A thicker Jesus

Easter week - what a great week to die! To go through Holy Week, Good Friday and then to celebrate the resurrection on Easter Day ... to have five days to really let the truth of resurrection sink in once again, and then to die - wow!  That is exactly what Glen Stassen did last week.

But who, I hear you ask, was Glen Stassen?

"Glen Stassen" we are reminded today by Jim Wallis, "was not only a professor of Christian ethics (both at Southern and later at Fuller Theological Seminary, USA), but he was also an activist for ethics who knew how to affect society. Like his father, Harold Stassen, a former governor and presidential candidate from Minnesota, Glen sought to bring Christian ethics to public life. When I worked with Glen on the strategy committee of the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign, I saw not just an ethical theorist but a smart practitioner who knew how to mobilize movements and change public policy. Glen wanted to change the world, just as Jesus called his disciples to do."

It was only very late in his life that I discovered Glen. It was through his classic book Kingdom Ethics. His parting gift to us, his last book, however is even more relevant to the issues we are currently dealing with in Faith2Share through our 'Depth Discipleship' programme.  In A thicker Jesus: Incarnational discipleship in a seular age Glen explores what it means to follow Jesus into the kingdom of God and into the world. The victim of an agressive cancer, Glen has entered the next stage of Kingdom life ahead of us but he has left us a wonderful guide for Kingdom living in this world.

Dying is never easy, but I guess Glen will have been pleased to go in Easter week.