In the Summer of 1997 I was offered a dream job. An office heading up ministry to students for a national network of Pentecostal churches and a salary from HQ for church-planting. It was a wonderful, exciting and generous offer from a network of churches that I loved. It was the natural extension of the pattern of church-planting I had been following to that point. But I knew I couldn’t take it. The Spirit had me on a different path.
The offer came hot on the heels of a period of fantastic church planting and growth and in one sense was the natural next step. Except that I had already awoken to a realization that was to shift my whole direction. It was the realization we had grown our network of congregations in number but not in depth. We had gathered well but were left puzzling over how we could achieve deeper discipleship and a more authentic transformation of life, what St Benedict in the 500s called “conversion of life.”
Me with a thriving church plant in 1997
So my question to the universe was, “How can we live the apostolic life taught by Jesus more truly, deeply and powerfully than this?” By way of an answer I realized that there was a sequence of spiritual movements through history whose stories always made me buzz whenever I revisited them. Recognizing this, I gave myself over to an intense period of study, buried in the testimony of Celtic missionaries like Columba, Aidan and Hilda, Benedict, Scholastica and the first Benedictines, Francis and Clare of Assisi, Dominic and the first Dominicans, Ignatius Loyola and the original Society of Jesus, John Wesley and the first Methodists, William Booth and the first Salvationists.
Every one of these movements resulted in new expressions of Christian community which functioned beyond the boundaries of the churchianity of their day. And each movement in its own way changed the world. Yet none of these movements was congregation-focused or meetings-based in the way I was used to. This intrigued me. There was something else too: Different centuries, different countries, and different church traditions, and yet all shared a signature of key elements in common: All began when a small group of friends entered into an agreement or pledge to share the journey of faith in a way that would transform their own conversation with God. Out of the womb of that personal tranformation came their respective contributions to the world.
I simply decided to do the same. I had already spent 10 years living in community in group houses with a sequence of around 36 people – in pastoral ministry and theological training. So in 1997 I made that pattern intentional by inviting those boarding with me, along with some alumni of my previous group houses, to begin sharing with me the rule of life I had taken on at my ordination – a pattern by which I had lived for 7 years already.
CSWG Cloister in the UK / Jesus Generation Cloister in Australia
I was personally re-shaped by the stories of those exemplars, and guided by the input of a wonderful spiritual director Reverend Edwayd Dudding a.k.a. Father Gregory, the Father Superior of the Community of the Servants of the Will of God (CSWG) an Anglican Monastic Community in the UK, rooted in the mysticism of the Eastern Church and the rule of life of the Benedictine tradition. With the benefit of that guidance, my own ordination rule morphed into the “Jesus Generation Pledge” and a network formed nased on the Benedictine constitution of CSWG. We called our Constitution “The Traveller’s Guide.” From 1997 to 2009, 40 Boomers and Millennials shared a journey in apostolic living, in varying degrees of community, connected by that agreement.
Some of us were hungry and thirsty seekers, some red-hot evangelists, some burned out on conventional church-culture but not not burned out on Jesus, or the Gospel, or people or community. In our shared rule we found a way to journey together, and to go deeper in our explorations of the apostolic way.
In later years the language of my rule moved beyond churchianity, and the canvas of its vision grew wider. But in one form or another this rule of life, rooted in my vows at ordination, has journeyed with me for more than thirty-five years – through every season of life and in every work-setting. In this way I have been able to make a journey of exploration surrounded by wonderful soul-friends. Along the way I boiled the rule-of-life down to the bare essentials: the Way of Love, the Way of Oneness, the Way of Simplicity and the Way of Soul-Friendship and have shared it only sparingly with a few soul-friends.
Every generation asks afresh, “What does it really mean to live a good life, a spiritual life, a blessed life, an apostolic, a godly life?” The Simple Rule is a very simple framework that allows friends to explore those questions and make the journey together.
It’s a pared back, boiled down, stripped back way of doing it. That’s why the Simple Rule page begins with the image of a campfire burning in the bush and a billy boiling. I look at that image and it tells me that a few friends are going to be sitting down together. They’re out in country and will soon be eating and drinking together. They will be talking together about their lives, gathered around a fire. And their lives will be different because of it.
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Paul Anthony Wallis 