the ordinary radicals

I watched The Ordinary Radicals yesterday.

The film is good, but I prefer Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical or his Jesus for President. A lot of the material in the film is based on the Jesus for President tour - which I was able to see when he came to Toronto - where it temporarily got renamed - Jesus for Prime Minister.

Living as an ordinary radical. Someone has descibed Claiborne as being like Dallas Willard with steroids and dreadlocks. Claiborne believes that a Christian is, by definition, a disciple: a follower of Jesus. One who is called to participate in God’s work in this world - sounds pretty straightforward to me.

There's a line in the film, in an interview with Tony Campolo that goes something like this:

Evangelicalism getting wedded to the any political party is like ice cream mixing with horse manure. It's not going to hurt the horse manure ), but it sure will mess up the ice cream.

If you get a chance to see the film - do so.

Here's the description from the ordinary radicals site:

SYNOPSIS: In the margins of the United States, there lives a revolutionary Christianity. One with a quiet disposition that seeks to do “small things with great love,” and in so doing is breaking 21st Century stereotypes surrounding this 2000 year old faith. “The Ordinary Radicals” is set against thie modern American political and social backdrop of the next Great Awakening. Traveling across the United States on a tour to promote the book “Jesus for President”, Shane Claiborne and a rag-tag group of “ordinary radicals” interpret Biblical history and its correlation with the current state of American politics. Sharing a relevant outlook for people with all faith perspectives, director Jamie Moffett examines this growing movement.

As Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw write in the book, “This is not a set of political suggestions for the world; this is about invoking and embodying the alternative. All of this is an invitation to join a peculiar people- those with no king but God, who practice jubilee economics and make the world new. This is not the old-time religion of going to heaven; this is about bringing heaven to the world.”

Featuring Interviews with: Becky Garrison, Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, Rob Bell, John Perkins, Brooke Sexton, Michael Heneise, St. Margret Mckenna, Logan Laituri, Zack Exley, Aaron Weiss and many more Ordinary Radicals.