New Monasticism
I finished this book so weeks ago but have been struggling to find the time to reflect on it, this is in part because I have been busy but also because it excites me and so caused many thoughts which need more time than usual to put into order.
Like many from the sacramental end of the Church I have some unease with 'Fresh Expressions', but I found this collection of essays reassuring. I went up to London for a launch event and hearing some of the contributors speak alongside reading their words gives a strong sense of the integrity of them as individuals and of the communities they speak for, that these are people deeply seeking to will of God. I suppose I need to be honest and say that this feeling was not completely universal, for example I don't get the Order of Mission and its 8 shapes - this might be my failing but I doubt I could ever discuss the Heptagon of a Vital Life with a straight face. There is also some rather uncritical and historically dubious references to the wonders of all things Celtic.
But putting the exceptions aside what makes the difference is their sense of the importance of tradition which seems remarkable for Christian communities which mostly have their roots and their being outside the 'Catholic' strand of the Church. Linked to this is the centering of the life of the Fresh Expressions on prayer, understood not as some health and wealth shopping list but the attentive waiting on the Lord.
Some of the images that are invoked are powerful, one essay reflecting on the raise of contemplatives as 'Christendom' fades quotes Jean Danielou "That age is passing - St Antony is coming back from his desert; there is no need for flight now that the Church is once again an army of martyrs, in the midst of a heathen society. 'My factory is my desert'." While another essay concludes "Karl Rahner wrote that the 'Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.' Beneath and beyond today's soulless hedonism lies a search for a meaning and a path. The emerging faith communities need to offer a route into these, not into a religious club that is over and against the human community, but into a renewal of the roots of the human community itself, which are divine." This vision of Fresh Expressions is in tune with my own underlining spirituality and so I found myself time and again agreeing out loud with this book (even, embarrassingly, while reading it on the train). But now and then you wonder how real all this 'end of Christendom' stuff really is - both because I think it in equal measure over states the level of 'faith' in the past and under plays the enduring place of 'folk religion'.
What sets this collection out most is that it views Fresh Expressions not as a re-branding, where the critical difference is not fancy coffee and scatter cushions, but as a rediscovery of the core essence of the Christian life, and once you are in tune with that core an authentic life of faith should blossom shaped by the cultural context. I think it is sad that so much of the energy being expended under various Fresh Expressions banners fails to live up to the ideals we find here, with the same old dears sat round tables, with doughnuts, told they are now 'Cafe Church' and cutting edge. This book should be a challenge and inspiration for us to reject such half-truths and demand seek a future for the Church that is found on a more costly and yet much richer path.
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