Janet Wolf is director of Children’s Defense Fund Alex Haley Farm and Nonviolent Organizing, in Clinton, TN; national organization working toward justice for children and the poor led by Marian Wright Edelman who worked as a young lawyer with Dr. King in MS and on the Poor People’s Campaign. She is also an ordained elder in the Tennessee Annual Conference.

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In Mark and Radical Discipleship, author Janet Wolf explores what it means to live a life of radical discipleship today using the Gospel of Mark as the foundation. Wolf explores the timeless issues of poverty, gender, justice, liberation, equality, and others using Mark as a guide. The stories of the women in Mark are a particular focus in this study and how, although often unnamed, they are prominent among Jesus’ followers and in Mark’s recounting of the gospel story.

Mark, the earliest of the synoptic Gospels, was written almost forty years after the crucifixion. A time when the early church was struggling, troubled, and traumatized. Many of those who had walked with Jesus were now imprisoned or dead. The Jewish-Roman War of 66–70 C.E. ended with a destroyed temple and a fractured and frightened community. And then, as now, Christians were asking, what does it mean to be a disciple of this Jesus, crucified and raised?

Wolf explores this question in five chapters that walk the reader through the Gospel of Mark, with each chapter exploring a different section of scripture. Throughout the text, Wolf tells of her own experiences as a pastor and community organizer, recognizing the power of these and other stories to heal, transform, liberate, and unshackle.

In Mark’s day and now, Christians are caught in a world of crisis and confusion, a time of uncertainty and fear. There’s a struggle going on and evil appears to be winning: injustice reigns, money and greed measure our living and our dying, divisions deepen and hope is sometimes hard to find. Then and now, part of the crisis is the church’s complicity, complacency, and silence in a world where so much has gone wrong.

And both then and now the gospel proclaims it is right here and now when the struggle is fierce and the clamor is loud; when our hearts are heavy, and our bodies weary; when we’re tempted to give up, to give in to the cynicism of our age. Here and now proclaims the gospel, in the fear and the uncertainty and the anxiety of living in our age, God comes singing to our souls, inviting us to be partners in the new creation, in God’s kingdom, kin-dom, realm, and rule. Caesar’s kingdom is already coming undone, the powers cannot stand, God’s kin-dom, realm, rule, breaks in to here, to now. “The kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15).

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