Let me take you back to the lobby of a former strip club. That was the building our church community bought – the last strip club in Markham! We went from a living room to a golf club to a huge building that we gutted and transformed into a gathering place.
One Sunday my wife, Blaise, was standing in the lobby when a woman walked up and handed her a book. “I think God wants you to read this…”
The book was titled “The Irresistible Revolution,” written by Shane Claiborne. Blaise promised to take a look at it. She did. And when she was finished 'looking' she handed the book to me and said, “I think God wants you to read this...” And I did.
“I asked participants who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”
- Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution
This little paperback book had us asking questions that we had never even thought about before. They were tough questions. They challenged our idea of Christianity. They challenged our lifestyle and the choices we were making to maintain it. They stirred up a dust storm that still hasn’t settled. Not even close. I was upset. We were upset. We were restless, agitated, thirsty. The finish of this book saw the beginning of another, and then another, each building upon where the others left off; as if God was building a case, making an argument, pushing us around a bit, splashing water on our face.
When I say God was pushing us around a bit, I don’t mean “a bit.” This wasn’t a little pig-tail-pulling at recess. This was almost 3 years of way more questions asked than answered, paramount frustration, anger, uncomfortable change, desperation, prayer and hope for something more. However, you could argue that we provoked Him... Pray the wrong thing and you could find yourself in a mess you can’t get out of. Ours went like this:
“Lord Jesus, we want more of you. We have all of this stuff, this house, our money, our time, and our lives, and it’s all for nothing if it isn’t all for you. Use us, as you will, for your Kingdom’s sake. Seriously. In Jesus name.”
A few days later the phone rang.
