Book Review
New monasticism seeks to enhance commitment
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, The Layman, December 23, 2009
MINNEAPOLIS – The idea of Christian community gets lip service on Sunday mornings, but after the benedictions and the donuts, Jesus’ followers disperse. Families live under separate roofs. They relocate when job offers come along. And they’d never even think to pool their incomes.
For a small but growing segment of American Christianity, this impression of the status quo leaves a hungry feeling. They crave a deeper commitment to one another and to practices held in common. So they’ve launched a variety of new communities to live more faithfully in spite of the individualistic, consumerist society that surrounds them.
The movement, known as New Monasticism, has spawned more than 40 new communities in the United States over the past five years, according to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author of New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church – An Insider’s Perspective (Brazos Press, 2008). They’re located in blighted urban neighborhoods as well as isolated rural areas. Members, as married couples and as celibate singles, sometimes dwell together in one or two buildings. Sometimes all families live in separate homes but still adhere to shared disciplines. And while members represent the gamut of Christian backgrounds, Wilson-Hartgrove says, most of the recent influx has been among young evangelicals.
“The broad evangelical tradition is where a lot of the new energy is coming from,” Wilson-Hartgrove says. “It’s attracting people who feel that Jesus really offered something in terms of a way of life, but they’re not getting that in the churches that they’ve been a part of.”
The young evangelicals are people like Brian and Tonya Toutge of Minneapolis. For years, they attended a megachurch with top-notch music and preaching. But something was missing, Brian says. They weren’t committed to each other in the way that they were, say, back at the Lutheran church of his youth in a Minnesota farming community.
“I wanted to find more of that connection, a sense of Christian community that doesn’t end on Sunday but is sustained through the whole week,” Brian says.
Now the Toutges have commitment in spades through Abbey Way Covenant Church in Minneapolis. All 30 adult members and their 30 or so children spend 3.5 hours together each Sunday with a leisurely potluck meal and a Communion service. Twice a month, they attend a chapter house, where several families vulnerably share life stories and listen for a collective calling from above. Everyone takes part on a monthly basis in spiritual direction, which involves letting others suggest how God might be moving (or not moving) in one’s life. And every day each member prays the hours (fixed prayers for appointed times) at morning, noon and evening.
Shared practices and intentional rhythms, Abbey Way members say, give shape to their lives – much as they do for cloistered monks and nuns. The similarities are sometimes overt. Abbey Way people ring deep, sonorous bells to mark transitions, such as when it’s time to move into extended silence during spiritual direction. They share food as a sign of hospitality just about every time a few members get together. And the structure seems to foster habits of working together, even beyond what’s expected of each participant. A few members came together this year, for instance, to repair an older church member’s ceiling or to paint each other’s houses.
“There were weekends when we didn’t want to go paint [another couple’s] house, when we had other things we wanted to do, but we went anyway,” says Heather Dart. “Even though it took longer this way, it was easier than it would have been to paint our house by ourselves because we [two families] were together.”
Expressions of new monasticism vary substantially from place to place. In San Francisco, members of Church of the Sojourners abide by a fixed ceiling for discretionary spending each month ($275). In the tough Walltown neighborhood of Durham, N.C., members of Rutba House pool their funds and operate a car co-op, which allows poor folks in the neighborhood to borrow a vehicle if and when they need wheels. Jesus People USA in Chicago operates a roofing business that supports homeless shelters as well as community members’ living allowances.
Amidst the diversity, new monastics by and large adhere to a set of 12 core principles. In pursuing a monastic vision for laypeople, Wilson-Hartgrove notes, new monastics aren’t entirely new. He points in New Monasticism to the German community of Bruderhof, which responded to the rise of the Third Reich by gathering to live together as a collective witness to Christ’s love. Of the approximately 80 new monastic communities in the United States, he says, at least 15 are more than a decade old. Some, such as Koinonia Farm in Americus, Ga., and Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston and Chicago, Ill., date as far back as the 1940s and 50s. Another 20 or so new monastic communities are scattered across the globe in Africa, Australia and Europe among other places.
New monastics aren’t trying to replace local congregations, says Wilson-Hartgrove, who’s a co-founder and member of Rutba House.
On the contrary, members are usually active participants in one or more area churches. They see their life together in community somewhat as a continuation of what they do on Sunday.
“We felt like we needed something more intentional” than just going to church once or twice a week, Wilson-Hartgrove says. “It’s a lot like being in AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. There’s nothing special about us, but we felt we needed a little more help to walk in the way of Jesus, and so we’ve joined together with other people who confess that need and are disciplined about trying to follow in this way together.”