Remonking the Church

A Christianity Today editorial
This article was first published August 12, 1988

Would a Protestant form of monasticism help liberate evangelicalism from its cultural captivity? (Apish Interjection; "I'd say its been more like depravity than captivity. The unsaved didn't make us run after the 'rich and infamous' tele-evangelical,' all prosperity' and 'all fluff' all the time 'Ganrtyeque Gurus'. Nor did it hold a gun to our heads to make us supporters of the state religion of the Empire. Nor did it demand that we become Comforter of the Comfortable and Afflicter of the Afflicted")


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.