After his studies, he reports in interview that he served at
Willow Creek Community Church in
Chicago. He went on to found
The Simple Way—"a small organization supporting neighbors in building a neighborhood where... all belong and thrive"—in 1998, with Joe Strife, Jamie Moffet, Brooke Sexton, and Michelle and Michael Brix, fellow graduates of
Eastern University, in
Kensington, Philadelphia. He is a board member for the nationwide Christian Community Development Association. In 2006, he published
The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, a plea for Christian
voluntary simplicity and
social justice. With
Tony Campolo, he founded
Red-Letter Christians in 2007, aiming to bring together evangelicals who believe in the importance of insisting on issues of
social justice mentioned by
Jesus, that name deriving from a convention of printing the words of Jesus in red ink in some
Bible editions. He lost all of his possessions in the fire. In June 2008, with
Chris Haw, he visited churches and community centers in cities across the United States in a refurbished used vegetable oil fuel school bus, labeled "Jesus for President", to give talks on Christian
social justice. In September, they released the book
Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals. In 2008, he was featured in the documentary
The Ordinary Radicals. He co-directed the three volume Another World is Possible DVD series. Claiborne wrote the foreword to
Ben Lowe's 2009 book
Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation. In 2011 he has appeared as both a guest and co-host of the TV show
Red-Letter Christians with
Tony Campolo. That year also, he declared his unwillingness to pay taxes to fund U.S. military activity. He withheld a portion of his income taxes meant to correspond to the percentage of the federal budget spent on the military, donating that money instead to charity. He wrote a public letter to the Internal Revenue Service to explain his decision. On January 26, 2016, he released the book ''Executing Grace - How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It's Killing Us''. It makes a case for the abolition of the death penalty through social and spiritual arguments. In 2023, he published the book
Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person, a book that calls for extending the Christian definition of the "
pro-life" movement to issues other than the fight against abortion, such as
gun violence,
poverty, the
death penalty and openness to
immigration. ==Published works==