monastery without walls

One of Grace Community’s catch phrases is “a church without walls”. It’s a great picture: the people of God moving out of the confines of church buildings so that they can bring Good News into the world. It’s a picture of evangelistic proclamation and incarnational service to our world, of being salt and light that’s out doing what it should do to bless the world.

But there is a touch of the heroic in this phrase. We can start seeing ourselves as super(natural) heroes, fearless foes of evil whose deeds become the stuff of legends (or at least, comic books).

In Eugene Peterson’s book “Under the unpredictable plant” he reminds us that what we need is a “monastery without walls”. Monks went into the monastery in order to work on their Christian formation. Their spiritual work was accomplished using spiritual tools: prayer, Bible reading, worship, a holy sense of work, and the disciplines of hospitality, confession and forgiveness.

What we need today is sense of being in a monastery without walls, seeing our own Christian formation as taking place through our life lived in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and homes. Instead of heroic adventures, God calls the world to himself when they see how God does the slow and painful work of transforming grace as we humbly offer him our messed-up, unworthy selves, as we hurt each other and then repent and forgive each other.

We want people to see the fruit of the Spirit but fruit is borne for only a short time. People are more likely to see the cultivating and fertilizing and nurturing that precedes the fruitfulness. It’s useless to pretend that we’ve got it all together. People can spot plastic fruit a mile away.

Our inclination is to hide ourselves in a monastery, work on our Christian formation, and then re-appear as a mature Christian community. But that’s not God’s way. He would rather tear down the walls, letting people see that just as he is at work in us, he can be doing a transforming work in them.