Jeremy L. Berg

This summer I want to share some reflections and highlights as I mark 20 years of ministry in my hometown community.

I was about 26 years old and working as a sub teacher, driving instructor, and basketball coach in my old high school while I finishing my seminary studies. My interactions and conversations with local teens about faith left me feeling frustrated and burdened.

Teens were bored with church-as-usual, forced by their parents to attend Confirmation classes that may have provided solid catechesis, but didn’t always inspire a living faith that made a difference in their everyday lives or the world they inhabit. “Believe in Jesus and go to heaven someday” was what many seemed to take away from church.

Meanwhile, I was taking night classes and learning all about the early grassroots movement called The Way made up of young Jesus followers who were described by onlookers as “turning the world upside down” as they proclaimed “another king, Jesus” (Acts 17). None of the churches I was familiar with could ever have been accused of turning anything upside down. Former Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, once quipped, “Wherever the Apostle Paul went there was a riot; wherever I go they serve tea.”

The Book of Acts hijacked my imagination in college, and I wanted to spend my life inviting other young people to trade the placid domesticity of the American Dream for a life of Kingdom adventure in the company of Jesus. I wanted to woo others into the Kingdom Story to discover the unique role God has for each of us in our few dozen trips around the sun. You see, I didn’t just want to read the Bible; I wanted to be swept up into its drama and live it out afresh in my day and my hometown.

As I graduated from seminary in the summer of 2005, God gave me a vision of a fresh movement of young people doing in my hometown, what the early Christians did in cities across the ancient world. A home base was established for some experimental revolutionary ministry when I took a job as youth pastor at Bethel Methodist Church in the heart of town in 2005.

I have told the story of launching and leading the Revolution out of that church many times over the years. (In fact, I have an unfinished 200 page memoir dubbed “Divine Summons” about it 2/3 the way finished, of which I have shared large chunks of here.)

I don’t think I have ever really mentioned the book that I led a small group of teenagers through that helped lay a foundation for this ministry and lit a spark for the brand of Jesus-shaped Christianity I have pursued and taught over the past 20 years in youth groups, churches, college classrooms, writings and podcasts.

The book was The Irresistible Revolution: Living As An Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne. I gave away several copies of that book to young people back in those days, and even though young people usually don’t enjoy reading, this book resonated with teens, gripped them, ignited a flame, and perhaps changed some lives forever. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Many of us find ourselves caught somewhere between unbelieving activists and inactive believers. We can write a check to feed starving children or hold signs in the streets and feel like we’ve made a difference without ever encountering the faces of the suffering masses. In this book, Shane Claiborne describes an authentic faith rooted in belief, action, and love, inviting us into a movement of the Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world.

Shane’s faith led him to dress the wounds of lepers with Mother Teresa, visit families in Iraq amidst bombings, and dump $10,000 in coins and bills on Wall Street to redistribute wealth. Shane lives out this revolution each day in his local neighborhood, an impoverished community in North Philadelphia, by living among the homeless, helping local kids with homework, and “practicing resurrection” in the forgotten places of our world. Shane’s message will comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable . . . but will also invite us into an irresistible revolution. His is a vision for ordinary radicals ready to change the world with little acts of love.

Shane Claiborne has continued to be the kind of Christian I gravitate toward. Not necessarily because of his politics, nor his activism, but because of his tenacious commitment to keeping Jesus’ actual words, teachings, and actions at the center of the Christian faith.

The Revolution ministry that I helped spearhead in my hometown, at its peak, had a group of 15-20 teens gathering in our living room on Monday evenings for “The Way of the Revolutionary” Bible study. We hosted larger music events to gather the crowds, but the goal was to invite people into the smaller circle of teens desiring to shed mere religion and to instead sit at the feet of Jesus and let his teachings revolutionize their life and outlook. We were intensely ecumenical, uniting around Jesus and his teachings, leaving other denominational and doctrinal differences aside. I once counted teens from some 16 different churches and backgrounds at our events.

I’m so proud of those kids, and their passion to spread the love of Jesus among their friends at school. They would meet by the gymnasium Thursday mornings at the crack of dawn before school started, reading Scripture and praying for the school and their friends. They creatively called it THUMBS – Thursday Morning Bible Study. We organized S.O.S. (Servants of the Savior), an on-call group of teens eager and ready to go out and lend a helping hand when the “SOS signal” was given. This group shoveled sidewalks of the elderly and such at a moment’s notice. We organized a couple very well-attended Elevate worship concerts in the high school auditorium, forming a worship band of talented kids from different local churches.

I could go on and on about that little grassroots Jesus movement that touched many lives and deeply shaped my own. I was living on faith like never before in those days. Walking the streets of town late at night, burdened for an entire city. Praying big prayers and expecting big answers. Seeing God move in that little youth movement in my hometown, paved the way for another big step of faith some years later when we began planting MainStreet Covenant Church in Mound in 2010. Check out this old website I started back then, with some newspaper headlines from our little local movement and a photo collage of those precious faces.

But for today, as I wrap up this reminiscence, 20 years onward I’m burdened more than ever by an American church that has drifted further than ever away from the Jesus-shaped Christianity me and that group of young disciples were reading about in Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution and trying to practice in the streets my old town. Amazingly, time has flown and I’m now growing grey and bald. I have kids of my own now approaching the age of those teens I read that book with. I’m seriously considering breaking that old book out this summer and reading it together with my son Peter and a couple other young teens in our church.

I want to close by recommending the Red Letter Christians movement that Shane Claiborne founded with Tony Campolo 20 years ago. RLC constantly challenges me, stimulates fresh thought, and offers bold critiques of the ways we, the Church in America, have often lost the plot and taken our eyes off of Jesus. Here’s a brief overview of this movement from their website:

Christianity in America is in a funk.

Many people, young folks especially, are leaving the Church. But it is not Jesus they have rejected. It is a twisted version of American nationalism that is camouflaging itself as Christianity — but it looks very little like Jesus. For many people, it is their love for Jesus that has put them at odds with what evangelicalism has become known for.

We, Red Letter Christians, are not partisan. God is not a Democrat or a Republican. Our allegiance is not to the donkey or to the elephant, but to the Lamb. But much of what we are seeing today is not about the Right and Left — it is about right and wrong.

As faith-rooted organization dedicated to culture change and shifting the narrative around faith and politics, RLC focuses on civic engagement, direct action, and movement building through storytelling and social justice. We seek to amplify the voices of those on the margins to help counter toxic evangelicalism and to incite transformative social change.

We believe that the best corrective for what’s gone wrong in white evangelicalism is Jesus.

It was Frederick Douglass who once said, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

When we take our eyes off Jesus, we end up talking a lot about things Jesus didn’t talk about and don’t talk about the things Jesus talked a whole lot about — like the 2,000 verses of the Bible that speak of justice, concern for the poor, and liberation for the oppressed. We want a Christianity that looks like Jesus again, that acts like Jesus, that loves like Jesus. And we know the best critique of what’s wrong is the practice of something better.

We call it Red Letter Christianity, because many Bibles have the words of Jesus highlighted in red letters. We believe in the black letters, too, and are convinced the whole Bible is God’s word. But Jesus is the lens through which we interpret the Bible, and the lens through which we interpret the world we live in.

So while this current age is a turbulent season for the Church, we believe that we are poised for revival, for another great awakening, for a new reformation in the Church.

It’s clear that some of the loudest voices of Christianity have not been the most beautiful voices. And some of the most beautiful voices haven’t had the amplification they deserve.  The way we change the narrative is by changing the narrators.

There is a new and beautiful movement stirring around the world.

It is a movement of folks, young and old, who want a Christianity that looks like Jesus again.

It is a movement convinced that Jesus did not just come to prepare us to die, but to teach us how to live. For us, being a Christian has as much to do with life before death as life after death.

It is a movement that refuses to use our faith as a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the hells around us.

It is a movement that is committed to building the world Jesus dreamed of — a world free of violence and poverty, a world where the last are first and the first are last, where the poor are blessed and the peacemakers are the children of God.

It is a movement that believes in resurrection and lives in light of the promise that life conquers death and love triumphs over hatred.

It is a movement of people who are reading the gospels with fresh eyes and saying, “What if Jesus really meant the stuff he said?”