Finding shalom

What dimensions of our lives are presently oppressed by the captivity of powerful and destructive principalities and powers? I suspect that the answer to that question is literally, every dimension suffers under such oppression. Consequently, it is in every dimension of life that we need to engage in radical, and sometimes symbolic acts of a hope for life beyond captivity, beyond the present crisis. We need to find ways to experience God's shalom, God's redemptive presence, in all the dimensions of our lives, from the marketplace to the bedroom, from the board room to the classroom, from the theatre to the dining room. In fact, there are many rooms to our lives, and it is in all of these rooms that we need to struggle together, in community, and with the healing presence of the Holy Spirit, to have a foretaste of a creationally restoring kingdom that is yet to come in all of its fullness.

Brian Walsh in Subversive Christianity

Spiritual Numbness

The prophet must speak with passion because the community is in a coma. Or to shift the metaphor, we are numb. To be numb is to be without passion; it is the absence of pathos; it is apathy. We are so numb that we don't even realise what has happened to us. Our numbness denies us of a spiritually renewed imagination. We are numb, we don't notice the perverse abnormality of affluence. We are numb to the precariousness of our times, numb to the danger of the earth, to the pain of the poor, to the impossibility of our present affluent lifestyles. We are numb to our own pain, and we want to remain numb to the pain of homosexuals in our communities and to the victims of abuse and incest. And, yes, we are numbed out by the irrelevance of the church to our present cultural malaise.

Brian Walsh in Subversive Christianity

Personal vs social

What we ask from Christianity is not a narrow concern for personal salvation but a social ideal that will stir enthusiasm and gain our devotion.  Christianity must not give a warning to set one's face against this world but a vision of the worth and meaning of the work to be done in this life.


Robert Roth
quoted in Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and other Christians in disguise by Robert Inchausti