In the Coracle

Today is the first day I have fully devoted to writing my doctoral dissertation. A couple of weeks ago I finished the paper for my last class in my doctorate and submitted it to some friends and to my course instructor, and today my job is to begin organizing for the writing process of the dissertation, plus the media project associated with it.

The focus of the dissertation is to learn from the early Christian monastic movements (the Benedictines, desert fathers and mothers, Celtic monastics, and then later the Franciscans and others) and see how they might influence how we live our Christianity in today’s Internet-paced culture.

Bakke Graduate University lets its doctoral students do two types of dissertations: The first is the typical one, a big paper, around 170 pages of heavily researched and footnoted text, describing some way in which the student is implementing transformational leadership in their local ministry context. The second is an abbreviated version of that paper, wrapped around a media project meant for popular use – usually, that means the student writes a book for publication as the media project, and then sandwiches that with 60 or 70 pages of research to provide a theological and social foundation for the book.

I’m taking the second approach, but instead of writing a book, I’m working on some outlets for spiritual formation resources using social networking. In particular, I’m doing a set of iPhone/iPad apps to help people establish rhythms of praying and living which equip them for mission in their everyday lives. I won’t be more specific than that right now, in public, because the result of this work is something that will be published on the Apple store, so there is some small risk of competition in the business portion of the idea that I’d like to minimize.

If you’ve been poking around on my blog (which more of you read after it autoposts to Facebook than on the blog website directly) for any length of time, you know that I’ve been reading and processing and posting snippets a lot of books for quite a while, and that will continue – most of my writing time has been focused on this doctoral process, and blogging has shifted away from what it was for me in earlier years (telling about our effort to plant a missional, emerging church in the Seattle suburbs), and now more to be an often neglected outlet for thoughts on culture and spirituality in general.

This is a quote that I happened across while digging through notes I’ve made over the past few years in an (Evernote-hosted) bucket of ideas that may be useful to include in the dissertation.

Christians struggling for sanctity in a too-comfortable world should pay attention to this observation by Mark Noll: “For over a millennium, in the centuries between the reign of Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideals of the gospel was done either by those who had chosen the monastic way or by those who had been inspired in their Christian life by the monks.”

- Chris Armstrong, in the article Re-Monking the Church, in Christian History Magazine Issue 93

When I try (usually to horrifyingly stumbling failure) to answer the question “what is your dissertation about”, or “why are you so deep into the monks”, I try to answer as Chris answers. I am fascinated by the long history of people who did absolutely everything they could to live the Christian story, and the values and practices of these individuals and communities shape me away from my own half-heartedness (or much less) far more than most contemporary resources that I’ve found.

And as I continue to hear from so many others across the globe who are trying to find ways of living wholly devoted lives in the paths of monastic movements, I know I’m not alone. God’s at work here, and I’m thrilled to be caught up in this stream of the story.