“New monasticism is spreading like kudzu, springing up as little signs of resurrection during Christendom’s twilight,” writes the author, who co-founded Rutba House, a new monastic community in Durham, North Carolina. Above, Leah Wilson-Hartgove (in red) and Sarah Jobe greet neighbor Jeremiah Green at one of two Rutba Community Houses. Photo credit - SCOTT LANGLEY

Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Almost everywhere I go these days, people agree that something is wrong in American Christianity. Whether I'm talking to Pentecostals or Presbyterians, Democrats or Republicans, Muslim friends or secular neighbors, there seems to be a consensus on this: the church in America isn't living up to what it claims to be. Somehow we've lost our way.

Some Christians get defensive when others point out the irony of Crusades fought in the name of the Prince of Peace or anti-gay preachers getting caught for soliciting gay sex. We're a little embarrassed by reports that suggest battered women are at greater risk if they talk to their pastors or that people are more likely to be racist if they are members of a church. But I think we may have reached a point of clarity here at the dawn of a new millennium.

Much of my generation has grown up with this sense that we are living in a post-Christian era. But I'll have to confess that I didn't. I was raised the son of Southern Baptists in King, North Carolina, one of those last bastions of Christendom between the ever-expanding holes in America's Bible Belt. Born in 1980, I was born again while Reagan was still in the White House. Where I grew up, we talked about Jesus like he lived just over the next hill. My people taught me to love God and memorize scripture, and I did as I was told. By the time I was in high school, I was certain the Lord had called me to lead the nation in Jesus's name by becoming president of the United States. While still a student in high school, I made my way to D.C. to work as a page for Strom Thurmond, then president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate.

That's where I learned firsthand that it's hard to be Christian in America. Just outside the doors of Union Station, as I was walking to get lunch one day I saw a man crouched down, holding a Styrofoam cup. He asked if I could spare some change, and I looked at him without saying a word. I remembered what I'd heard back in King about how poor folks in the city were lazy and begged money to buy drugs and booze. A country boy in the city, I was dressed in my Sunday best, doing everything I knew to fit in. I didn't want to look naïve. So I looked straight through the man and kept walking.

But about the time I stepped through those glass doors into Union Station, I recalled one of my memory verses from Vacation Bible School. They were the words of Jesus, ringing in my head: "Verily I say unto you, just as ye did not do it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did not do it unto me" (Matthew 25:40). I knew that if those words were true I had not only just ignored a fellow a human being; I had also completely missed the Lord I was trying to serve. In my rush to follow Jesus to the White House, I'd almost tripped over him outside Union Station. Following Jesus wasn't as simple as chasing after my dreams.

Though the signs of the time suggest that it's hard to be a Christian in America, there are also signs that God is doing something new in places that have been overlooked and abandoned by our society. Stumbling to follow Jesus myself, I found my way into some of these communities and learned to read the Bible anew with them. The story of the people of God came alive in that context, and I began to see how God has moved through the centuries to remind the church of her true identity through monastic movements. Monasticism, I learned, isn't about achieving some sort of individual or communal piety. It's about helping the church be the church.

In the midst of the madness that overwhelmed Nazi Germany, the Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to his brother, "The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism which has in common with the old only the uncompromising attitude of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ." It was the prayer of a desperate man, but it was also a prayer to which a community called the Bruderhof was already becoming the answer. Led by Eberhard Arnold, this group had fled Berlin in 1920 saying: "We need brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to live Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. We need to show that a life of justice and forgiveness and unity is possible today." In their first year together, they hosted 5,000 guests.

From Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement to Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm, from the grassroots Christian Community Development Association to Jesus People USA in Chicago, this underground new monastic movement has continued up to the present in this place called America. It has, by and large, been overlooked by journalists and historians. Yet it has produced Habitat for Humanity and national affordable housing legislation; the movement has formed many of Christianity's most creative and hopeful leaders. And now, as almost everyone acknowledges that it's hard to be a Christian in America, new monasticism is spreading like kudzu, springing up as little signs of resurrection during Christendom's twilight.

Once a month I travel to neighborhoods all across the country where young people are choosing not to be cynical about the challenge of finding an authentic life of faith, but rather are giving themselves fully to a whole-life faith in community with other people. It's beautiful to see murals painted over gang tags and gardens planted in abandoned lots. I delight to hear stories of crack houses reclaimed, neighborhoods redeemed, children embraced, and ex-offenders restored to their communities.

I hold the stories of those few days with me the rest of the month as I live my life at Rutba House, a new monastic community in Durham, North Carolina. We have our signs of resurrection, too -- and I love to tell those stories -- but at home I am also aware of how hard it is to love one person, to be faithful in one place over a lifetime. The revolution of love that we've been invited into doesn't feel very exciting when an alcoholic friend stops by at 6 a.m. to say once again that he doesn't need anybody's help, but could he get a ride downtown?

But we live this life by faith, trusting that a seed can grow up into new life only if it falls into the ground and dies. The prophets and monastics who have called us back to our roots generation after generation remind us that the roots of God's kingdom spread beneath the surface, effecting change from below. It is a quiet revolution -- one that is often ignored by the newspapers and missed by the historians. But it is, in the end, how God plans to save the world. Like those rhizomes, God's kingdom just won't go away. It is, as the book of Daniel says, "a mountain that grows to fill the whole earth" (2:35).

In Robert Coles's biography of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, the author writes about how Day understood working from the bottom to be "Christ's technique." "She was always taking Jesus as seriously as possible," Coles observes. "She was always trying to remember that He was an obscure carpenter who in His early thirties, did not go talk with emperors and kings and important officials, but with equally obscure people, and thereby persuaded a few fishermen, a few farm people, a few ailing and hard-pressed men and women, that there was reason for them to have great hope."

There is, indeed, reason to have great hope. Even as the signs of the time say it's hard to be a Christian -- or a person of any faith, for that matter -- new life is springing up all around. May we have eyes to see it and grace to live into it where we are.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an author, speaker, and recovering sinner (jonathanwilsonhartgrove.com). This article is adapted from Jonathan's book New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today's Church (Brazos Press, 2008).