Shane Claiborne

About six hundred young adults crowded into a hot sanctuary in Philadelphia on Saturday night, July 26, for the final presentation of “Jesus for President.” Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw were completing a national tour of their show consisting of readings, visual messages and music. Traveling in their “veggie bus,” a converted school bus running on used vegetable oil, they were promoting a stance toward politics based on a radical reading of the Bible. The Jesus for President message (www.jesusforpresident.org) was reinforced by the dynamic music duo, The Psalters, (www.psalters.com), who provided musical interludes of unusual intensity and creativity.

Based on their book by the same title, which they bill as “a book to provoke Christian political imagination,” Claiborne and Haw offered an alternative reading of the biblical story as a challenge to every nation that exalts itself and thereby misses God’s plan for the world. Says Claiborne, “Our greatest challenge is to maintain the distinctiveness of our faith in a world gone mad. All of creation waits, groans, for a people who live GOD’S DREAM with fresh imagination.”

In their view, the Christian message gets hopelessly tangled when the state coopts the faith for its own ends. Referring to the historic moment when the emperor Constantine declared that Rome was now a Christian empire, Claiborne asks, “What is the Jesus-follower to do when the empire gets baptized?”

It is a question many in the emergent church community have struggled with. If Constantine’s declaration spelled the beginning of a seventeen centuries-long era known as Christendom, it appears that with the advance of secularism, we are now in a post-Christendom age. That presents new challenges and new opportunities for Christians. For Claiborne, it requires a new stance by Christians toward politics. “Jesus is forming a new kind of people, a different kind of party, whose peculiar politics are embodied in who we are. The church is a people called out of the world to embody a social alternative that the world cannot know on its own terms.”

“This whole project is about the political imagination of what it means to follow after Jesus,” Claiborne said. “The language of Jesus as Lord and savior is just as radical as it would be to say ‘Jesus is our commander in chief’ today.”

“This is not about going left or right; this is about going deeper and trying to understand together. Rather than endorse candidates, we ask them to endorse what is at the heart of Jesus – and that is the poor, or the peacemakers – and when we see [candidates promoting] that, then we’ll get behind them.”

It was a remarkable evening, not only for the stimulating political vision, but also in what that Saturday evening represented.

* There was hardly a person over thirty in that sweltering sanctuary. It’s as though a new generation of Jesus people has appeared, forty years after a similar occurrence in the early 1970s.

* We met in the former sanctuary of the Chambers Wylie Presbyterian Church, a congregation with a 200 year run and a strong evangelical stance. Nevertheless, when the last few elderly members decided to throw in the towel a few years ago, they undoubtedly thought, “Of course we can’t continue on as a church. There aren’t any young adults living around Broad Street anyway.”

* But there are lots of young adults in the area, and Broad Street Ministries, an emerging church that took over the Chambers Wylie building, has a vision to reach them. That hundreds of young adults would spend their Saturday night in a steamy sanctuary is testimony not only to interest in the Jesus for President tour but to the network of young adults in Philadelphia who are finding new ways to follow Jesus.

* And this is the final point: these young adults adopting the Jesus for President approach are formulating a plan for reshaping America, and their views are seldom echoed in the traditional church. Jesus for President is giving voice to a world view that will outlast this year’s election.