the way of the simple way

was busy doing some research online for my book and came upon this passage from ‘the irresistible revolution’ which talks about how the early simple way people saw the simple way – may give you a better idea of what we’re looking at:

“An Experiment in Truth
Coming out of college, my friends and I had a hunch that there is more to life than what we had been told to pursue. We knew that the world cannot afford the American dream and that the good news is that there is another dream. We looked to the early church and to the Scriptures and to the poor to find it.

So about thirty of us from Eastern College continued dreaming together about another way of doing life. Most of us were getting tired of talking and were ready to live. We went to the ghetto. We narrowed our vision to this: love God, love people, and follow Jesus. And we began calling our little experiment The Simple Way. In January 1997, six of us moved into a little row house in Kensington, one of Pennsylvania’s poorest neighborhoods, just minutes from old St. Edward’s cathedral. It felt like we were reinventing the early church for the first time in two thousand years. (We were quite ignorant.)

We had no idea what we were getting into. We had no big vision for programs or community development. We wanted only to be passionate lovers of God and people and to take the gospel way of life seriously. People sometimes ask us what we do all day on an ‘average day’ at the Simple Way. It gets a little crazy since our lives are full of surprises and interruptions. I’ll do my best to describe it to you.

We hang out with kids and help them with homework in our living room, and jump in open fire hydrants on hot summer days. We share food with folks who need it, and eat the beans and rice our neighbor Ms. Sunshine makes for us. Folks drop in all day to say hi, have a safe place to cry, or get some water or a blanket. We run a community store out of our house. We reclaim abandoned lots and make gardens amid the concrete wreckage around us. We plant flowers inside old TV screens and computer monitors on our roof. We see our friends waste away from drug addiction, and on a good day, someone is set free. We try to make ugly things beautiful and to make murals. Instead of violence, we learn imagination and sharing. We share life with our neighbors and try to take care of each other.

We preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her violent slumber. Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

We spend our lives actively resisting everything that destroys life, whether that be terrorism or the war on terrorism. We believe in another way of life – the kingdom of God – which stands in opposition to the principalities, powers, and rulers of this dark world (Ephesians 6:12).

Since those early days, we’ve made plenty of mistakes and have never learned the secret to not hurting each other. We have described the layers of our common life as an onion, at the core of which are the partners who covenant to love and cherish each other (the hardest and most beautiful thing we do), and each of us shares healthy responsibilities and expectations. We’ve hashed out our nonnegotiables and tried to understand those we do not agree with.

New folks have brought energy and imagination, and we’ve seen new visions born. Our programs revolve around the needs and gifts in our community and are always changing. They never define us, for we set out not to start programs but simply to be good neighbors.
We now have so many partner communities and organizations that it really feels like a movement much bigger than the Simple Way. And we are just one little cell within the Body, very full of life but only a small part of the whole. Cells are born and cells die, but the Body lives forever.”

read the rest of the book passage here [http://www.catalystspace.com/content/read/the_simple_way]