Believe it or Not

Meet the reluctant face of Kensington's radical Christian movement.

by Isaiah Thompson

By: Michael T. Regan

Eleven years ago, six white kids, fresh out of college, took a vow: They would shack up; they would share. They would live either in monogamous married couples or be celibate. They would work only part-time, valuing one another and their community over wealth. They would stand against injustice where they saw it, and bring about justice where they could.

And they would live in the hood, with the poor —not just among the poor, but with the poor and for the poor. They would open their hearts, their wallets and their front door to the neighborhood.

They would live, in a nutshell, the way they thought Jesus wanted them to.

They just needed somewhere to do it. The six kids found a house on the corner of Potter and Westmoreland, in the heart of Kensington, that suited their needs (it was cheap, almost big enough to fit them all, and it was in a neighborhood that was, pretty much indisputably, severely messed up). Because none of them had much money, they made the down payment — only $4,000 — with a credit card. Within 24 hours, they had moved in.

They called their experiment The Simple Way.

Once a hub of Philadelphia industry, Kensington was literally built around the factories that employed its residents and fueled its economy. But those factories are long gone,and little has come along since to replace them. Besides drugs, that is.

The streets are strewn with trash and spent needles. Just a block away from where The Simple Way set up shop —visible right from their porch, in fact — is The Avenue, Kensington Avenue, where drugs and sex are sold in plain view, sometimes right in front of the battered shop windows advertising Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, or the handful of storefront churches offering salvation instead.

Indeed, The Simple Way was hardly the first bunch of energetic Christians to look at the poverty, disorder and incredible need in this urban ghetto and see in it a mission. Thirty years ago, when a small team of Franciscan friars were sent to Philadelphia with the charge of ministering to the poor, they, too, chose to live and work in Kensington, establishing the St. Francis Inn, which has served a hot meal every day of the week since it opened its doors. The need never went away.

But in the last 10 years or so, K-town has become the epicenter of a new movement of young Christians, many of them from mainstream Evangelical backgrounds — sects usually associated, not incorrectly, with social conservatism, self-righteous youth groups, and, in the last few decades, massive political power. The extent to which the religious right has controlled the image of what it means to identify as a Christian was apparent in the reactions I got from secular friends when I told them I was working on this story: They wrinkled one eyebrow every time I said "Christians," and both if I added "young" first.

But this new movement of Christians doesn't fit the classic categorization. In many ways, they're left of the left, though on some issues they aren't. A better way to put it is that they are rejecting old labels for a Christianity that is both intensely religious and refreshingly open-minded.

Right here in Philadelphia, on the broken streets of Kensington no less, Christianity is getting a face-lift.

The seeds of The Simple Way were planted in 1995, when the six founding members were students together at Eastern University, a Christian college outside Philadelphia. Shane Claiborne recalls sitting in the school cafeteria when a friend walked in brandishing a newspaper.

A group of homeless families calling themselves the Kensington Welfare Rights Union had that morning broken into abandoned St. Edward Catholic Church in North Philadelphia, and declared the cathedral their home.

Police arrived almost immediately, but declined to make any immediate arrests. After an emergency meeting, the Archdiocese had given the families 48 hours to leave.

Claiborne, who had grown up in a mainstream Evangelical environment in Tennessee, was in the midst of a spiritual slump. He had come to Eastern to explore his faith, but the more he read the Gospels, the less he saw his fellow Christians living according to them. He and a friend had started heading down to Philadelphia to hand out food and hang out with the homeless, which seemed more Jesus-y to them than going to church.

The story of a group of homeless families being turned out of a church transfixed Claiborne and his friends. They drove down that night and met the families. The next night, they came back, sharing in a "last supper" with the families as the 48 hours ticked away.

The families weren't turned out. After two months, during which time the Eastern students visited almost daily,they left the church of their own volition (some of them taking over abandoned houses instead).

For Claiborne, the experience wasn't just exciting, it was a revelation: "It was in St. Ed's that I was born again ... again," he later wrote of the experience.

Mainstream Christianity, it seemed to them, was out of touch — with the poor, and with Jesus. So they would remake it themselves. What better place than Kensington? They moved in.

"For the first six months, we really just kept our mouths shut and listened to the neighbors," recalls Jamie Moffett, who spent the first four years of his six-year stay in the house living in a hallway ("I had to really plan it out when I was going to change," he recalls fondly).

After informally polling their neighbors on how they might make themselves useful, the group turned their downstairs storefront into a thrift store, which they still open once a month —all you can fit in a bag for a buck.

Slowly, more ideas came. They planted a garden; they made food bags; they held Monday night dinners, to which anyone and everyone was invited —guests, neighbors and homeless alike. The house became a neighborhood drop-in, with people stopping by just to say hello, to get a snackor to crash until they came down from a high.

"Sometimes people just wanted someone to talk to, someone who wasn't trying to scam them," recalls Moffett.

When someone was murdered in the abandoned house at the end of their block, the group took it over. The building was sealed, and getting the city to deed it over looked like it would take a while, so they broke in through the roof and cleaned it up from the top down. When they finally got the deed, they ceremoniously kicked the door open — from the inside. The new house became host to "Yes! And ... " an after-school program for kids in the neighborhood.

"There was no one thing that we did," Moffett explains. "It was this anarchical thing."

There were numerous snags along the way. Communal life is hard. But none of the members of The Simple Way were prepared for what proved to be their biggest challenge: They got famous.

In 2006, Claiborne wrote a book that both put The Simple Way on the map and changed it forever.

The book, Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, is part memoir, part manifesto. Claiborne tells the story of his own spiritual evolution, starting with his days as a "Jesus freak" in Tennessee, through the founding of The Simple Way and his experiences living in Kensington.

The book is both an indictment — of capitalism, of global inequality, of Christian hypocrisy and complacency, of war — and an articulation of his vision for Christians as "a community of people who have fallen desperately in love with God and with suffering people, and who allow those relationships to disturb and transform them."

The book wasn't just a success; it was a phenomenon. It reached beyond crusty anarchist Christians to young, mainstream, Evangelical America, and that's a big market. Suddenly, Claiborne was being asked to speak everywhere, all the time.

Kensington, of all places, became a magnet for young, disaffected Christians looking for an authentic experience of faith —looking, in many cases, to have Claiborne's experience for themselves.

"Really, man, the only people who knew about us when that book came out were our close friends," recalls Moffett. "We don't want to contribute to ghetto-tourism — these are our neighbors and friends."

Young Christians started showing up from all over the place looking for The Simple Way — or just Shane — and hoping to live the experience they had read about.

"It's sort of nuts," says Moffett. "One day while I was rehabbing my shop, these two random kids from Kentucky came by like, 'Hey, do you know where The Simple Way is, dude?'"

Jesce Walz, who lives at the house, admits that all the sudden attention hasn't been easy.

"We've had at least two people in the last year walk to our house from across the country or something. ... It can really be kind of uncomfortable, being in the public spotlight like that," she says.

But their newfound fame had some very practical applications. In the spring of 2007, at 4 o'clock one morning, an abandoned warehouse along H Street, right next to The Simple Way's home, caught fire. The blaze spread quickly, blowing up a row of cars parked on the street and engulfing the houses.

Erik Stenbakken ALL TOGETHER NOW: Claiborne (center) and others praying together at New Jerusalem, a community of recovering drug users founded by Sister Margaret McKenna, a friend and mentor to Claiborne.

The fire took nearly two hours to put out and destroyed seven houses, among them the second house The Simple Way had acquired.

Overnight, The Simple Way transformed itself into a disaster-relief organization for the victims of the fire. They replaced the popular homepage of their Web site with a plea for donations (payable online) to two separate funds — one for The Simple Way and one for victims of the fire.

They raised more than tens of thousands of dollars for families, and used it. They repaired roofs and siding on damaged houses; they paid moving expenses and the first and last months' rent for families who had to relocate. In the case of one woman, who simply wanted to sell her severely damaged property and move on, they bought it. In fact, unexpectedly, The Simple Way not only wound up raising a considerable amount of money, but also acquiring a sizable chunk of their block. In the space of a few years, they'd gone from talking about planting gardens to building playgrounds.

Not two miles away, a completely different radical church had begun planting its seeds in Kensington, too. At roughly the same time that The Simple Way was beginning to get national attention, the Philadelphia-based Circle of Hope church bought a storefront on Frankford Avenue, right on the border between Fishtown and East Kensington, to house its newest congregation.

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Though much bigger and more organized than The Simple Way — they actually have pastors — Circle of Hope is similarly unconventional.

The Frankford congregation, one of three in the city, is led by pastor Joshua Grace. Only 30 years old, Grace wears a long, biker-style beard and two arms' worth of pretty serious tattooage (before becoming a pastor, he spent some time as a bike messenger). Grace recently invited me to a Sunday night "public meeting." Afterward, we headed to the Memphis Taproom for beer.

Grace joined Circle of Hope in 1997, just one year after it was founded by Rod and Gwen White. The church appealed to the self-described burned-out Pentecostal with its willingness to ditch the last few hundred years of Christian tradition in favor of a close reading of Gospels — particularly, Jesus' more radical preachings on poverty, empire and materialism.

"Rod had an idea to hit the reset button on the church," explains Grace. "And really take it back to the Gospels and the earliest traditions."

Circle of Hope is anti-war and pro-environment, and members talk about systemic injustice, poverty, the oppression of the poor —all messages that they see as coming straight from the pages of the Gospels.

But what distinguishes Circle of Hope from other progressive sects —Universalist Unitarians, say —is an intense devotion to living out those ideals in a tightly knit Christian community.

"We're not just trying to just get theologically correct," Grace emphasizes. "We're not trying to do something that's just cerebral."

The new congregation on Frankford Avenue has about 280 members, Grace estimates. Of those, about 200 live within a few blocks of his own home in East Kensington.

"We hang out, we watch each other's kids, we play baseball — baseball's a big deal," Grace says. "And it brings such a sense of community. You start to recognize, I live on a block, not just some island somewhere."

The location isn't an accident. Circle of Hope, like The Simple Way, puts an emphasis on living in poor communities. Recently, it started a new congregation in Camden.

Of course, the prospect of young, mostly white families flooding a poor neighborhood is sometimes called something other than "community." "Obviously, gentrification is going to be a huge conversation you're going to have to have," acknowledges Bryan Robinson, a member of the Circle of Hope pastoral team, who is himself African-American.

Robinson, who grew up in Germantown — another low-income neighborhood that's seen an influx of Circle of Hopers —has made a point of engaging members on the issue of gentrification.

"What we say is, if you're actually going to do it, and move to the neighborhood, you're going to shop in the neighborhood, educate your kids in the neighborhood, become part of the neighborhood and you're going to keep your dollars in the neighborhood. Otherwise you're just extracting from the community."

And there's no getting around the fact that Circle of Hope, and The Simple Way, are both overwhelmingly white, no matter how much each strives to include people of color (Circle of Hope has a Racial Reconciliation team dedicated to keeping the conversation alive).

"It's hard," admits Ryan Bowers, a member of Circle of Hope and a former board member of The Simple Way, who's also African-American. "But I think that's one thing with Simple Way and Circle of Hope, is that I think they're really interested in trying to have relationships that aren't just one-way."

A few months ago, Philadelphia Weekly ran a cover story about MeWithoutYou, a Christian band out of Philly with ties aplenty to the city's growing radical Christian scene.

The same day, Philebrity blogger Joey Sweeney posted a tirade against "Emo Christians" on his site:

"Self-righteousness (and outright clueless disregard for any kind of self-awareness) runs rampant in this crowd, and at the end of 8 years of Bush rule, please pardon me if it makes me pissy to think that this fucked repressive cloud has finally, definitively, infected the underground, such as it is."

Commenters pushed back. "Really, they're not judging us, we're judging them," wrote one reader. "Lighten up. Introduce yourself. These are good folks."

Still, Sweeney's screed touched on (pounded with a meat tenderizer is more like it) a real sentiment out there.

Sometimes, The Simple Way and Circle of Hope's missions don't seem so different from those of other progressives. Circle of Hope visits prisoners and gives out energy-efficient light bulbs. Recently Grace's congregation prayed in solidarity with the revolutionary Mexican Zapatista movement. Likewise, when the United States invaded Iraq, The Simple Way protested (Claiborne actually went to Iraq for the invasion). When City Council passed an ordinance allowing for more aggressive fining of the homeless, The Simple Way led the march against it.

But they're also into Jesus, big time, and not afraid to talk about it. Secular folks — atheists, agnostics, even just people who keep their faith private (disclosure: You can place me somewhere in there) —tend to be wary of people who go around proclaiming their faith in Jesus.

Even Sweeney has a point: After so many years under the reign of divisive, right-wing religious politics, it can be hard to believe that these people, many of whom still identify as Evangelical Christians, can be progressive.

Plus, it's hard to like someone who thinks you're going to hell. And isn't that what they think — about me?

Safely into our second round at the Taproom, I put the question to Grace.

"There are definitely some people in our congregation who would say that if you don't proclaim publicly that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, you're going to hell," he answered. "I don't really know where I stand on hell myself. A lot of times when I think about hell, I think about how unfortunately, a lot of the people who don't care about the poor are Christians."

When it comes to other potentially alienating issues, like homosexuality, Circle of Hope is mum.

"The way we've set ourselves up to have that conversation is to not have a policy," explains Grace. "Some people, even in the church, don't like that, because it doesn't condemn homosexuality, it doesn't say gay people can't be part of our covenant. Other people don't like it because it's not welcoming enough."

"I'm not about judging people," he added. "I'm interested in living in a different way."

Finally, I asked if Circle of Hope evangelizes — tries, that is, to convert heathens like me to Christianity.

"Look," he said, "I'd rather hand out compact fluorescent light bulbs than Bibles, you know?"

Claiborne, like Grace, was ready to answer hard questions. In an e-mail conversation, he wrote that he does believe in hell, but, "I just don't see Jesus spending a lot of time on hell. And much of the time he speaks of the religious elite and the rich folks being in danger of the fires of hell. If Christians do not believe that God's grace is big enough to save everyone, they should at least hope it is."

By: Isaiah Thompson SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Circle of Hope pastor Joshua Grace leads the "public meeting" at the congregation on Frankford Avenue every Sunday night. The church is made up of small, individualized groups: "We're kind of anarchic by nature," Grace explains. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Claiborne was unconcerned enough about hell to co-found The Simple Way with Moffett, who was then, and remains, an agnostic.

Among non-Christians, Moffett says, "There's this impression that I'm slowly drinking the Kool-Aid, or that I'm a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's just not the case." But "I would talk to Christians and say, 'Hey, I met all these [secular] folks who are doing amazing things,' and slowly they would get quiet, or frustrated ... that those people could be interested in the same stuff.

"I think there's an analogue between this kind of Christianity and the secular social justice friends I have," he says. "The fuel is just different."

For the record, Claiborne's answer on homosexuality was this: "We welcome everyone. We are committed to being a safe place for sexual minorities and to people who are trying to figure out their sexual identity. ... We love without condition, ulterior motive, or judgment. And I trust deeply in the goodness and limitless love of God."

Eleven years after the first six members of The Simple Way moved into the house on Potter Street, the last three are moving out. Shane Claiborne is the only founder who still resides there, and he and his two housemates, Walz and Jessica Shoffner, are moving out by the end of the year.

As The Simple Way project grew, and as its original members turned from twentysomethings to thirtysomethings, moving out to have children or work on their own, it got hard to be both a house full of people dedicated to one another and, at the same time, an organization.

"The balance between trying to accomplish something together and care for each other well is very hard," Walz explained recently.

She cited a quote that's been on her mind (she can't remember whose): "Eventually, ideals turn into paperwork."

It hasn't necessarily helped that Claiborne's book inspired some young Christians not only to rethink their faith, but to actually come to Kensington to join him, expecting perhaps to see the stories they read re-enacted, with them playing the parts.

To some extent, The Simple Way got a little bit too cool.

It's a problem that Circle of Hope's Grace is well aware of, and does his best to thwart. Circle of Hope, too, has attracted a lot of young members. The Sunday meeting I attended was composed mostly of members in their 20s and 30s. The service was kicked off by a young ensemble that included a didgeridoo and a banjo-turned-mandolin ("A banjolin!" Grace later explained).

"Almost every week I make fun of being cool," he says. "Some people are like, 'Well, I just want to be worshipping where someone plays a banjolin.' It's like, 'No — that's Carl. Carl grew up on a pig farm, and he came out here to live his faith."

The trick, Grace says, is encouraging all the good things a strong faith community has to offer, including art, music and fun, without turning the whole thing into a party and losing sight of the basis of that faith. For Circle of Hope, that's Jesus.

"For a lot of Christians, religion is like buying fire insurance. OK, I gotta show up, pay some money, whatever. To me, that's boring. But hedonism is boring, too."

Meanwhile, as The Simple Way shrinks in one way, it grows in another: As a nonprofit, The Simple Way has more resources and greater ambitions than ever.

The funds and property it acquired in the wake of the 2007 fire —as well as the money that's come in from Claiborne's book and speaking tours, all of which he gives to the organization —allowed them, for the first time, to hire a small staff, and to look into larger-scale community development projects.

The fire left a number of buildings on the block uninhabitable. And although the abandoned factory in which the fire started was owned by the city, the city's only remedial action was to bulldoze the damaged houses, bury the rubble, and charge the owners, even though the fire had started on city property. When those charges — something along the lines of $15,000 apiece —weren't paid, the city placed liens on the vacant lots.

Claiborne, who is also president of the nonprofit (he still doesn't draw a salary, and estimates his yearly personal income at about $1,500), wants the city to deed the vacant lots on his block over to The Simple Way, so they can turn the land into "a place where neighbors can grill out, kids can play, gardens can grow." But so far, the city won't forgive the debt, despite a request from Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sanchez's office. Just this Tuesday, Redevelopment Authority Director John Coates told the group they would be able to buy two lots adjacent to their house, on which they plan to build a community garden (which they'd already started anyway).

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There are always new projects. Moffett, who owns his own video production company, recently released a movie called Ordinary Radicals which profiles Claiborne and other "revolutionary" Christians and was just screened at Wooden Shoe Books. During the presidential primaries in the spring of 2008, Claiborne co-authored another book, called Jesus for President, which focused on re-imagining Christian politics, and which he promoted by touring in a vegetable-oil-powered bus. This fall, he co-authored yet another book, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, encouraging Christians to turn their prayers into meaningful action.

I asked whether it was strange to spend so much time speaking to mainstream Evangelicals who represent the very ideas he rejected in co-founding The Simple Way.

"There is a reshaping happening within Evangelicalism," he said. "The religious right has not produced a new generation; the monologue of the Christian right is over. Now there's room for a conversation."

Once the members move out, The Simple Way hopes to use the Potter Street house for formal "apprenticeships," allowing people to join the community more slowly and with more guidance than in the past.

Of course, Claiborne plans to stay in the neighborhood. I asked if he had anywhere lined up yet.

"You see that abandoned house?" he asked, pointing out the front door.

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)