Anglican Community Project

Rod Dreher continues to write about the Benedict Option on a weekly basis, and has a book coming out on the subject. I think it is an approach (among many) that merits serious consideration. Utopian dreams aside, what would it take to create such a community? I think the best way to start something like this is to move to the same neighborhood, be that in a city, suburb, or smaller rural town. In my reality, that means staying in the same urban area that I live in, because that is where jobs are. Perhaps moving to the outskirts of major urban areas would make sense for this kind of approach. I am really just thinking out loud, but I would like to put some flesh on the bones of a theory. What does the Benedict Option (or whatever we want to call some kind of community organized to preserve our faith) look like in reality? How do things like the following work? Housing Jobs Church Relation to government Education Preservation of texts Dealing with people who lose faith in the...

One of my passions as a church planter is to think more deeply about how the church can better inhabit our communities. I want our church  to arise out of and serve our community here in Carol Stream. Community describes our life together within the church. That is internal community. Community is also where our church lives together with our neighbors . That is external community. And both matter. We must be intentional about both. Or else our mission will lose something vital--the real, embodied presence of Jesus Christ in our neighborhood. I am convinced that many suburban churches struggle or fail at evangelism because they are not that living presence of Jesus in their various suburban neighborhoods. Outreach then feels and looks artificial. It becomes programmatic, assigned to a few church leaders or passionate lay people. It is not the living reality of who a church is. And unbelievers instinctively feel it. But the context of suburban life is itself a huge obstacle to...

The focus of most of my thinking about intentional community within the Anglican tradition has two foci: the academy and the suburbs.  I focus on the academy because until just this summer, my professional home has been in the academy for my entire adult life.  And while I have enjoyed urban living briefly in stints in my 20's and early 30's, I was raised in the suburbs, have lived in the suburbs most of my life and am living here now.  So I guess that makes me a suburbanite. Part of my vision for my new ministry venture , Emmaus Road Anglican Fellowship , is to turn the suburban culture on its head.  There are things we do every day in the suburbs that we could do better if we did them communally.  So I thought I would stop and run off a quick blog post before I undertake a great suburban ritual that fits that bill perfectly--namely, mowing my lawn.  A suburban church could turn the suburban culture on its head if it fostered such community that its ...

From Rod Dreher: A Secularist Sees The Benedict Option : I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but a few years ago, in my book “Crunchy Cons,” I suggested that traditionalists should consider what I called “the Benedict Option” — living in variations of monastic communities for the sake of preserving certain countercultural values in an increasingly dark age. The name comes from the Benedictine monks of Western Europe, whose monasteries were oases of faith, order, and light during the Dark Ages, and eventually helped midwife the rebirth of civilization. Cultural historian Morris Berman thinks this might be necessary. From a review of his new book “Why America Failed” ; the reviewer is George Scialabba: As a former medievalist, Berman finds contemporary parallels to the fall of Rome compelling. By the end of the empire, he points out, economic inequality was drastic and increasing, the legitimacy and efficacy of the state was waning, popular culture was debased, civic virtue among eli...

Rod Dreher has published several posts on the Benedict Option lately, which I will link here for future reference: Tomorrow’s Christianity Today : Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove gets all Benedict Option-y: By the end of the fifth century, when a middle-class, young Italian named Benedict left his home in Nursia to go to school in Rome, the Empire that had been centered there was in total disarray. The church whose faith had become the official religion of that Empire was in turmoil. It was in every way a time of transition. In short, it was a moment not unlike our own. Everyone knew that a new future was being born, but no one was sure just what it would look like. In a moment of clarity, Benedict saw that the system of education that had been designed to prepare him for a world that was passing away could only lead to a dead end. While it could teach him what had worked in the past, the system did not have the resources to present a way forward. A different kind of school was needed. ...

This interview has a lot of affinities with a Benedict Option future for the Church. A sample: In your book, you not only provide a biblical and theological discussion of the concept of place, but do so in a way that addresses the crisis of place in contemporary culture. What's the nature of the crisis ? What we are experiencing in our world is a wide sense of displacement, which does not lead to human flourishing. Outside Christian circles, the literature on the crisis of place is huge, but within Christianity, it's only starting to get attention. Contemporary life roots against this deep implacement through the speed of culture, technology, the automobile, and the state of economics. The middle class is always on the go  through  places and are not generally deeply rooted in a particular place. When I travel I have opportunities to see new places, but many are all the same corporate chain stores that we have here in Hamilton. Everything is monochrome. All the houses l...

Theoretical words : Eric Gregory offers this wise counsel: “Words do not work the same way in normative theorizing as they do in historical inquiry. It is enough that ‘Donatist,’ ‘Pelagian,’ and “Manichean’ exist as live options in moral, political, and religious discourse – even if Augustine or later storytellers invented them in order to coordinate doctrine with their experience of God in Christian faith and practice.  These words, and the narrative scripts they signify, provide broad classifications for a range of commitments.” Historical study has an important role in helping “dislodge settled grooves of thought and make us skeptical of the stories we tell.  They can show the normative consequences of how we construct intellectual histories. They can also challenge us with an Augustine we thought we already knew by helping us understand the world behind the texts.”  But also those uses don’t rob terms like “Stoic,” “Platonic” or “Augustinian” of their conceptual usefulness, especia...

The article is here . As Pope Benedict XVI has said about believing Catholics in secularized Europe: “I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.” So it must be with us crunchy cons. What else is there?

My friend Scott passed along this article to me. The conclusion of the article says: At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre remarks that the world is waiting not for Godot but for a new St. Benedict. When Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict upon his election to the papacy, an important motive may well have been to inspire a renewal of the civilizing work of Benedictine monasteries amidst societies in cultural decline during the anarchy of the Dark Ages of the first millennium. Perhaps a new “Benedictine moment” is already at work during our current era of cultural decline, carried out quietly and modestly by dozens of small liberal arts colleges, many of them Catholic or Protestant, by private preparatory schools and high schools, by institutes and foundations dedicated to nurturing the Western tradition, and by home-schooling parents and associations. The monks inspired by St. Benedict withdrew from a corrupt, chaotic world to do their work of restoration; the ...

. . .from Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author and activist in the 'new monasticism' movement: Christian Community w/Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove from The Work Of The People on Vimeo .

Over at the Touchstone blog, Anthony Esolen writes about the history of the Church in preserving our cultural past. He writes: When I was in Sweden with my daughter this summer, we saw some churches with plaster ceilings that were entirely white.  But now and then we'd see a shadow beneath the white, and that made me wonder if there hadn't been paintings underneath, whitewashed over.  My guess was correct.  In the Enlightenment, that period of self-satisfied bigotry, the constriction of the arts, and the consigning of centuries of human learning to the flames, the smart people of the day commissioned the destruction of works of folk art that were learned, intricate, and quite beautiful.  It is hardly an isolated instance of the phenomenon of culture-destroying among deistic or antiecclesiastical elites.  Francis Bacon consigned Aristotle to irrelevance, but it is much to be doubted whether he actually read such Renaissance Thomists as Suarez and Banez, much le...

What should be different about community life in an Anglican parish vs. in any other strand of Christendom? Off the top of my head, it seems that our office of prayer provides the opportunity for small groups of people to pray in a church building or outside it in an equally structured manner. The lectionary means that we can theoretically be reading in harmony with large segments of the Church at the same pace and thus think about some of the same topics together. But these elements can be duplicated in Lutheran settings, Catholic settings, and a host of other traditions, so it is not uniquely Anglican. But perhaps that is a good thing. While I see a revived Anglicanism as the best hope for Protestantism in America and elsewhere, it is not the One True Church (copyright). So my attempts at thinking through an ideal Anglican community do not have to uniquely apply to Anglicanism, but should be able to be duplicated in many communions.

Richard Fletcher [ The Barbarian Conversion ] notes that ancient Christendom was not monolithic: In terms of custom and practice there were many churches in sixth- and seventh-century Europe, not One Church. Christendom was many-mansioned. Fletcher talks about the motif of exile in the monastic expansion. Christians, following the writing of Augustine, saw themselves as exiles and pilgrims and then the monastics took this exile literally. They often left their homeland and people to found monastic missions amongst others. Fletcher says: Pilgrimage, in the sense of ascetic renunciation of homeland and kinsfolk, is of special importance in our understanding of the phenomenon of conversion in the early Middle Ages. Pilgrimage merged insensibly into mission. The monasteries that were founded by the exiled holy men had something of the character of mission stations. It was not that they were established primarily among pagans; indeed, they could not have been, dependent as they were on we...

One of the puzzling facets of the Christian life as I live it and see it lived is the lack of joy that we have. It seems to me that many Americans are living lives of quiet desperation, under layers of regret, hopelessness, frustration and outright depression. This applies to the unsaved as well as the saved, but in our case it is puzzling because of what Jesus has told us. Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” I imagine that the joy of Jesus is of such an infinite magnitude that it would be wonderful to experience. Furthermore, God sternly rebuked Israel for not serving him with joy. He said, “Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lacking everything.” That seems to summarize our American condition succinctly - an abu...

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...