J4P - Looking for help

Starting soon we will be starting a conversation with the book Jesus For President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. My hope is to engage with this book and what it might mean for the larger community of Richmond. So, I’m inviting a multiplicity of voices to join me in blogging through this book. That means I need your voice! I’m looking for Christians, atheists, red state, blue state and purple people who are willing to read this book and add their voice. I’m looking for people who believe that “Another world is possible” here in Richmond and in the world.

When people hear the title of this book it often comes with mixed reactions. So I’d thought we’d let the authors tell us why this book was written.

This book is a project in renewing the imagination of the church in the United States and of those who would seek to know Jesus. We are seeing more and more that the church has fallen in love with the state and that this love affair is killing the church’s imagination. The powerful benefits and temptations of running the world’s largest superpower have bent the church’s identity. Having power at its fingertips, the church often finds “guiding the course of history” a more alluring goal than following the crucified Christ. Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual virtues of humility, gentleness, and sacrificial love. (17)

In the rest of the introduction Shane and Chris talk of the dangers of not knowing where the state ends and the church begins. To illustrate this point, they use the famous Tony Compolo quote: “Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream and cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream.”

This raises all sorts of questions for us. Can a follower of Christ be political? What would it look like to engage in politics as a Christian? Is this what Jesus was warning us about when he said that we can’t serve two masters? Or maybe we need to redefine what it means to be political…

We hope this book will broaden the definition of political. As you’ll find in the following pages, political doesn’t refer merely to legislation, parties, and governments. So while we will insist that the Christian faith be political, we also want to redefine what political means or looks like. We hope to redefine it simply as how we relate to the world.

The book is divided up into four sections.

1. Before There Where Kings and Presidents (Hebrew Scriptures 101)
2. A New Kind of Commander-in-Chief (Jesus)
   
3. When then Empire Got Baptized (How the Unholy union began)
   
4. A Peculiar Party (Stories of Subverting the Empire)
   

We will be breaking down these sections into 24 separate posts. So if you are interested in writing a post and adding your voice to the conversation, let me know and I’ll send you the topics you can choose from. And even if you are not interested in posting your thoughts, we still invite you to read the book and join in the conversation in the comment section.

Peace,

brent

*** Posting should begin by May 26th (that should give everyone time to start reading the book).