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This article was first published August 12, 1988

John R.W. Stott, the elder statesman of British evangelicalism, has stated recently that if he were young and beginning his Christian discipleship over, he would establish a kind of evangelical monastic order. Joining it would be men vowed to celibacy, poverty, and peaceableness.

Senate Chaplain Richard Halverson, speaking last April to the Anabaptist Hutterian Brethren, said something "cataclysmic" is in the air. Perhaps it is the return of Christ or, less dramatically, a "mighty visitation of God upon the Earth, upon the church." When it happens, "people in the evangelical community will have to move a lot more in the direction you [the Hutterians] are, more toward the simplicity, away from the materialism that I believe now has really infected badly the whole evangelical community."

Fuller Seminary philosopher Richard Mouw, speaking a few months back at Wheaton College, suggested that the church, and its evangelical sector in particular, would benefit from "remonasticization"—the clear and radical witness of a smaller body within the church, calling the entire church to a clearer and more radical witness.

Talk of monasticism from three thoroughly Reformed Christians is striking, and perhaps only coincidental. But perhaps it is not so coincidental. North American evangelicals are now acutely awake to the fact that they live in a post—Christian culture. There is much talk against violence, sensuality, and materialism. Yet even the most casual observer can see that the evangelical church is "infected badly" by all three.

The faint but (we hope) growing call for remonasticization is provoked by the recognition that our situation will not change merely with continuing talk. American mass culture presents the church with a challenge unique to its history. It is a culture dominated by the mechanisms and mentality of consumerism, and facilitated by mass media that penetrate every nook and cranny of the country.

In this milieu individual Christians, and the church as a collective body, cannot easily maintain their distinctive identity as a people killed and raised with Christ (Rom. 6:4‑10). The dominant ethos is all pervasive, able to assume milder, less offensive forms for those who will not embrace it with its mask off. So if the church dislikes coarse "worldly" celebrities, let it create its own celebrities. If it is cautious about the worldly mania for numbers (stocks sold on Wall Street), let it develop its own mania for numbers (souls saved by the megachurch).

Thus the church must not only recognize its plight, it must imagine new and truer ways to address that plight. It is in this context that we issue a formal call for remonasticization in the church.

Defining remonasticization
The remonasticization we would support would not be as tightly defined as traditional monasticism. It would not, for example, mean the stereotypical cluster of people retiring to desert solitude. Rather, it would look to the biblical antecedents for a select group of holy persons set apart to call all persons to holiness, such as the Old Testament Nazirites, Israel's witness as a light to all nations, and Jesus' calling of disciples to train and teach with the goal of drawing all Israel to the same discipleship. And, of course, there is the church itself which is supposed to be no more than it hopes the world will someday be. In this context, remonasticization might take several forms, all oriented toward service in and to the world.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49