In just under two weeks I pack my Johannesburg bags and - along with my passport - head far, far north, way beyond the Boerewors Curtain to join a new monastic community...in Pretoria North. "Why?" you ask? "Are you becoming a monk?" you say? "What will you be doing?" Read on!

Technorati Tags: new monasticism, Nieu Communities

NieuCommunities has been present in South Africa for around four years. The front page of their site explains their ethos best:

Tolstoy wrote, Everybody wants to change the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Maybe we're a little over ambitious, but we want it all. We want to change our world and become a changed people. NieuCommunities is a handful of missional communities scattered around the world who are committed to developing followers of God in the way of Jesus. Each year we invite about a hundred young leaders to come and spend some time with us as we engage our God and our world. Many come on short, 1-2 week Road Trips to get a taste of missional life. But our core formational experience is our 10-month missions apprenticeship. If you're ready to change the trajectory of your life and change your world in the process, we invite you to read on.

Our hope and calling is to shape uncommon followers of God as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus together. Jesus lingered long with God, and so we carve out time to do the same. We call this communion. He did life day-in and day-out with a small band of sojourners, so we choose to share our lives with each other. We call this community. He lived with an unwavering purpose as he created spiritual home for others, so we open our hearts to be taught how to live on purpose wherever we find ourselves in the world. We call this mission. Communion, Community, and Mission are the three streams that run through everything we do in NieuCommunities. Each of our communities sets out every year to pursue God relentlessly, to allow our faith and character to be transformed in the crucible of community, and to submerge into the cultures around us and make a difference in peoples' lives.

I met Arthur, Bryan and Sean two years back at the News Cafe Midrand for coffee...after chatting with Arthur online at Emerging Africa and deciding to meet. I didn't recognise them at first since I thought I was looking for a 40-year-old Afrikaans guy...not three laid-back coffee-drinking Californians who looked too normal to talk about church! Turns out they don't just write online about theology and mission and formation and justice - they also live the life. Soon after that meeting I visited their site in Pretoria North - about an hour's drive from my home in Joburg - and started hanging out with them more and more. The first time I visited the Apartheid Museum was with them, which also resulted in another first for me: lunch in Soweto. They're part of the emerging church conversation in South Africa and part of Church Resource Ministries. One of the other CRM ministries - InnerCHANGE - is starting a house in Soshanguve mid-year: my friend Luc Kabongo is leaving NieuCommunities soon to establish that (InnerCHANGE are communities of missionaries living in poor, marginalised neighbourhoods around the world).

I will be an apprentice at NieuCommunities from mid-January to mid-November. After that, who knows...maybe Cape Town? As for my reasons for this decision, due to a number of circumstances it makes sense now, at this time of my life. Last year I realised that I don't want to be doing web development as the main thing I spend most of my time on (I will still working as a freelance web developer for years to come - even this year - just scaling back my involvement). Although I enjoy a great deal of it I'd like to spend more time learning - and practicing - interactive visual art (much like the Nintendo Wii: systems where people can interact with computers in different ways, like movement or sound, and have those inputs translated into music, or games, or varying the height of a helium balloon on a pulley wire with an LCD light inside). Part of my self-directed study this year will be Max/MSP/Jitter, a program which allows for this sort of interaction. My first project will be building an interactive tic-tac-toe game which uses hand movements for plotting where to move on the virtual board.

I've also wanted to live in intentional community for some time now. I'm drawn to monasteries and places of prayer; I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in Grahamstown last November. The main question would-be monks explore during their novitiate is, "What do you desire?" This is also the question asked when they make their vows, and it is exploring this question that underlies this year for me.

NieuCommunities is part of a larger movement called "new monasticism." It isn't based on any usual rules of monastic life - like the rule of St Benedict - mainly because it's developed within the Protestant stream of Christianity (monasteries are usually either Catholic or Greek Orthodox). What has happened in the last 15-or-so years is that Protestants have realised that the monastic way of life solves many problems inherent to contemporary culture, like individualism, materialism and consumerism, and has looked at the monastic way of life to see what can be taken out and adapted to modern life. Those who are new monastics do not become monks, so Sean - you can stop telling people you know someone who's becoming a monk!

NieuCommunities are currently the only new monastic community in South Africa, which will hopefully change soon, since I think it's a good model for how to do faith in community. My friend Brett Anderson is looking to start one in Stellenbosch early this year: he's currently attempting to visit Shane Clairborne (author of The Irresistible Revolution) in Philadelphia.

Wish me luck! I hope to still be around Joburg reasonably often and to start meeting some more people in Pretoria too. I'll also be writing a bit more, on this blog and maybe for some magazines...

Yay - we can't wait to have you on this side of the Boerewors curtain!

reply to this comment

Posted by: Cori 08 Jan, 2008 - 11:52:43

I'm interested in the dialectic between intentional withdrawl and intentional engagement.

I find myself often quoting Henry David Thoreau in Walden:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".

reply to this comment

Posted by: nic paton 08 Jan, 2008 - 15:11:07

Well, now that you've decided to cross the Rubicon (or at least the Jukskei) perhaps we can meet some time!

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Posted by: Steve Hayes 08 Jan, 2008 - 18:40:28

Way to go - and you know I mean that.

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Posted by: Carl 10 Jan, 2008 - 15:48:58

Cori and Steve: looking forward to spending more time with you :) Thanks for that quote, Nic - encouraging :) Carl - props for the most original send-off line :)

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Posted by: Roger Saner 10 Jan, 2008 - 16:03:11

hey man
see my note on the Simple Way on FB
all the best for this year - just hungry for church man, community, meaning, purity or heart soul mind, that sort of thing
trust we'll both be one step closer
God bless ya guy
love b

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