Benedict’s Rule and the modern Christian

Last year I enjoyed reading The Rule of Saint Benedict. A friend asked whether we could be shaped more by this ancient wisdom today. So here are some random reflections on that theme.

Things we could learn

1. One of the strengths of the Benedictine Rule is that life has set rhythms. This is a challenge to modern ideas of freedom- after all having daily, weekly, monthly and annual patterns means we aren’t free to improvise or do what we feel like. But modern life (and this includes social and church life) is often made hard by decision fatigue and the need to organise everything we want. To have rhythms of life, and communal rhythms of life, could help embed healthy patterns. To some extent, we have that with Sunday worship and midweek homegroups. But perhaps we could do more- building in patterns for prayer, for hospitality, for work etc.
2. A second strength of the Benedictine Rule was how much Scripture was read and sung communally. The reformation led to family devotions become more central, and later evangelical movements have emphasised the personal quiet time. But it seems to me there could be real gain to having communal Bible reading patterns that everyone follows (to help accountability and spiritual digestion).
3. A third strength of the Benedictine Rule was communal praise and prayer. Having more opportunities in the week for some people to gather for prayer and/or singing together could well be a good thing, helping us to express our faith, and perhaps to avoid becoming over intellectual in our approach.
4. A fourth strength of the Benedictine Rule was its commitment to hospitality, including to strangers. I wonder if it would be possible to create either communal hospitality or a rota of household hospitality that made it easier to welcome strangers to share food with us, which seems a very New Testament Church kind of thing.

Limitations for church (but perhaps not for homegroups or smaller groups of Christians)

1. The Benedictine Rule just won’t work with children in the mix. It’s hourly rhythms don’t work with the more organic rhythms of babies and young children. It’s relative silence outside Bible and prayer and worship is almost certainly not a healthy environment for young children.
2. The Benedictine Rule, or attempts to approximate it, would lead to inability to engage with significant aspects of life, as community and family events often don’t fit neatly into rhythms, but missing them would mean not connecting with people when there are opportunities.
3. The Benedictine Rule, if adapted in some form as a churchwide rule, would almost certainly lead to a church that excluded many sincere Christians. It could only gather very committed Christians whose work and family commitments enabled them to spend a lot of time on church activities, and who could fit work and family commitments around the church pattern. That is hard if for example you do shift work, or to give another example if you are married to someone who is not a Christian.

Because of these limitations, I think it unlikely that a whole church could realistically go very far down the Benedictine route. The helpful elements would be far less intense (a weekly pattern of Sunday worship, homegroup, perhaps a praise/prayer meeting, perhaps a Bible reading scheme in a year not a month). But it might be that households, or small groups of households, choose to create more intense rhythms of worship and community and hospitality and Bible reading that could be helpful for a season. If those small communities did not become superior to others in the church but served them, those “Benedictine groups” could be helpful in fostering the community, Bible reading, rhythms of life and hospitality that can sometimes be lacking in modern church.