New imagination is required to follow the gospel, Shane Claiborne said in a plenary gathering at Stewardship Kaleidoscope Sept. 23 in Baltimore. That includes what he called radical giving.

The annual conference is presented by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Claiborne, a popular speaker and author, is the founder of The Simple Way in Philadelphia. He also heads up Red Letter Christians, a movement of folks who are committed to living “as if Jesus meant the things he said.”

Claiborne grew up on the same Tennessee hillside as the late Dolly Parton. He described falling in love with Jesus in the Bible Belt, but finding a Christian culture that only seemed to scratch the surface of the gospel.

“You know, as my friend Tony Campolo said, we would come to the altar singing ‘Just As I Am,’ and we would leave just as we were and keep living just like we always had,” he said.

“I didn’t want just a doctrinal statement. I wanted to change the world,” he said. “As a Methodist, I started reading about John Wesley. I’m like, this dude was wild. John Wesley, right? He said, ‘If I should die with more than 10 pounds, may every person call me a liar and a thief, because I’ve betrayed the gospel and betrayed the poor.’”

As a college student, he and his friends wrote to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, offering to come and work with her for the summer. After the letter went unanswered, Claiborne followed up with a phone call and was stunned when Mother Teresa herself answered. She took the young people up on their offer.

In India, Claiborne worked in a place saturated with poverty and prayer. Shoes were customarily removed during prayer, and one day he noticed that Mother Teresa’s feet were deformed. He later learned that came from years of digging through donated shoes and picking the worst pair for herself.

“She would say: When you give to the poor, you should give the very best that you have because you’re giving it to Jesus in his most distressing disguises,” he said.

Mother Teresa was called Mother because she truly became “mama” to the poor children and countless others in her orbit, Claiborne said.

“I think it’s one of the most radical ideas in Scripture, that we are to be born again into a new vision of family, right? That’s bigger than biology. It’s bigger than nationality. It’s not defined by DNA or borders, but by the breath and image of God in every one of us,” he said.

That’s also why Christian nationalism is problematic, he added; it’s just too small.

Closer to home, in Claiborne’s Philadelphia neighborhood, “we created a movement called Common Change. We pool money together, but we don’t give to any organizations or anybody we read about in a newsletter. It’s all relationally given.”

When the corner store was robbed, for example, “We said, what did y’all lose? It was a couple thousand. We said, well listen, there’s a bunch of us that are all trying to follow Jesus and we try to help each other out, so we’d like to just replace the window that was broken. We’d like to replace the money that was lost,” Claiborne recalled.

He also told of a young man who, inspired by Claiborne’s book, The Irresistible Revolution, donated all his winnings from “The Price is Right” to go and work with AIDS orphans in Uganda. He later became a pastor.

Claiborne closed with a prayer:

“We pray, O God, that you would give us new imagination. Give us a fresh touch of your spirit. Thank you for this community that, for years and years, has been seeking together to be faithful disciples and stewards of your riches and your abundance. May you continue to shape and form them and each of us into who you want us to be, so that more and more people in this world would know of your love because they can see it and feel it and touch the goodness of your love.”