New Monasticism

Community of the Transfiguration: a commendation

Paul Dekar’s book, Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community (Cascade Books, 2008), maps the historical, theological, liturgical, and missiological life of Holy Transfiguration Monastery [HTM], or what many of us know better as The Breakwater Community – a Baptist monastic community in Geelong, near Melbourne. HTM was birthed in the early 1970s and bound together by ‘a common calling to contemplative prayer, simplicity, a Eucharistic focus, and the nurture of monastic spiri­tuality’ (p. 33). How this birth happened, and the shape that the life birthed has taken, and is taking, is a focus of this book; it is, however, by no means the only focus.

Dekar, who is Professor Emeritus of Evangelism and Mission at Memphis Theological Seminary and (as I understand it) a ‘Companion in identifica­tion with HTM as a spiritual home’, locates the story of the Breakwater Community among the wider stories and history of Christian monasticism in both its ancient and contemporary forms: ‘HTM exhibits many generic traits of its monastic forebears and of the new monastic communities. These include the centrality of Jesus Christ, communal life under a rule of life, vital worship, use of the visual arts, care for youth, care for the natural world; and ministries among marginalized persons. In this sense, the life of Community mem­bers is neither unique, nor original, perhaps only “newly born … a spirit and an endless trying, changing and beginning again”’ (p. 57). That the members of the Community have sought to explore and live out of traditional monastic spiri­tuality for over thirty-five years has, in Dekar’s words, ‘made the Community somewhat of a working model, or bridge, between past and contemporary forms of monastic religious life’ (pp. 61–62).

Dekar believes that ‘the radical love Community members have extended to lay people, pastors, denomi­national leaders, critics, and even enemies is perhaps its greatest gift’ (p. xvi). That I can count myself as one among many who has been, on more than one occasion, the recipient of the hospitable love of this extraordinary and permission-giving community (once in the form of home-made lemonade and a pumpkin – food for the journey, so to speak), is but one the reasons that I was so keen to read this book. From my brief experience and observation as a pastor in the Baptist Union of Victoria, among the greatest gifts bestowed by the Breakwater Community to the wider Church is the centrality, rhythm, and theological maturity afforded to gathered worship, and the attendant invitation to live all of life as an expression of and participation in the One who gives himself in the eucharist. It is, I believe, appropriate, then, that Dekar devotes a significant portion of the book to introducing readers to some of the liturgical resources and prayers authored by the Community, and to outlining the theology and practice of HTM’s worship, the shape that a community in which ‘the nurture of warm, personal intimacy with the Holy Trinity’ (p. 89) lies at the heart of common life.

On occasion, Dekar gets sidetracked from the main story and expends ink on some of his additional interests which, although loosely related to the book’s subject, disrupt its flow. Still, this moving and challenging book records a fascinating and important – albeit small – chapter of the story of Victorian Baptists, and locates that story in both a wider and more grassroots ecumenical and catholic context. Those already familiar with the inspirational life and witness of the Breakwater Community and its relationship with the Baptist family in Victoria, and those interested in hearing a more detailed account of one community that religion sociologists might locate in a movement known as ‘New Monasticism’, will find much of interest here.

School(s) for Conversion – a commendation

On 14 January 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned the following words to his brother Karl-Friedrick: ‘… the restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this …’

Whether we are thinking about explicitly religious, or of broader, expressions of new ways of being human community, the birthing of new types of monasticism has long been a feature of ecclesial existence. While having at times drifted in and out of neomonastic communities, and while wrestling frequently with the kingdom-foreignness of the way of being-in-communion that my own introverted default setting reboots to, I’ve mainly been an intrigued onlooker who has read very little in the last decade or so that has come from within the movements themselves that articulates in any depth the intentionalism of such life together. (Whether or not all such communities characterise the ‘new type of monasticism’ for which Bonhoeffer longed is not the point here.)

But I’ve been eager to read and think more. I was delighted, therefore, to discover Wipf and Stocks’ New Monastic Library Series, of which School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism, a book edited by The Rutba House, is a part. (I’m also currently reading Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community by Paul R. Dekar, and “Follow Me”: A History of Christian Intentionality by Ivan J. Kauffman, both of which I’m enjoying immensely.)

The ‘new’ monasticism differs from the ‘old’ in a number of ways. Here are three, for example: (i) vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience are relatively rare; (ii) while geographic proximity of members is preferable, it is not necessary; and (iii) distinctive religious habits have been largely replaced by non-distinctive Levis.

The movement of the Spirit from which this book is birthed sees itself as characterised by the following twelve marks:

1) Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire;

2) Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us;

3) Hospitality to the stranger;

4) Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation;

5) Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church;

6) Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate;

7) Nurturing common life among members of intentional community;

8) Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children;

9) Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life;

10) Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies;

11) Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18; and

12) Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

This book attends to these marks, one chapter on each, exploring each theme drawing upon Scripture, contemporary examples, and personal experience.

Taking up Alasdair MacIntyre’s challenge to construct ‘local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us’, the contributors to this volume believe that when such longing as this instructs the church, ‘the local forms of community for which MacIntyre calls are no longer primarily for the sustenance of intellectual and moral life. Nor are they communities that withdraw from the world to insure their own survival and the flourishing of their members. Rather, within the life of the church a new monasticism exists to sustain knowledge of the gospel of the kingdom that was proclaimed, embodied, and accomplished in Jesus Christ. And the communities of the new monasticism exist for the sake of witness to Jesus Christ who is the life and hope of the world’.

This book is written not by theoreticians or monasticism-virgins cutting their idealistic and yuppie teeth in a utopian wilderness for a while before retreating back to ‘the real world’. Rather, these challenging essays betray a maturity and realism that one might expect from those who have the runs on the board, so to speak, whose commitment to embodying the kingdom which is truly the life of the ‘real world’ is humbling and utopia-destroying, and who love the church as God’s community in travail and often so slow to be on the way.