pat loughery

The paper that I’m finishing up tonight on my Orthodox Trail trip and class has me thinking again about where I am currently ministering, or where I’m participating in the Kingdom. I’d like to think that this is a 24×7, everywhere and anywhere type of answer, but I think that there are certainly areas and tasks that are more on m radar screen than others.

Taking what I wrote completely out of context, I wrote the following, which I thought might be helpful to post here.

For most of my fellow students, they will be writing to a specific context, a well-defined ministry. My ministry context is more fluid.

Previously a church planter and pastor, my current ministry is more fluid. I participate with a local church but am not its pastor. My wife and I lead a small group composed mostly of people who were in our former church plant. I organize a very loose gathering of people who are interested in missional and neo-monastic community, mostly as a way to hang out together and chat over beers or Ethiopian food. My wife and I enjoy teaching marriage and relationship workshops. Finally, I am fascinated with social networking and am trying to find ways to create spiritual community in Internet spaces.

I believe that I will lead in the church context again, but perhaps not in the same format as what I have been used to previously. Following where I believe the Lord is leading me now, I am studying spiritual formation as it happens in community. I am very interested in how intentional community has shaped people spiritually, and that has led me into a deep interest in monasticism both old and new.

This interest comes as I am also aware that I live in a different place than most people practicing monasticism. I am married with a family; my calling is not to join an established religious order in the traditional sense of monasticism. And while new monasticism is normally understood as including multiple family groups intentionally living under a single roof, I live in a single family home in suburban Seattle, Washington. My neighborhood is upper-middle class, and I don’t foresee that my family will choose to live in a cohabitation environment any time soon.

I hope that studying the themes and practices of various Christian communities will help me to understand how spiritual formation happens in communities of various flavors.

My wife and I do find ourselves practicing spiritual formation in our own community in ways that echo what I’m learning about intentional communities like the monastic streams. We practice hospitality by opening our doors to strangers; we seek deep friendships with people who are different from us; we are intentionally exploring ways that we can grow together.

As my family participates in our local church, we are learning from others who are different than us as well as finding ways to help to shape the community with relationship counseling and plain old friendship building.

I also am learning that my context for ministry includes the social networking relationships that I have through weblogs and services like Facebook and Twitter. A child of the Internet era, I am comfortable in this technological arena. I hope that what I am studying will be of particular help to them also as we learn what it means to be community even when we are scattered geographically.