The Village is a neo-monastic mega house church nestled in the heart of Tucson. Its unique way of following God is born out of a passion to love our neighbors well by taking them into our lives and homes and serving each other out of the gifts and abilities God gives us collectively and individually. It is the way in which we live out our vision to bring healing to the city, one person at a time.
Neo-monasticism is a Village understanding of community that is different from some classic forms of monasticism. In the past, a monastery was most often a cloistered community that separated from the world in order to dedicate itself to a simple life and communion with God. Those within the walls kept vows in order to maintain community and be disciplined in seeking God. There are certainly modern day equivalents to these ancient communities. Our new form monastery seeks to tear down walls along the lines of St. Patrick’s entry into Ireland for the purpose of the mission of God. We seek to walk among our neighbors and friends as the embodiment of the gospel and live our lives together in such a way that the mission of God is honored. To that end, we choose to engage each other in homes and over meals. The building
God gave us looks a lot like a house. You walk into the kitchen and move easily into the living room. We play songs we have written, hang art that we have created on the walls, and eat food that our own hands prepare, although sometimes the cooks wants a night off so we order in pizza. We have kid rooms in the back and they are always a mess even though we beg them to clean their rooms. There are picnic tables in the backyard along with a playground area complete with swings and a slide. The house is filled with comfortable chairs and couches and we are always dragging them around in order to make it easier to engage each other. It is our home.
We are always inviting people over to the house. We love it when folks show up and we do our best to extend hospitality to them. We are a bit absentminded so we sometimes forget to tell them where the bathrooms are or ask if they’d like a drink or make sure they get some dinner before the kids come back for seconds. We try to respect the millions of diverse opinions and expectations of our guests. We truly want folks to stay and engage and maybe become part of the family even if that means they just want to be third cousins twice removed. We know it is difficult to walk into somebody’s house and feel comfortable, but that is one of our deepest longings.
We are an open monastery, but we do take vows. They are vows of love. We are guided by certain values and we agree to do our best to live them out and to honor God and each other as we do so. These primary values are community, accessibility, authenticity, creativity, truth, and the disciplines.
Accessibility:
From the beginning we have believed that the Village should be a place where anyone can come and be accepted. We have fought hard against our own prejudices and lies so that we can be doorways into the kingdom of God. We resist our exclusionary ways in order to allow people to find God at their own pace and in their own way. We seek to understand the perspective of others and to love them as they are. We find that Jesus was willing to be associated with those whom society thought were outcasts as well as religious and government leaders and we seek to emulate Jesus as we engage the people he places in our path. We hope to place no stumbling block between Jesus and the people we meet except for the gospel itself.
Authenticity:
We believe that walking the narrow way Jesus calls us to is difficult, and we attempt to be honest about the struggle. We want our community to be unafraid to confess sin and failure, and we want to be sure that people count the cost as they begin their walk with Jesus. We weep with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice. We do not sugarcoat the journey and we spend a good deal of our time dealing with our own sin as well as the sin of those we have come to love as sisters and brothers. We strive to display not only the good hearts God has placed in us, but also deal with the residue of the old man we still drag around.
Community:
Foremost among our values is that we are called to be the body of Christ and to live in community with each other. We recognize that being together is hard and that it takes work and sacrifice to be able to truly love and serve each other. We often throw parties and share meals in our homes as a way to offer the gifts of love and hospitality to others. Messages are preached in such a way that the community normally has opportunity to also speak into the passage. Various events such as Pilgrim Groups and Monastic Community Gatherings foster intimacy and we also host parties and other events in order to have places to connect our community with the broader community of Tucson. We teach and are taught to submit ourselves to the community and to listen for the truth that the community speaks into our lives. We strive to be a community known by its love.
Creativity:
At the Village we believe that people are made in the image of a creative God and that because this is true, we also create. Calling people to be creative in the way God has uniquely fashioned them is a huge part of our being in community. We call on people to attempt to draw, paint, photograph, sculpt, write poetry and computer programs, create music, write lyrics, cook, bake, garden, renovate buildings, and engage in other creative endeavors and then share the products of that creativity with the community. We choose to use worship songs that are created in our own community or in other nearby communities where we find relationships. We display the creativity of our community as part of our offering to God. We sponsor art shows, music concerts, and other places to proffer the things we have created to the Village community and to the broader community. We have also made the website a place to display the creativity of our community.
The Disciplines:
We believe that the path to freedom, healing, and joy is found in the disciplines of prayer, reading God’s Word, meditating, fasting, and self-denial, as well as in other spiritual disciplines. We have invited people into times of solitude and reflection and try to keep the practice of the disciplines part of our own routines. The elders regularly pray over and anoint people with oil for the purpose of bringing healing and hope. Some have invited people into their homes for a season in order to help them grow more disciplined lives in the area of resisting addictive behaviors or handling their financial affairs. Annually we covenant together to allow ourselves to be disciplined by those God has placed in spiritual authority over us.
Truth:
We believe in truth. We also believe that the evil one distorts the truth and invites us to believe lies. We make it our passion to speak the truth in love to each other, that is, to speak the truth to each other as we grieve the losses and the struggles of being called to deal with lies we have chosen to believe. We believe the Bible is true and that it is a primary place where God speaks truth to us. We also believe that God speaks truth to us in our community and through the still, small voice of his Spirit. We try to speak truth to the cultural lies of the Tucson community as well as offering the way, the truth, and the life of Jesus to those who need desperately to hear the simple, painful beauty of truth. We attempt to speak the truth without harsh judgment and condemnation, but with the gentle love of Jesus and a deep awareness of our own willingness to hang on to lies.
Our community meets together in three primary ways. Each gathering is crucial to fully belong to the community. The first, and primary gathering is Sunday evening Vespers. We gather to worship God, hear him speak to us, express ourselves to him, and share a meal. It is a regular weekly rhythm of keeping Sabbath and is the ordinary way of enjoying God and each other. It usually begins with a call to worship followed by singing, reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostles’ Creed together, and a teaching from Scripture. After the message, there are opportunities to quietly reflect on what God has said, give offerings to God, confess a longing to be healed, and identify with Jesus by taking bread and juice as a reminder of his body broken for us and his blood poured out for us. This time is followed by more singing songs of worship, lament, and praise, singing Happy Birthday to those who celebrate birthdays by bringing us sweets, and a calling down of God’s blessing. We then eat a meal together and share our stories, our longings, our hopes, our desires, and our lives with each other. Vespers is a weekly expression of our desire to be with God and with each other.
A second way that we are together is in Monastic Community. These are monthly gatherings in people’s homes for the purpose of establishing and deepening relationships, irritating each other on to good works, eating together, having fun, and creating a safe place to begin to be a part of the family. We might do things like feed the homeless, host a kid’s game day, provide a ‘date night’ kid care experience for parents, or any of a number of other projects the Monastic Community dreams up. It is a place to get to know each other in richer ways and work together for the sake of bringing healing to the city.
Finally, we meet together in Pilgrim Groups. As the name indicates, these are small groups of men and women who study scripture together, pray together, and help each other via the ‘hot seat’ where we acknowledge our struggles and sin and call each other to deeper trust in Christ. It is a place of intimacy where we can acknowledge our deep need for a Savior and our longing to be saved. It is where we admit our sins and encourage each other toward reconciliation with God. It is where we offer and receive grace.
