Monastics…

“Towns and cities were developing and offered a new challenge to the church. Traditional expressions of faith were failing to cope with worldliness and the growth of population. Many clergymen recognized the need to bring a new form of spirituality to the people…”  Robert G. Clouse

Where do we go from here? It would be easy to point the finger at past generations and current models of church and place blame. But where does that get us? Nowhere, in my opinion. The Lord has been challenging me to draw closer to Him. He has shared with me that in some ways my life will begin to look different (I’m sure how much different it can get… trust me, I’m pretty peculiar).

He has led to the monks to study how these transitions plays out. What I’ve noticed most is that monks were willing to sacrifice worldly pleasures to strengthen their relationship with the Lord.
At one point I thought that monks and contemplatives were just blindly doing works trying to earn God’s favor. That may be true in some cases, but God is calling me to build my relationship with Him so that unneeded worldly pleasures will become unattractive and will need to be cut from my life.

My gifting in the body of Christ is to be a voice of reason to it. If the first quote in this blog entry is true, then we are in serious need of some reforming. Communication devices have saturated the earth, social connectivity is at it’s highest, religion is most prevalent, while communion with God has been pushed even further from the world’s agenda.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen at this point. I will tell you this, I’m doing experiments now to try and see where God wants us to go. Keep posted as this topic will be a consistent theme of this blog.