Standard Podcast [4:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read by Br. Tom Shaw

God has called us into being as a community and our life as a community, though fraught with struggles and failures, is a powerful act of revelation, testimony and service.

In community we bear witness to the social nature of human life as willed by our Creator. Human beings bear the image of the triune God and are not meant to be separate and isolated.  All of us are called by God to belong to communities of personal cooperation and interdependence which strive to nurture and use the gifts of each and to see that our basic needs are met. Jesus called his disciples to be the light of the world, a city set on a hill, which cannot be hid; through the vitality of our life as a community we are meant to help people remember their own calling to form community.  In an era of fragmentation and the breakdown of family and community, our Society, though small, can be a beacon drawing people to live in communion.

One of the ways in which we promote community is by being the nucleus for a wider fellowship.  This is formed through the relationships we establish in our varied ministries, especially the hospitality of our houses; through the Fellowship of Saint John, whose members keep a rule of life in harmony with ours; by the participation of our personal friends and families and by our neigh­bors regularly joining us in worship.  Our proclamation of the good news is also an invitation to be in communion with us.  “We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us.”  This wider family is a true expression of community sustained by many energies of mutual service.  We not only serve our brothers and sisters by acting as a spiritual center and home and ministering to them; they support us in innumerable ways in prayer, through their gifts and voluntary labors, by teaching and inspiring us and by working together with us in Christ.  Some who find themselves relegated by neglect and prejudice to the margins of society will find a special grace in participating in this wider fellowship around our community.

Our human vocation to live in communion and mutuality is rooted in our creation in God’s image and likeness.  The very being of God is community; the Father, Son and Spirit are One in reciprocal self-giving and love.  The mystery of God as Trinity is one that only those living in personal communion can understand by experience.  Through our common life we can begin to grasp that there is a transcendent unity that allows mutual affirmation of our distinctness as persons. Through prayer we can see that this flows from the triune life of God.  If we are true to our calling as a community, our Society will be a revelation of God.

Our life as a community should also be a sign to the Church to rise up to its true calling as a communion of the Holy Spirit, the Body of Christ and the company of Christ’s friends.  We are not called to be a separate elite, but to exemplify the life of the Body of Christ in which every member has a particular gift of the Spirit for ministry and shares an equal dignity.  Fr. Benson taught that “there are special gifts of God indeed to the Society, but only as it is a society within the Church.  The small body is to realize and intensify the gifts, to realize the energies, belonging to the whole Church.”  Our witness and ministry is not merely to separate individuals; it is for strengthening the common life in the Body of Christ.

 

 Standard Podcast [5:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read by Br. Eldridge Pendleton

Just as we believe that our Society had its origin in the response to God’s creative call of our founders Richard Meux Benson, Charles Chapman Grafton and Simeon Wilberforce O’Neill, so we believe that it is sustained through our own obedience to the voice of God continually calling us on. God speaks to us in many ways to maintain and renew the vocation of the Society. God speaks to us through the Scriptures and the Christian tradition, through men and women of the Spirit of different ages and cultures, through our own experience and through contemporary voices that engage us with the challenges of our own time. Among the many voices that mediate God’s call to us, the witness of our founders and predecessors in the Society has a special importance.

God calls us to remember them and to value their testimony. Reflection on our community’s own tradition, and a dialogue between our contemporary experience and that of our predecessors, helps us to sustain our identity as we strive to rise up to the demands of the present. As we explore the spiritual legacy of our forbears we remember that they are not dead figures from the past. Risen in Christ, they belong to the great cloud of witnesses who spur us on by their prayers to change and mature in response to the Holy Spirit who makes all things new.

Faithfulness to tradition does not mean mere perpetuation or copying of ways from the past but a creative recovery of the past as a source of inspiration and guidance in our faithfulness to God’s future, the coming reign of God. As we meditate on the grace of tradition each of us will hear the call to become, in Father Benson’s words, “a man – not simply of the day, but a man of the moment, a man precisely up to the mark of the times. This makes the religious – so far from being the tradi­tional imitator of bygone days – most especially a man of the present moment and its life.”

Our Society was the first religious community of men to be firmly established in the Anglican Church since the Reformation and embraced from the beginning both the contemplative and active dimensions of the religious vocation. As we struggle with God’s call to us today to be active in ministry, prophecy, teaching and service, and to have a deep life of prayer and worship, we shall find encouragement in remembering the example of our forbears in their dedication to the mystical and apostolic aspects of our calling.

There are many aspects to the witness of those who formed our Society’s tradition. Their lives inspire us to be indifferent to celebrity and success and to trust the power of hidden prayer. They stir us to be prophetic critics of Christendom and its compromises and to be dedicated to the renewal of the Church. They summon us to have a world-wide vision of mission, to be adaptable to a wide variety of settings, to be available in ministry to all classes of people. They teach us to integrate the catholic and evangelical traditions and dedicate ourselves to the ministry of reconcil­iation and unity.

Inevitably, the Society’s past is also marred by many failures. God will have much to teach us through them, as long as we humbly keep in mind our own biases and shortcomings.

 

 Standard Podcast [4:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read by Br. Paul Wessinger (1915-2009)

We hear God’s living word in all the Scriptures but the testimony of the disciple whom Jesus loved has special power for those whom God calls into this Society.  It gives us joy to know that Jesus drew this man John to himself in order to enjoy the blessings of close friendship.  We believe that through our religious vocation Jesus is drawing us also into the deepest intimacy with himself.  We find a profound significance for our own lives in what the fourth gospel tells us of the beloved disciple’s friendship with Jesus and his call to be a witness to the mystery of the incarnation.

This is the man whom Jesus wanted to have closest to his heart at the last supper.  The image of the trusted friend lying close to the breast of Jesus is an icon of the relationship we enjoy with the Son of God through prayer.  It is by being close to him that we are reunited with the Father, for Jesus is “God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart.”  And contemplating the closeness of the disciple to Jesus at the supper can deepen our awareness that the communion we have with Christ in the Eucharist is no mere abstract idea but a real and growing bond of personal love.

The beloved disciple did not hide from the suffering of Christ at Golgotha but took his stand there with Mary.  By being steadfast together at the cross, enduring all that others found unbearable, they remained in Jesus’ love.  If we abide in that perfect love shown on the cross we will receive the grace to face together all that we are tempted to run from in fear.  Christ’s gift of enduring love will be the heart of our life as a community, as it was in the new family which he called into being from the cross when he gave Mary and John to one another as mother and son.

Only love can understand what God gives and reveals through Jesus.  The beloved disciple understood that the pouring out of water and blood from Jesus’ side signified the giving of the Spirit.  Love will open our eyes to the Spirit’s power in the sacraments, in prayer, in action and service.  He went into the empty tomb, and believed at once in the mystery of the resurrection.  Love will make us men of faith who know God’s power to bring life out of death.  The beloved disciple recognized the Lord in the stranger by the shore.  Love will expand our ability to know him in all persons, in all things and in all places.

The beloved disciple lived on, faithful to Christ’s call to “remain until I come.”  The years spent exploring the depths of the revelation in which he had taken part bore fruit in the great gospel which bears the name of John.  We have taken this name to show that we too are Christ’s friends and witnesses.  Through us also many come to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and through believing have life in his name.

 

 Chapter 1 - The Call of the Society [4:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read by Br. Curtis Almquist

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, the eternal Word by whom all things were created, to become flesh and live among us.  In all the signs that he did and the teaching that he gave, he made known to us the grace and truth of the eternal Father.  When his hour came the Son consummated his obedience to the Father, and expressed his love for us to the uttermost, by offering himself on the cross.  He was lifted up from the earth in his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead in order to draw all people to himself.

We whom God calls into this Society have been drawn into union with Christ by the power of his cross and resurrection; we have been reborn in him by water and the Spirit.  God chooses us from varied places and backgrounds to become a company of friends, spending our whole life abiding in him and giving ourselves up to the attraction of his glory.  Our community was called into being by God so that we may be entirely consecrated to him and through our common experience of the glory of the Father and the Son begin to attain even now the unity that God desires for all humankind.  “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.  I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Our mission is inseparable from our call to live in union with God in prayer, worship and mutual love.  Christ breathes his Spirit into us to be the one source of our own conversion and of our witness and mission to others; “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  We are sent to be servants of God’s children and ministers of the reconciliation which the Lamb of God has accomplished.  Our own unity is given to be a sign that will draw others to have faith in him.  Christ has entrusted to us the same word that the Father gave to him, so that those who hear it from our lips and perceive it in our lives may receive the light and through believing have life in his name.

By giving us the grace and courage to make lifelong vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience in an enduring fellowship, God makes us a sign of his eternal faithfulness.  A community of men who pledge to stay together until death is a powerful sign to the world of the grace that enables those who love Christ to abide until he comes.

The divine Wind that blows where it chooses has not restricted our Society to a few ministries.  Varied gifts within our brotherhood bear witness to the living power of Christ and extend his salvation.  Though our gifts differ we share one call to be consecrated in truth, through the power of God’s word and the grace renewed by feeding on Christ and drinking his life-blood in the Eucharist.  As a sign of our identity God gives us all an affinity with the witness of the beloved disciple embodied in the Gospel of John.  We bear the name of St John the Evangelist to show the Church what is the source of our inspiration and our joy.

A rule, from the Latin regula, suggests not so much a code of legislation but a means of regulating and regularizing.  A monastic rule sustains identity by mandating the rhythms of worship, spiritual discipline, prayer and rest, work and ministry.  It sets the patterns by which authority is distributed and where accountability is expected.  It delineates the bounds of the community and describes the processes of initiation.  And it connects the ideals of the particular community or order with the gospel and the Christian mystery.

Our Rule is a contemporary one, created by the Society of Saint John the Evangelist over a period of eight years and formally adopted in September 1996.  It replaces the original Rule, written by our founder in the 19th century.  While it draws on the teaching of Richard Benson and other early members, the new rule addresses a whole host of issues that we knew to be vital for the health and faithfulness of a community making the transition into the third millennium.  It is an authentic expression of our life for today, both who we are and who we hope to be.

Our sole motive in creating a new Rule of life was to strengthen our own community and our awareness of the particular vocation that God has given us; in other words, we produced it specifically for ourselves.  Friends urged us to publish it for those who know us and who are seeking a deeper understanding of a way of life to which they feel attuned. And we offer it for those who do not know us yet, but who, in this time of widespread spiritual hunger when the monastic way is exerting a considerable pull on people’s imagination and interest, seek a window into the life of a contemporary religious community.

The response to its publication has been overwhelmingly positive. Roman Catholic and Anglican religious communities on both sides of the Atlantic have welcomed it, in some instances using it to enhance the teaching of their own Rules.  And large numbers of men and women of a variety of faith communities in their daily meditations have drawn strength and renewal from its teachings.