A few years ago, I was editing a small Christian magazine, and we had commissioned a series of articles from Randy Harris, who had become popular for his “standup theologian” style of teaching at Abilene Christian University.
He sent me his first article hand-written and by fax. Who hand-writes articles, and who uses fax machines anymore? Randy’s handwriting was difficult to decode, and I was a little frustrated, but what I did not know then was that he wrote that piece in the middle of his 40-day retreat at Lebh Shomea house of prayer in the Texas desert. He had no computer, no Internet.
This 40-day prayer retreat changed the life of Randy Harris. It started when he asked himself, “What would happen if I gave God my full attention for 40 days?”
The fact that I did not get the context of Randy’s hand-written piece illustrates an important truth: I can’t fully understand someone’s prayer journey until I pay attention to God as well.
Like the Israelites waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai or the disciples waiting for Jesus in prayer on the mountain, we expect that someone who has spent time with God, paying full attention, will come back with words of wisdom that will blow us away.
Randy doesn’t claim God gave him any special revelation, but he did receive something profound during his 40 days in the wilderness. Randy found that God wanted to teach him the gospel all over again. This time he would learn it more with his heart than with his head.
Those 40 days also set Randy on a quest to learn to live out the teachings and mission of Christ.
Over the next decade, Randy spent time with practitioners of prayer and mission in Celtic and Ignatian retreat houses. He did a two-year program in the Shalem Institute, learning to do contemplative spiritual direction. He spent time at the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., where he saw a way to bring together the contemplative and missional, a powerful way of following Jesus and touching the world.
We want the fearlessness of warriors and the discipline of monks. As warriors our weapons are not guns and swords but love and prayer.
“I had done a lot of mentoring of students, but it always seemed to be from the neck up. It wasn’t bad, and it impacted a lot of people, but I wanted to know if there was another level of engagement,” said Randy.
“As a college professor, I’m very interested in spiritual formation, but college students are notoriously difficult to form,” Randy said in his recent book, Living Jesus. “It’s a great formative age, but many students have also checked out of church. So I began to wonder, Is there a way to form students that will take permanently? They are probably never going to be able to replicate their four-year college experience, so what are the ways to form them so deeply that will impact them for the rest of their lives?”
That question and his journey led Randy toward an experiment he’s doing now with students at Abilene Christian.
After studying contemplative and missional communities, he learned not to be afraid of the word “rule” or “religious order,” as countercultural as that might seem. A rule is simply a way of life that a group of people commit to live.
Two books that helped him understand how to establish orders outside the context of a monastery: The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker and Punk Monk by Andy Freeman and Pete Greig, who come out of the British 24/7 prayer movement and build on Benedictine disciplines.
He devised a plan. He would form a group of freshmen and develop a three-and-a-half year plan, taking in a new group every year and having the upper-classmen continue on in the group.
The name for the group is Tau Chi Alpha—one of the things it stands for is “Toughest Christians Alive.” They are quick to say that this is an aspiration not a claim. They refer to themselves as “Monk Warriors.”
“We want to have the fearlessness of warriors but the discipline of monks,” Randy says. “As warriors our weapons are not guns and swords but love and prayer. We’re trying to develop skill using weapons that the Spirit of God has given us.”
The Monk Warriors believe that life change comes by the grace of God, but it is not without a response of intentional work, “training in righteousness,” toward goodness and love and learning the Word of God.
So the group commits to living out the Sermon on the Mount together. They sign a covenant to live basic principles of the teachings of Christ, like loving neighbor, practicing deep integrity, and sexual purity.
“One of the things that surprised me—I should have known—is how powerful signing on to a covenant is,” Randy said. They do not claim to live their vows perfectly, but they do take them seriously.
The young men also covenant to hold each other graciously accountable. They give others in the group permission to speak into each other’s life. If someone sees a member of the group on the soccer field not representing Jesus well, they’ve given permission to be spoken to in that situation. They pray specifically about sin in their lives and reach out to people who need hospitality or love.
About 20 freshmen come in each year, so the group stays at about 60-80 ongoing. The group also has some rituals that identify them, including chanting prayers, and they all memorize the Sermon on the Mount.
“The old guys had it right that when we memorize Scripture, it gets into you in ways it doesn’t when you just read it,” Randy said. While people might balk at memorization, Randy points out that we all have a storehouse of songs in our heads that we’ve memorized. Scripture can access that same part of the brain, particularly when chanted or sung or prayed. It doesn’t take as long as most people think it does to memorize, but it does take work.
The group also does exercises and challenges together. One of the exercises at meals is that members cannot serve themselves or ask to be served. “We watch and see if others need something, a drink or a plate of food, so we have to look around and notice people’s needs and fill them for one another,” Randy said.
The group also practices “dwelling in the Word.” This means the group reads a section from the Sermon on the Mount then asks questions such as, “If we took this teaching about loving our enemies seriously what would we do?” They formulate what they call “challenges” or “experiments” to go out and live this out.
Randy reports that many Tau Chi Alpha Monk Warriors who were struggling with their spiritual lives have more confidence and the relationships are pretty dynamic after time in the group.
“I think they would tell you it’s made a huge difference,” he says. “It’s a three-and-a-half year process, but the payoff is 10 years down the road.”
The college experience is probably not something students will ever get to repeat, so taking advantage of this crucial time to change the heart as well as the mind is central to what Randy is doing.
The Monk Warriors do not live together in one house, though some of the members room together. While some religious orders are cloistered, the Monk Warriors are very sensitive about not becoming elitist, self-absorbed, or isolationist. How do you instill values in a group of people in ways that change their lives yet doesn’t isolate them? How can they really impact their world? Their approach is to have a covenant with one another and live it out in the larger world.
“We learn monastic disciplines but do them in everyday life,” says Randy. “So we don’t plan to have a monastic softball league. The students are engaging the world, identifying places on this campus where they can be salt and light. Our light and life don’t revolve around this group. We are out there living this radical life, not spending all our time meeting with each other. And it has worked better than I thought it would.”
Greg Taylor is lead minister at Garnett Church of Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is author (with Randy Harris) of Living Jesus: How the Greatest Sermon Ever Will Change Your Life for Good.
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