A New Monastic Handbook: From Vision to Practice

A New Monastic Handbook

From Vision to Practice

Ian Mobsby and Mark Berry

© Ian Mobsby and Mark Berry

Published in 2014 by Canterbury Press

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 1 84825 458 9

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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

Contents

Introduction

Part 1 Roots and Shoots

1. Our Story and God’s Story

2. Old but New

3. Followers of the Holy Trinity

Part 2 Intentionally Prayerful and Spiritual

4. Living a Rhythm of Life

5. Forming a Rhythm of Life

6. Encountering God through the Contemplative and Sacramental

Part 3 Focused on Mission

7. Catching up with God

8. Getting beyond Them and Us

9. Formation and Discipleship

10 . Building real Community

11. Practising healthy Community

Afterword

Appendix

Resources

Introduction

The restoration of the church will surely come only from a new kind of Monasticism which will have nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer¹

We live in an extraordinary time in the Western world, when church attendances are diminishing but spiritual hunger is rising.

Dave Tomlinson²

New monastic Christians do not walk around town in black or brown robes. Yet a monastic spirituality and sensibility informs our identity. Some of us have stated solemn intentions to our bishop, to one another, and to a ‘rhythm of life’ (what the ancients called a ‘rule’). We made our decision to walk this way not only for ourselves, but together and for others. We believe that in the midst of a culture whose primary commitment is to the self and consumerism, monasticism has something to offer ourselves, the rising numbers of the ‘spiritually curious’ and the many for whom life is painful and lacking in meaning about the project of being and becoming more human. And so, in our everyday clothes, we make these commitments to one another, to our church, and to living an ancient way of life in a radically different context.

Today, the Church and the Christian faith face a major cultural change. Many parts of the post-industrial Western world are increasingly post-church (a culture where the majority of the population do not attend church and no longer see the Church as a major feature of life), post-Christian (a culture which was once predominantly Christian and had values determined by the teaching of the Church but is now multi-faith and multicultural), post-secular (a culture which had seen religion and spirituality as dead and of no relevance but is now beginning to rediscover their value), post-Christendom (a culture in which Christianity had held significant power and influence but now does not) and postmodern (a cultural reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality). ‘Spiritual, not religious’ is the fastest growing religious identification.³ People are seeking new solutions to the spiritual and existential questions they face, and many are not finding answers in traditional churches. This is not all negative. The fact that people are seeking spirituality in an increasingly post-secular culture is an opportunity for the Church to respond in innovative mission, to build new and authentic forms of church.

The shift going on in our postmodern and post-secular context is not so different from the changes faced by Anthony and his companions in the third century as they set out to found monasticism in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. From its beginnings, the Church had comprised a group of societal outsiders, living a radically different life from the excesses and power abuses of the Roman Empire. As Christianity became accepted as the authorized religion under Emperor Constantine, the Church was radically reorientated by a change in its nature into what has sometimes been called ‘Christendom’. By becoming the official mainstream religion, the Church became part of the establishment absorbing the values of political power, money, patriarchal hierarchy and a focus on the rich and influential rather than the poor and marginalized. The early desert mothers and fathers felt that something was being lost and responded by seeking to retain something of the previous DNA of Christianity and the Church by going into the deserts. The first rules or rhythms of life were a reaction against Christendom. Poverty as a response to increased power and materialism, obedience in response to individualism, hedonism and the Emperor Cult (because Jesus was God not the Emperor) and chastity in response to sexual promiscuity and licentiousness.

Much is now written about new monasticism in the USA, in the UK and around the world. This growing library has emphasized the call for action outside the bubble of comfortable Sunday worship services by going to serve God in many different areas of our own communities. There is much poverty and impoverishment in contemporary culture that has created a hunger and yearning for mysticism and spirituality which is practical and accessible to ordinary people. This is, at its heart, a reopening of Christian spirituality and formation through the call to mission and, more precisely, the loving intentions of God who seeks for all things to be restored into right relationship with the Holy Trinity. This is the core practice to which monastics (who gravitate to places of prayer, service and withdrawal from general life) and mendicants (friars who were called to serve God in small missional communities to particular places where the Church was weak) have given obedience: to love God, love yourself and love others.

This book is written out of our shared conviction that new monasticism is inspired by a particular understanding of God the Trinity (the nature of God, God as holy community, God one yet three, God as unity in diversity), that has much to say about what church is. As God is a dynamic event of grace where the Three Persons of God practise perfect unity, love, justice, equality and inclusion, so the Church is called to be an imperfect representative community of the one perfect divine community of God.

New monasticism is not about a romantic withdrawal to beautiful and privileged places in the countryside, fleeing from the problems of the world, but rather a radical commitment to stay with and re-engage in mission, seeking the kingdom of God in places where God can feel absent. We have many friends throughout the world where there is either a deep spiritual hunger for meaning and belonging or a desire for hope and the alleviation of pain, hopelessness and suffering while rejecting mainstream Christianity. So who is going to engage with the many people who are spiritually curious and hungry for transformation and liberation, seeking alternatives to the dehumanizing effects of the global market and what has become known as ‘ecocide’: the combination of global warming, deforestation and reducing biodiversity? What forms of church are going to assist such people who do not trust church and religion to experience Jesus Christ? Who is going to help such people to become Christian pilgrims? We hope this book will help some to engage in this journey.

So what do we mean by a new monastic community? This book is an attempt to answer this important question. We believe that the distinctiveness of a new monastic community is the combination of a number of features. None of these features are unique to new monasticism, but it is the particular combination of these features that defines the essence of what new monasticism seeks to be. These features are explored in detail:

1. A formal written rhythm of life that includes seasonal aspirations, spiritual practices and postures (Chapters 4 and 5)

2. A commitment to being missional and contextual (Chapter 7)

3. A variant vocation to being a new monastic ‘monk’, ‘monk-friar’ or ‘friar’⁴ (Chapter 10)

4. A commitment to participative governance (Chapter 11)

5. Worship that is participative, contemplative and sacramental (Chapter 6)

6. A commitment to non-dualism and non-tribalism (Chapter 8)

7. A commitment to post-Christendom and servant discipleship (Chapter 8)

8. Deeply Trinitarian in belief and practice (Chapter 3)

9. Experimental and creative in spirit and practice (Chapter 6)

10. Radical yet fully integrated into the local church (Chapter 8)

11. Fluid at the edges yet deeply centred (Chapter 11)

12. Flexible and relational by being small and missional (Chapter 10)

13. Offering ‘whole-of-life’, incarnational and experiential approaches to Christian formation (Chapter 9)

14. Balancing affirmation of contemporary society with the calling to be countercultural for the gospel (Chapter 7).

Notes

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from a letter to Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer, 1935.

2 Dave Tomlinson, 2009, Re-Enchanting Christianity: Faith in an Emerging Culture, Norwich: Canterbury Press, p. x.

3 http://pewforum.org/Age/Religion-Among-the-Millennials.aspx.

4 Examples of this variance are given in Chapter 10.

Part 1. Roots and Shoots

1. Our Story and God’s Story

I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, God can work through anyone.

St Francis of Assisi

Mark’s story

In the mid-nineties I took what I thought would be time out from my career as a theatrical lighting designer to train as a youth minister. This change of direction meant that I spent many an hour in Christian bookshops looking to fill my shelves with theology and ministry books. In these bookshops there always seemed to be a high-profile section full of what they called Celtic Christianity. I don’t think I ever saw more images of rainbows over beaches and ruined castles in a misty landscape! As well as the core subjects of my training course, we had occasional visiting speakers, one of whom came to talk to us about this ‘rediscovery’ of Celtic spirituality. As I sat and listened I got more and more annoyed with what I saw as a load of romantic nonsense. I could not see how this was at all relevant to me or the kids from South London I had been working with. It just looked like the latest middle-class Christian fad. Yes, the poetry was lovely and the imagery at times beautiful, but it felt so disconnected from what life must have been like at that time and from what life was like now. I thought the only way for me to put to bed my growing frustration was to find out the real story. So my wife and I took a flight to Dublin, booked a little B&B and spent a week travelling around the Republic of Ireland, following lines of High Crosses, visiting sites and learning what we could about the culture and people of these early monastic communities.

What we encountered as we travelled was something far wilder, more extreme and harder than the modern interpretation of Celtic Christianity. In a tiny visitor centre in County Cavan we learned about St Killian, who took the gospel to Bavaria and was murdered for his trouble when he challenged a duke in Würzburg about his marriage. In Glendalough we learned about St Kevin, who established a community in the hard countryside of County Wicklow and is reported to have stood naked up to his chest for days in the freezing waters of the lake praying. We learned about St Brendan, who is said to have set sail in a fishing boat on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean that would take seven years. These, and many other stories of wild and somewhat crazy men and women (for we also discovered that many of the communities included men and women, even families), seemed to have no connection with the soft, romantic version of Celtic Christianity peddled by some of today’s writers. Perhaps these people did have something to say to our present-day culture about commitment to God, about community and about mission after all.

One evening I was running a youth club in my training church, when a man riding a Vespa scooter pulled up in front of the adjacent house. I have always had a passion for Italian scooters, so I went to speak with him. He invited me to meet him and some friends of his at a local pub on the following Sunday. When I arrived I was the only one there, but after a while a tall, well-built skinhead walked through the door. He was dressed head to toe in black, apart from his red braces, and on the arm of his jacket were a large number of badges which gave away his political allegiances, including to the then leading far right group, the National Front. I tried to look the other way, but he spotted me and began to walk over. As he approached me he reached out his hand and said, ‘Hi Mark, glad you could make it.’ This was the man I’d met, now divested of his waterproofs and crash helmet. As others joined us I realized that his political views were not in a minority in the group! I had a decision to make; I could make my excuses and leave, or stay and be very uncomfortable. I decided to stay and for the next two years I spent time with the group, taking part in their joys – their weddings and the birth of their children – and their sorrows. For these people church simply wasn’t something they thought about and no matter what changes were made to what church looked like, they were not going to go.

After completing my training I went to minister in a large church in South London which was very successful and in many ways self-sufficient. We had a thriving group of young people, very creative youth worship events and great relationships with other youth groups. But there was little engagement with young people outside the church: to be honest we didn’t need that! In my second year in post I received a phone call from the vicar of the neighbouring parish, a smaller, more traditional church that had been the original village church. A young boy from the large school in the parish had committed suicide on the anniversary of his father’s own suicide. Young people were leaving notes in the church and the vicar wanted to ask me what I thought he should do. I suggested buying a big block of Post-it-Notes and a box of pens and leaving the church open. He did this and within a few days the altar was covered with messages from the young people, some words of anger, some of grief and some prayers. These young people had had no obvious context in which to express their feelings and their grief, but they needed to nevertheless.

These two stories are examples of how my thinking about mission and the Church has been shaped over the years. I began to look to those who sought to live out their faith in the midst of the communities of others. Those early British ‘peregrinate’, Celtic holy wanderers, came to inspire me more and more. In 2005 my wife and I moved to Telford to found safespace, a new Christian community. The aim was to explore what a Christian community might look like in a post-Church culture and to engage in mission among those for whom church had no relevance. Our vision was to identify ourselves as wanderers, and grow a community that did not want to increase by attracting others, but wanted always to ask how we live our lives as guests in the wider community and culture. It would be a community that helped all its members to live this way, by supporting, challenging and serving each other. New monasticism for safespace has never been a goal or an ending; for us it has been an ongoing attempt to engage with the immensity of a God who is ‘out there’, yet who is present within our culture. We desired to walk with God as individuals but more importantly as a community.

Ian’s story

In my book God Unknown, I talked about a growing awareness of God’s presence through art, feelings in the guts and through experience, or what I called the ‘trans-rational’ (knowing God through experience rather than knowing God just through rational facts about God). This was the beginning of a ten-year pilgrimage in experiencing and seeking after God the Trinity, not as some form of overly and stuffy academic or elitist head-knowledge, but a hunger to experience and understand the implications of the heart of the Christian faith. However, as I reflect now on how I ended up a new monastic Christian, I remember there were other important elements that began with a hunger for deep spiritual community and communion with God. Mysticism as a deep connection with God became a yearning.

At the age of 17, my only experience of Christianity was religious knowledge at comprehensive school, a local charismatic Baptist church and Songs of Praise on the TV. It was less than exhilarating. However, at the end of my first year of sixth-form college, I was invited by some friends to join them on a trip to the Taizé Community on the border between France and Switzerland. Not knowing what to expect, I found the whole experience full of awe, beauty, spirituality and deep humanity. I stayed for several months and the pattern of my day became a rhythm of work, prayer and chanted worship. The Brothers were very encouraging, and I found myself deeply enthralled by everything to do with the religious life. My cynicism about Christianity and negative stereotype had been challenged and replaced by a greater respect.

Twenty years later I became involved with the Moot Community, which was a fresh expression of church in Westminster. In a conversation with Steven