The Wall Street Journal explores trends in Christian community life sort of – GetReligion (blog)

The article goes on to refer to Rod friend of this blog Drehers upcoming "The Benedict Option" book, then swings back into a lengthy piece on the good and bad points of setting up a communal life in the sticks. When I finished it, I was not convinced that this movement is a trend by any means, as the writer only cites one other community to make his case.

That community - which only got two paragraphs in the story -- is a group of Orthodox Christians who live within walking distance of St. John Orthodox Cathedral in Eagle River, Alaska.

Its a shame the WSJ writer didnt visit that group, as its a whole different scene than what he discovered in Oklahoma.

I dropped by the cathedral (pictured with this article) back in 2015 for a Sunday service and noticed the local streets named after saints and how many of the congregants lived walking distance from the church. Located a 20-minute drive north of Anchorage, its nowhere near as isolated as is the Clear Creek group.

Attention editors: There are dangers to taking an upcoming book, visiting one specific community (apparently) mentioned in the book, citing another and then extrapolating a national trend from it all.

When I came out with a book on Christian community in 2009, I was looking all over the country for likeminded communities that would welcome it. What I found was slim pickings. Id be interested in learning that a mass movement had happened in the eight intervening years, but Ive found that experiments like Clear Creek and St. Johns Cathedral are the exception.

This is also not the first time the Clear Creek and Eagle River folks have appeared together in an article. A 2014 piece in Crisis magazine cites Dreher's work and names the same two communities and is similar to the Journal piece, albeit it's critical of the Benedict Option. If you're going to profile a movement, try not to use the same two examples that other writers have used.

Its too bad more of Rods quotes on how many of these communities are out there were not included. Im curious too as to how these folks are different from the Amish, Bruderhof (some tmatt coverage here) and Hutterite communities that have been doing much the same thing for decades.

Im glad the writer found one person who disagreed with the community concept, but unfortunately, she was the wrong person to cite.

A lone fundamentalist Christian church in red-state Florida is not the same as an intentional rural community like Clear Creek. You can't just cite an independent Protestant group in criticism of hierarchical Catholic and Orthodox groups. It's apples and oranges.

If youre going to find a critic, latch onto Facebook groups of people whove lived in multi-household communities where they are geographically close to a church, have some form of income sharing or engage in a common industry. I listen in to one such group (of disenchanted Catholics whove been part of a group of Midwestern charismatic communities) whose members could have provided much better quotes.

I appreciated the piece and the effort taken to report it, but the article needed more.

What does the local bishop think of this group? How connected is Clear Creek to the Diocese of Tulsa? Yes, there are photos on the monastery's webpage of a visit by Cardinal Raymond Burke, but that says more about the community's isolation because Burke is not exactly in Pope Francis' good graces at the moment. If theres anything Ive heard from Catholics whove been members of such communities, its that they wished they hadnt veered so far from the mainstream church but had found some way of integrating more parishes into their vision.

Then again, the monastery has been featured recently by Our Sunday Visitor.Also by the Tulsa World. Can't get much more mainstream than that. But the Journal focused on the lay community near the monastery; a different kettle of fish. There's been a lot written about how even the best-intentioned communities sink into authoritarian tendencies. What steps is Clear Creek taking to make sure the Benedict Option doesn't go bad?

Those are the questions people are asking and which journalists should be answering.

Photos are by the author and from clearcreekmonks.org.

Visit link:

The Wall Street Journal explores trends in Christian community life sort of - GetReligion (blog)