Loading…

Missionary Monks: An Introduction to the History and Theology of Missionary Monasticism is unavailable, but you can change that!

Missionaries go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, while monks live cloistered in a monastery and focus their lives on prayer and studying Scripture--correct? Not exactly. When we study the history of Christian mission, especially from around 500 to 1500 CE, the key missionaries that we constantly encounter are monks. In fact, if we don't have monks in this period then we have...

we do not just forget details, but even what was once very important. Christians forgot that they had a new vision of peace and fraternity where each was a brother and sister and, unlike their memory of Cain, they would be concerned with each other’s welfare. But it was easy to forget that that meant that slavery had no place—and in less than a generation after Jesus told them that God was their Father and they were all brothers, they had forgotten this and slavery was acceptable “within limits.”