In the early days of the conversion of Northern Europe, the faith was carried into new places and among new peoples largely by monks. Monasteries sprouted all over the territory of the old Roman Empire and beyond in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Centuries. And they were welcomed. The monks pioneered new forms of devotion and spiritual direction. They offered pastoral care and education in places that were underserved in both areas. They fired the imagination. People wanted to experience the sense of closeness to God and the belonging to others that came from being part of a monastic household. Over time, people continued to feel the call to the cloister, but other things changed. The founders changed over time. The early monks founded abbeys and monasteries because they wanted to live in them themselves. They took care of their followers, but their intent was to live that life among them. They were monks first, and priests or administrators second. As the church penetrated the societies of Europe, the royals and nobles (England is the textbook case of this) began to found monasteries. This was to give themselves and their descendants a place to be buried, provide a place for younger sons and unmarried daughters to inherit the rule of, and to assist in evangelism and pastoral care when there were very few churches as yet. This second wave of founders, however, still desired the monastic life for themselves. Quite a number of royal and noble abbots and abbesses are known to us, who were remembered for their spiritual gifts quite as much as their worldly rank, St. Hilda being a prominent example (great-niece of King Edwin and baptized in the first group of converts in Northumbria). Eventually, though, founding monasteries became a pious act engaged in by kings and the greater nobility: to pray for their souls; to provide for education of the young; to impress others by their piety. Meanwhile, among the ordinary laity, there were still people who felt a call to that life, but many others who had acquired money or land began to imitate their betters by endowing the monasteries with their worldly goods. So there were three phases in monastic life that showed a change in the nature of the founders/benefactors. The first wave was foundation by those who most desired to live the monastic life themselves. The second wave was foundation by great families who would be associated with the monastic mission for the benefit of both themselves and the people they ruled. The third wave was foundation by the king or other persons for reasons that had nothing to do with their personal desires and relationships; founding a monastery was founding a public institution like a college or a hospital (indeed, in the beginning there wasn’t a clear distinction among those bodies); endowing a monastery was also supposed to endear one to God. As the monasteries caught on, they grew in numbers of monks, but also in wealth. They did great good for the church, but as parish churches and stand-alone colleges and hospitals developed, they weren’t needed in quite the same way. And so the mission of the monks themselves changed. Oh, the desire to get close to God and live in close relationship to others hadn’t changed; but managing all these assets meant that the monastic community was different. For one thing, the people who worked all the lands owned by the monastery changed. There had always been a bit of a status difference between the leaders of the great abbeys and the people who worked their land, but in the beginning, even the leaders did manual work, and the lay brothers or sisters were considered equal partners. Hilda was a royal abbess, but she knew her cowman Cædmon face-to-face, and brought him forward when his gift of poetry was discovered. They were both members of the same community. But there just weren’t enough hands to work all the lands that had been bequeathed or otherwise acquired by the monasteries. So now the abbeys had tenant farmers, just like the feudal magnates had. The tenants were not monks, nor had any desire to be. And the monks were, as landlords, not much better in how they treated their dependents than the aristocrats. And the relationship between the leaders and the led within the cloister was changing, too. As I said, there had always been an acknowledgement that those who had leadership gifts and other advantages, such as Hilda, were destined to rule, while peasants like Cædmon were destined to tend cows. But the separation between the ordinary monks and their abbots and priors widened. Not just because there is always a bit of a separation between the stations, but because secular notions of rank intruded. The younger sons of the aristocracy placed in the church (and even the rising churchmen of humble origins but great talent) began to look at the monasteries they ruled not as congregations (to which they belonged), but as institutions – and as appurtenances of their personal power. Time and talent were devoted to looking after the assets and swanking around among other leaders of society, rather than in encouraging the occasional poetic cowman. All of this is natural enough, I suppose. The very success of the monasteries contained the seeds of their decline, when there were too many assets and not enough monks even as prince-prelates treated their brothers and sisters in religion like serfs and jockeyed for advantage among the secular lords. The old monks had a saying: Discipline begets abundance, but abundance if it be not checked destroys discipline. Now, keeping in mind that Methodism was always intended to be “monasticism for the masses” – that is, a way for ordinary people to get close to God and belong to each other in very intense ways without leaving the world for a parallel order – I look at this history and see parallels to our day. Oh, the Church of today is nowhere near in the position it was in during the runup to the Reformation. We don’t have that kind of social power. But I see a lot of power-mongers eager to tell the Church what it ought to be doing and what it ought to teach, from the outside, rather like the later kings who wanted a compliant church to employ its assets for the king’s goals. And I see a lot of princely prelates who rule their churches – particularly The United Methodist Church – as if they were primarily concerned with the assets piled up by generations of the faithful: endowed agencies with lots of fat jobs; congregations considered as “salary-paying units”; mega-church plants with lots of real estate and social prestige. And as we set about organizing a new form of Methodism, the Global Methodist Church, I would remind myself and my friends that we shouldn’t fret over scrabbling for what the powermongers and prelates care about. We should be like those first founder-abbots: we are looking to found a church we ourselves want to be part of. Where we can get close to God and belong to each other. We might have to work with our hands, but that’s okay. I can do without all the buildings and publishing houses and possibilities for promotion. We need to re-orient ourselves toward the real treasure, not the institutional assets that we are giving up (or are having taken from us). We will find joy in building all over again, and others who would like to get close to God and find a place to belong will join with us. It's the life we are called to that matters, not the stuff that we tend to accumulate by living that life.