Servants Movements
PROTESTANT MISSIONARY ORDERS
WITH VOWS
OF NON-DESTITUTE POVERTY

VIV GRIGG

(first published in 1985, updated 2000)

Summary:

This paper demonstrates some factors involved in the generation of several new Protestant missionary movement to the poor of the slums of the third world. Beginning with Winter's thesis that mission structures are equivalent functionally to Catholic orders, Viv Grigg demonstrates how a further step of building Protestant orders around core values of the early phases of Catholic orders is essential for the emergence of new Protestant mission thrusts to this primary mission field of the next decades.

INTRODUCTION

A Protestant order? It smells of musty monastic halls, of rotund, smiling men in brown cassocks attentive to minute and ridiculous tasks while the world pursues its accelerating plunge to destruction. Why a Protestant order? To accomplish a task thus far largely neglected by Protestants: the task of establishing the church in the thousands of urban slums of the third world.

For during the next decade a billion people will move from the rural areas of the third world to the mega-city capitals. The majority will move into slum and squatter areas. There are one billion that have already made this migration since 1950. In Asia between 19% to 66% of the people in the mega-cities live in such slum and squatter areas(Grigg 1986:2).

Among these urban poor it is rare to find a church, hard to find a pastor, impossible to find a missionary. In a number of cities studied (Grigg 1986:3) the church in the slums ranges from 0%-3% of the Christians in the city. The gospel Jesus brought for the poor never made it to them. While missions to the cities have ministered to the rich and middle class and elsewhere to the last frontiers, the frontier has migrated into the slums. Nobody has known what to do, for existing mission structures built on middle and affluent values, the independence of Protestantism and an individualistic pietism have lost sight of identificaion with the poor - the critical element in establishing the church among them.

A major factor in this failure to Jesus' specific calling of ministry to the poor by Protestant missions, has been the lack of the kind of order that has enabled Catholics for centuries to maintain their focus on ministry to the poor.In the necessity of finding models for ministry to the poor the study of history and particularly the Catholic orders is not only a useful pastime but an urgent necessity.

Such study is also imperative as we look for models for new Protestant missionary orders to emerge from the poor churches of the Latin American countries to the poor of Asia. This task of developing new structural forms for third world missions over the next decades is heightened by the realization that some elements of the older Catholic orders seem much closer culturally and pragmatically to what is needed than do the North American mission models of the last generation.

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Throughout much of history the world has been reached through the religious orders.

The orders grew out of responses to a growing imperfection within the church as it grew increasingly corrupt, powerful, wealthy and lukewarm. Generally they began as lay movements, growing out of a sense of rebellion against the increasing structuring of the church. Often a man of God would seek out a place of retreat only to find other seekers after holiness drawn to him and a community spring up focused on the search for holiness and for God. By the end of the fifth century monasticism had spread so widely it had become characteristic of the Catholic church (Latourette I 1975:221-2).

The orders grew out of seeking a lifestyle that was consistent with the gospels. At the same time there was much in them that was in conflict with these same gospels: the desire to work for ones salvation, withdrawal from society to work for one's own salvation, often severe ascetism growing out of early gnostic tendencies with their rejection of the physical body.

Over time, other corrupting influences led to the death of the monasticism. Despite vows of personal poverty the communities became rich because the monks worked hard, church folk gave and land owners willed property and goods to them. As wealth increased there was a growing laxity in their rules. Abbots became fuedal lords over these lands and diverted their energies from religious to secular pursuits. Secular leaders gained the power to appoint abbots and did so - often ther own irreligious sons. Immorality became rife because of the non-biblical elements that had crept in to the basis for the vow of chastity.

Yet God raised up reform movements and among them orders of preaching friars. It is primarily from these we can learn some useful models. Eventually a series of reform movements developed into the reformation. The laxity of morals in these orders led to their abolishment by the protestant countries. Along with this came a rejection, well thought out by Luther , of vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

As a result of rejecting these evils, the Protestant reformation for much of two hundred years also lost the positive aspects of the monastic and preaching orders. Fortunately, the concepts were not entirely lost within Protestantism. Wesley deliberately set about modelling his movement on the concept of an order. The Salvation Army, at a later date, with a similar commitment to the poor, was originally an order. Ralph Winters in some landmark studies seeks to demonstrate how today many Protestant mission societies are essentially orders in their structure.

Winters focusses on the structural components of orders comparing them to Protestant para-church and mission structures. He comments on various functional analogues between these two, mentioning decentralization, mobility, and eliteness of the religious communities. His plea is for an acceptance of the optional, voluntary structures for deeper community and effective service.(1979:142,145) He summarizes Gammon, enumerating characteristics of these voluntary structures(1979:162-3):

 

1.Voluntary deeper commitment

2.Response to a challenge

3.Stress on both devotion and active involvement

4.Task forces ready for any good work

5. An organizational espirit de corps

6.Both come-structures and go-structures

7.Amazing durability(of purpose and existence)

8.Stress on Christian basics

9.A normative pattern of discipline, for example:
 

a. community of members

b.related to the church but semi-autonomous

c.a structure of authority - "quasi-familial"

d. common property

e.celibate chastity, mono-sexual membership in any one order

f.& g.elite commitment beyond that of ordinary church members.

 

II.THE LOSS OF THE CORE

But in the process of reinventing the wheel(a Protestant version of a Catholic wheel in this case), we need to speak to a deeper level than the structural level at which Winter's analysis initiates us into thinking about Protestant orders.

The need of these urban poor requires a new call that is more than a faint Protestant sodal echo of the structural forms of the Catholic orders. It is a call that goes a long way back into some of the lifestyle and value issues out of which the Catholic orders emerged while rejecting the theological and historical distortions that were the cause of so much destructive schism.

For not all para-church or mission structures are orders. While there are the useful structural similarities that Winters talks of, there is more than simply a structural issue here. There is a question also of the spiritual dynamics that produced the early orders. There is a different level of value system in the traditional Catholic orders than is evident in Protestant missions. It was this value system that for many of these orders facilitated a ministry to the poor. It will not be effective to add to our Protestant package of tricks(referred to by Carey as organizational means), another structural trick called a Protestant order.

Dr Winters has given this first insight into the possibility. The idea has then germinated while walking in the slums of Asia with Assissi, Xavier, Wesley and Booth.

These thoughts, moulded amid the cries of the poor, born of the compulsion of the Spirit of God to seek out the poor and the needy, are the dynamism behind the development of a series of new Protestant movements known as SERVANTS movements.

In initiating these new Protestant orders it has been helpful to work from some of the value systems of the orders, rejecting their ascetism and other aberrations and tracking with their strengths. In seeing Protestant failure to minister to the urban poor in the mission context, it has increasingly become apparent that this is more than helpful, it becomes essential.

A Pastoral Response

Why go back into the orders? In the same way that Napoleon, MacArthur and others were students of the great battles of history in order to face the battles of their time, we do well to master the lessons of the past.

The process of developing an order has been an evolutionary one. Out of the experience of incarnational ministry among the poor of the slums of Manila, some critical elements became evident if we were to facilitate teams to follow with success and emotional and physical health patterns of incarnational churchplanting among the poor.

The pastoral care felt for those walking in the Lord's steps as poor among the poor has lead to the development of a set of values and lifestyle commitments to enable both ministry success and long-term mental and physical health.

What is Missing?

With the loss of the orders came a loss of focus on the centrality of incarnation as the central component of missionary strategy.

Orders were devotionally focussed. Ministry among the poor cannot be sustained unless there is a strong pattern of devotional lifestyle. Protestant missions have been work focussed.

Orders were communally focussed. Protestant missions have had teams but they have primarily been work teams of loosely-related individuals. Community is essential to provide sufficient emotional and spiritual support for incarnational workers among the poor.

Despite Ralph Winters affirmation that "Protestant missions do plan for poverty"(1979:163), the third world experience of invasions by North American missions is of groups dependent on a large sourcing of finances living affluent and middle-class lifestyles in the midst of a sea of need. Orders on the other hand have always had a focal commitment to poverty and hence to the poor.

Protestants in their rejection of celibacy have in recent years lost sight of the necessity for single men and women in the pioneering and difficult situations among the poor. In Catholic orders the commitment to celibacy has for many enabled such callings to be a natural communal commitment.

Apostolic Communities

Many would understand that going back to the old orders for models would lead to regulations and static patterns. But there were many types of orders. And many in their formative stages were distinctly evangelistic and discipling movements. Similarly an order from an evangelical arm of the church by its very source will be apostolic rather than monastic. For Assissi, Xavier, and Wesley, poverty was not seen as a virtue in itself alone, although good for the soul, it was seen as essentially apostolic in nature, a key to effective evangelization.

The need is for a pastoral structure to facilitate development of a band of apostles, prophets, pastor-teachers, evangelists and deacons(i.e community organizers, small business developers and social workers) in a ministry that is both apostolic and prophetic(for ministry to the poor is by nature prophetic). We look towards communities of incarnational workers living two by two among the poor they are reaching and returning every two weeks to a central location for ministry to each other.

This concept of community is developed from the patterns of Jesus and Paul's mobile ministering teams rather than the pastoral communal concepts of Acts 2 or Acts 4 . As such we are looking more to an order similar to the early celtic orders and the 12th century preaching friars than to the more monastic meditative orders.

A Rule or a Value System?

One of the lessons learned from Assissi is not to structure too highly a work. He refused for years to write down a rule for his order. When he did it gave room for men within it to execute power plays that stripped him of his leadership. He understood the necessity to have only a very narrow set of focal values and minimal structure. So the Lifestyle and Values for the first order seeks to emphasise only that which is focal (each Servants Mission has developed their own model of this.

He sought to avoid the error of many of the orders where the Rule became central and that Rule focussed on minor details and administrative structural issues. This administrative focus error occurs monotonously within Protestant mission societies. Their focal document is normally an administrative document, a manual, rather than a document setting out focal values and lifestyle. It is an easy error to fall into since governments require constitutions not value systems and it is human nature to do the work that must be done before that which is of highest priority.

What is needed to facilitate an order is a simple yet demanding value system that structures people into critical areas of focus but at the same time frees people to the mobility of apostolic ministry.

This is the first level: a set of vows or pledges or commitments or covenants to a value system, a set of general principles that give an incarnational worker an inner structure in the direction of communal commitments to incarnational churchplanting among the poor. It must be simple, focussing only on the central values. If it becomes complex or comprehensive the focal values become lost. By being written at a values level it can leave freedom, avoiding the restrictive, enabling a centreing down on those focal values.

To back this at a secondary level there is a need for a minimal set of rules and regulations to implement the values, an operating manual which for each national movement of incarnational workers must of cultural necessity be different; for principles and values determine action, not rules and regulations. They are the application of these in given situations. Rules, regulations, systems are in general monocultural, and time and space defined.

Such rules and regulations can be developed in two ways.So that the structures they regulate become limiting or in such a way that they become releasing because they generate harmonious patterns of decision-making.

Knowing God

The emergence of Protestant mission societies was a task-focussed emphasis. Out of the pietism in the Protestant revival movements came missions. Pietism was assumed rather than built into the pressures of the structures. By contrast older Catholic orders were focussed around devotion out of which stemmed mission work. Mission and work were part of the search for God not the raison d'etre.

In returning to the concept of an order there is a desire to return to the focal value that our apostolate is for the purpose of deepening devotion. Many Protestant groups have slogans such as "To know Christ and to make him known", but the written documents and structuring of the works include no significant parameters that will compel the missionary to focus on a devotional lifestyle. All that is assumed, because of the strong pietistic undergirdings of evangelicalism. The pressure of the structure is towards production and work, not towards devotional lifestyles.

The resultant underlying guilt of evangelical missionaries is consequently a major stress factor. Intense work pressures are accentuated by the task orientations of the mission organizations. There is, in general, little emotional release through the mission community because when it meets it is task-oriented. This is not to deny that major attempts are taken to combat these two areas of sin by missions team leaders who care for their younger missionaries. The problems however are inbuilt into the heart of the work-oriented structures. Thus only modifications are possible.

Vows

As Protestants we have a history of rejecting lifelong vows as being contrary to the freedom of the scriptures. Luther's De Votis Monasticis Judicium is a work of unrivalled importance. In it he takes considerable pains to point out that the vows are contrary to the word of God.

"Both in the New Testament and in the primitive church we find utterly no knowledge of the practice of making any vow whatsoever, but in fact a disaproval of a perpetual vow - rare and qasi-miraculous in any case - of chastity. Vows on system, are a purely human and pernicious system" (Luther quoted in Biot 1963:15).

Luther's arguement was that vows required the person to go beyond the requirements of the Gospel. Thus they were contrary to the gospel. Submission, for example, is required of all Christians one of another not as submission vowed to a single person. Evangelical Chastity for example does really exist - a voluntary chastity, freely preserved, paradise of any obligation, practiced by certain people simply because it pleased them to live in that way. Vowed chastity, contrariwise was not evangelical (Biot 25).

Short-term vows for most Protestant groups are an acceptable mode of operation. Many prefer words like covenant, commitment or pledge. The first and third order value systems have been developed on the basis of a yearly renewable covenant between the individual, the community, an advisor and God.

The Vow of Poverty. In the scriptures poverty is always a negative term. It is not poverty that is blessed but the poor - those godly poor who respond to the kingdom. Thus a vow of poverty is also unwise. Simplicity appears to be the lifestyle of the master, and - for ministry to the poor - incarnation among and identification with their poverty. Workers with Seravants make covenants to live lifestyles of non-destitute poverty and simplicity for the sake of identification with the poor.

The Vow of Chastity. Celibacy is nowhere commanded in the scriptures, nor set as an ideal for greater spirituality. The reformation rejection of celibacy as a mechanism for holiness was a historical necessity and we have no need to reverse what was bought with the blood of martyrs. Winters is accurate in his summation of continueing Protestant perspectives on celibacy: "Protestants in particular generally recoil from any whiff of one group being "holier than thou" and especially from the concept of celibacy"(1979:163). On the other hand both Paul and Jesus highlight the special blessings of the gift of singleness, be it chosen or imposed by the processes of life. Limited commitments to singleness appear both to be within the framework of the scriptures and to be of necessity for pioneering new and difficult areas. Those with such gifts need to be strongly encouraged, for the Protestant ethic, in its reaction to an errant Catholicism, coupled with the breakdown of American family structures has moved to an extreme worship of comfortable marriage that ignores the pressing urgency of the times and sacrifices needed to redeeem the poor of the earth.

The Vow of Obedience. One of Luther's five main arguements was that the vows are contrary to evangelical liberty. Indeed the very origin of the orders as schools of spiritual education in which disciples lived in liberty had over time grown into an oppressive system of regulations that necessitated a system of pressures.

Again in Servants movements, we see the necessity for a commitment to authority relationships, leadership by servanthood, decision-making which is accountable both upwards and downwards and other issues related to harmonious community. But to make fixed vows to miniscule rules on these issues is deeply disturbing to an evangelical. So we are forced back to the same position of making commitments to paradisely defined and central values while leaving ourselves to work out the details in the freedom that is in Christ.

III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SERVANT-COMPANIONS

(a protestant movement drawing on the historical models of the third order friars)

But what of those not called to lifestyles of incarnation among the poor? Can they have a significant part to play in the emergence of the movements? Is there a place for them within the biblical mandate towards the poor? The concept of a third order has provided the initial framework to facilitate this involvement.

1st,2nd and 3rd Orders

In traditional Catholicism there are often three associated orders. The first is an order of single men who are active in ministry or in prayer. The second of single women primarily devoted to prayer but often also serving the poor. The third order is those couples who want to live out the lifestyle of simplicity, devotion and ministry within their family and work responsibilities.

In the Servants movements we have not defined the first order by sexual divisions but on the basis of incarnational commitments: all married or single people who are part of communities(teams) of workers living two by two or by families incarnationally among the poor of the slums.

The necessity of a third order concept came through bitter experience. What do you do to assist those who having entered the structure of the mission find they are unable, or unwilling, to pay the price of incarnational churchplanting roles? One wants to enable them to remain within the fellowship and yet the core commitments to incarnation are so critical to effectiveness that they are non-negotiable.

This order then, is for those whose total active commitment is towards establishing the kingdom among the poor and:
 

1. are unable to live among the poor for one reason or another acceptable to the poor and to the other workers in a mission community(team).

2. are unable to learn the language of the people to whom they are ministering despite attempts to do so, and yet national leaders continue to desire them to remain in that country for a specified task.

3. are working full-time in the sending base offices

4. are mission administrators who are constantly travelling and thus unable to live among the poor.

5. have a primary concern to do justice for the poor and for one reason or another are unable to accomplish this task while remaining among the poor.

6. Short-term workers who are living among the poor.

In order to maintain the primary focus of ministry, no mission community(team) should have more than about 20% of its members as third order members. It is good for the first order to be held up as the model for workers,as an elite, since these people on the forefront pay a high price, and some sense of being accoladed is a small recompense. In a sense the third order should see themselves as servants of the first order - servants to servants to the poor.

Entrance to the first order is after a period of church-based and prefield training(similar to a Catholic concept of novitiate). After this is a two year period of in-field apprenticeship, before full acceptance into the work as members.

Another group within the sending base is known as Companions. These are people who are not formally part of the mission structure but are involved with the work in an intercessory and financial manner, living lifestyles of simplicity, prayer and commitment to the poor in the sending base country. They too make the same commitments as do missionaries, third order commitments, to live missionary lifestyles in the home base.

In conclusion, orders look back to the historical reality of the church. They have a certain historical mystique with roots into antiquity, a mystique that has been lost by the free churches that most missionaries come from. In the process the peitism they encaptured has been lost to a work and production ethic. Orders provide a sense of identity and brotherhood and vision. They provide a nucleus of values from which effective ministry to the poor can be developed. The basic structure and value system of the earlier celtic orders and the preaching friars appears to be the most appropriate models in history for the generation of new third world mission movements out into the last frontier - the one that migrated to the slums of the mega-cities of the city-states of the third-world, while the strategists looked elsewhere. The movements spawned are one attempt at implementing these ideas. May God grant us wisdom to most effectively mobilize and structure such movements as rapidly as possible.

APPENDIX A: VALUES AND LIFESTYLE OF SERVANTS

APPENDIX B:VALUES OF COMPANIONS

Some of those called to minister to the poor, for reasons of health, family, or specific ministry roles for serving the poor through effecting justice at higher levels in society are not able to live among the poor as poor. Others are called to remain in their home country but wish to live a lifestyle in solidarity with the poor of the third world. The following rule is designed to enable these lifestyles to be lived out within the spirit of the Servants movements.

Each member of the third order undertakes to set aside a block of time yearly(preferably at a spiritual retreat) to write out their own covenant or commitment, outlining what they feel God is calling them to for the next year based on the following areas of commitment.

Each person is asked to find a spiritual advisor who has some experience with a rule of life and together with this person establish an accountability system which best fits their personality, needs and growth goals.

VALUES AND LIFESTYLE

1. Knowing God through:

  lives of obedience,
intercession and devotion,

renunciation of wealth and possessions

self-denial

service to the poor

identification and solidarity with the poor

seeking wisdom

2. Simplicity as a missionary lifestyle at home or on the mission field:

 

as a sign of identification with the poor

as an aid to an intercessory lifestyle

as a just lifestyle

3.Serving the poor in one or more of the following areas:

 

Seeking justice for the poor

Giving aid to the poor

Preaching the gospel to the poor

Service among the poor

Hospitality for the poor.

4.Intercessory lives for the poor in the cities of the third world.

5.Spiritual Disciplines

In consultation with a spiritual advisor and reviewed at least monthly in an accountable relationship with a friend, each is asked to develop a personal rule of life covering the following areas:

 

1.daily prayer and intercession for the poor, regular fasting as a part of intercession.

2.simplicity

3.growth in areas of knowing God

4.growth in wisdom including devotional and biographical reading,

5.communal prayer, worship and the Lord's supper

6.retreats

7.meditation based around regular daily bible reading, in-depth study and memorization of the scriptures

8.examination of areas of needed character formation

9.serving the poor

This rule will be developed in more detail through discussions over the next few decades.....

APPENDIX C: REFERENCES

Biot, Francois, O.P.
1963 The Rise of Protestant Monasticism, Helicon Press Inc., 1120 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, Maryland,21202

Cherupallikat, Justinian O.F.M. Cap.
1975 Witness Potential of Evangelical Poverty In India. Nouvelle Review de Science Missionaire, CH-6405 Immensee, Switzerland.

Compton, Piers
1931 The Great Religious Orders. 54 Bloomsbury St, London W.C.1:Elkin Mathews and Marrot.

Grigg, Viv
1984 Companion to the Poor. Sydney :Albatross.

1986 A Strategy to Reach the Urban Poor of the World's Mega-Cities. Urban Leadership Foundation.

1986 Hardly a Church, Rarely a Pastor, Seldom a Missionary. Urban Leadership Foundation.

1997 Transforming Cities: An Urban Leadership Manual, Urban Leadership Foudnation: Auckland

Latourette, Kenneth Scott
1975 A History of Christianity, Vols I & II. Harper and Row.

McNeill, John Thomas
1974 The Celtic Churches; a History. A.D. 200 to 1200. University of Chicago Press.

Schutz, Roger, Frere
- The Parable of Community. Winston

The Society of Saint Francis
- The Third Order:Principles and Rule. American Province, The Society of Saint Francis.

Winters, Ralph
1979 Protestant Mission Societies: The American Experience. William Carey Library, 1705 N. Sierra Bonita Avenue, Pasadena, CA91104.