Engage →

Shane Claiborne, in a Q & A hosted on Rachel Held Evans's blog, is asked by a stay-at-home mom how best to start engaging the needs of the city. He responds:

This is an invitation—a call—to re-imagine who we are and how we are to live in light of Jesus. And I get excited because I see folks who are doing that everywhere, in all kinds of different ways.

Now, while there are a million different ways to respond to this invitation, we do see compelling patterns in the gospel. So even if we don’t all respond in the exact same way, we can all, for example, see the suffering of this world as something we are called to enter into instead of flee from. We can reject the patterns of, for example, suburban sprawl that are often built around moving away from pain, or away from neighborhoods of high crime, or away from people who don’t look like us, and respond instead to the gospel inertia that invites us to enter into that pain. So this means we also have to challenge some of those patterns of consumerism and insulation, and sprawl, and homogeneity.