A New Monastic Handbook

From Vision to Practice

Ian Mobsby

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848254589
• eBook ISBN: 9781848254893
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Two leading practitioners of new monasticism open up the movement's spiritual landscape and its distinctive calling and gifts within today's church. Practical experience and story is set alongside reflection and liturgies as a creative resource for all who are already involved in, or are exploring intentional living in community.

Part 1. Roots and Shoots

1. Our Story and God’s Story

I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, God can work through anyone.

St Francis of Assisi

Mark’s story

In the mid-nineties I took what I thought would be time out from my career as a theatrical lighting designer to train as a youth minister. This change of direction meant that I spent many an hour in Christian bookshops looking to fill my shelves with theology and ministry books. In these bookshops there always seemed to be a high-profile section full of what they called Celtic Christianity. I don’t think I ever saw more images of rainbows over beaches and ruined castles in a misty landscape! As well as the core subjects of my training course, we had occasional visiting speakers, one of whom came to talk to us about this ‘rediscovery’ of Celtic spirituality. As I sat and listened I got more and more annoyed with what I saw as a load of romantic nonsense. I could not see how this was at all relevant to me or the kids from South London I had been working with. It just looked like the latest middle-class Christian fad. Yes, the poetry was lovely and the imagery at times beautiful, but it felt so disconnected from what life must have been like at that time and from what life was like now. I thought the only way for me to put to bed my growing frustration was to find out the real story. So my wife and I took a flight to Dublin, booked a little B&B and spent a week travelling around the Republic of Ireland, following lines of High Crosses, visiting sites and learning what we could about the culture and people of these early monastic communities.

What we encountered as we travelled was something far wilder, more extreme and harder than the modern interpretation of Celtic Christianity. In a tiny visitor centre in County Cavan we learned about St Killian, who took the gospel to Bavaria and was murdered for his trouble when he challenged a duke in Würzburg about his marriage. In Glendalough we learned about St Kevin, who established a community in the hard countryside of County Wicklow and is reported to have stood naked up to his chest for days in the freezing waters of the lake praying. We learned about St Brendan, who is said to have set sail in a fishing boat on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean that would take seven years. These, and many other stories of wild and somewhat crazy men and women (for we also discovered that many of the communities included men and women, even families), seemed to have no connection with the soft, romantic version of Celtic Christianity peddled by some of today’s writers. Perhaps these people did have something to say to our present-day culture about commitment to God, about community and about mission after all.

One evening I was running a youth club in my training church, when a man riding a Vespa scooter pulled up in front of the adjacent house. I have always had a passion for Italian scooters, so I went to speak with him. He invited me to meet him and some friends of his at a local pub on the following Sunday. When I arrived I was the only one there, but after a while a tall, well-built skinhead walked through the door. He was dressed head to toe in black, apart from his red braces, and on the arm of his jacket were a large number of badges which gave away his political allegiances, including to the then leading far right group, the National Front. I tried to look the other way, but he spotted me and began to walk over. As he approached me he reached out his hand and said, ‘Hi Mark, glad you could make it.’ This was the man I’d met, now divested of his waterproofs and crash helmet. As others joined us I realized that his political views were not in a minority in the group! I had a decision to make; I could make my excuses and leave, or stay and be very uncomfortable. I decided to stay and for the next two years I spent time with the group, taking part in their joys – their weddings and the birth of their children – and their sorrows. For these people church simply wasn’t something they thought about and no matter what changes were made to what church looked like, they were not going to go.

After completing my training I went to minister in a large church in South London which was very successful and in many ways self-sufficient. We had a thriving group of young people, very creative youth worship events and great relationships with other youth groups. But there was little engagement with young people outside the church: to be honest we didn’t need that! In my second year in post I received a phone call from the vicar of the neighbouring parish, a smaller, more traditional church that had been the original village church. A young boy from the large school in the parish had committed suicide on the anniversary of his father’s own suicide. Young people were leaving notes in the church and the vicar wanted to ask me what I thought he should do. I suggested buying a big block of Post-it-Notes and a box of pens and leaving the church open. He did this and within a few days the altar was covered with messages from the young people, some words of anger, some of grief and some prayers. These young people had had no obvious context in which to express their feelings and their grief, but they needed to nevertheless.

These two stories are examples of how my thinking about mission and the Church has been shaped over the years. I began to look to those who sought to live out their faith in the midst of the communities of others. Those early British ‘peregrinate’, Celtic holy wanderers, came to inspire me more and more. In 2005 my wife and I moved to Telford to found safespace, a new Christian community. The aim was to explore what a Christian community might look like in a post-Church culture and to engage in mission among those for whom church had no relevance. Our vision was to identify ourselves as wanderers, and grow a community that did not want to increase by attracting others, but wanted always to ask how we live our lives as guests in the wider community and culture. It would be a community that helped all its members to live this way, by supporting, challenging and serving each other. New monasticism for safespace has never been a goal or an ending; for us it has been an ongoing attempt to engage with the immensity of a God who is ‘out there’, yet who is present within our culture. We desired to walk with God as individuals but more importantly as a community.

Ian’s story

In my book God Unknown, I talked about a growing awareness of God’s presence through art, feelings in the guts and through experience, or what I called the ‘trans-rational’ (knowing God through experience rather than knowing God just through rational facts about God). This was the beginning of a ten-year pilgrimage in experiencing and seeking after God the Trinity, not as some form of overly and stuffy academic or elitist head-knowledge, but a hunger to experience and understand the implications of the heart of the Christian faith. However, as I reflect now on how I ended up a new monastic Christian, I remember there were other important elements that began with a hunger for deep spiritual community and communion with God. Mysticism as a deep connection with God became a yearning.

At the age of 17, my only experience of Christianity was religious knowledge at comprehensive school, a local charismatic Baptist church and Songs of Praise on the TV. It was less than exhilarating. However, at the end of my first year of sixth-form college, I was invited by some friends to join them on a trip to the Taizé Community on the border between France and Switzerland. Not knowing what to expect, I found the whole experience full of awe, beauty, spirituality and deep humanity. I stayed for several months and the pattern of my day became a rhythm of work, prayer and chanted worship. The Brothers were very encouraging, and I found myself deeply enthralled by everything to do with the religious life. My cynicism about Christianity and negative stereotype had been challenged and replaced by a greater respect.

Twenty years later I became involved with the Moot Community, which was a fresh expression of church in Westminster. In a conversation with Steven Croft, then Archbishops’ Missioner and Fresh Expressions Team Leader, he suggested in a moment of great wisdom, ‘Have you thought about Moot developing a rhythm of life as a way to define and inspire a particular understanding of Christian discipleship?’ That went right into the guts with a number of us, as it felt deeply of God and actually quite obvious. After a year of exploration, discernment and learning in dialogue with a number of new monastic communities, Moot developed its aspirations (aspirational statements about how we can seek to be Christians living an integrated and healthy life in, but not of, contemporary London society) to name its own sense of calling and vocation. What had begun as an alternative worship community had grown into an emerging church, and was now growing into a particular expression of a new monastic community. In that time we formed relationships with Anglican Franciscans and Benedictines seeking to work out if we were called to be more like monks or mendicant friars. These were beautiful and affirming conversations which helped the Moot Community to realize that we were part of the ongoing tradition of the religious life, but also something new in the sense that we were being called to be both monks and friars, and that many new monastics shared this dual vocation with a different form of spiritual rhythm or rule. The aspirations, the first level of our rhythm of life, sought to engage with the question, ‘How should we live in, but not of, the culture of London?’ A couple of years later the spiritual practices followed, defining our pattern of Christian discipleship, and the postures defining what it means for us to live a life of worship of God.

This journey felt totally natural and exciting. It really did feel as if we were following a path that God was revealing regarding our next steps. Now established for 11 years, Moot is meeting with a number of other new monastic communities charged with a new discernment, to set up a new Anglican New Monastic Acknowledged Religious Community (a designation given to Church of England religious communities who have a rule or rhythm of life but do not make the core vows of poverty, obedience and chastity), with a vision to grow a community of brothers and sisters not just in central London, but wherever God leads.

So new monasticism has become a key motif in my sense of vocation as a Christian and as an ordained priest seeking to serve a new monastic religious community of ordinary people called to be and do extraordinary things.

2. Old but New

While other Christian traditions have the monastic life, not all have a monastic spirit that is so readily accessible … Thus, this monastic spirit becomes a gift that Anglicanism can offer back to the Church Catholic.5

In the last 20 years, new monastic communities have been bubbling up within the UK and beyond. In the UK these communities and their inherent missional orientation were recognized as a category of Fresh Expressions of Church as documented in the ‘Mission-Shaped Church’ Report.

A number of bishops in the Church of England have blessed and encouraged the birth and development of new monastic communities and the making of seasonal vows and aspirations. There is now much interest and support for nurturing and supporting new monastic small missional communities in this new mixed economy of the local church. Some may revitalize parish life and some, like traditional communities, will operate outside but in co-operation with diocese and parishes.

For this to work well, it is important that new monastics understand this ancient and future task, drawing on the wisdom of the tradition of monasticism and the religious life, and what this means in practice.

The Anglican inheritance in England

Some new monastic communities in England have a connection with the Anglican Church. Within the DNA of the Church of England is an important monastic inheritance. Among the chaos and violence of the Reformation, one of the greatest tragedies was the closure of the monastic and mendicant friar houses (which among others things were the welfare state of their time) causing starvation and death of the poor. However, the reforming vision for parish churches at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries saw the local church as the new accessible local monastery, as the locus for monastic prayer and worship. So the Church Commissioners of King Henry VIII stripped the monasteries of their resources, and expected parish churches to encourage a local rhythm of daily prayer, Holy Communion, loving service to the poor and participation in the local community. At the same time, cathedrals retained their monastic focused community and Daily Office so ensuring that the spirit of monasticism lived on.

A key element to the formation of the Anglican Church was the creation of the Book of Common Prayer under the auspices of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. He was not a monk, but nevertheless the Book of Common Prayer became the standard for liturgy throughout the Church, and the monastic office was right at its heart. Cranmer took the seven times of day that monks and nuns prayed and reduced it down to two: Morning and Evening Prayer. In so doing, he made the monastic approach to prayer and spiritual discipline something that was both accessible to ordinary people and expected of the clergy. The Daily Office would no longer be for the privilege of closeted monks and nuns, it would now be a central aspect of the Christian life for everyone.6

However, the monastics had not been expunged forever. In the carnage and terrible working conditions of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and in a time of weakening of the Church, the Oxford Movement led to a revival not only of mission, but of the re-creation of communities of the religious life. If you read accounts of the time, it is fascinating to see how the Church did not know what to do about the many people who discerned a vocation to become monks, nuns and friars, but who actually had a very hard time being accepted. There are many accounts of the struggle of these new monastics recovering nineteenth-century re-creations of the way of St Benedict, St Clare and St Francis. They were clearly oppressed at the time, but the floodgates of this monastic missionary zeal could not be held back, and a nu...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1. Roots and Shoots
• 1. Our Story and God’s Story
• 2. Old but New
• 3. Followers of the Holy Trinity
• Part 2. Intentionally Prayerful and Spiritual
• 4. Living a Rhythm of Life
• 5. Forming a Rhythm of Life
• 6. Encountering God through the Contemplative and Sacramental
• Part 3. Focused on Mission
• 7. Catching up with God
• 8. Getting beyond Them and Us
• 9. Formation and Discipleship
• 10. Building real Community
• 11. Practising healthy Community
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Resources