New Monasticism as Fresh Expressions of Church
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New Monasticism as Fresh Expressions of Church - Canterbury Press
New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of Church
Also in this series
Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition
Edited by Steven Croft and Ian Mobsby
ANCIENT FAITH, FUTURE MISSION
New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of Church
Edited by
Graham Cray,
Ian Mobsby
and
Aaron Kennedy
Canterbury%20logo.gifCopyright information
© The Editors and Contributors 2010
Published in 2010 by Canterbury Press
Editorial office
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London, EC1A 9PN, UK
Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd (a registered charity)
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www.scm-canterburypress.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
The Editors and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 1 84825 044 4
Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Contents
List of Contributors
1. Why is New Monasticism Important to Fresh Expressions?
Bishop Graham Cray
2. The Importance of New Monasticism as a Model for Building Ecclesial Communities out of Contextual Mission
Ian Mobsby
3. Marks of New Monasticism
Shane Claiborne
4. Cave, Refectory, Road: The Monastic Life Shaping Community and Mission
Ian Adams
5. New Monasticism, Mission and Young People
Andy Freeman
6. New Monasticism and Engagement with Spiritual Seekers
Mark Berry
7. Creating Communities of Celebration, Sustainability and Subversion
Tom Sine
8. The Order of Mission: Being a Sent People
Diane Kershaw
9. Pilgrimage: A School of Transformation
Pete Askew
10. Connected Solitude: Re-Imagining the Skete
Philip D. Roderick
11. Celtic Monastic Inheritance and New Monasticism
Ray Simpson
12. A Rhythm of Life: Critical Reflections
Tessa Holland
13. Reflections on New Monasticism
Abbot Stuart Burns
14. Afterword: Is God Shaping a New Monasticism?
List of Contributors
Ian Adams is a writer, mentor and artist working in the areas of spirituality, culture and community. A popular Greenbelt festival speaker, he is author of the daily Morning Bell call to prayer in the monastic tradition. He’s an Anglican priest, and was co-founder and abbot of the experimental mayBe community in Oxford. Ian is a director of Stillpoint, a project seeking to nurture the spiritual practices of the Christian contemplative and mystical traditions through engaging with other faith traditions and the arts. He is a partner in the see:change project which aims to encourage personal and community development. Ian is an associate missioner with Fresh Expressions, and is the facilitator of the CMS Small Missional Communities project. For more information visit www.ianadams.info
Pete Askew was ordained in 2002 after training at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Prior to this he worked as a business manager for an engineering company. Since ordination Pete has been involved in church planting and was licensed as a pioneer minister in September 2006 to develop a network of youth cells across the Archdeaconry of Richmond, in the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds. In 2008 he was licensed as diocesan advisor for Fresh Expressions in the same diocese, and has co-led the MSM course for the Yorkshire region. For the last 12 years Pete has been part of the Northumbria Community and in October 2009 he was appointed as an overseer of the Community and now works full-time based at the Mother House in Northumberland.
Mark Berry is a lay pioneer minister who after a number of years exploring community with and for young people on the fringes of church found himself birthing a new community called safespace in Telford, Shropshire. Safespace seeks to be a community of followers who are committed to mission and holistic Christian spirituality. Mark is an accomplished public speaker, and lectures widely on mission, evangelism and youth culture. Mark has made meditation videos and music for television, published a book of liturgy and has regularly appeared in the local and national media.
Abbot Stuart Burns OSB is the abbot of the Benedictine community of monks and nuns who have just built a new ‘sustainable’ monastery known as Mucknell Abbey, near Worcester. Abbot Stuart is a member of the Church of England’s Advisory Council which links the House of Bishops with the religious communities, and along with two others has a special responsibility to develop the Council’s relations with the new monastic communities.
Bishop Graham Cray was appointed Archbishops’ missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team on 1 May 2009. He is married to Jackie and they have two daughters, Catherine and Sarah. He was consecrated in 2001 and became the Bishop of Maidstone and the Bishop for Mission in the Diocese of Canterbury where he remained for eight years. Before becoming a bishop he was principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, a Church of England theological college; before this he served for 14 years as vicar of St Michael le Belfrey, York, where he worked with and then succeeded Canon David Watson. He chaired the working party that wrote the Mission Shaped Church report on church planting and fresh expressions of church. Graham is currently chairman of the Soul Survivor Trust.
Shane Claiborne is one of the founding members of a new monastic community called The Simple Way in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is also a prominent activist for non-violence and service to the poor. His focus on ministry to the poor has been compared to Mother Teresa with whom he worked for ten weeks in Calcutta. Shane has written and contributed to a growing library of books on the issues of new monasticism, non-violent protest and ministry to the poor. His book The Irresistible Revolution (Zondervan 2006) has become a core text for new monasticism around the world. Shane has given talks at various academic institutions and denominational gatherings, festivals and conferences around the globe. For more information visit: thesimpleway.org/shane
Andy Freeman is 39 years old, married to Karen, has five kids and lives in Reading. For the last ten years he has pioneered and developed 24-7 Prayer Boiler Room communities in Reading, around the UK and globally. Boiler Rooms operate around prayer and practice – forms of community based on following a simple monastic rule. Andy co-authored Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing in 2006. He is now training to be an ordained pioneer minister and seeks to continue the development of the Boiler Room fresh expression in Reading, which is called Reconcile. Andy blogs at http://www.isthisbiblical.com/
Tessa Holland is a priest with general license in the Diocese of Chichester, living as a contemplative-in-action in the midst of the muddle and joy of marriage and family life. She is a companion on the way with the community of Contemplative Fire (www.contemplativefire.org) and is a pioneering facilitator accompanying fellow companions both regionally and across the community. She also organizes local Contemplative Fire Gathering and Still Waters events. Complementary to this ministry is her work as a regional chaplain for the Quiet Garden Movement (www.quietgarden.co.uk), and as a spiritual director. Her work is essentially one of prayer, hospitality and accompaniment, resourced by times of silence, solitude and creativity with a commitment to the Contemplative Fire rhythm of life of contemplative, creative and compassionate praxis.
Diane Kershaw has been a member of The Order of Mission (TOM) since 2003 when it was inaugurated in Sheffield by the Archbishop of York, David Hope. She is one of the guardians of TOM and is currently employed to support the oversight of this dispersed community of missional people, particularly guiding the process of people joining TOM and moving from temporary to permanent vows. Diane is based at and is part of the leadership of St Thomas’ Church in Sheffield – the birthplace of TOM. Diane is working out her own missional leadership through leading a small mission community based in an urban estate in the city, overseeing discipleship, outreach and gatherings on the estate. Diane is in training for ordination through both the Anglican Church and The Order of Mission.
Ian Mobsby is an Anglican ordained missioner and a founding member of the Moot Community (www.moot.uk.net), a new monastic, emerging and fresh expression of church in the City and Diocese of London. Ian is an associate missioner of the Fresh Expressions team and a member of the Church of England’s College of Evangelists. Ian has lectured widely around the world, and has authored and edited a number of books, including Emerging and Fresh Expressions of Church, The Becoming of G-d and Ancient Faith Future Mission: Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Traditions. He is currently completing a book on new monasticism for Paraclete Press entitled The New Monastic Friars. Before being ordained, Ian was an occupational therapist working in the specialities of neuro-rehabilitation and community mental health. Ian blogs at www.mootblog.net and www.ianmobsby.net
Born in Cardiff, Philip Roderick has been a student at the universities of Swansea and Aberystwyth and a lecturer in theology in Bangor. After an extensive spiritual search in the late 60s and early 70s, Philip spent a year at a Russian Orthodox hermitage in the UK. This prepared the way for the launch of the Quiet Garden Movement (www.quietgarden.co.uk) and Contemplative Fire (www.contemplativefire.org). Contemplative Fire has a contemplative–apostolic charism. Its new monastic explorations focus upon the balance and movement between inreach and outreach, contemplation and intercession, withdrawal and creativity. For the majority of the 80 companions in this dispersed ‘community of Christ at the edge’, this dynamic of being, knowing and doing is a generative resource and cornerstone. Philip is now working as the spirituality advisor to the Bishop of Sheffield.
Some years after his studies at London University and St John’s College Nottingham, Ray Simpson planted a fresh expression of church at Bowthorpe, Norwich. In 1994 he and others founded the dispersed international Community of Aidan and Hilda, which calls people to live a way of life, accompanied by a soul friend, which includes their making a life-giving personal Rule. Ray is the international guardian of CA&H, and now lives on Lindisfarne, near to the Community’s Celtic Christian Studies library, office and Open Gate Retreat House. Church leaders engaging with new monasticism come to the Open Gate for help and encouragement. His latest book, High Street Monasteries: fresh expressions of committed Christianity, surveys five waves of new monasticism and sets out a way in which ‘villages of God’ can emerge in our cities.
Tom Sine is a speaker and author who seeks to enable individuals, congregations and communities to re-imagine new ways of making a difference in our uncertain future. Tom lectures for Fuller Theological Seminary and other institutions. He and his wife Christine describe themselves as Anabaptist Anglicans. They are co-founders of Mustard Seeds Associates (www.msainfo.org), and part of a small urban monastic community called the Mustard Seed House, in Seattle. They are also in the process of founding a rural new monastic eco-village on 40 acres on an island north of Seattle. Tom has written a number of books that includes The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time (Paternoster & IVP, 2008).
1
Why is New Monasticism Important to Fresh Expressions?
+Graham Cray
Introduction
Significant changes in culture create both difficulties and opportunities for the Church. Difficulties because historic approaches to ministry find themselves in alien territory and can easily become either distanced and out of touch, or compromised and ineffective, failing to read the new context properly. Opportunities because here is a new context in which the gospel can be proclaimed afresh, Church can take appropriate shape, and Christ can be embodied again. Opportunities like these frequently result in new combinations of the ancient and the innovative, as the Church draws on its ancient heritage together with the Holy Spirit’s anticipations of the future. It is in this context that I understand the emergence of ‘new monasticism’.
Personal history
I come to this subject with a personal history. Some of my most formative years were at St Michael le Belfrey in York, where, for some years, my wife and I lived as one of a number of extended households, inspired by developments at the Church of the Redeemer, Houston.¹ Our years at St Michael’s, and the household experience in particular, convinced me that while always personal (God has no grandchildren, as David du Plessis used to say), Christian faith is essentially corporate rather than individual.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. (1 Cor. 12.12f.)
It is not that Christians ought to be interdependent with one another. We really are interdependent with one another, for better or worse! In Paul’s letters alone the expression ‘one another’ comes 34 times. The key question as culture changes is, what form should the ‘one another’ life take today?
Some of the extended households in York needed agreed patterns of life and some outside help from a ‘visitor’. When a Roman Catholic friend saw the resulting guidelines he pointed out that it could all be found in the Rule of Benedict! St Michael’s took part for some years in a Community of Communities meeting (later renamed Circle of Fellowships). Recent classics on community living, such as Bonhoeffer’s Life Together and Community and Growth by Jean Vanier, were profoundly helpful. The call to live as a household was for a season only, and it changed as our family increased in size. The individualizing culture that accompanied the Thatcher years made any form of shared living more difficult, but the vision of a local church characterized by hospitality and mutually committed relationships never died. Our 17 years in York were followed by another nine years in the liturgical and communal life of a theological college – community again. Although the last decade has involved me in a more isolated Episcopal ministry, and despite my being temperamentally an introvert who needs his space, my conviction that Christianity is corporate – a shared life – remains. Christians do not go to church. They are Church – sometimes gathered, sometimes scattered, but always interdependent. For good or ill.
The challenge of discipleship
The ultimate test of any expression of church, whether a fresh expression or a more traditional one – is what quality of disciples are made there? The discipleship question is the critical question facing the Church in Western culture. And it is an unanswered question. We are in new territory. The cultural shift we have been living through (from modern to postmodern – call it what you will) has put new questions to our familiar patterns of Christian life and relationship. ‘We have not been here before and we do not know what to expect’ (Bauman, 2001: 128).
Our culture, and some parts of the Church, likes to provide packaged answers to pressing questions (and to trivial ones for that matter!). But the question of the shape of Christian