A Simpler Emerging Way

August 20, 2010 by Chaplain Mike

When Jesus heard this, he said to him,  ¢â‚¬ËœThere is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. ¢â‚¬â„¢ (Luke 18:22, NRSV)

 ¢â‚¬ËœWhen you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. ¢â‚¬â„¢ (Luke 14:12-14, NRSV)

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles ¢â‚¬â„¢ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. (Acts 4:32-35, NRSV)

Some of us take Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ words and the example of the early church seriously. The rest of us sit in our nice homes and read about them.
In my opinion, the most important and attractive part of the Emerging Movement is what has been called the New Monasticism. The idea is not strictly new, but rather a renewed emphasis with new expressions of Christian community. Discussion of this approach, and examples of its modern incarnation in evangelicalism have been around for forty years or so.

For example, according to a 1988 editorial in Christianity Today:
John R.W. Stott, the elder statesman of British evangelicalism, has stated recently that if he were young and beginning his Christian discipleship over, he would establish a kind of evangelical monastic order. Joining it would be men vowed to celibacy, poverty, and peaceableness. (CT ¢â‚¬” ¢â‚¬ Remonking the Church ¢â‚¬ )

CT ¢â‚¬â„¢s editorial mentioned other unlikely Christian leaders who were in favor of such an approach, and the editors strongly advocated that the evangelical church could be strengthened by groups of believers forming  ¢â‚¬Å“remonasticized ¢â‚¬  ministries bringing renewed testimony to the power of God ¢â‚¬â„¢s Word and prayer.

Earlier Intentional Communities

Back in the mid-1970 ¢â‚¬ ²s two friends and I joined one of the most unusual prayer circles I ¢â‚¬â„¢d ever been in. It was Easter Sunday morning in a park in downtown Baltimore. Behind a stage, we three clean-cut suburban white privileged Christians held hands with a group of long-haired, tattooed hippie-type folks whose prayers ignited and accelerated and lifted off into some dizzying spiritual stratosphere with which I was totally unfamiliar. Our humble folk trio took the stage and did a few songs and then these new friends ¢â‚¬”members of a group called Resurrection Band ¢â‚¬”followed with an opening blast that would have moved the stone if the angel had needed help that Easter morning. I ¢â‚¬â„¢m pretty sure no one was asleep in Baltimore after the opening chords.

They were from Chicago, from a community called  ¢â‚¬Å“Jesus People USA ¢â‚¬  (JPUSA). Founded in 1972, in the midst of the  ¢â‚¬Å“Jesus People ¢â‚¬  movement that arose during those turbulent days, JPUSA has maintained a witness of self-supporting, communal Christian living and urban ministry among the poor and dispossessed for more than 35 years now. These days, they number about 500 people who live, worship, and serve in Chicago under the oversight of the Evangelical Covenant Church.

The New Monasticism

Now, let ¢â‚¬â„¢s go to 1998, when Shane Claiborne and six other students from Eastern University left campus and moved into Philadelphia ¢â‚¬â„¢s impoverished Kensington neighborhood near St. Edward ¢â‚¬â„¢s Cathedral, where two years earlier students and activists had joined with 40 families to live in the abandoned facility as a protest against the forced eviction of homeless women and children from the community. The Simple Way was formed.
Today, the Simple Way, with its two houses on Potter Street, is one of the oldest of a new crop of Christian intentional communities. Formed often independently by mostly young, single Christians, these communities are the latest wave of evangelicals who see in community life an answer to society ¢â‚¬â„¢s materialism and the church ¢â‚¬â„¢s complacency toward it. Rather than enjoy the benefits of middle-class life, these suburban evangelicals choose to move in with the poor. Though many of the same forces drive them as did earlier generations ¢â‚¬”a desire to experience intense community and to challenge contented evangelicalism ¢â‚¬”they are turning to an ancient tradition to provide the spiritual sustenance for their ministries. (CT,  ¢â‚¬Å“The New Monasticism ¢â‚¬ )

The community life and work of The Simple Way, along with reflections on what it means to be an  ¢â‚¬Å“ordinary radical ¢â‚¬  who  ¢â‚¬Å“loves God, loves people, and follows Jesus, ¢â‚¬  is captured in Claiborne ¢â‚¬â„¢s stimulating and provocative book, The Irresistible Revolution.

The founding of The Simple Way was rooted in three major formative experiences in Claiborne ¢â‚¬â„¢s life: his experience of identifying with the homeless residents of Philadelphia in St. Edward ¢â‚¬â„¢s Cathedral, a stint with Mother Theresa ¢â‚¬â„¢s ministry in Calcutta, and a year in the wealthy white suburban Christian world of Willow Creek Community Church and Wheaton College.

It was in St. Ed ¢â‚¬â„¢s that I was born again ¢â‚¬ ¦again. There is something mystical about finding God in the ruins of the church. At the time, I had no idea who St. Francis of Assisi was, but somehow the divine whisper that he and those young radicals heard in Italy in the thirteenth century was very familiar:  ¢â‚¬Å“Repair my church which is in ruins. ¢â‚¬  Now hundreds of years later, another bunch of young dreamers was leaving the Christianity that smothered them, to find God in the abandoned places, in the desert of the inner city. I felt so thirsty for God, so embarrassed by Christianity, and so ready for something more. (p. 65)

In The Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne tells stories about the daily life and work of the community. In doing so, he challenges nearly every assumption underlying the comfortable, culture-bound Christianity of the American church. If read carefully, both political conservatives and liberals will find plenty of reasons to feel threatened and get angry by what Shane Claiborne represents and asserts. Some will dismiss him as an idealistic, leftist activist. Others will complain the approach doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t go nearly far enough and that he ¢â‚¬â„¢s too conservative to be a true social activist.
Claiborne himself claims he and his friends are just trying to follow Jesus, in particular by living among the poor and identifying with them in love. Note: not by helping the poor, serving the poor, giving to the poor, ministering to the poor. Living with the poor ¢â‚¬”sharing their lives, their hurts, their needs, their hopes, their sorrows. And in the process, forming a community that ministers to one another. Taking seriously the NT vision of a new community unlike anything the world has ever seen.

And Jesus did not set up a program but modeled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God, a community in which people are reconciled and our debts are forgiven just as we forgive our debtors (all economic words). That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread like disease ¢â‚¬”through touch, though breath, through life. It spread through people infected by love. (p. 159)
What I love about the New Monasticism and these renewed efforts toward genuine community and incarnational ministry is the down-to-earth, grassroots, person-to-person, face-to-face nature of the work. This is about small, not big. This is about humble, not self-important. This is about people, not about  ¢â‚¬Å“building great churches ¢â‚¬  or ministries. As Claiborne says,  ¢â‚¬Å“God ¢â‚¬â„¢s kingdom grows smaller and smaller as it takes over the world. ¢â‚¬ 

This is not academic or pretentious gobbledegook about post-modernism and how to speak the Gospel in a world without metanarratives, about  ¢â‚¬Å“engaging the culture, ¢â‚¬  or going about the deconstruction of traditional categories and practices. At its best, this is simply about loving brother, sister, neighbor, and enemy in the name of Jesus in terms and ways we all can understand.

Such movements that take radically different approaches are always in danger of self-righteousness, however, and this temptation must be scrupulously avoided. New Monasticism is a different calling, not a superior one. Right alongside this new monasticism, the church in our day needs a  ¢â‚¬Å“new vocationalism, ¢â‚¬  so that we can ALL learn to live as  ¢â‚¬Å“ordinary radicals ¢â‚¬  in every possible expression of life, work, setting, and economic situation.

Postscript: The 12 Marks of New Monasticism

The New Monasticism movement had its official birth at at 2004 conference in Durham, NC. Representatives from communities old and new met with academics and worked out a voluntary rule to guide the various societies in their life and ministry. Here are the twelve marks they developed:

Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.

Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

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