Guest blogger Rachel Pater reviews Shane Claiborne's latest book

Rachel Pater - A House For All Sinners and Saints Home-girl is my first guest blogger.  She's agreed to review Shane Claiborne's latest book:

Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers:  Prayer for Ordinary Radicals

    by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
    2008 InterVarsity Press

Let me just start by saying that I have a big fat crush on Shane Claiborne. I have read his books, heard him speak multiple times (waiting afterward just to express my unabashed love for him).   His ideas were part of the reason I, someone raised in a church that was social justice-lite, to teach in inner city at-risk schools for the past three years.

I am not alone in my allegiance to Claiborne’s message (though maybe not everyone digs the dreads and potato sack fashion as much as I).  He is considered one of the fathers of the New Monastic Movement and he and his co-author, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, are founding members of intentional living communities in Philadelphia and Durham, NC, respectively. 

This book, according to its subtitle, is directed towards their followers: those already on this New Monastic (or at least social justice-minded) train. 

This is not, in any strict sense, a prayer book.  Christian social justice groups are less known for their contemplative prayer lives and more for their work with our poor.   And this book does not challenge this stereotype: it presents prayer as less a time for the pray-er or the message prayed and more a time realign with God’s will and act accordingly.

In fact, conventional Christian prayer is all but dissed in the intro, as one of the authors tells a story about someone looking at a building that needed a wheelchair ramp and exclaims: “Don’t go pray for a ramp!  Build them a ramp!” 

What follows is a compilation of anecdotes on how each community has been called to action.  The stories come interspersed with prayers from the Bible, Saints of old, and other well-known mothers and fathers of the faith. 

One irksome component of the book is that many of the stories also appear (some almost verbatim) in one or both of Shane’s earlier books, “The Irresistible Revolution” and “Jesus for President.”  (For you other Claiborne junkies: the one about the Pepto-Bismol, the one about Wall Street, and the one about the woman who talks down the thief of the subway, just to name a few.)

Is this literary laziness?  Or do we forgive them this repetition like you forgive your Grandpa when he tells a story for the umpteenth time because, well, it’s a good story? 

This book is a bit prayer-lite, if you ask me.  As a narrative, though, it succeeds in providing inspirational and touching stories to the reader, most about their communities living and learning among the poor and marginalized of their poverty-stricken cities.  Like these men’s other books, it is another awakening (and sometimes embarrassing) reminder that the contemporary American church is not the radical social force it was called to be.

Rachel Pater is an English teacher at the Denver Street School.  She writes for http://burnsidewriterscollective.blogspot.com/ and oh-so-religiously attends House for All Sinners and Saints.

Comments

[Peter Boumgarden]

Rachel
Some good thoughts... I really want to read some of his stuff, but haven't yet. You may have moved him to the top of my reading list.
Peter B

[Tim]

Thanks for the review!

Re:story repetition... I know I have a finite amount of "Tim stories" that I could use as a preacher or writer so I wonder what you do when you have to put together another sermon or book without any new illustrative material.

Peace!

[Crisismembership]

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