Rumblings of the Benedict Option?

The hunger is there, see this post:

New Towns

The Anglican Benedict Option

I’ve written a bit about creating an Anglican community by like-minded Anglicans moving to the same location. Steve has put down some great thoughts about what educational praxis could look like in an Anglican setting. I’d like to see all of this come together in an Anglican Benedict Option - fleeing the collapsing modern state and “preserving the remnants of Christian and classical virtues and laying the groundwork for the rebirth of a new civilization.” If you have any interest in really doing this and not just thinking about it, please contact me!

It seems to me that this would require some agricultural know-how. Working the land might be necessary in a small town with no big job-provider around. I am presuming that the internet and modern communication will persist, but that the permanent things will be left behind by a reckless culture. So I speculate on other trades that could provide income in a situation where a new community attempts to carve out a place and survive on the outskirts of the empire. I wonder if typography in the form of a type foundry could work in a small town? Fonts are distributed globally so perhaps that is a flexible enough craft to be performed from anywhere. Book binding is a niche market that would seem logical for the people of the book. Publishing in general would be desirable, and creating lasting editions of works like the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, and the Church Fathers would be essential to a Benedict option for Anglicans. Depending on proximity to the ocean or lakes, some type of boat building / repair might be profitable. Establishing a school and a university would seem to be necessary to perpetuate learning in the face of global ignorance and the bankrupt university system of the United States.

We can cultivate a different way of life in the face of the moral miasma that is the air we breathe. Formed by the cycle of the Church year and daily prayer, devoted to alms giving and works of mercy, fearless in proclaiming the Gospel and practicing the liturgy that has undergird the Church since her earliest days, we can begin again.

Whither Religious Communities?

Two recent stories in the Church Times lament the demise of religious (monastic) communities in the U.K., and especially within the Church of England.

The religious life within Anglicanism has never enjoyed the level of support found in Roman Catholicism. As a church born of the Reformation, religious communities were suppressed within the Church of England. They were, however, revived thanks to the Oxford Movement of the 19th century. Even some seminaries (like the one I attend) were inspired to follow the daily rhythm of Benedictine Rule.

Today, though, such communities are--again--on the decline. The stories in Church Times describe the paradox that ours is an age that enjoys anew contemplative forms of spirituality but yet membership in religious orders is at an all time low, and many communities as a whole are dying a silent death. The problem seems to be commitment. The idea of committing oneself, lifelong, to the rigors of monastic oaths--particularly, celibacy--is a cross too heavy to bear.

How might we address the problem (if you, like me, agree with the authors that this is genuinely a problem)? The second story raises this fascinating proposal:

Sometimes I wish we had a kind of monastic National Service, akin to the tradition of temporary monasticism found in some Buddhist countries. This is not as implausible as it might seem. The Melanesian Brothers and Sisters, the Anglican religious order in the Solomon Islands, take vows for five years at a time. Unlike most religious communities in the UK, the order is youthful, vibrant, and growing.

The predictable objection to the idea of temporary vows in the context of traditional monastic communities is that it would undermine the principle of stability, which is the very basis of their life. I wonder. Presumably among those who signed up for a limited term, there would be some who would stay longer, per­haps even for life — as is the case with the Melanesian Brothers.

It is possible that by removing the forbidding notion of a life-sentence, the prospect of being a monk, a friar, or a nun would seem a good deal more feasible to people who might like to explore the possibility, but felt unable to make a life-long commitment at the outset.

I like this idea a lot. In fact, it could easily become a feature of other kinds of faith-based communities--non-celibate intentional communities, for instance--where Christian brothers and sisters, perhaps even families too, could enter into a deeper form of community for a certain stage of one's life. Perhaps it is during one's graduate education; or during an transition stage, where one career path is opening onto another; or during an interim phase, where one lacks a clear path ahead and needs time for prayer and reflection. A family who finds itself homeless might join such a community as the parents train for new careers. For me, personally, the idea that I could have taken a 3- or 5-year vow during my graduate education, for instance, would have held genuine appeal. I needed the daily discipline of prayer and study, and doing so within a community of brothers in Christ could have given my education an entirely deeper spiritual dimension.

On a grander scale, my suspicion is that the luster of the modern world is beginning to wear off in the West. More and more, people sense that consumerism is vapid. The economy itself is teaching us that the pursuit of wealth is a vain delusion. Happy-go-lucky relativism is a luxury we can ill afford in a world full of 9/11s, Darfurs and AIDs pandemics. What has not faded yet, however, is a whole other panoply of romantic delusions. They live on. To whit: that we can live life on our own terms; that sexual experimentation is a right everyone ought to invoke as soon and as often as possible; and that commitment is only bondage, not genuine freedom.

Religious communities clearly are not immune from these cultural tides. But while the modern world dies in fits and starts, it seems to me that the things of enduring value will persist, even if they must--for a time--adapt. Religious communities are well poised to help us negotiate these turbulent times, and serve as a beacon amidst the storm. I hope that they will not die but will find a way to adapt and renew their vision and mission. For their sake. For ours. And ultimately, for our Lord's.

The Smaller, the Better

I can't find the quote right off, but I believe it is in his book The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction where Eugene Peterson states that a local church really ought not to be greater in size than about 200 people, give or take a few. The reason is quite simple. A pastor cannot get to know by name more people than that and continue to take an active, praying and listening role in each of their lives. Pastors must fundamentally be people of prayer and listening. Pastors ought not to be distant figures up on some stage, but incarnate amongst their people a prayerful, listening form of ministry.

Now, megachurch-type ministries have sought to honor this principle in their own way by breaking the big church up into smaller units, sometimes quite intentionally calling them separate "congregations." But I think the economy of scale presupposed by the church as a whole may just miss the point and perhaps undermine the concept from the start. Big churches accustom people to, train their sensibilities in anonymity. What's more, when they fight anonymity, they generally do so by allowing people to 'shop for' their own 'niche,' for their own congregation or social grouping among more people like themselves (e.g., the 20s, young professionals, seniors, etc.). In a sense, they have you go deeper into your individuality, not transcend it. If you are never really forced to pray for or listen to someone outside your social group--which you can easily avoid in a megachurch--then you are far removed, I believe, from growing in the love of neighbor. As such, megachurches can exacerbate inter-generational or social group differences and lose any sense of cohesion.

That's the point of Peterson's model. It actively seeks to resist anonymity throughout an entire church not just throughout one's self-chosen small group or the like. Church should challenge us to love our neighbor right next to us, whether they are like us or not, by having that neighbor right there next to us at each point along the way.

I am deeply moved by Peterson's vision, to the point where it has opened my eyes to a whole new sense of what church ministry possibly could be. (I sense that part of why his vision inspires me so much is that I see such strong elements of this embodied in our very own pastoral team. I've seen it work, and it is good.)

As a result, I now believe firmly that any church which approaches, roughly, 200 active attendees ought to raise up a core group of 30 to 50 to plant a new church. If not before!

For me, the key now is not size, but dynamism. You want a church where intimate relationships can develop, and one-on-one discipleship is a living reality. You want that church to reach out well to folks in the community with whatever gifts the parishioners bring to the table. Small is better in this sense because it remains personable, not threatening and overwhelming as some shopping-mall sized megachurches probably are to the unchurched. We need to be busy in the relationship business, and you can only do that when you have a church where everyone can realistically get to know everyone.

What's more, it's gotten me thinking that the most logical way that you keep a church congregation small but dynamic is to have it plugged into a local community. Here I want to revive the old historic 'parish model' of doing church, where a church is at the center of a local community--the living, breathing hub of spiritual and social life. In such a model, the priest is a pastor not just to those on the inside but, in a sense, also to even the non-churched person who lives down the block. A pastor should know all the people in the surrounding community by name. They should know who could pray for them, if they want, where to find pastoral help, if they need it. And so the small, local congregation should end up being the hub for everything from after school tutoring and summer programs for kids to feeding the hungry, providing food for shut-ins and the sick or hosting block parties. To be sure, the church is not just a dispenser of social services (which is what I fear some socially active Roman Catholic parishes end up becoming). Rather, the Gospel is preached with power, and lived out within a local community. It ought to be an attractive way of doing church, with a genuine appeal to those who do not know Christ (yet) because the Body of Christ incarnates Him and makes Him real in the community.

On this model, local parishes should not be about recruiting members from outside of a given radius but constantly focused on getting to know and then serving everyone within their own. If enough people from another local community start attending--as they are certainly welcome to do--then they ought to begin thinking about how they are going to plant a similar church in their own neighborhood. And so on. Church growth, then, is a process of planting small but dynamic congregations who know their communities and serve them with the hands and feet of Christ.

My sense is that this model would work not only in densely populated urban areas, but especially well in the suburbs, where we could begin seeing subdivisions as parishes with their own church and the like. Rural areas may cover relatively larger swaths of land, but that is well-known terrain for such people. They are used to 'driving into town.' All is means is that the pastor must visit homes much more--and be the kind of person whose presence is always welcome.

Being a welcoming presence: that, to my mind, is the key. Everything else follows from it. For example, in contemporary American suburbs there could easily be zoning issues if a parish wanted to build a building (which would serve as a visible sign and physical meeting place for the community). But I would like to insist that before there is ever talk of a building, there must be genuine worship and service flowing out of the homes of parishioners to that community. If the church is a welcoming presence, it will likely be welcomed by her neighbors. Welcome enough, I would hope, to where the people of that community might actually desire the parish to build a facility, where they might see the value of having one in their midst--even if they themselves never intend to darken the door for worship. If church is built on relationship first--the core of Peterson's model for pastoral ministry--then everything else, including a meeting space, etc., will follow on its own.

In general, Christians need to stop viewing church as an organization whose members meet to worship and engage in all sorts of 'Christian activities.' Rather, church is the relationship we have amongst ourselves and to the world. To be the church, rather than to have one--that is the heart of the matter.

A Dying Age

As Americans, we've lived with the idea of our own permanence for so long that we can't imagine a post-American world. I think that the entire 20th century was almost an American eschaton. Our way of life triumphed and seemed forever stable. How could we ever descend into anarchy when Leave it to Beaver re-runs are on every day?

When day to day life involves trips to the grocery store, watching TV and living in ever-expanding suburbs, you don't see it ending. Perhaps we will have another century of more of this, but it seems to me that the end of our order is in sight. The old agrarian republic is long since dead, the Constitution is a meaningless document and we live in a centralized empire that bears only skin-deep resemblance to the Republic or the Colonies. But what does it look like when an empire really dies?

Charles Norris Cochrane provides some idea in his book "Christianity and Classical Culture." He writes:

The period following Theodosius may be characterized in general as one of twilight government by twilight men, whose puny and distracted efforts proved utterly inadequate to forfend the approaching doom. That doom was signalized in the destruction of cities, the devastation of the countryside, and the disruption of communications. Already in 396, the first year of Arcadius and Honorius, the situation, as portrayed by a contemporary observer, was little better than hopeless.

"The mind shudders," declares St. Jerome, "to contemplate the ruin of our time. For the last twenty years, the blood of Romans has drenched the lands between Constantinople and the Julian Alps, where innumerable and ferocious tribes spread devastation and death...The bodies of the free and noble, of matrons and virgins have become the prey of lust. Bishops are imprisoned; churches plundered; horses have been stabled at the altars of Christ; the bones of martyrs flung out of their coffins...Everywhere grief, everywhere lamentation, everywhere the shadow of death!"

Cochrane outlines how buildings fell into ruin due to no money being available to repair them. Taxes and duties became so onerous that people stopped paying them and fled into the barbarian regions. Thieves multiplied, roads became unsafe, and foreigners poured over the borders of the Empire and gave feigned allegiance to Rome while remaining citizens of their tribe. The laws were unenforceable, the armies weak. Centralized authority broke down everywhere and the Medieval Age began.

So where are we at on that kind of timeline? It is of course impossible to know the future. Our military is still in the field, our systems of communication are intact, and our imperial center is still able to enforce the law. We do appear bankrupt on every level, much of our recent architecture and building has been ephemeral rather than durable, so our cities and suburbs will fall into ruins unless continuously updated. We lack any unifying or central purpose of life, we have no clue what we are here for or what we are trying to accomplish. Our institutions are generally filled with people who hate our own history and way of life. We have experienced massive waves of illegal immigration which will forever alter what this nation thinks and how it is governed. We are not yet in total disintegration, but you can now see how it could happen.

I believe we will recover from the present economic turmoil, perhaps quickly. But the bigger picture is one of a balkanized and incoherent nation which is living on the fumes of past glory. I think Christians are being called to a new Benedict moment - a withdrawal to a new monasticism. Not monasticism of the celibate, but of the married - a Protestant monasticism if you will. Families may need to relocate to small communities where we can preserve the heritage of the past and put down roots which will endure in the coming ages. Because on the other side of the Roman collapse came Christendom, led by a Church that spanned nations and tribal boundaries. Our nation may become three nations, or ten, all spanning this continent. The old configuration may collapse of exhaustion and debt. But the Church will endure, God's Word will stand forever and communities that love the permanent things can shape a future age.

Clear Creek

Clear Creek is a Catholic community that is living the Benedict option. There is a monastery with a growing community of lay people around it. While I would suggest a different configuration, largely based on Protestant ecclessiology, this is a good model for us to consider.

Now more than ever

We need community. The need is everywhere present and easy to see. Much of life in the Church is shallow and meaningless. We are not bearing each other's burdens. We are not discipling, we are not evangelizing, we do not live near each other, we do not care for the neighborhoods we live in. Let's make 2009 a year where we begin to reverse these trends and carve out an Anglican response to this sickness.