Resistance and Redirection: Our First Forty Years: A Memoir

Since their marriage in 1975, John and Pat Schwiebert have shared a remarkable 40 years, living in community, offering hospice care to persons dying from cancer and AIDS, practicing military tax resistance and other forms of non-violent resistance, ministering in several church congregations in Portland, Oregon—including one they helped start—and creating Grief Watch, a home based publishing enterprise. In this memoir John recalls the events that led the two of them to “seek first the commonwealth of God,” and in so doing to pursue a specific way of life that would put them at odds with the dominant culture, and sometimes in trouble with the law. The sixteen chapters in this book explore such shared life choices as Embracing Community, Sharing All Things in Common, Saying No to Caesar, Living with Interesting People, Doing Church Differently, and more.