A fledgling new monastic community is looking to create a space in Dublin city centre. Rev Garth Bunting explains more.
I have been Residential Priest Vicar at Christ Church Cathedral since September 2010, leading the cathedral's spirituality programme. I live in the Deanery at Werburgh Street, Dublin, and it's from there we are developing a new monastic movement that aims to look at the traditional monastic ways of life and reinterpret them for living in today's world.
We are at the very beginning of this journey but we are all longing to see what emerges. Basically, we are currently a group of seven people and we have been meeting together as community over the past year, fortnightly, over a simple meal. During that time we have felt our particular mission emerge from our discernment and recently took the decision to open a space for silence, meditation and reflection in our area of Dublin.
It all started when I went to do some study in Christian spirituality. I have always been interested in some sort of monastic way of life and am a tertiary of the Anglican Third Order, Society of St Francis. While I was studying I came across the stories of a new monastic movement that seems to be happening across the world. I began to look in more depth at new-monasticism and the way in which it interprets the traditional monastic model for today's society and culture. I am very interested in how that might create community, and possibly a fresh expression of church.
I came to work in Christ Church Cathedral when I had the opportunity to focus in on this world of spirituality. One of the things I got to do very early on was to host an evening when we looked at the monastic tradition and the journey has really gone from there. Six or seven people became a kind of community wanting to explore the tradition, we are now interested in creating something as community. We have spent the last nine months getting to know one another, supporting one another in life, ministry, jobs, and so on.
Then we started asking ourselves, 'how can we share what we do with others living around us?' We want to continue creating community but centre it on some sort of spiritual practice or spiritual way of life – though we would also want to emphasise that it is a spiritual way of life that is Christian. People can be looking for all sorts of spiritualities but ours is clearly focused on Christ and that's very important.
Something interesting that has emerged for us in all of this is the recurring image of a doorway. We see it as an invitation for people to come in and it's also about us going out into our own local area and getting involved. As a result of this we have tentatively named ourselves 'An Doras Oscailte Community' – that's Irish for the Open Doorway Community.
We are an ecumenical group: Anglican, Roman Catholic and Lutheran. We meet around my kitchen table and that regular, two-hour, meeting in the same place has been very important to us; we all live in the centre of Dublin and feel it's right for this community to be in the heart of the city.
As we go on to create community we are not even going to ask if the people who come to us have a faith or not. It's about sharing our life. Now we want to create a physical space for reflection and looking for God in the midst of people's busy lives. We are still not quite sure where that space is to be though. Christ Church Cathedral is a two minute walk away from where I live and there is also a parish church close by – or it could be somewhere else entirely. We are looking to create this space over the summer so we have something to offer to people wanting to explore more of this new monasticism.
Belfast's Titanic Quarter is at the heart of the city's regeneration. A few years ago the area was largely deserted, but a large-scale redevelopment programme is transforming it into a 21st century 'urban village'. Chris Bennett is chaplain of The Dock.
It requires a kind of reordering of your expectations in a new way. It's a process. I was coming in with some expectations which were pretty standard parish-based ideas and it's been fun having that knocked out of me.
The idea of yet another expression of church in a place where division and sectarianism has caused such problems in the past can be seen as not overly helpful. There are very few working models of how Christians all share a ministry other than chaplaincy – why should it not work in the Titanic Quarter? The variety of needs here is too great to ever be encompassed by one minister or even one denomination. Chaplaincy is helping us to work out shared working in denominations. It's a key that unlocks unity rather than describing my absolute mission statement.
Clearly the Titanic Quarter, when complete, will be big enough to merit its own local church. But the opportunity runs even deeper than the chance to plant another church along existing models. A brand-new community, in a brand-new part of the city, offers an opportunity to re-envision church for a new cultural context.
I would see our expression of church as our weekly Dock Walk where we chat about a passage of Scripture as we're on the move, or as we stop, pray, or listen to meditations or music. We use 
As part of our future plans, I also hope to get a boat – that has been the concept right from the start. Quite a few people ask us why, particularly with all of the Titanic associations here, but it feels like we are at the stage where we have done all we can do in coffee shops and a boat would give us an operational base. That means people could physically find us rather than having to rely on a website and a phone number for information.
As for being associated with the name of the Titanic, we're all accustomed to queries as to whether it's bad taste to commemorate that link at all. In fact the view in Northern Ireland is that it was all right when it left here; it was later on when disaster struck. But for many years there was a real level of shame about it – I actually think there is something of God about the way that everything is tying together in Northern Ireland at the moment. Somehow, the Titanic, from being a thing we never much talked about, is being re-born because it pre-dates the Troubles. For all that it was quite clearly a tragedy on its maiden voyage, the very fact that it sank has stamped its name on history. Many other ships suffered tragedies but the scale of the Titanic's amazing construction makes it unique and people now feel it's right to remember the incredible expertise that went into it. That's why there was such interest surrounding the recent 100-year anniversary of the Titanic setting sail.
The talk in the corridors of political power is all about Shared Future and Community Cohesion – redefining the existing communities and asking them to change but here we have the opportunity to create a new community that looks very different from our sectarian past.
Boring Wells is a network of fresh expressions of church in and around Belfast. Each has a very different flavour but all share the same vision and core values. Adrian McCartney explains more.
I had taken a year to recruit a group of people. Initially there were 35 of us who started meeting in a pub in Moneyrea. We organised a Sunday service but not one unchurched person ever came to it! We threw everything at that service; we had projectors and sound and lovely coffee and nice things to eat. We also had lots of visitors from other parishes, saying, 'O we'd love to do this' though there was always the underlying thought, 'This just looks like we are moving the existing church around.'
Within a year of us starting, we set up Tinys. It all happened when we were running that service in the pub; one night we simply came across a crowd of teenagers drinking on the windowsills of a row of shops. In time, we rented one of the retail units as a coffee shop for young people; there was no way those youngsters would or could transfer to the Networks church – then known as Moneyrea Wells. We needed to let them do something to express their experience of Christ where they were in their own way. That was quite a learning curve for the first group of people who had thought that what they were originally offering was a fresh expression of church only to discover that something very different was happening with the people who actually lived in the place.
The Shankill well is all about people serving in the area, a place at the heart of sectarian paramilitarianism. The Summer Madness festival started Streetreach to offer an opportunity of service to the community. Every summer for five years we used to take teams of people to do street cleaning and gardening in different parts of the city. Growing out of that was a group of people who had a strong sense of call to go and serve in Shankill itself. One couple have moved to live there.
Kevin Metcalf, Church Army Evangelist, describes his early attempts at pioneering in Bangor, Northern Ireland.
At present there is very little for younger people to do on the Bloomfield Estate, so I have been developing relationships with community workers to identify needs. I am passionate about children's work, so I have been focusing on activities that engage with younger people and provide positive opportunities. Although local young people have a lot of religious and bible knowledge through school education, many do not have a form of the Christian faith that resources their life. For example, at the local school of three hundred and fifty young people, only fifty have a stated religious affiliation, leaving three hundred with none. So in the context of Northern Ireland this is a bit of a paradox. Even though it is a very ‘religious' country, many do not have a committed faith that they find to be spiritually resourcing. My aim then is to enable younger people to come to faith and experience Jesus in a real and living way, not just knowing about him, but knowing him personally. Through this, I want to see whole families come to faith.
So far, I have built up connections with a local school, and a community association in the Council Estate. At the school I have been engaged with children through assemblies and after school clubs. In these times I have been using crafts and other activities as well as talking about God. In the Community house we have been running a 'Kidz Klub', using similar activities with a limited number of children as the space is quite small. To build on these relationships and see the work develop and grow, we have started running another Kidz Klub in the local primary school and a team of Christian volunteers visit the homes of the children who attend. Our first night we had 48 children! Through this we are building relationships with families on the estate and discovering how we can help support the wider environment of the children and witness to God's love.
The use of this primary school, I think will give us the space to build up a fresh expression of church. We are very aware that the local middle-class forms of traditional church are an alien environment for many people coming from the Bloomfield Estate. So we hope that a 'Messy Church' approach will be flexible, accessible and more laid-back and therefore appropriate. This will enable people to explore Christian spirituality, and the big issues of life, but also an opportunity to build relationships with local people.