| New monasticism? |
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This might sound a bit whacky – and I guess it is to some extent – but there is a sense of God creating new missionary movements in the West that have several things in common with some of those great monastic missionary movements of old. The German martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “the renewal of the church will surely come 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. It is high time men and women bonded together to do this.” This is what we are attempting to do. And we are not alone. Urban Vision is part of a growing spiritual movement in the West seeking to put the Kingdom first, expressed through new communities of monastic-type discipleship roughly referred to as a ‘new monasticism’. The key word here is ‘new’. In other words, we’re not simply copying something from the past, but that this similarity to the old missionary movements has come about because of the contexts we live, because of the times we live in and the prevailing culture of society and the church at this point of history in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Essentially we can boil down our ‘monastic’ similarities to six main threads:
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