Live From The Inside Out

May 28, 2007 | Filed Under books, missional, new monasticism |

12-marks.jpgIn chapter one, titled “Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire” Margaret McKenna discusses the need to create new expressions of relocation. She asks what forms could the classical desert take in the world of the twenty-first-century? Here is a bit of her description:

The following desert-inspired ingredients seem to influence their development: God-seeking and prayer will have the primary place, but be thoroughly integrated with life and witness. We will build the practice of Sabbath freedom into the rhythms of our calendars, lives and work. Our reverence and love for God will be connected to and include all of God’s creation. Hospitality in the form of sharing food, roof and friendship with neighbors will foster both compassion and engagement and will be a form of holy communion with marginal cultures and poor populations. The issues of our time, such as militarism, nuclearism, poverty, homelessness, and ecological problems, as manifested on the margins, will call for our personal and communal conversion in the form of disciplined resistance in lifestyle and engagement in the search for solutions. This resistance and engagement will be as much prayer as it is work. Promotion of alternatives to violence and imprisonment will be practiced as well as promoted. Presence and witness will have a prophetic quality that comes from God’s Spirit. Personalist and communal rather than institutional models of organization will be characteristic. Numbers and finance will not dominate or dictate our concerns. We will not allow ourselves to be intimidated by the “Powers” of Empire. . . . We will live and witness from the inside out.

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