“We live in a lot of interruptions and surprises,” Shane Claiborne said. “And it’s part of the charm living in a neighborhood where you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Claiborne is a founding member of The Simple Way, an outreach group that focuses on the early church as reflected in Acts chapters two and four.

“All believers were together and shared everything they had and there was no needy persons among them,” he said. “We really caught that vision and we said let’s rethink that, re-imagine that, and there was sort of a moment where we decided we were going to stop complaining about the church we’ve experienced and work on becoming the church that we’ve dreamed of, that we see in scripture.”

In 1995, Claiborne was a student at Eastern University in Pennsylvania when he and a group of friends heard about several homeless families living in an abandoned cathedral. The families had been given a 48-hour eviction notice or they would be arrested for trespassing on the church property.

“We got involved and it was really in there, I think, I really understood what it meant to be born again because it wasn’t just an idea, but it was this reality,” Claiborne said.

After helping the families that were living in the cathedral, the group of students purchased a home in North Philadelphia in order to live out what they had studied of the early church.

“We found the one with the best credit,” Claiborne said. “We got his credit card and bought the house. We said ‘we’ll pay you back man, hopefully, Lord willing.’”

The house was the beginning of a neighborhood that the outreach group would turn into a community.

Though the nation is in the middle of an economic crisis, Claiborne urges Christians to keep their chins up and look into the future.

“What happened on Wall Street is very predictable, we only need to look at Leviticus and Deuteronomy to see this vision of jubilee, of dismantling inequality, to see that God’s got a different dream from Wall Street and when we live outside of God’s dream, it collapses,” Claiborne said.

Claiborne said that on Wall Street, 86 percent of the profits have gone to the richest 10 percent and the richest 20 percent own over 80 percent of the resources and the poorest 20 percent own 1.4 percent.

“We have some of the most disparaging inequality between the increasingly rich and the increasingly poor that this world has ever seen,” Claiborne said. “I don’t see God’s wrath as something that God’s just waiting to zap us, but actually God has told us how to live and can’t bare to watch us destroy ourselves.”

According to Claiborne, because of the economic crisis, North Philadelphia alone has lost over 200,000 jobs and is home to over 700 abandoned factories.

The mentality that the poor are poor because they are lazy is a principle that Claiborne hopes to diminish.

“It causes all of us to work at it because we can’t just tell someone, ‘oh you just need to go get a job,’ if there are no jobs there,” Claiborne said. “I can’t tell a kid on my corner that’s dealing drugs, ‘don’t deal drugs,’ unless I have another way that he can provide for his family, because some of the kids dealing drugs, that’s their only motivation, they would never use drugs, but drugs are the second largest economy in my neighborhood. We have to figure out alternatives for folks if were are going to say this is not ideal.”

Claiborne shared that he thinks one of the hugest gaps in the church is that gap that separates the rich and the poor.

It’s not that the rich don’t care about the poor, Claiborne said. It’s that the rich doesn’t know the poor.

Claiborne cites Matthew 25 as an example of how you should help the poor, by forming a relationship with them and helping them in personal ways, rather than ignoring the problem.

“We’re giving criteria for what love looks like and what to love our neighbor as ourselves is going to look like,” Claiborne said. “So when we live outside of that, without a doubt there are consequences and it’s fragile.”