Megachurch and Monastery

The Church of the Open Door is a megachurch in Minnesota with some 3,000 people attending weekly. In recent years they've discovered that facets of monasticism are making a great difference to the way the church functions, and the way in which members of the congregation view their lives as Christians.

At the end of his article, Keith Meyer details a number of ways in which the core members of the church function together. The first of these is:

Living in Jesus. We will have regular habits of "being with Jesus" for transformation into Trinitarian life.
-Slowing our lives down together to eliminate hurry.
-Paying attention to God together, all of the time.
-Confessing our sins to one another in safe groups.
-Memorizing and meditating together on longer, transformative passages of scripture.
-Interceding for each other, our community, and our world in prayer together.
-Mentoring and being mentored across generational, ethnic, class, and gender lines.

What is also interesting in the article is that the way in which members have acted out some of these spiritual disciplines has caused other members to react against them.

Jesus for President

On the Out of Ur site, there's a review of the latest book by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. (Clairborne's first book, The Irresistible Revolution - living as an ordinary radical, has been amongst the top twenty 'Christian living' titles on Amazon for a couple of years).

The new book is called Jesus for President, an intentionally ironical title, since the authors' stance is basically a criticism of the way Christians have 'got into bed' with the State, in the USA.

David Swanson has written two of an intended three-part review on the book, and the comments that follow the first part provide an interesting insight into the way thinking on this very topic is very mixed in the US.

Claiborne and Haw are amongst the founding members of The Simple Way, a New Monasticism community in the US.