Another Question: How Now Should We Live?

It is interesting that you highlight these two questions. It is also interesting that people will go some distance and expend enormous amounts of time settling the first question (who’s in charge?) and rarely get to the bottom of the second. I think the two questions are extricably linked in that the search for authority comes from a feeling of extreme vulnerability that in turn has its roots in an almost total lack of confidence within many Christian communities.

I wonder from where this lack of confidence comes?

If there’s some-one ‘at the top’ so to speak, we are able to delegate responsibility to them

There will be comforting rules which (nmust not be) dont require questioning, often leading to a brainless regurgitating of the accepted ‘point of view’ on anything

Perhaps considering ‘how now should we live is simply to complex and should be left to the experts?

Maybe, when it comes to living out a life of faith that doesn’t have lots of neat and well rehearsed answers and actually means engaging with people outside of the four walls of a Sundicentric local church sub-culture, we say it’s ‘too hard’ and requires too much ‘sacrifice’

My family and close friends are on this journey and it’s a heck of a struggle – but if it means that gradually we become God’s language, His message and a bridge for reconcilliation then it’s got to be worth doing!!

Hope the event goes well – a little far for us to travel

Gareth – Belper, Derbyshire, UK

Very good questions. I am almost finished with The Great Emergence. Very interesting how all the past events (including the previous “rummage sales”) have brought us to this point.
I do question, though, the validity of the monastic contribution. The devotional aspects are great…but I fear, as the past shows, that it can lead to way too much navel-gazing and also to a quarantined lifestyle. If we as “salt” are not in the world, then we lose our savor and become worthless to the world as well as to the Lord.
Mike – Mt. Juliet, TN USA

The monastic lifestyle, with it’s devotion, contemplation and centeredness need not exist solely in quarantine from the world. It is a powerful witness to have these small communities chanelling the benefits of a monastic lifestyle into an urban setting. The fields are white among the porr and downtrodden and present a tremendous opportunity to live out a disciplined life in service of others.

Several of these communities are striving here in Tampa as elsewhere to do just this, and it has presented a daunting challenge, to our local communites and to our community at large. But there is a familiarity in that challenge, one that resonates with Christ’s commands. Blessed be God, who hallows us with these.

I’m looking forward to that community of communities website to learn more about what others are doing! I have signed up for the hyphenated conversation but will be very interested to hear about yours as well.

I sometimes feel like those desert mothers and fathers, wondering now that Christianity is part of pop culture how I should live. It seems so “easy” to be a Christian these days, but part of me knows that wasn’t the message of Jesus.

While I am deeply simpatico towards the new monastic movement, I do wonder what place folks in interfaith relationships might have relative to such communities. I’m not sure there is a place…but would be interested in any experiences on that front.