovering from my conversion.
I ended up at Eastern University outside Philadelphia, studying Youth Ministry with Duffy Robbins and Sociology with Tony Campolo, a strange combo that got me in some trouble. I ended up doing things like having homeless folks preach at outreach events. On one mission trip serving in homeless shelters, our students started joking about how easy it would be to live on the streets, so that night we locked them all out of the building to sleep on the streets. Needless to say, my youth ministry career was short-lived.
Too often we just try to help our youth choose a good career track, asking what they want to do when they grow up. What would a teenage Jesus have said if they asked him, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” I don’t know, maybe something like, “I’m going to turn the world upside down… I’m going to hang out with prostitutes and tax collectors until people kill me.” Or what would Peter have said: “Well I was going to be a fisherman, and then I met this dude and he messed all that up.” So I started calling myself a vocational “lover.” My high school reunion handbook back in TN just listed me as a career “Lover”. I’m okay with that. I dream of the day when people here the word Christian and the only thing they can think of is Love.
What if youth ministry had a prophetic imagination that did not conform to the patterns of our culture that has strayed from the Beatitudes of our Lord and bowed to a market built upon the seven deadly sins? What if youth groups began to sew clothes together as a way of protestifying against the groanings of “least of these” laboring in sweatshops overseas? What if missionaries were students who went to law school to defend folks who are on death row because they are black or poor? What if Jesus-freaks were kids who ate lunch with their janitors?
My friend Jim Wallis met this radio DJ down in Nashville. He was a secular Jewish guy with some discontent with the embarrassing things done in the name of God, but then he said: “But the Bible’s got some good things to say, especially the stuff in red… and you all seem to take that stuff seriously… you should call yourself ‘red-letter Christians’.” So we did, a bunch of us including Jim and Tony and a bunch of other folks around the country have started calling ourselves red-letter Christians, and have set out to take the commands of Jesus seriously, and the commission of our DJ friend. We need red-letter Christians that will once again read the words of Jesus and ask, “What if he meant this stuff?”
[Shane Claiborne is a founding partner of The Simple Way, and will be a main session speaker at Shift 2008. Used with permission of YouthWorker Journal.]
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