Anglican Community Project

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...