Christian activist Shane Claiborne often tells the story of traveling to India to work with Mother Teresa and the Sisters of Charity, hoping to find “an old nun who believed Jesus meant what he said.”
“Mother,” as she was called in the streets, was hard to pin down; it took Shane awhile to get an audience with her. When he finally got one, he was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t think of anything to say. He wanted a hug. She gave it to him. She told him what she told everybody: “Calcuttas are everywhere if we only have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.” Claiborne knew it was time to come home.
Claiborne is best known for founding The Simple Way, an intentional community in Philadelphia committed to ending poverty—although Claiborne himself has been an evangelist for many causes, most recently ending gun violence. Claiborne and Mike Martin, a youth minister-turned-blacksmith, recently toured the country, promoting a book they co-wrote after yet another round of school shootings. At each stop they held a rally (more like a revival) on gun reduction and nonviolence. Martin set up his forge and anvil at every venue, took a donated gun that had been used in a violent crime, and literally beat a “sword into a plowshare” (Isaiah 2:4) as he transformed the weapon into a garden tool.
I met Martin a year before the tour, when I took a group of seminarians to his backyard forge in Colorado Springs. He taught us to make a garden rake from a gun with a story (we donated our awkward-looking tool to our seminary’s “Farminary”—our campus on a farm– when we returned to campus). After the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Martin had felt called to respond. He hung up his youth minister hat and entered the world of Christian social innovation. He didn’t set out to be a social innovator; he set out to find a creative way to embody a prophetic imagination toward gun violence. So, he trained to become a blacksmith and founded RawTools, a nonprofit (now in partnership with The Mennonite Church, U.S.A.) that, in addition to making garden tools out of guns used in violent crimes, offers training, resources, and networking around gun reduction and nonviolence.
This is Mike Martin’s Calcutta.
Martin is as unassuming as they come. He is the opposite of the hero-preneur. His why is his who: his heart breaks for the victims of gun violence, and his love for Jesus compels him to respond. Martin knows the story of every gun given to him. He has heard the stories of hundreds of shattered lives and has witnessed small glimmers of redemption when someone hands him “the gun,” knowing that it will now and forever be an instrument of peace. Excellence is not the point (though his work looked excellent to me). Martin’s ministry is a study in reverence: he aims to wake people up by creating space for the prophet’s task of grief. He is a quiet furnace of passion, driven to “forge peace and disarm hearts,” as the RawTools website declares, until there is war no more.
He innovates for love.
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(NOTE: This article is excerpted from Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book Innovating for Love: Joining God’s Expedition Through Christian Social Innovation.)
Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean is an ordained United Methodist pastor in the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference, and the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. In addition to teaching in practical theology, education, and formation (specifically youth and young adult ministry, Christian social innovation, and theories of teaching), Dean works closely with Princeton’s Institute for Youth Ministry and the Farminary. Dean is the author of numerous books, including Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford, 2010), Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church (Eerdmans, 2004), and The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry with Ron Foster (Upper Room, 1998).
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