The New Friars
Two Opportunities to Serve the Lost and Needyby Scott Bessenecker
When I was in high school, my younger brother, Chris, and I decided to visit a nearby monastery. We were young and idealistic. Both of us took pretty seriously our Christian heritage and were curious about this gathering of men who would pledge themselves to poverty in order to stand alongside the poor, helping not so much by pulling them up from above them, but as those who would place themselves underneath the poor, so as to push them up from below. Was this a calling we could endure - to be single all our lives, poor, and devoted to the authority of the Church? With a healthy dose of respect we entered the sacred grounds.
I’m not exactly sure what Chris and I expected, but it certainly wasn’t the college fraternity environment we encountered. The brothers swore like sailors, smoked like chimneys and lived like kings so far as Chris and I could observe. We asked the brother leading us on this tour of the monastery about the cable TV in every room. This was 1979 when cable was a relatively new luxury and one that our middle class family did not enjoy (at 41 I still have never had cable TV). “The brothers take a vow of personal poverty,” the brother emphasized. “These things are actually owned by the monastery, not the brothers.” Apparently, as long as it was communal wealth, a brother could live in luxury at this monastery.
I suppose the thing that really jarred me and Chris was the baby baptismal in the backyard that had been turned into a barbeque pit for those pleasant summer evenings when these “friends of the poor” could enjoy a grilled steak with their beer and cigarettes as they rehashed the games they had watched on ESPN earlier that day.
That visit was profoundly disenfranchising for me. The things I thought were noble and righteous about the Church seemed like a façade. Underneath the austere robe tied with the simplicity of a rope belt was a course-jesting, steak-eating, rich kid who simply got around the vow of poverty by saying he was only enjoying someone else’s wealth and not his own.
Twenty-five years later I found myself visiting a 24-year-old believer, an evangelical who had recently graduated from MIT with a world of wealth open to him. David Von Stroh, instead, had chosen to live in a Bangkok slum community. He lived in a scrap-wood structure in an upper room over a space where the church in that community gathered. His dwelling, like the others in his community was built on stilts over the raw sewerage that ran below the neighborhood of corrugated-tin lean-tos.
David was working with this community as an insider, trying to identify the key felt needs of their slum neighborhood. Addressing the problems of drug use is at the top of their list. The woman in the structure next to David ran methamphetamines out of her home to addicts and dealers in the area.
David was struggling with the loneliness that comes with the kind of life he had chosen – to live among the poor as one of them, just as Jesus did. He did not have the same sort of prestige that often accompanies the outward appearance of pious poverty, but David’s life witnessed to the same spirit of poverty proclaimed by Jesus and many of the heroes of our faith, from St. Francis to Mother Theresa.
The Church’s concern for the poor and marginalized has been born and subsequently died hundreds of times through the ages. When a once vibrant movement of solidarity with those who live on the edge of society withers, another seems to rise to take its place. But there is a growing move of God to follow Jesus on a path of downward mobility. “You know how full of love and kindness our Lord Jesus Christ was. Though he was very rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty he could make you rich.” (2 Cor. 8:9 NLT).
The New Friars
People like David Von Stroh are beginning to pop up all over the place - university students who have been turned off by the glitz of a material existence and who hunger for a spirituality that includes solidarity with the marginalized. There is just something about denying the call to suburban affluence that seems to a spiritually starved soul to be a good thing to do: Fast from materialism and binge on relationship with the poor.
Living as Jesus and his followers the semi-homeless life of simplicity among society's dregs, at least for a season has something that beckons the idealist. And many seem to be turning the ideal into the real. There are a growing number of organizations who cater to this kind of spirituality. Servant Partners, Word Made Flesh, and InnerCHANGE are three fellowships that are bent on planting the kingdom of God among the poorest of the urban poor. In many ways they are the new friars, inviting the 21st century St. Francis and St. Clare to come and preach the good news to the poor – if necessary using words.
My brother, Chris, has recently been living out in Banda Aceh in Indonesia serving the survivors of the Tsunami. His disenfranchisement with our visit to the monastery bore him into non-government organization service. As for me, I work to help Christian university students find their spirituality and missional calling among society’s marginalized. The Global Urban Trek and the internship program in Madison – see Kim Miller’s and Angela Tuan’s blogs - are designed to help students and recent graduates find life in their service to the poor. Come join the brothers and sisters minor (as they were first known) as we seek to befriend Jesus – as Mother Teresa would say – in the distressing disguise of the poor.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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