Shane Claiborne – Social Activist, Author, and Speaker

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People Podcast. This episode's guest is Shane Claiborne. Claiborne is what one would call a “cool” Christian.
He's the author of ten books and he has worked alongside Mother Teresa. He also served in Baghdad on the Iraqi Peace Team. He's the opposite of mega-church pastors with private jets and palace-like churches.
He describes himself as a champion for grace, which means he helps the homeless, protests against wars, advocates for the end of the death penalty and supports methods to end gun violence. One of his props is an AK-47 rifle beaten into a plow. Claiborne is also the co-founder of Red Letter Christians, named because the words of Jesus were printed in red in bibles.
Among the organizations values are: Freedom comes through serving others, not power, politics, or materialism. Diversity and collaboration make us stronger, not weaker. We embrace and work alongside people of different faiths, erasing the lines of “us versus them.”
By the way, do you know why Gandhi traveled in third-class on trains in India? Keep listening to find out.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People Podcast, and now, here's Shane Claiborne.

Guy Kawasaki:
Is it possible to find bible passage to rationalize almost anything? For example, if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. I read that in of your pieces to justify gun ownership. So effectively, isn't there, “A bible lets me off the hook,” gospel?
Shane Claiborne:
I think that you can read anything you want to, into the bible and that's been true for generations for millennial. I think it was the Stringfellow that said, "A lot of us read the bible American-ly rather than read America biblically." We, like, project ourselves on the scriptures. Someone once said, "God created us in His image and we decided to return the favor." We make God into who were God to be. So now, I mean, you literally have bumpers stickers that say, "If Jesus it had in AR-15 assault rifle, he'd still be alive." Like, "Wow".
But here's the thing, Guy. What I love about Jesus, in my understanding of Jesus, is that this is where we have God putting on skin, moving in to the neighborhood, living among us, showing us what God is like with skin on, what love looks like with flesh on, and so, a lot of the work that we do within Red Letter Christians in a larger circles that I'm in, is allowed Jesus to be the litmus test. Jesus is the sounding board for whatever. So whatever we end up interpreting scripture as, we bounce it off with Jesus.
In my community we say, "Before you eat some donated food it needs to pass the sniff test,” and I, we're saying it needed to pass the Jesus sniff test. Does it smell like Jesus?
And the great thing about Jesus is I think we can see that God is not violent, that God loves God's enemies, that God cares about the poor, God is born as a refugee, dies executed on the cross. So God is near to the suffering in the world, and now when bible verses can be interpreted to say anything we want, Jesus becomes the referee of our kind of interpretation when we're pitting bible verses against each other or whatever else, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
When somebody sites something like that to justify buying a gun, that person believes that he passes or she passes the sniff test. So how do you administer the sniff test effectively?
Shane Claiborne:
The interesting thing I think with like say justifying guns and using a scripture to do that, is we that we don't just have the words in paper but we have the life of Jesus that speaks for itself too. So for instance, when one of Jesus own disciples uses a weapon to defend them and ends up cutting the guy's ear off, that was Peter, Jesus scolds him and says, "No, you live by the sword, you die by the sword, put that away,” and then He puts the ear back on, the guy had Peter wounded and heals them, and the only Christians understood that is final triumph over the idea of redemptive violence. And when the early Christians you said, “When Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarms every one of us because if ever there was a case for justifying violence to protect the innocent, Peter had the best case in the book.”
We also had things like how the early Christians heard this. So it’s very important to me as I study church history, that for 300 years, Christians were committed passionately to non-violence so they stood against war and violence and every generation-- they stood against the death penalty, they stood against abortion, they spoke against the gladiatorial game. So that commitment to non-violence, it does come from Jesus, for me but it also comes from the earliest Christians how they interpreted the life and teaching of Jesus which ended up meaning a life that is committed to non-violence and the loving our enemies, which meant not killing them.
Guy Kawasaki:
So tough question number two: if you were to just read the news today, many people would conclude that a large percentage of evangelical Christians, if not all, believe that if the person is anti-abortion, all other sins are forgiven, forgotten or ignored or secondary. So as long as you're anti-abortion, go ahead, grab women by the private parts, call Muslim’s terrorists, Mexican's rapist, it is all okay. As long as you're anti-abortion. So what percentage of evangelical Christians really believe this?
Shane Claiborne:
I think most of the world outside of that kind of, they know anti-abortion group is baffled by this. By how nearly we define what it means to be pro-life to one issue, and I think we would be more accurate in that group saying, "They're pro-birth" or, "They are anti-abortion," rather than pro-life because the irony is that you can be pro guns, pro-death penalty, pro-military, and still say you're pro-life as long as you're right on abortion.
I like to talk about this, about how we need more robust ethic of life that encompasses everything that is destroying the life and squashing the dignity of God's people. Every person is created in the image of God, and when a life is squashed or destroyed, it grieves God's heart because we lose an image bare of God in the world.
So to be pro-life, to me, doesn't just mean anti-abortion, it means that “I care about immigrant lives, that black lives matter, that the environment matters.” Ending the death penalty, gun violence, all these thing. So I think it really does kind of blow folks mind when they see those contradictions.
But the same people that are against abortion are for life on a whole other issue. So the younger generation, I think though, sees that. A recent poll of millennial Christian, so born after 1980, show that overwhelmingly, eighty percent of them are against the death penalty, and it's not in spite of their faith but because of their faith, because of how they interpret the life and teachings of Jesus himself.
So I'm encouraged. I do think that older abortion movement, there is one iteration of that. On the culture words of the eighties and stuff that continues to have some residue, but I think there's a whole generation rising up that has a much more robust ethic of life, and in fact there's a whole new conversation coming around abortion where the actual conversation is, how can we reduce abortions in America? And some of the folks on the far left and far right have really held the conversation hostage.
So one of the things I love about Mother Theresa, who I've learned a lot from, is that she was consistent. She cared and spoke passionately about eradicating abortion but she was also passionate about the death penalty and all these other things that was destroying life. And for her, and for me, and for a lot of us, I think our passion on reducing abortions is not just about t-shirts and bumpers stickers and picketing Planned Parenthood, but it means we got to be ready to take in fourteen-year-old moms.
It means that we've got to foster and adopt kids that don't have families because I think that ideologies can be cheap, but if we really have the convictions and they require that we take responsibility and not just have a bumper sticker.
Guy Kawasaki:
Even beyond the bumper sticker, it's hard to put two things together that you're pro-life but okay with separating families of that order. How do you put those two things together?
Shane Claiborne:
I can't put those two things together. I have friends that work for some of these groups that focus on the family, that I get to do with the number of things but I would go to them and say, "How can you possibly allow these to happen? How can we see folks who care about family,” I mean, it's in the name. Not speaking out against the caging of kids on the boarder and the--
Guy Kawasaki:
And what do they say?
Shane Claiborne:
Some of them, privately, will say, "We're deeply concern about this,” but then, what you're getting at, Guy, it happens, they're calculating the risk that they take and they want to keep us see the table, but when people tell me, and I have close friends that are in conversation with this administration and they were like, "When we care about the persecuted church overseas but that doesn't translate into welcoming Syrian refugees that are escaping persecution into our country." That was the contradiction that just calls my head to spend amount of heartache.
Guy Kawasaki:
You touch on this briefly earlier but I want to revisit it. So what is your reaction when people seem to be saying that God has chosen America? Where did they get that from?
Shane Claiborne:
Oh, wow. My first response is that this is nothing new. Some of the exact language that we use around the sort of exceptionalism of America was exactly what Rome is using. That it was the light of the world, right? And--
Guy Kawasaki:
That's not good news.
Shane Claiborne:
No, I mean and this is the wild thing, is that Jesus could not be more overt in his critic of that. I mean Jesus’ language within the gospels is like reap, right out of the imperial lexicon and He's challenging that it was really a theology that created the foundation for this kind of Roman exceptionalism. Sometimes, when I hear like “America first,” this poetical ideology. I can no more imagine Jesus wearing a Rome first shirt, you know?
This idea of “America first” or that we have a whole idea, even in the doctrine of discovery, right? There's almost this manifest destiny of America. So one of the greatest challenge is in America right now is the co-opting of real Christianity with this kind of American nationalism that kind of camouflages itself in Christianity because, like our money says, "In God we trust,” but our economy looks like the seven deadly sins. What we’re in danger of is kind of inoculating people from Christianity with this idea that... The bible doesn't say, "God so loved America." It says, "God so loved the world."
Guy Kawasaki:
Are we in the presence of modern day Cyrus?
Shane Claiborne:
We're in the presence of a very unhealthy, broken man with the whole lot of power and a lot of Christians that are providing cover for that and defending things that are indefensible, and one of my friend’s kid said it best. They said, "We have to remember, God loves Donald Trump, but that doesn't mean God wants him to be president."
It shows that God redeems broken people, but we have absolutely no signs of repentance and life change and that's where, for Christians, that's been one of our core beliefs, is that God can redeem anybody, but we also believe in repentance and that we need to show signs of our change of heart, our commitment to Christ and when Donald Trump was asked, point black, about his relationship with God, and if he ask for forgiveness for your sins? He's answer is stunning. Over and over he says, "That's not just how God and I roll. I don't want to ask God for forgiveness. I live in ways where I don't need to ask forgiveness."
That's what he said, right? And we can't hang with that as Christians. We believe that we are all sinners, we got a whole lot, and yet when we provide grace without repentance that's where Bonhoeffer talks about cheap Grace. We cheapen what it looks like and we end up defending things that are indefensible.
I mean, where to start? I mean the life-style commitments to the tweaks, to the policies of Trump. Almost daily, betray the very core values of Christianity. So it becomes impossible to hold together a fidelity, a loyalty, to Jesus and this loyalty to Trump. That like opposing magnets.
So yeah, I hope Donald Trump dedicates his life to Jesus but when he does, we should see some signs that we know the fruits of spirit. The fruit of the spirit that the scripture says, "This is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control". That's what God is like, and none of us are fully there but that's what where going for.
And so when you look at things, like the beatitudes where Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful." They are the emphyteusis of the things this administration is blessing, and that's where I think it becomes... As Jesus said, "You can't serve two master." You just can't reconcile the gospel of Jesus looks so different from the gospel of Trump.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you tell me how you really feel, Shane? Literally, don’t hold yourself back, bro.
Shane Claiborne:
Dude, I tell you, I'm so concerned. I'm so concerned because eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the last election, but not only that, they continue to defend things that are just indefensible and I'm not part of scene.
I don't endorse presidential candidate. I love Jesus and it's my love for Jesus that causes me such concern for the things that Trump is doing and the folks are enabling him, and the problem for me is through that, folks like Franklin Graham and Robert Jefferson, this very prominent evangelical Christian that defend Trump, it doesn't feel like they see the damage that that is doing to an entire generation that is looking in on this and going, “If that's what Christianity is, I don't want anything to do at it. I thought it was better than that.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I would make the case that Christianity has a real marketing problem these days.
Shane Claiborne:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you explain to me how a group like the Prosperity Gospel comes to form? How does something like that evolve?
Shane Claiborne:
Well, it does resonate with people. So I think there's an importance to understand why does it resonate with people. When I travel around the world, there's an aching, hurting world, with people in desperate poverty, people that are coming out of real struggle that want to know that there is a God that wants to bless us, but what the Prosperity Gospel has done is manipulate and capitalize and exploit that pain in a way that-- and it's not just poor folks, I mean you got rich folks that want to justify their private planes. So you literally have these tele-evangelists like, "Well, God gave me a private jet because my ministry is so important, I can't fly and coach class with ordinary people". You’re like, “Woah! What in the world?!”
Guy Kawasaki:
Shane.
Shane Claiborne:
“What the world?!”
Guy Kawasaki:
Shane.
Shane Claiborne:
Yup?
Guy Kawasaki:
You see this list of questions? Literally, one of my question I'm about to come to is: Is any pastors time so valuable that he or she needs a private jet?
Shane Claiborne:
Oh my gosh.
Guy Kawasaki:
I just cross that one off right now.
Shane Claiborne:
So Gandhi's response when I said, "Why do you travel third-class on all the trains in India?" And Gandhi said, "Because there's no fourth-class." And I mean, I think that looks more like Jesus than most of the tele-evangelists because what Jesus doing is inviting us, not to climb the ladder up, but to keep moving closer to those who are at the bottom.
So I heard the pastor saying, "If we find ourselves climbing up the ladder of success, in upward mobility and status, we should be careful or else on our way up we will pass Jesus on His way down,” because Jesus shows us a God that leaves all the comfort of heaven and is born as a baby refugee. A brown skin Palestinian, Jewish refugee in the middle of the genocide when King Herod was destroying families, ripping kids apart from their parents and that's how Jesus is born, and all through His life, until he dies on the cross, executed by the state, someone dying on his left and on his right. I mean he enters and to the human struggle, and so we spend most of our life trying to move away from suffering and yet the gravity of the gospel should be pulling us into the suffering of the world as it did Christ.
So this Prosperity Gospel that God just wants to bless us with riches, it doesn't pass the sniff test, right? It doesn't require Jesus. Jesus said, "Sell everything you have and give it to the poor,” and I heard someone once say, "We're all into the born-again thing, that if you want to enter the kingdom you should be born again." But this songwriter Rich Mullins who used to say, "But if you tell me I got to be born again then I could tell you got to sell everything you had and give it to the poor because Jesus said that too." So this is why I got admitted highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like.
No, I know this. I know that God wants us to move closer to the suffering of the world and I also know that we have a whole lot of ways that we do theological gymnastics in order to justify things that just are fly on the face of everything Jesus taught and live for us.
So now one thing I would say is this, Guy, is that I believe a better model than the Prosperity Gospel is this idea that God wants everybody to have what they need, and so in the prayer Jesus teaches us, he says, "Pray that we would have this day our daily bread". And Proverbs says, "Give me neither poverty nor riches, for in my poverty, I might be forced to steal and in my riches, I might forget my God". So I mean that's beautiful. It's this vision of enough.
So we talk about in our community a theology of "enough" where people neither have less than they need or more than they need but that people have this day our daily bread, and I think in a world such deep in inequity between the super-rich and super poor, that's really a wonderful vision. So that's what we are trying to live into.
Guy Kawasaki:
So this would be the enough gospel?
Shane Claiborne:
Yeah, man, and that's what the early church talked about. They shared everything they have, no one claimed their possession as their own and they put their offerings at the apostles’ feet and it was distributed to the folks as they had need, and it says there were no needy persons among them because they shared.
There were even stories in the early church of when poor people would come to the community, if there wasn't enough food, then no one would eat. No one would eat until everyone would eat. They would literally fast to make sure there was enough food for everyone.
Guy Kawasaki:
What are the tall-tale signs that your church has gone astray?
Shane Claiborne:
Well, I don't think that I'm the moral gate keeper of the world but I do think that Jesus really is our sounding board for this. So for instance, when church is telling their parishioners, the folks in the congregation, to bring guns to church. That's a problem, right? Because Jesus didn't carry a weapon, He carried a cross, and I think that gun and the cross give us two different versions of power and one of them says, "I'm willing to kill,” and the other says, "I'm willing to die,” and I think we really have many competing things for us.
I think entitlement is demonic. Entitlement the idea that we deserve something, it lies in the face of everything I think Jesus stood for. So whenever we hear preachers saying that, “We are entitled to fly first-class,” or “God gave me this mansion” or something, I have a lot of question about that. I think that so much of the gospel is about being showered with things that we don't deserve, like grace. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
What if someone pushes back and says Christianity is inherently quid pro-quo-- you believed, you get eternal life. Isn't it that quid pro-quo?
Shane Claiborne:
I don't think that it's an exchange like that. I think we can definitely cheapen what the sacrifices Jesus did on the cross. Again like what Bonhoeffer said, "We can cheapen grace and just make it this exchange." Just like God paid the bill or God-- You can have all the kinds of theology that turns God out to be a real monster. There's a lot of versions of why Jesus died, like “God was holding a gun at humanity, and God took it off of us and put it on Jesus and He killed Jesus so that we didn't have to die,” but it makes God out to be sort of blood thirsty monster and I think that's problematic.
We can have versions of the gospel that make God really easy to fear but really hard to love, and in the end, the God that I see in Jesus is the God that is so gracious. And in some ways, anybody who thinks that they are entitled, Jesus consistently challenges them, and those who think that they don't deserve anything at all, they're showered with love and included.
Joan Chittister, she's a wonderful nun. She says, "Jesus consistently challenges the chosen and includes the excluded,” and we that when Jesus is talking to the religious elite, the kind of self-righteous teachers of the law and the Pharisees who thought they were the hub of everything. They had the corner on the Market of everything God was doing in the world, and Jesus says to them, "You are brood of vipers."
Guy Kawasaki:
Right?
Shane Claiborne:
“The tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” That’s the stuff that give you killed, right? That's where we really need to challenge ourselves to say, "Are we challenging the chosen and including the excluded?" And a lot of times, the church has been guilty of exactly the opposite. We’ve frustrated the people that Jesus magnetized and we've massage and cared for the people that Jesus was constantly ticking off.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you hear leaders after the tragedy offer their thoughts and prayers, what's your response to that?
Shane Claiborne:
First of all, I'm someone who believes in prayer. I believe in the power of prayer.
Guy Kawasaki:
Sure, duh.
Shane Claiborne:
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of activist that don't spend much time in praying, right? However, I also believe that prayer can become a place to hide. A place to hide from responsibility.
And so after a mass shooting, when politicians and preachers offer thoughts and prayers, I think that can be empty words because thoughts and prayers need to turn into actions and policies, and when people say, "All we can do is pray." That's not true. We can pray, but we can also organize, we can boycott, we can engage politicians, we can amplify the voices of the oppressed, we can march in the streets, we can do direct actions, there's all kind of things that we need to do to supplement our prayers and put feet on them, right?
And I think, sometimes, frankly, a lot of Christians, we put all of this responsibility on God. Where one of the greatest mysteries of our faith, I believe, is that God actually invites us to be a part of the miracle of changing and healing and redeeming the world. So when we throw our hands up at God, we say, "God, why don't you do something about this injustice." If we listen closely, we may hear God say, "I did do something. I made you. Get out there." So sometimes, I think we're praying and waiting on God. And God may very well be waiting on us.
So one of my mentors said, "Good things come to those who wait upon the Lord, and good things also come to those who get off their butts and organize." And so week after week, in our little small group, if we are praying for our friend to get a wheelchair ramp, maybe we actually need to get some carpenters together and build them a wheelchair ramp, right? We can pray, but we also have gifts and skills and resources that we often don't tap into.
Guy Kawasaki:
You think God is sitting around and saying, "Boy, I regret this whole free will thing, man…”
Shane Claiborne:
I don't know that God has regrets like that but I do think that... Oh Man, I saw this film series one time that was a series about Jesus, and there are part of it went crazy about, but it was really an interesting scene where all of this is flashing before Jesus’ eyes as He is going to the cross and it's the devil telling Jesus, "This is what you're dying for,” and it shows the crusades, and it shows all of these distorted versions of the Christian versions in Nazi, Germany, defending Hitler. It was like, "Are you sure you want to die for these people?" That was the question. But I think that's the miracle of God's grace and is also why we held out the hope that no one's beyond redemption.
Guy Kawasaki:
Prayer in public schools.
Shane Claiborne:
I get it, I believe in it, love it. When I was in High School, I organized those See You at The Pole rallies. Where we gather around the flag pole and pray the keep the prayer in the public schools and whatnot, and I think a lot of these things have become more about a culture world that we’ve created than about the real reality. I mean, people can pray wherever they want.
In fact, I just got invited back to my public High School to speak to an all-school assembly and I was able to share about my faith. This was in a public High School. Sometimes, we are so aggressive with things that-- what we actually want is we want to impose our religion on everybody.
I don't think that we should be forcing people to say prayers if they don't like-- or reciting ten commandments in public school-- or something like that. I also don't think we should be making kids say the pledge of allegiance. We tell our kids, "If folks ask you to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance, we invite you just to not make a big deal out of it but just pray the Lord's prayer." As the pledge of allegiance is saying because sometimes you end up with these kind of competing narratives. Like I said, the American Nationalism and kind of stay true to where we’ve actually pledged our allegiance, which is Jesus.
We teach our kids we obey the laws of our government, when they reflect the values or faith and when our government does things that we don't agree with, then where called to stay faithful to loving our neighbor. Which right now means challenging Immigration laws, something like that. So, yeah. I love prayer, I also don't think that we need to use it as a weapon.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's kind of really hypothetical question, but do you think Jesus would be on social media?
Shane Claiborne:
That's a good question. You’ve got such good questions, Guy. Jesus is on Twitter, haven't you seen that? So I think there's actually four or five Jesus on Twitter, but I think that it's hard to say.
Would Jesus drive a car? Or Would Jesus rode a donkey? But I think, Jesus came in a particular space in time and communicated with the means that were available to Him and so I think, each of us is asking “How can we communicate in the age and time that we are living in,” but I do think the question around social media is a really good one because virtual relationships can't replace real ones, and at the end of the day, I do worry about a generation that is growing up, looking at pixels on screen rather than the eyes of human beings.
So I think we really got to be careful not to replace real love, real activism, real relationships, with virtual stuff. I told some of the young people I was working with, "If you only eat virtual food, you will be very hungry and malnourished and if all we have is virtual relationships, then I think we still end up very lonely people."
Guy Kawasaki:
If Jesus had not been resurrected, do you think He'd be turning over in His grave right now?
Shane Claiborne:
I saw this great comic. It was actually Jesus and Obama talking, and Obama's shaking his head and he's going, "Oh, Jesus, Trump is undermining everything that I did in my Presidency,” and Jesus looks back in Obama and said, "Oh, Barrack, the evangelicals are undermining everything that I lived and died for."
But I'm encouraged because of this, Guy. My friend, Richard Rohr, he's wonderful Catholic Franciscan priest and he says, "The best corrective for what's wrong is the practice of something better." As Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see,” and I think we need folks who will lived a better version of Christianity. One that is fascinating, people with love and with compassion.
One of the things we often say is that, "The gospel spreads, not through force, but through fascination." But a lot of our Christianity has become less and less fascinating to the world, and in fact, a lot of people they love Jesus. They just wish that Christians acted more like him and that's what we're trying to build. It’s a movement of Christians who live like Jesus, meant the stuff He said, and when we fall shortly, we are honest about it.
Guy Kawasaki:
And in a sense, aren't you saying that, I don't know if you're saying it, but isn't it one interpretation that's viable is that you love God but you don't like the church? This is really weird metaphor but I think there are people who love Macintosh but hate Apple.
Shane Claiborne:
There are things that there are some deep wounds and some traumatic experiences that people have had from church. The tricky thing is I think that... There's early Christian said that, "We can't have that God is our father without having the church as our mother." And so you can't be Christian without the church in the big sense. It was attributed Augustine that he said, "The Church is a whore, but she's my mother,” and it's really a pretty strong language.
Guy Kawasaki:
What?!
Shane Claiborne:
It's really a pretty strong language but I think what we had seen--
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a new once, Shane. I got admit, I never heard that one before. Wow.
Shane Claiborne:
So we can see that the church is very dysfunctional, but I think we love the church back to life.

And here's another one for you. This is a pastor from my neighborhood who said, "The Church is kind of like Noah's ark." They're all boat without the animals, you should think about it. It must really stunk inside the ark and the church is kind of like that sometimes. It's stinks inside but if you jump out, you're going to drown. So what we need about I think is clean enough to stench and do something about that. But I don't think that the answer is to kind of try to be Christian without the church. I think the good answer is to try to have a church that's more like what Jesus wants it to be. And we do that by kind of building the kind of church that we dream of and that we think that God longs for.
There are some congregations and even some denominations that I think are quite toxic. And some of them are built on being on the wrong side of history when it comes to race and slavery. And the residue of that is very apparent. So I think we need to join the healthiest part of the church that we can and also began restoring the other parts.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is it possible that, just like Jesus, the church has to die and be resurrected? Do we need a church 2.0 or second-coming of church?
Shane Claiborne:
I love that. We're going to have to do a second podcast, man. This is awesome.
Here's what I would say to that, is that the church, Jesus describes it as a body. A living body, right? And bodies are constantly living and dying, like cells of body's and I think of congregations, and maybe even denominations, like cells of the body. In cells are constantly dying and being born and multiplying but the body lives.
There are some cells that need to die. There are some versions in denominations even in congregations, they are very unhealthy and they are dying, but the body continues to live. And that's where I think we need to build on the best of our past and of our traditions and be honest about healing and confessing the worst to it.
So we did a project called, Common Prayer-- a prayer book with prayers for each day. We worked with thirty different people from all different denominations, so it was a holy project because we got Orthodox Christians, and Catholics and Pentecostals and Protestants, Mennonites, Anabaptism, all working together to say, "Let's remember the best of our traditions and also be honest about some of the worst part of the history." So that’s kind of the restoration of the church is what I believe in.
One of my friends who's a Catholic, Chris Haw, we wrote a book together, Jesus for President, and he's passionately Catholic and people go, "Why are you joining the Catholic church?" And he said, "Well, it's similar to why I move in the Camden." When he moved in the Camden, New Jersey, it's already the worst place to live in America and he said, "I believe in God of resurrection." We buy abandon houses because we bring it back to life. He said, "I joined the church because I believe in God that is constantly resurrecting dead things." That's a powerful line.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's end this podcast with an upbeat. Give us some hope. What can any listener do to make the world a better place?
Shane Claiborne:
Oh, man, I am so excited to be alive because I think all of us, especially younger folks. I'm just going to put you and I in that group too, Guy. Are...
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm not young!
Shane Claiborne:
You and I aware that the world we have been handed is really fragile and it's far from what God would like it to be, but hope comes from that place that things are not as they should be, but they can be. They can be different, and we don't have to settle for what is; we can build what should be.
A friend, Walter Brueggemann is a great Christian writer. He wrote a book called The Prophetic Imagination, he's a dear friend, and of the things he said is that, "We often misunderstand the Prophets and we think that the biblical Prophets that they were fortune-tellers but they were truth-tellers." They weren't just trying to predict the future, they were trying to change the future by naming the present. By shaking us and waking us up and inviting us to imagine a world that's different from where we're headed right now. So I think we're called to that prophetic imagination, right?
So, like, one of the things we've been doing, inspire by Micah and Isaiah. When they talk about the beating swords into plows and spears into pruning hooks, is we've been taking-- we don't have any swords in the U.S. but we have a lot of guns-- so we've been taking guns and melting them into gardening tools, and that vision is that something can be made different.
A gun can become a plow or a shovel. Something that's design for death can be made into something new that's designed for life. Jesus took the cross that was the instrument of torture and humiliation and now, we think of it as an instrument of God's love, a conduit of God's grace, and so we need to be Prophets of the new world. That scripture, Micah and Isaiah, Swords into Plowshares ends by saying, "Nation will not rise up against nation, people will study war no more."
But that vision begins, not with politicians, but begins with the people of God and it's an invitation for us to remember that change doesn't come from the top-down, it comes from the bottom-up, and we are the people that we've been waiting for. So let's build the new world. We're the midwives of a different and more beautiful world. So I'll end this with that, brother Guy.
We do not have to accept the world as it is, we can build the world that God dreams of, and before every movement that change the world, everybody said, “It's impossible ending slavery, women's voting, the follow of the apartheid South Africa.” Before every social movement, people said its impossible. But then after that movement and everybody looks back and says, "That was inevitable."
So let's be the people who believe despite what we see right now and build a better world, and I really believe that it takes courage to say, “Slavery is wrong.” Not just a generation after we've ended it but it takes courage to say slavery is wrong when it's the status quo, when it's accepted, when Christians are defending it with the bible, and so right now is the time where, I think, we can have courage to say many of the things that we see in our world are wrong and the Christians that are defending them, they're not bad, but they're wrong and we need to come to Jesus.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Shane Claiborne. Actually, I hope that it challenged you too. When in doubt, check what's in Red, and now you know why Gandhi traveled in third class.
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People Podcast.

My thanks to Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick, and my thanks to Katie Jo Brotherton who helped make this interview happen.
Shane Claiborne:
“For our bible doesn't say, ‘God so loved America.’ It says, ‘God so loved the world.’ Our bible doesn't talk about standing your ground, it talks about turning the other cheek. Our gospel says, ‘When you welcome the stranger, you welcome Me. If you don't welcome the stranger, you don't welcome Me.’
Guy Kawasaki:
This is Remarkable People.