Anglican Community Project

In two previous posts on this blog, I have written about an idea for an Anglican educational community, what I now call an "Anglican Studies House." I can report some progress on that front, and would like to issue a call, as well. Progress: I have now shared this idea with several leaders in the ACNA (and to a lesser extent, the Episcopal church), and it has received enthusiastic support. Along the way, I have also learned of at least one other such initiative already under way. I am working to organize people locally so that we might begin planting one in the Chicagoland area sometime in the next year or so. In these conversations, I have sensed a deeply felt need to 'do education' differently, in a way that forms young people in the Anglican ethos with a uniquely Christian worldview, to the glory of Christ and the advancement of His kingdom. Many have genuinely agreed with my general assessment that Anglicans (in north America at least) have done a poor job a...

     I have been reading and enjoying A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. The novel outlines a grim future where a global nuclear holocaust has sent man back to primitive times and an order of Catholic monks preserve any knowledge of our age that they can get their hands on. They laboriously copy and re-copy blueprints, scraps of textbooks and so on.      The book describes how in the wake of the nuclear war, the people who survived turned on anyone of learning and killed them because they blamed the intellectuals for creating nuclear weapons and allowing or causing the massive death and suffering across the globe. In their fury the mobs kill anyone with knowledge and burn every book they can get their hands on. Vast stores of learning are wiped out of existence by these mobs. Add to this the nuclear war which has turned cities into lakes of glass and you have almost erased our civilization overnight.      Reading ...

The hunger is there, see this post: New Towns

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 ...

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...

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...

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 charac...

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.

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.