This article was recently published in the online version of Relevant Magazine

On an average Saturday morning you’ll find me creating a tantalizing weekend breakfast, green coffee cup in hand and my current reading material lying open on the kitchen table. My sister and I will slowly wake up, catch up on the week’s events and plan our day—simple, normal and relatively average.One recent Saturday, however, a couple girlfriends and I decided to do something different. Forget sleeping in and our nonchalant weekend wake-up—we wanted to see a different part of our city.

And not only see it, be apart of it.

Change it.

Affect it.

Potter’s Hands Ministries, located in the heart of downtown Red Deer, serves breakfast to approximately 150-200 people every Saturday morning. They count on faith and the stirring in people’s hearts to get volunteers out to serve. And every time the doors open, there is just enough help. We discovered that approximate 90 percent of those served at Potter’s Hands are homeless or live in very low-income housing.After helping with food prep, serving, smiling and a lot of observing, 11 a.m. came, and it was time for clean-up. Bring out the broom and mop, time to get ready for Sunday church. The echoes of “thank you ladies” or “see you at church tomorrow” rang through the building and my mind as I pushed the dirt into a nice neat pile. Pastor Stan turns to me and says, “Thank you ladies for staying and helping clean up. Most people just serve and leave. This is the real unsung work.”

What caused us to stay until the end? Seeing a need and not wanting to leave until our part was done? Sure. Knowing the impending guilt that would come should we leave early? Absolutely. Wanting to experience the whole of what it takes to feed the homeless in our community? Exactly.Lately my sleep has been disturbed by the thoughts of not only humans in our community going without, but the world going without. I toss and turn, leak some tears and wake up in the morning with an undeniable stinging in my heart that the way I am living my life must change if I am to affect change. I am becoming more and more thankful for the disturbed sleep.

Poverty is defined as the state of being without enough food or money; lack of. Did you catch that? Without enough. Have I ever really experienced “without enough.” The fact that I have an education, stable family upbringing, a church family and great job likely suggests a strong “no”.But just because poverty has never personally knocked on my door, does not mean I am not to affect it—play a part in eradicating it completely from our planet.

Allow me to spout some stats that will hopefully get the wheels of your mind turning (www.globalissues.org):Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, lives on less than $2 a day. In 1999, when the whole world was worrying about Y2K and the end of this world as we knew it, nearly one billion people were still unable to read a book or sign their names. One billion children live in poverty (that’s 1-in-2 children in the world). Let’s put that into perspective for a moment. Imagine the whole country of India (2001) is made up entirely of children, and all of them are living in poverty —or “lack of enough.”There are 640 million people living without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water and 270 million have no access to health services. In 2003, 10.6 million children died before they reached the age of 5—whether it was lack of food, water or AIDS. That works out to roughly 29,000 children per day.

When I hear about innocent kids who are dying simply because they don’t have enough food or medicine to effectively treat their aids or condition, it gets my goat. They didn’t ask to be born in a third-world country anymore than a 4-year-old suburban girl was born into “enough”. It’s an unsung, far-off cry from what our normal world is.I remember as a child visiting all my great-aunts’ houses who insisted to feed us when we came to call. Their curly grey hair, crocheted pink slippers and stained apron couldn’t fool you for what stubbornness really lied behind the suit. We could always count on a full meal or cookies and milk. Now as an adult, I have discovered this love to feed people in my home—and yes, with a bit of genetic stubbornness. And now I find myself directly trying to get involved in feeding the world. Call it coincidence, but I know that the way we are brought up directly affects the way we live out our lives as adults. Surrounded by family wanting to feed me, I now know my life must feed those who haven’t enough. It is someone’s reality, though it may not be mine. It is the passion to continue the unsung work of a regular human being.

For any of you that have seen the movie Hotel Rwanda, you’ll know that there are places out there that are just not like Western countries. The journalist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, states in this movie when urged to call on North America, “They’ll see it, say that’s too bad, and go back to eating their TV dinners.” I do not want to be guilty of ignoring the world’s needs when they call for us.I understand that not everyone has the ability to travel overseas to bring food to the hungry or have a first-hand look at what is really going on in the world. But anyone can sponsor a child. Someone can write to bring awareness to the uneducated. Anyone can discover their strength and find something to contribute. Every life can literally make a world of difference. And what matters is that we try.

My church, Word of Life, has recently taken up the project of building an orphan and widow care facility just outside of Kigali, Rwanda. Our worship pastor, Jachin Mullen, also wrote and recorded a song titled “Pray for the World”. All the donations for this CD go directly to the Home of Hope Rwanda. For more information on the Home of Hope Rwanda project or to make a donation to the Pray for the World fund you can also visit www.homeofhope.ca.On any given day, you can Google “poverty” and you’ll find countless ways to make a difference. If we allow a lack of knowledge of these issues to continue, we will have only ourselves to blame for the state of our world in ten years.The words of the Potter’s Hands Pastor still permeate my thoughts—this is the unsung work. I know with all my heart that every life can make a difference. The unsung work of each person is what brings a real song to those in need—to the untouchables. The unheard. The unloved. The unborn. Unnoticed. Unwanted.

Your unsung work will change this world.

I'll be honest; I'd be kidding myself if I said I'm not much of a soapbox person (i.e., the self-deluded declaration with which I had humbly intended to open this piece). Nope—in truth, if given the right opportunity, I would happily lecture you on the treatment of Latinos in the United States, the state of the institution of marriage in our society, the misplaced priorities and values of today's young woman and probably a half-dozen other issues that have been loudly thrashing about in my head and heart for the better part of a decade. That being said, I've discovered a new soapbox that has quietly formed beneath my feet, almost without my realizing it.

Do you shake your head in grief when you read an article about the AIDS pandemic that is ravaging sub-Saharan Africa (irrefutably the region most wracked by HIV)? Have you prayed that God would bring relief and healing to those desperate nations? Have you taken part in the One Campaign? Do you support Blood:Water Mission?

If your answer is yes, that is great. If you are sincere in those gestures, then I sincerely applaud your efforts. They are great organizations doing great things. Just one more question: When was the last time you thought about/prayed for/contributed to the 1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS in North America (according to The UNAIDS/WHO’s “AIDS Epidemic Update: December 2006”)?

Many people reading this article live in the Western world. Let me encourage you not to forget your own neighbors! There has been much publicized about AIDS sweeping African countries (and supporting that need is a noble cause) but it becomes easy to let those regions not in the spotlight fall by the wayside. Current North American cases account for “only” a fraction of the roughly 40 million people worldwide living with HIV (as of 2006). But please hear me when I say that even as a fraction, 1.4 million is still an enormous number, and it’s a number living—and growing—right where you live.

World AIDS Day came and went this past December 1 without turning nearly as many heads as would have been warranted. HIV/AIDS is not the hot topic it once was, especially not in the United States. I have to admit that a few short months ago, I myself was guilty of the very thing I am now trying to discourage—I had never known a world without AIDS, and it formed little more than a blip on my radar, a red dot blinking over the African continent.

Then, this past September, I found myself beginning a 10-month stint as an intern at an AIDS service agency in North Carolina. The scales fell from the eyes, and I’ve seen (and continue to see) how very real and present is this struggle to survive, even thousands of miles away from developing countries. What I’ve also seen is how little active compassion is often displayed and extended toward these men, women and children.

Now, at this point I’m sure that somebody out there is getting angry thinking that I’m shrugging off the suffering of Africa. Wrong! I don’t ask that your attentions be diverted away from the crisis there; I only ask that you care also for their sick brothers and sisters who are living and dying in your own neighborhood. Geography, the supposed availability of medication and death rates should not dictate the value of a life, or the value of helping one. If you can reach far, you can also reach near.

Fighting AIDS in Africa is clearly a good thing, and it’s also very popular. Championed by celebrities and social justice-minded media, the cause has received the attention necessary to put itself in the minds of even the least socially aware. Ironically (given the “land of plenty” stigma surrounding the United States and other western nations), those infected with the virus in the West have sometimes found themselves as underdogs in the running for compassion, so-to-speak, even from their neighbors, their compatriots.

I’m not asking you to build your own soapbox, just to evaluate your perspective. Though if that means jumping up here with me, I’d be more than happy to make room …and so would some 1.4 million others.

www.Relevant.com

Horrific descriptions of poverty and injustice have become fairly common, so much so that many Christians are numb. Today I want to tell you a story about five people in their 20s from central Illinois who are combating this numbness. It begins with a journey across the sea.

Welcome to Mitumba, one of the smallest and most neglected slums in the city of Nairobi, Kenya. Widows and orphans compose a vast majority of the slum’s 12- to- 15,000 inhabitants. There are no government schools, and while 70 percent of the population is HIV positive, no medical help exists. Flushable toilets and clean water are not part of Mitumba’s reality. Children without shoes run through streets filled with garbage, broken glass and feces.

Prior to March 2006, Chad Parker had never heard of Mitumba. The 25-year-old entrepreneur knew a lot about business, website design and baseball … but not about Mitumba – that is, until God sent him and four friends to Kenya. Many people question the value of short-term missions, but for Chad and his friends, this trip was more than just another “eye-opening experience.”

As is the case with any mission trip, this team found themselves in numerous unexpected situations. One of the most memorable was the day they spent with Pastor Shadrach in Mitumba. Pastor Shadrach and his wife began Rural Evangelistic Ministry, which is currently the only Christian organization serving the people of Mitumba. This ministry provides church services and weekly a Bible club for children, while also striving to fulfill physical needs. On a budget of only $60- to- $70 per month, they began a school in Mitumba that educates 120 of the slum’s 3,000 children and feeds each child two meals a day of either rice or porridge.

During his afternoon at Shadrach’s school, Chad noticed that most of the children were sick with colds. So the next day he purchased an $8 case of cough medicine. Within a week, nearly all the kids were better. For a person living in Mitumba, this medicine is very expensive, yet the $8 was a meager sacrifice for Chad. He began to see how easy it is to make a difference.

The team of five boarded their plane home with images of Mitumba etched in their minds. An eight-hour layover in London found them brainstorming ways to help Shadrach’s ministry. Chad had met with Shadrach to go through the ministry’s budget and knew that the biggest needs were money and volunteers.

This group of young people returned to their jobs, friends and families with a commitment to continue serving the people of Mitumba. From this commitment came an organization called GOYA Ministries.

GOYA is working to obtain non-profit status, but has already begun sending donations abroad with the help of HighPointe Community Church in Bloomington, Illinois. In hearing about the organization, people often ask, “What does GOYA mean? Is it a tribal word for ‘Jesus?’” The answer is no. GOYA is an acronym that stands for “Get Off You’re A--” It is a response to the apathy with which many Christians address problems in the world.

GOYA has numerous projects underway. For example, plans are being made to sell ornaments, soapstone jewelry and angels carved out of wood – all handmade by women in Mitumba – this holiday season. Bracelets, T-shirts and other merchandise will be available soon as well, with 100 percent of the proceeds going directly to Mitumba. (To learn more about other projects, visit GOYA’s website.)

Preparation has also begun for three future trips to Mitumba – in March, May and August 2007. Tentatively, the March team will start a building project and implement new grade school curriculum. The trip in May will be a medical mission. GOYA hopes to send several doctors as well as a team of people to assist the physicians.

Lincoln Christian College, along with two churches in central Illinois and a church in rural Idaho have already partnered with GOYA and are helping to elicit awareness and support. With money that is raised, GOYA hopes to provide food, clean water, clothes and shoes for the children, school curriculum, teacher salaries and medical supplies. Eventually, the organization also intends to help with community development and work toward better living conditions in Mitumba.

A short trip to Kenya and a whole lot of faith has propelled these central Illinois twentysomethings into action. It’s easy to read this article and think, “Good for them! I’m glad someone is helping all those poor people without any food or medicine or a roof over their heads.” But the point is that God calls all of us to be people of action.

As is written in the book of James: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if people claim to have faith but have no deeds? ... Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (2:14-17, TNIV).

So “GOYA” and ...

... Encourage your small group to donate funds or help in other ways.

... Get your local indie band involved.

... Get your co-workers involved (whether they’re Christians or not).

... Go on a trip to Mitumba.

... Buy GOYA merchandise to support fair trade in this impoverished place.

... Encourage your local coffee shop to donate proceeds from their African blend coffees.

... Come up with other creative ways to educate people and raise money for Mitumba.

... Spread the word; tell someone else who might care.

... Or don’t have anything to do with GOYA, but get up, and do SOMETHING!!!

“If God says go, ask how far. And when He says ‘around the world,’ just know that with His help, any idiot can do that,” Parker says. “I am proof positive!”

For more information, visit www.goyaministries.org, email the author of this article or email info@goyaministries.org.

Sweat dripping and shoulders aching, we stumbled through the darkness and into the light of the campfire circle the rest of our team was gathered around. Lurching past the team to our “kitchen” (a gathering of pots and pans around the glowing embers of a second fire), Joel and I rolled the water pails wearily off our shoulders, letting them smack hard on the dusty, reddish dirt. Our shirts were soaked from sweat and spilled water. Our breathing began to slow as we realized we had actually made it. Tired, we grinned at each other broadly. “We did it!” I cried, still a little surprised at how stubborn my will can be. The southern cross gleamed over us in the bright, night sky. And our sense of accomplishment dimmed as we remembered what compelled us to carrying water that night.

Joel and I were on the southeast shore of Africa in the country of Mozambique. With more than 50 percent of the population living on less than $1 a day and an HIV infection rate of 16 percent, much of Mozambique struggles through their daily life. We were nearing the end of a 10-day relief and community development assessment trip with World Relief, a holistic, evangelical relief agency with extensive international operations. We had spent the last week in two villages, Chaimite and Koca Misava in Gaza province, listening to the people and learning how we could partner with them in AIDS and poverty relief. Earlier that day we had been walking around the village of Koca Misava, comprised of a mixture of reed huts and small, one-room cement block dwellings. The dirt was cleanly swept in the working space around each house and kids and women were busy grinding corn and separating the chaff, preparing for the fast approaching evening, when darkness hits around 5:30.

Just under 20 percent of the world lives without daily access to potable water. In Koca Misava, there is one well in town of brackish water, but it operates through an electric pump and there is a $.10 US equivalent charge to secure a day’s worth of water. Of the 2,200 families in Koca Misava, just under 100 can regularly afford this extra expense. The other 2,100 make two trips, one each at dawn and dusk, to gather the water they’ll need to make it through the day from the river in the Limpopo valley, a little more than two kilometers outside of town. Upon reaching the outskirts of town late that afternoon, we saw many women and young girls making their evening trek to gather water. Wandering with them toward the river, we came suddenly to a steep drop off. A gorgeous panorama was spread out before us, the valley below stretching for miles in either direction. Patches of rice, maize and other vegetation were hand-tilled below, the soil to wet to support a tractor. To our right, a narrow, uneven dirt path descended steeply and we could just see at the bottom where the women were gathering water.

As we paused at the crest, a young girl bobbed up the path next to us, balancing 20 liters of water on her head. We had left the village behind some distance before and were stunned to think that she was about to carry this all the way back after already ascending the sharp terrain below. Sybil, a World Relief staff member with us, inquired of her age for us. She was just 10 years old.A liter of water weighs 1.01 lbs. Add about 5 pounds to the total number of liters to account for the weight of the bucket, and this 10-year-old girl was carefully balancing 50 pounds on her head. From the middle of the village to the riverbed is 2.25 kilometers. Hiking down to the river loses 265 feet of elevation, the overwhelming majority of that being in the last æ kilometer, which she had just crested. Stunned by the distance and steep ascent of the hike back, Joel and I decided to get a taste of African life and carry our own water that evening. Sybil shared with us on the way back to camp that your average pail of water for an adult is 25 liters (roughly 60 pounds). At 6’4”, 145 pounds, I’m not exactly a man of steel. But I’m incredibly stubborn. Joel is 2” and pounds less than me. And apparently just as bull-headed. Sybil looked at us and laughed when we said we wanted to try it out that evening.At our campsite in the middle of Koca Misava, we picked up our water jugs and two World Relief staff members to make sure we didn’t get lost and headed out into the gathering dusk.

The walk down was an enjoyable enough, talking about our activities of the day and admiring the beauty of the African countryside surrounding us. Just under 30 minutes after leaving, we came to the watering hole. A small stream of muddy water, dammed by a few logs, it wasn’t more than 6 inches deep. We stopped to fill our pails to overflowing, scooping with a small jug that was lying among the bushes. Men don’t (thankfully) carry things on their head as the women do, so were lifted the jugs to our shoulders and began the daunting return trip. An hour and a half after we had initially left our campsite, we stumbled back in, dirty, wet and worn-out. As we sat down to dinner around the campfire, we considered that our one trek was a relatively small drop in the bucket of what life is like in the villages of Mozambique. We didn’t have to get up at 4:00 the next morning and hike back down to repeat the same trek. We hadn’t spent all day grinding maize by hand and preparing our meals. We didn’t even drink from the pails we had returned with, sipping instead from bottled water that wouldn’t sicken us.

As the Milky Way swept over the night sky, we took in deep breaths and considered the life we’d been blessed with. I often wrestle with the responsibility of the life I’ve been given, unsure why I have so much that others lack. I pray for wisdom to live frugally and for the benefit of others. And I long to link arms with my African brothers and sisters and carry the water of life to all of humanity.

"Water from the Weary" by Joel Daniel Harris is featured in the online version of Relevant Magazine, as are many of the articles you'll find on godelta.

If you're interested in helping combat the problems of lack of clean drinking water, or the AIDS crisis in Africa, check out www.bloodwatermission.org, or link to it through our resources page. $1 can provide 1 African with clean water for 1 year....

1999 was an explosive year. NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days straight and terrorist bombs leveled Moscow apartment buildings, sparking a merciless Russian march into Chechnya. Y2K threatened to topple the western infrastructure while India and Pakistan traded heavily armed blows over the disputed region of Kashmir. And in a tiny corner of Nashville, Tenn., a 22-year old version of me almost lost his faith. Boom. It was the sheer volume of carnage. How could God really be in control of such a wildly violent, dismal and corrupted planet? (An ancient and cliché question, I know, but sincere just the same.) I listened closely, for a whisper or a bellow, but the clamor of the evening news was my only reply. No booming voice from the heavens, no reassuring sermon from a Sunday school Jesus.
I was on my couch with a handful of pretzels and a head full of bad news when I decided to take Christ’s admonition to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep” to it’s logical conclusion. It was the only thing that seemed to make sense in the midst of such a spiritual crisis. Through the television screen I could see weeping Chechen grandmothers and streams of hobbled Albanian refugees. Enough said. That’s where my faith will become relevant, I thought. No more miming the gospel to contemporary Christian music on a street corner, I’m going to find a way to walk quietly alongside those who are suffering.“Walk” might have been a tad ambitious. “Stumble” is closer to what actually happened when I touched down in Tirana, Albania to run a small church bakery feeding Kosovar refugees. There were cultural misunderstandings and linguistic mishaps. I frequently mixed up the Albanian words for sugar, yeast and butter, producing some rather disappointing (not to mention entertaining) batches of bread. I stepped on my Albanian friends’ cultural toes, and they helped me see the relative limitedness of my white, middle class desires to “save the day.” It was a fruitful, albeit tense, relationship.And I began to chisel out a model of following Jesus that seemed to make sense against a backdrop of genocide, spiraling violence and abject poverty: work hard, work humbly and try to do the work that others either can’t or won’t do. Bakeries were a perfect fit. I couldn’t find many examples of people or organizations committed to setting up bakeries for local churches, yet I knew many churches in the developing world had a desire to minister to their communities through food programs. The beauty of bread, I realized, was its simplicity and prevalence among most people groups.Bakeries just make sense. With a mixer, an oven and a clean working space, a local church in the developing world (places where I still find much hope) can easily bake a thousand loaves a day. Using half the bread for ministry and half for profit, the whole operation remains self-sustaining and even provides a few jobs for local church folks. Streamlined, simple, effective. I know bakeries won’t save the world, and I’m pretty sure they won’t stop bombs or machetes. The biblical axiom: “Man will not live by bread alone,” after all, is there for a reason. But Christ, working through local churches committed to sowing kingdom seeds in their communities, is a much surer bet. The more we can do to support and encourage those local congregations the better.I came home from Albania with a renewed hope in following Jesus, in witnessing less with my words than my actions, in creative “kingdom building.” That term, according to the evangelical circles in which I had been trained, ultimately seemed to refer to the saving of souls, the amount of tracts one could pass out on a street corner or the number of hands raised after a rousing rendition of Carmen’s “The Champion.” But as a moderately privileged western Christian, it was critical for me to find a way in which I could follow Jesus and support His church without belligerence or bullying. God is good, His Church is full of promise and the kingdom is still emerging, despite the fact that these truths, at times, get swallowed up by the news, our hurt, our cynicism. Being a behind-the-scenes baker is just one way I found to keep after the King in a manner that somehow intersects with the daily news, while all the while trying to change the headlines.

“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:16, TNIV).

Last Friday was a beautiful night in Houston, TX. The stars were out, downtown glowed from the light of hundreds of people working late and in two local parks, a resurrection story was taking place.

In Hermann Park, students from Rice University came out like they had every week for the past year, carrying leftover food from their cafeterias, and sat down with the homeless to eat. Afterwards, where they usually held a Bible study, they acted out Bible passages.

The community in Hermann Park has grown close in the past few months, and while it was very little surprise that the folks there had moved outside Bible studies and into new ways of sharing what they believed, I still wanted to jump for joy. It was beautiful.

Meanwhile, across town at Emancipation Park, a friend and I were being given an after dinner tour of the third ward, a mostly lower income area of Houston that was currently resisting developers with a “Third Ward is not for sale” campaign. We were shown a boxing gym founded by a preacher who used to be a middleweight fighter and an artists’ community.

We also talked to Johnny Brown, our friend from the area. He told us that because we had dinner for him in the park every Friday, he could then jog down to the prison and go down the list to identify every name that was under 19 years old. He would then visit those kids and tell them about Jesus and “what they had to do.”

The biggest surprise of these two events is that they both came about through the same idea. Every Friday, a group of us would go out to the park with potfuls of food and invite everyone we could find to join us, then hold a Bible study or sing a song with anyone who wanted to stay. I believe that this is an approach that, given enough time, will work any time, any place with any group of people. I also believe it will introduce people to Jesus that have never met Him, as well as allow different members of the Body of Christ to act as one. We call it Church in the Park, because it’s literally when the Church meets in the park.

Of course, it didn’t happen on the first night we went to the park. It took weeks of attending Emancipation Park before everyone decided that we could be trusted. In addition, we found that different circumstances needed different approaches. Because the winters are a bit colder in the north, you have to find a way to hold dinner inside. But patience pays off.

Earlier I said this was a resurrection story, and here’s what I mean: One night, at Hermann Park, a man walked up to me and told me he always requested Fridays off so he could come to Hermann with us. I asked why he came to Hermann as opposed to a feeding ministry or a church, and here’s what he said: “Before I came here, no one would look at me. I was someone to feed, or someone to be preached to, someone to fight for a blanket or someone to be ignored. But this is church to me, and here I’m treated like I’m a living person, not just another body. I am alive.”

Since this article is in the Revolution section, here is the revolution I’m calling for: To the parks! Students, take your Bibles and leftovers from your cafeterias and share them. People with jobs and paychecks, make a pot of chili the night before and head out with friends (don’t go alone). Pastors, you know who likes to cook in your communities; suggest that they serve. My vision is that the Church move outside, to the place where we cannot insulate ourselves and to a place where we are visible to all who walk by.

If you have any questions or want to know more, I’ll be more than happy to answer them if you e-mail me or visit our blog at churchinthepark.blogspot.com. To the parks!

“Thousands more visitors … come every year-and of these thousands, what if only a few hundred came consciously as Christians seeking their brothers? Even people who have never dreamed of being missionaries could play a role here larger than anything that has yet been done” (Brother Andrew, from God’s Smuggler).

"...Jesus wrecked my life"

The following is from an article by Shane Claiborne, author of "The Irresistible Revolution", and one of the founders of The Simple Way, a community of believers in Philadelphia who have followed the Biblical mandate of "selling all you have and giving it to the poor". Check out Shane's book for his full story---It will pierce your heart, with its hard message and strong words.

Being Interruptedby Shane Claiborne from Outreach magazine, May/June 2006

I grew up in Tennessee—churches everywhere. We went to a Methodist one, but I also went to different youth groups—whichever one was most entertaining. I'd go on all these youth trips where you were invited to "accept Jesus." I must have gotten born again six or eight times.
I'm still recovering from my conversion. I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus, and He wrecked my life. The more I read the Gospel, the more it turned everything I believed in upside-down. After high school, I found I was just as likely to meet God in the sewers of the ghetto as in the halls of Christian academia. I met people who took the command to love your neighbor as yourself more seriously. We'd be walking down the street, and if they met someone homeless who needed their jacket, they'd just wrap it around him. It was a very reckless and beautifully sacrificial way of loving others.

A bunch of us decided to help prevent some homeless families who had moved into an abandoned cathedral in north Philly to survive, from being evicted by the city and the archdiocese. We said, "If they come for you, then they'll have to take us, too." And that's when I realized that being born again is not just a mystical thing, but has very real-life implications. Because we're born again into a dysfunctional family, where some people have more than they need and others have less.

The body of Christ was so alive in that cathedral. Every Sunday, we sang old hymns and freedom songs. Gospel choirs came, and we danced in the aisles.

The families in the cathedral were not blood-related, but they were taking care of each other, sharing things that reflected the economics of the early Church.

But during those three months in the cathedral, I saw how removed the Church was from the homeless. From my desk at college, it looked like we had stopped living Christianity and had just started studying it. So I went on a quest to find someone else who wondered what if Jesus meant the stuff He said, and found Mother Teresa.

I wrote Momma T a letter, and when I didn't hear back, I started calling nuns and finally got her digits. She told us to come for the summer. So a friend and I went to Calcutta, India, and worked alongside her helping the lepers. And I saw that these people were children of the same God. The Church is the most diverse family we could ever imagine. And that is beautiful, especially to the poor because there's a sense that they've got hundreds and hundreds of brothers and sisters around the world to help carry their burden. But that same idea is disturbing to those who are comfortable. Mother Teresa would say that there are Calcuttas everywhere; people just need to find their Calcuttas. And I knew mine was back in Philly.

When I returned, a group of us decided to do what we'd been talking about. We started The Simple Way. What do we do? We just hang out. It's not some crazy, far-out thing. We just help kids with homework, we eat together, we cry, we just open the door every day with joy and love, to be present with whoever shows up. It's a great honor to wake up each morning and know we're going to meet Jesus in His most distressing disguises.

We once had this prostitute come to our house; we didn't say anything about Jesus. She said, "You guys are Christians, aren't you?"

We said, "Yeah." She said, "I knew because you guys shined, and I used to shine like that. But it's a cold, dark world, and I lost my shine on these streets." And she asked us to pray with her that she would shine again. She came back weeks later with a box full of Marlboro Miles, just her way of thanking us. And now she's got a family and a kid.

It's really incredible to see people begin to heal from the things that have been destroying them—whether that pain has come from their own decisions or from the decisions of a society that needs to be reminded how to love.

Jesus was always being interrupted. He was always being present with the person at the well or the person grabbing on His shirt.

And that's a really beautiful way to live.

Sometimes called an "urban monk," Shane Claiborne helped found The Simple Way (thesimpleway.org), a radical faith community in inner-city Philadelphia. Having graduated from Eastern University and done graduate work at Princeton Seminary, Claiborne is an activist and speaker as well as the author of The Irresistible Revolution (Zondervan). He spent 10 weeks serving alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta and three weeks in Iraq in 2003 with a peace team during the first bombings after Sept. 11.

This content originally appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of Outreach magazine, the gathering place for ideas, insights and stories of today's outreach-oriented church leaders. For more ideas and information, visit outreachmagazine.com. For your free 3-issue mini subscription to Outreach magazine, click here.

Copyright © 2006 Outreach.