Irresistible Revolution: A Quest to Be Ordinary Radicals
This presentation is an invitation to join a new movement of God's Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world. It is an invitation to listen to stories to inspire and provoke us as we seek to live out our call as people of faith in social work. This message is meant to comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable. It sketches out a vision of "ordinary" Christians in social work ready to change the world with little but radical acts of love.
As a result of this training, participants will be able to:
1. Describe a way of life that prophetically proclaims what it means to be a follower of Jesus reaching out to others in the twenty-first century
2. Outline the challenges of the consumer culture and distorted priorities of the global economy to human flourishing at both the individual and community levels
3. Articulate several strategies for Christians in social work to authentically live out their faith through their work with others
Shane Claiborne graduated from Eastern University and did graduate work at Princeton Seminary. In 2010, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Eastern. His adventures have taken him from the streets of Calcutta where he worked with Mother Teresa to the wealthy suburbs of Chicago where he served at the influential mega-church Willow Creek. As a peacemaker, his journeys have taken him to some of the most troubled regions of the world, from Rwanda to the West Bank, and he's been on peace delegations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Shane is the visionary leader of The Simple Way, a faith community in inner city Philadelphia that has helped birth and connect radical faith communities around the world. He is married to Katie Jo, a North Carolina girl who also fell in love with the city (and with Shane). They were wed in St. Edwards church, the formerly abandoned cathedral into which homeless families relocated in 1995, launching the beginning of the Simple Way community and a new phase of faith-based justice making. where everything started back in 1995.
Shane writes and travels extensively speaking about peacemaking, social justice, and Jesus. Shane's books include Jesus for President, Red Letter Revolution, Common Prayer, Follow Me to Freedom, Jesus, Bombs and Ice Cream, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, and his classic, The Irresistible Revolution. He has been featured in a number of films including "Another World Is Possible" and "Ordinary Radicals." His books are translated into more than a dozen languages. Shane speaks over 100 times a year, nationally and internationally.
His work has appeared in Esquire, SPIN, Christianity Today, and The Wall Street Journal, and he has been on everything from Fox News and Al Jazeera to CNN and NPR. He's given academic lectures at Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Liberty, Duke, and Notre Dame. Shane speaks regularly at denominational gatherings, festivals, and conferences around the globe.