I posted something the other day asking for hopeful Benedict Option stories — that is, stories from real life showing people living out Benedict Option principles, and thriving. I’m getting some good ones from readers. Here’s a selection:

1. From Timothy Graham:

First a huge word of thanks for your book & your blog. I have benefited hugely from what you write about the need to form real Christian community. You are helping to rebuild God’s ruined house & I hope you continue to ignore the naysayers.

I thought I’d let you know about an embryo idea for a community just south of London, nestled in the green hills of Surrey – people can scarcely believe that there could be countryside & woods like this just 40 mins from central London on the train.

My wife & I – and five young children – rent a cottage with three/four acres of land attached, and have already got some vegetables/fruit growing, as well as a score of assorted poultry: chickens, ducks, geese. The property & land is part of a grand estate owned by the National Trust, a massive national organisation that looks after heritage buildings and parkland that can no longer be maintained by private landowners, but which the owners want to be maintained for the public interest. I work as a doctor in a London hospital (which helps pay the rent) but my time to develop the place is therefore limited. I’m also studying for the permanent diaconate in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, so have cut down to four days per week to fit it all in.

We are hoping to school the children at home & I am trying to re-arrange my work timetable to allow this & share the burden with my longsuffering wife. We would really love to form some kind of co-operative effort with like minded families to farm the land, share produce & also meet to pray the office together regularly, and keep fast & feast in a traditional way. There such potential here for a group to develop something.

This would have to be a very light-touch community as we don’t own the land and couldn’t set up a business or build, for example. It would all have to be run on the lines of friendship only.

There is a lovely disused Saxon church just five minutes away (officially in the care of Church of England) where we could meet to pray the office & where I already have been given permission to turn up on Sundays to sing Vespers in the old Sarum rite.

Now all we need are other people and families with the same kind of vision! I think it will come together eventually. When we had the opportunity to move to the cottage two years ago, I felt that God was opening a door for something, and think that He will bring the people along when the time is right. I’m not looking for people of a particular religious affiliation, just people who will get what it is about.

My biggest inspiration is the original 17th century Benedict Option community, Little Gidding.

2. From another English reader:

I have been reading your blog for a while and I am a huge fan of The Benedict Option – I have been recommending it to all my Catholic friends. I am very much your audience – early 30s, traditional Catholic, married and expecting our first child (a boy) due on the Epiphany.

We are lucky to live near Oxford, as it has a couple of churches (and parishes) with authentic Catholic teaching, beautiful liturgy, and a lot of young families. I have been feeling pretty doom and gloom lately. However, yesterday we had a day that truly exemplified the Benedict Option life.

My husband and I went to a beautiful sung Mass at the Oxford Oratory. We then had a long chat with the priest who married us, about the Catholic book club that the Oratory has set up. It takes place once a month and we are trying to read the great Christian and Catholic writers (in fact my last submission was your book How Dante Can Save Your Life!) Then afterwards my husband and I walked across Port Meadow for a Christmas party with a group of friends, all Catholic like us. We had a wonderful meal together, and then gathered in our friends’ living room and sang Advent and Christmas carols in English and Latin. There were five young couples, two expecting children. It was a truly joyous occasion, and it made me think that while we have gatherings like this, we will be ok. We plan to make this a regular thing — food, great conversation, and music. Certain subjects are banned, as they just depress us.

It’s like the French and the Italian young Catholics I’ve met through Ben Op travels. How exciting!

3. From a Tennessee reader:

I read The Benedict Option a year ago and still think about it regularly. Your section on education really pushed me to rethink our children’s education and is one of the significant factors in why we are moving our three to a Christian school with a classical approach to teaching/learning. Before reading the book I had thought the best option would be one of three top prep schools in our region after they completed their time at a private K-5th grade school here in Chattanooga, TN. I went to boarding school and learned more there than in the public Ivy I attended and wanted similar opportunities for our two sons and daughter. While there are a significant portion of believers at those places — we are the buckle of the Bible Belt after all — our kids are not growing up in the world we did in the 80s and 90s. I want them to be able to think clearly and speak confidently about their faith and have the courage to stand up for it when they leave our home. Most of all, I want them to learn in an environment that values reality and uses language as a tool to describe and enlighten, not as a weapon. The transgender agenda scares me to death. My heart goes out to Peter Vlaming — I know the same thing could happen even here, and I’m willing to sacrifice fewer language and sports options for fully formed children who aren’t afraid to speak the truth, as opposed to “their truth.”

On a separate note, I can’t help but think that Lookout Mountain, TN has been a BenOp community before there was a name for it. My family does not live there, but we go to church at Lookout Mountain Presbyterian, and it is a model for Christian community. If I remember correctly, the church gives 2/3 of its budget to missions locally, nationally and internationally where most struggle to give away 10 percent. And families there are literally giving birth to an army for the Lord. I don’t what percentage of the church has more than 4 kids, but it’s a lot and most live on the mountain. It’s so noticeable (including the families of the clergy) I jokingly asked our membership interviewer if the church would let us in because we only have three. Most moving to me is that so many families adopt, and adopt children with special needs. One family has five biological children and four adopted children with significant physical special needs. There are so many families of children with special needs that there is a ministry for them –Hedgehog Grove — which allows parents of those children a night out once a month so they can go on a date.

For those looking for work, the church goes out of its way to circulate resumes among members and connect those who could be of help. And if you are sick or need meals, you’re covered for months. I could go on and on, but I’ve never attended a church in my decades of going to evangelical churches that so faithfully cares for the widows and orphans and stands out for its love. It’s very white and upper middle class which makes it trash on the intersectionality chart, but what a giving and humble group of people from the clergy on down. You’d have a great audience here — especially as so many professors and students from Covenant College attend.

Don’t lose hope! The Lord is working out his plans for you in many places and people you don’t know!

4. From a Mormon reader:

Perhaps you are looking for groups where people are living together apart from their society. But I write to you a hopeful tale of people who live in their society, but are not part of it. And that faith community is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

My local congregation contains about 350 persons. In addition to sabbath worship, we are all ministers to each other; every family is assigned other families who watch over and care for them, making sure they have help in any crisis. So it is a real community, not just a Sunday congregation. And we definitely live “apart”–the most important ways in which members of the Church part ways with their culture include:

–a dress code. Our thighs, upper arms, and torsos are covered and our men do not go shirtless. Even with regard to swimwear, we are different: our women do not wear bikinis, for example. This makes our children look different than others.
–we’ve been asked to give our kids dumb phones, not smart phones, and we are often asked to go on social media “fasts.”
–our children go to an hour-long Church lesson before their school day. Every single weekday our kids get up at 5:45 AM to arrive on time.
–we’ve been asked to not consume media that is the equivalent of R-rated and above. Members of our Church created VidAngel, for example. In our own home, we do not have cable or TV. We watch DVDs or VidAngel-ed streamed films.
–our Church continues to preach that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and that homosexual behavior is sinful. The Church emphasizes we should only marry in the temple, which marriage ceremony is for eternity–and one cannot marry a non-member in the temple. This means Church members typically seek other members to marry, which augurs well for a continuation of the faith through the generations.
–the Church has a code of honor, which includes dietary restrictions (such as no tea or coffee), no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no swearing, and a strict standard of chastity before marriage and fidelity after.
–there’s no dating until 16 years of age, and group dates are the norm even then.
–our 18 and 19 year olds go on 18 month-2 year missions, where they are sent out into the world to preach the Restored Gospel as a full-time occupation. This is an incredible sacrifice, but also an incredible strengthening period for our youth.
–we’ve been asked to garden and also keep (insofar as we are able) a one year supply of food and water for our household. We also tithe a full 10% of our income to the Church. And we are admonished not to go into debt.
–the Church maintains at least 3 institutions of higher learning, the Brigham Young University system, where our brightest young people can gain a college degree in an environment that supports their faithfulness, rather than undercutting it. The tuition is less than $3000 per semester, making college affordable for our young people.
–we have no paid clergy; all of our clergy (up until you get to the highest levels) are regular people with jobs working on a strictly volunteer basis. And all of our male ecclesiastical leaders must be married.
–many members of our Church also homeschool.
–the marriage rate and the fertility rate of the members of our Church are well above the average for our society, as is the average level of education. Indeed, the more educated a member of our Church is, the more devout they are, according to research. Unlike many other denominations, our membership is growing, not declining. And our Churches are full of the happy laughter of children.

While we do not live in separated communities, our beliefs and our codes of conduct set us apart–way apart–from our society. My husband and I have 8 children, and they are all hoping to have large families, as well. We live in happiness because we live so very differently from the rest of our society. Might there come a time when members of our Church will be so persecuted that they will have to separate themselves in a more physical sense? Perhaps. But for now our lives, and the lives of our children, are already quite separate.

May this give you hope, though we are neither Catholic nor Orthodox.

I appreciate this. Faithful Mormons are disciplining themselves for hard times.

5. A reader in New Zealand writes:

A friend sent me this video clip the other day about the Underground church based in the USA but with apparently 10,000 house church / micro church affiliates all around the world. The interesting thing to me, and hopefully for you, is that they are totally missional, gathering small groups, forming meaningful communities, sharing the love of God and the hope we have in Christ.

[vimeo 256315051 w=525 h=300]

Underground People from PJ Accetturo on Vimeo.

Again, this is unlikely to be the format for church that resonates with you, but it is hopeful, it is happening in America, it’s on your doorstep so to speak.

I’m not sure that it is intentionally Benedictine, but it seems to contain elements of community that is at the core of our solidarity and mission.

UPDATE: I watched the documentary just now, and it’s really inspiring. Very Evangelical — this “microchurch” model can’t be precisely taken up by Catholics and Orthodox. But a lot of it can be, and should be. One thing I admire about Evangelicals is how entrepreneurial they are.

6. Reader Eric Wearne:

You asked for some good news about Benedict Option-style entities, so here is one example: Holy Spirit College in Atlanta.

This summer I left a position as an associate professor in the social sciences at a (growing) public institution to become Provost for a campus that is totally faith-based, that is only approved for “unpractical” liberal arts and theological degrees, and that is very conscious of cost to students (a year of full-time undergraduate tuition can be had for less than $10,000) – perhaps in part due to the idea of the Benedict Option and as a way of pushing back against the age.

If you pay any attention at all to news stories about higher education around the country, you’ll notice some themes (and that HSC does not fit in).  One theme is that higher education is increasingly unfriendly to free expression on campus, including religious expression.  A second is that despite this unfriendliness, policymakers and companies want more people to go to college in order to feed the economy and existing businesses.  And a third is that despite the unfriendliness and despite this encouragement to attend and to grow the market, for some reason college costs can’t help but increase every year.  HSC is a religious, liberal arts school, which takes cost and sustainability seriously (which I’ll say more about below).

To cite Benedict Option ideas specifically, I believe that higher education has arguably become a point of relative weakness for the Church in terms of storytelling – of telling itself its own story, as you say.  We have some good Catholic K12 schools and homeschool communities around the country, especially those focused on classical education, and parishes do a lot to work with their young adults through retirees, but formal higher education is a place where the Church could use some more institutional renewal.  Historically, the Church has been a great force for higher education.  One could argue – I would – that higher education exists largely because of the Catholic Church.  But at the moment most U.S. colleges are not known for being the kind of places students would go to deepen their faith.

So the question then is: How do we plan to improve this situation at Holy Spirit College?

We are at the end of the fall semester with our graduate classes.  We have offerings for adults who want to earn degrees or to take a class at a time for personal study.

We are also launching a new undergraduate program and are currently accepting students to begin classes in Fall 2019.  We have one approved degree: the B. Phil., or Bachelor of Philosophy, which focuses heavily on theology as well as philosophy.  The content of our courses will be on the Western and Catholic intellectual tradition, and all of our faculty request the mandatum from the Archbishop.  Aside from the inherent value of following this course of study, this is the kind of broad liberal arts degree that employers are going to be looking for as things like AI advance, and as the economy changes and makes what a lot of people think of as practical degrees obsolete.  Employers will increasingly want creative people who can think deeply and do slow, deep work.  But we have some ideas about how to make this kind of degree more practical too.  So while every undergraduate who graduates from Holy Spirit College will finish with a B.Phil, along the way they will all choose one of several concentrations which will include some practical coursework and a field experience their senior year.

I hope we get massive numbers of new students asking to enroll and that they all stay for four years.  But it’s possible someone may want to major in something other than Philosophy/Theology.  We also came to an agreement with Ave Maria University in Florida this fall, whereby a student could do their first two years at Holy Spirit College, complete their core curriculum, maybe live at home, mature a little bit, save some money, and then transfer those credits toward Ave Maria’s core curriculum requirements.

We also see the cost of college and the resulting debt around the country as serious, concrete problems people are facing.  For a student to leave college with a huge debt load hurts them and hurts society. It hinders their ability to start families, to make freer decisions about their lives regarding where to live and work, etc.   And so we recently started a new cost structure option for undergraduates.  That structure is that undergrads can pay $750 a month for 12 months, and take as many classes as they want in that fall, spring, and summer, within some limits.  That comes to $9,000 a year, and a student who is very careful with their time and planning might even be able to finish in three years instead of four.

We hope that the graduate students and the coming undergraduates, and other friends of the College will help us build up HSC as a center for Catholic intellectual and spiritual life for Atlanta.

We are very much in startup mode and are building all of this as we go. The main takeaways I would to leave you with are three:

1.      To say that HSC is very much in a growth phase.  We are looking for brave undergraduate students to start next fall to help us build this new Catholic college.  If you’re reading this, please also let your friends know we’re here.  Go to our website and find us on social media.

2.      To emphasize that the students who do come will have a very different experience from other institutions of higher education today. The existing model of higher ed is both culturally unhealthy and financially unsustainable.  We are at over $1 trillion in student loan debt in America now.  Maybe you’ve heard this before, but if something can’t go on forever, eventually it will stop.  Lots of colleges are going to shrink or close in the coming decades but we are working on a model that we hope will last. In terms of culture, we are and always will be relatively small so I can promise that students will be known, they’ll be cared about, and they’ll be taken seriously, and their faith will be taken seriously.  That’s becoming less and less common in higher ed, I can tell you firsthand.

3.      To ask you to pray for us.  We have a lot of advantages at Holy Spirit College with a beautiful campus and support from our parish, but there are strong headwinds from several sources that push against the success of institutions like this. Please pray that the work that has begun at Holy Spirit College will bear some fruit.

Thanks everybody. Keep them coming.