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Around 696, Duke Theodore of Bavaria gave the young bishop Rupert of Worms a grant of land in what is now Austria. A small Benedictine monastery called St. Peter's already existed in the midst of what was left of a Roman town. Rupert made the monastery into a launching pad to evangelize the eastern Alps. He also founded the convent of Nonnberg, the oldest continuously existing female convent in German-speaking lands.

In about 100 years, Salzburg went from being a ruin of a Roman town to being the center of missionary activity and learning in its region, with a monk-bishop supervising many monasteries and churches. What happened in Salzburg also happened elsewhere. Just as they built new buildings from old Roman materials, these medieval missionaries adapted or replaced elements of the pagan culture they found, constructing a new Christian culture in its place.

Again and again, monks built a monastery in an isolated spot, observed pastoral and educational needs in the local population, and responded by establishing schools and taking on pastoral tasks. Monasticism was a lay movement of people seeking an uncompromised Christian life, but by the 12th century half the Benedictine monks were also ordained priests. Benedict's Rule had never envisioned monks engaging in pastoral or missionary activity. But even in Benedict's own life, the contemplative and the pastoral roles went hand in hand.

In the year 600, Christianity was almost entirely an urban religion, centered on the still surviving, if often decaying, cities of the Roman Empire. By the time Charlemagne died in 814, Christians had moved into vast rural areas of the old empire, and a broad swathe of central and northern Europe—from Hungary through Poland to Scandinavia—had received Christianity for the first time. It was one of the most expansive and remarkable periods in Christian history, and it was largely due to the work of monks.

Since the earliest period of the church, Christians had almost universally assumed that Christianity would develop within the boundaries of the Roman Empire and follow the contours of Roman life. Only in a few places did Christians attempt to evangelize the hinterlands beyond the Roman cities. Thus the word for "country-dweller" (paganus) also meant "pagan," or non-Christian. After the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, Christians felt a new urgency to evangelize the barbarians now living among them.

Pope Celestine I sent Ireland its first bishop, Palladius, in 431, but Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) was the first pope clearly to imagine evangelization beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. He articulated the general principle that missionaries should adapt to existing societies as much as possible. Gregory is best known for sending a group of Roman monks to England in 597. Their leader, Augustine, established a community at Canterbury, earning him the name Augustine of Canterbury (to distinguish him from the early church father, Augustine of Hippo).

Benedict wrote his Rule about a half-century earlier, but we don't know whether Augustine and his monks were Benedictine. During the seventh and much of the eighth centuries, monasteries based their practices on a number of different monastic rules then circulating. Only gradually did Benedict's Rule win out over the others. But already in the mission to England there were visible patterns that would occur repeatedly in succeeding generations, among Benedictines and non-Benedictines alike.

The Canterbury community lived a life of shared prayer and worship, without private property, in conscious imitation of the Jerusalem Christians described in the book of Acts. But the monks also preached the gospel outside the community, converting and baptizing many who, according to the early English historian Bede, admired "the simplicity of their holy lives and the comfort of their heavenly message." Eventually they converted King Ethelbert of Kent, whose wife Bertha was a Christian from France. It was not uncommon in the years that followed for a Christian queen to be the agent of her husband's conversion.

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