Featured Story

week of January 18, 2020

Resurrecting Church

by Shane Claiborne

We were sitting in the college cafeteria eating dinner, complaining as usual about the food and going back for more (the woes of college students). Suddenly, a friend walked up to our table and threw down a newspaper, muttering, “You guys are not going to believe this.” The top story was about a group of 40 homeless families who were being evicted from an abandoned cathedral in North Philadelphia.

The families that lived there were with an organization called the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, made up mostly of homeless mothers and children who took care of one another. They had been living in a tent city a few blocks away from the cathedral, but conditions were worsening, with rats and flooding.

St. Edward’s cathedral had been closed along with half a dozen other cathedrals in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods, and it had been left vacant for several years. Many of the people were stuck on an endless waiting list for subsidized housing.

So, living in worsening conditions and with the government threatening to take custody of
their kids, the families moved into St. Edward’s as an act of survival and a refusal to remain invisible. Soon after, the Catholic archdiocese which owned the building announced that they had 48 hours to get out or face arrest. We could hardly believe our eyes.

We scarfed down the rest of our dinner with our heads spinning, wondering what we should do. Now homelessness was not just adults on the downtown streets but women and children. It wasn’t long before we were packed in a car heading into “the Badlands” in search of St. Edward’s in a neighborhood we had always been told to stay clear of. Little did we know that God’s got a thing for showing up in badlands like Kensington and Nazareth.

The families had chosen to seek refuge in the historic sanctuary and had hung a banner out front that read, “How can we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” It took us a minute to realize they were talking about our Savior as a homeless man. Timidly, we walked up to the large red doors and gave them a knock. We could hear the thumping echo through the marble cavern. Several folks clumsily opened the doors, and they embraced us without hesitation. Then they invited us in. And we would never be the same again.

"Do you want to stay?"

They gave us a grand tour of the shantytown they had constructed inside, and introduced us to a few of the children, who promptly stole our caps and jumped on our backs. They poured out their hearts to us, their struggles and their dreams. They assured us that if we all shared with one another, there would be enough for everyone.

The next day, dozens of us poured into the cathedral, casting our lives next to the families’, saying, “If they come for you, they’ll have to take us too.”

We rang the old bell in the tower of the cathedral to alert the people of the neighborhood, many of whom were already bringing donations and gathering outside. Around the forty-seventh hour, we prepared a “Last Supper,” with all the families and friends gathered around a table on the old marble altar to sing, to pray, and to break bread together, with lots of tears. The families asked for a show of hands of who would remain in the building, risking arrest, when the officials returned. As I raised my hand, a young girl named Destiny was sitting on my lap, and she asked why I was raising my hand. “Do you want to be able to stay here?” I asked. Destiny said, “Yes, this is my home.” And I told her, “That’s why I’m raising my hand.” She hugged me and slowly lifted her hand into the air.

I’ll never forget when the officials came to evict the families. The representatives from the archdiocese pulled up to the curb, took two steps out of the car, saw the crowd, and crawled back into the car without uttering a word. The 48 hours came and passed.

Becoming church

We students became known as the YACHT Club (Youth Against Complacency and Homelessness Today). It was not a boating club, though we did have some boaters mistakenly call on occasion, and we didn’t hesitate to ask them for money. The Spirit was tearing through our college campus like a wildfire, igniting us with passion.

Every week, dozens of us piled into Sunday services at St. Ed’s, where we sang old hymns and freedom songs. It was a revival of sorts. Gospel choirs came, and we danced in the aisles. Courageous Catholic clergy led liturgies. Kids and homeless mothers preached the gospel. We shared communion—apple cider and stale bagels or whatever we could find—and many of us were experiencing true communion for the first time in our lives.

The body of Christ was alive, no longer trapped in stained-glass windows or books of systematic theology. The body of Christ was literal, living, hungry, thirsty, bleeding. Church was no longer something we did for an hour, and church was not a building with a steeple. As Don Everts says in his book Jesus with Dirty Feet, “Referring to the church as a building is like referring to people as two-by-fours.”

The church became something we are—an organism, not an organization. Church became so fresh and vibrant, it was like we had brought something dead back to life. And perhaps we had. In fact, one of the news headlines read, “Church Resurrected.”

And yet amid all the spiritual movement, we kept bumping into this other thing people still called church, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It seemed so far from the Scriptures, so far from the poor, so far from Jesus.

One day we received a box of donations from a wealthy congregation that will remain nameless. Written in marker on the cardboard box were the words, “For the homeless.” Excited, I opened it, only to find the entire box filled with microwave popcorn. My first instinct was to laugh.

We barely had electricity, much less a microwave, and popcorn wasn’t near the top of the needs list. My second instinct was to cry because of how far the church had become removed from the poor.

Later that same week, another group of folks brought donations by St. Ed’s—the mafia. With the media jumping on the story, the mafia came by and gave bikes to each of the kids, turkeys to each family, and thousands of dollars to the organization. I thought, I guess God can use the mafia, but I would like God to use the church.

Shortly afterward, I sat puzzled, grieving over the state of our church. “I think I’ve lost hope in the church,” I confessed, brokenhearted, to a friend. I will never forget her response.

“No, you haven’t lost hope in the church. You may have lost hope in Christianity or Christendom or all the institutions, but you have not lost hope in the church. This is the church.” At that moment, we decided to stop complaining about the church we saw, and we set our hearts on becoming the church we dreamed of.

—Condensed from The Irresistible Revolution

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