Dear saints,

If my plane takes off and lands as it should, by the time you read this I will be in London to attend the fall board meeting and annual general meeting of the Compass Rose Society, the fundraising body for the work of the Anglican Communion of which All Saints' is a member. I always appreciate how the Compass Rose gatherings help reconnect me to the wider church and demonstrate just how much we are a worldwide community of faith in our particular Christian tradition. 

I'll be staying just down the road from the headquarters of the Church of England and just down the road from Trafalgar Square, home to so many great English institutions, including the parish church of St. Martin in the Fields (https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/). St. Martin's is famous for many reasons. It has the world renowned Academy of St. Martin in the Fields that has been bringing great music to central London and far beyond for sixty years. It hosts a speaker series that would be the envy of any church, from award-winning novelist Zadie Smith to former Archbishop Rowan Williams. St. Martin's boasts an elegant worship space from 1726, not the first on the site which dates back to before the 13th century. St Martin’s was involved in the anti-apartheid movement and the founding of many charitable organizations, including Amnesty International. 

I am particularly drawn to St. Martin's for the ways it has helped churches across the world think about their particular patch of land as an asset for the communities around them through the lens of four Cs: Commerce, Compassion, Culture and Congregation. It imagines the church as occupying a "heart-edge" - a community that walks the edges of society drawing people into the warm heart of the church's life and, crucially, also a community of faith that is drawn out of the church into the warm heart of people whose lives are lived out in marginal places. Guest and host, server and the one being served thus become interchangeable and it is the proximity that becomes the transformational element of change. 

An initiative called the Nazareth Community, which St. Martin's pioneered during the pandemic, builds on the principle of the church as a people who are called to "be with." It formed as a scattered diaspora across London of people who committed annually to a contemplative and compassionate "Rule of Life"—a tradition drawn from the monastic orders. It was a vision of a kind of urban monasticism, not lived out by monks or nuns or others in holy orders, but by people otherwise living their everyday lives who grounded that daily living in seven principles: silent prayer, service, listening to the scriptures, participation in the sacraments, generosity, sabbath rest and perseverance in community. It became a loosely constituted fellowship of belonging in a time of profound isolation during the lockdowns that pervaded British life at the time. Each year, members of the Nazareth Community renew their commitment to the rule of life, and hear how members are living out the rule in the midst of the city around them.  

As we imagine the future of the church on our own block and in this city, it is easy to see how an urban monasticism could take form here. We know of churches such as St. Mark's Episcopal, Philadelphia, who have a young adult community living among them on church property who themselves follow a rule of life of eating together, common worship, service to the community and ministry in the parish. You don't have to be a young adult to be able to live within that kind of intentionality. Perhaps there is a calling for us to create a space for such a life together here for all sorts of ages and stages and people. 

In the meantime, I invite you to ask: what sort of intentions govern your life with others? Indeed, what sort of intentions shape how you life in community with fellow parishioners here at All Saints'? The church has never actually relied upon buildings to be what it is called to be. As Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians reminds us, we are living temples—we carry God's holiness within. May we all find ways to widen the doors of our hearts as we seek to live out that calling.