All are invited to attend a special event next week, featuring young Christians actively involved in ministry with the poor, with peacemaking, and a radical vision of discipleship in American society that is inspired with the Spirit of Jesus. Their spiritual energy and uncompromising faith stimulates a powerful re-engagement of personal faith with American society. Their message is not about the November election ballot this year, but about the new social order they hear Jesus calling his followers to embody in our culture.

On Tuesday, July 22, 2008, the “Jesus for President” book tour will make a “campaign stop” in the Triangle area, with a program at 7:00 p.m. at First Baptist Church, 101 S. Wilmington St., Raleigh, NC. The program features co-authors Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, whose book Jesus For President was published this spring by Zondervan, as they and their friends and guests offer musical performances, video, and discussions of the nature of power, politics, and Jesus’ mission as portrayed by the Bible. Their tour, recently covered by CNN, is making stops like this throughout the U.S. this summer (coverage of the tour stop in Pittsburgh can be seen at CNN’s site for those who want to watch it, and a text version of the story is also available). The stop in Raleigh is sponsored by the Eastern Carolina District of the Virginia Mennonite Conference and by the North Carolina Council of Churches.

More than your regular book tour, prominent activist Shane Claiborne and artist and theologian Chris Haw bring a mix of Bible study, social commentary, music, video, and revival to their gatherings across the summer this year. In highly politicized times, Claiborne and Haw are awakening the political imagination of Christians with their book and tour Jesus for President, redefining “political” as “simply how we relate to the world.” As members of an activist Christian community in Philadelphia called The Simple Way (www.thesimpleway.org), they have lived and worked among the poor of south Philadelphia, witnessed against the war in Iraq, and built an intentional community of Christians committed to simplicity, nonviolence, and cooperation with their neighbors as an expression of Christian discipleship.

“Amid all the buzz, we’re ready to turn off our TVs, pick up our Bibles, and reimagine the world,” Haw and Claiborne say. “The church has fallen in love with the state and this love affair is killing the church’s imagination. Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual virtues of humility, gentleness and sacrificial love.” They present Christian discipleship as politically and social engaged, but in a way that confounds and transcends parties: “It’s easy to have political views—that’s what politicians do. But it’s much harder to embody a political alternative—that’s what saints do.”

Publishers Weekly awarded their book Jesus for President a starred review, calling it “the must-read election-year book for Christian Americans. Claiborne emerges as an affable, intelligent, humorous prophet of his generation, calling people out of business-as-usual in a corrupt world and back to the radically different social order of the biblical God.”

Weaving Claiborne’s stories with Haw’s thorough research, Jesus for President encourages a new kind of campaign, a different kind of party, and a different kind of commander in chief, casting a vision for what the Christian Church could look like if it placed its faith in Jesus, instead of American institutions. Besides its provocative essays, the comprehensive retelling of biblical stories examines the political realities of God’s people in Jesus’ time and in the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament)—followed by creative ideas on modern-day living that makes an impact in the world at large. “Jesus is forming a new kind of people, a different kind of party, whose peculiar politics are embodied in who we are. The church is a people called out of the world to embody a social alternative that the world cannot know on its own terms,” the authors say.

For more information, please contact Spencer Bradford at 919-596-4702, or at sbradford@nccouncilofchurches.org.