Seven Radical Elders: How Refugees from a Civil-Rights-Era Storefront Church Energized the Christian Community Movement, an Oral History (New Monastic Library: Resources for Radical Discipleship)

Many young idealists, after a few failures, burn out and return to status quo lives. Not so with the seven radicals in this book, who met in an interracial house church and intentional community on Chicago's West Side during the civil rights era. Here you will make the acquaintance of a Church of the Brethren pastoral couple who tried to bring communal life to the black ghetto; a fashionable socialite who trashed her curlers and joined the simple life; an elite Stanford graduate who cast his lot with a bus full of black teens on an epic ride to Washington, DC, to hear MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech; two ethnic-Mennonite women who became community leaders and elders during a male-dominated era; and a painfully shy "geek" awakened to the traumas of racism by five days in the Albany, Georgia, jail. Now, in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, these veterans of community witness to the possibility of radical life conversions, engagement with the hard, slow work of racial reconciliation that learns from mistakes and does not quit. This book concludes with the invitation to the joyful path of becoming who God made us to be--saints.

David Janzen is a member of Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois, whose current work is nurturing a new generation of intentional Christian communities. He is the author of Fire, Salt and Peace: Intentional Communities Alive in North America (1996) and The International Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus (2012).