Modern 'monastery'

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Shane Claiborne, 31, the author of the new book "The Irresistible Revolution," is a symbol of a movement toward living out one's faith radically. He lives in the Simple Way -- two households in downtown Philadelphia that are part of a larger circle of Christian communities that pool their funds, give to the poor and are environmentally aware.

Christianity Today magazine termed this lifestyle a "new monasticism" because of the simple lifestyle led by these idealistic, mostly single Christians. Mr. Claiborne helped organize a large demonstration in Philadelphia's Love Park in 1998 on behalf of the homeless, was one of several demonstrators who dumped $10,000 in coins outside the New York Stock Exchange in 2002 to publicize sharing one's wealth with the poor and traveled to Iraq in 2003 to protest the war.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Mr. Claiborne:

Question: Aren't you copying what the newly converted hippies did in the 1970s when they formed Christian communes across the country?

Answer: What's unique about our communities today is we don't see ourselves as an underground church or detaching ourselves from the larger congregations. Actually, we're really integrated in [the churches of] our neighborhood. Folks identify us as a monastic movement because they see us as a renewal connected to the larger body, not in schism from it. The church is like Noah's ark: It stinks sometimes, but if you get out you'll drown. Our embarrassment and frustration with the church is the very reason we engage, not disengage. I think the church needs some healthy discontent, or else things never get better. So we are trying to be the change we want in the church.

Q: What's been the response?

A: We have a ton of visitors who are interested in the community aspect or social justice and they may not be Christians at all. On Christian college campuses, there are tons of kids who are thinking outside the box on this idea of the detached nuclear family model. They want intimacy, they want community. House church, micro-church: All those things are expressions of a longing for community. As people experiment with house churches, they want to move a little deeper, so they start sharing lawn mowers, they start doing cooperative child care and move toward modified common pools of money.

Q: Why did a large evangelical publisher like Zondervan take a chance on you?

A: Zondervan recognized there's a conversation going on in the church that's outside their traditional reach. There's not really a paradigm in evangelicalism for what we're doing, so evangelicals think we're super Christians living like this. But the Catholics totally get what we're doing. We're giving visibility to Christianity as a way of living rather than as just a way of believing. I think that is attractive to people. Most people who've been suffocated by doctrine know there's more to Christianity than just believing. When people see there are ways of living that don't conform to the patterns of the world, that is very attractive.

Q: Sociologist Tony Campolo has said that if St. Francis lived today, he'd be Shane Claiborne. What are you doing to merit that sort of comparison other than refusing to own a cell phone?