The Irresistible Revolution - continued

As I continue to ponder Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, I recognize how God has been whispering to me over the past several months not just through through the words of this book, but also through Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, Robert Benson's The Echo Within: Finding Your True Calling, and Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the "Saint of Calcutta." I have also been reading through the Bible this year - I'm now in Nehemiah 7 and Acts 3 - and time and time again the Spirit has prodded me to reconsider what it means to be a follower of Christ.

Early in his book, Claiborne writes about being born again and again and again as a student as he attended an annual summer Christian festival and responded enthusiastically (and repeatedly) to the altar calls. At some point, though, he realized that something was amiss: "I came to realize that preachers were telling me to lay my life at the foot of the cross and weren't giving me anything to pick up. . . . I believed all the right stuff - that Jesus is the Son of God, died and rose again. I had become a 'believer,' but I had no idea what it means to be a follower. People had taught me what Christians believe, but no one had told me how Christians live" (pp. 38-39).

Orthodoxy without orthopraxy. "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead" (James 2:26).