Scott Bessenecker is Assistant Director of Missions for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an interdenominational university student ministry, and has been involved with InterVarsity’s overseas mission projects since 1986. He has written numerous articles for publications such as RELEVANT and Mission Maker magazines, and is the author of New Friars; How to Inherit the Earth; and editor of Living Mission. Inspired by folks like Viv […]

Podcast – emerging communities · ancient roots

Episode 29—Scott Bessenecker: New Wine, New Wineskins, New Frairs

David Janzen’s experience in Christian intentional community spans the greater part of four decades. In the early ‘70s, David and his family helped found New Creation Fellowship in Newton, Kansas. In 1984, they moved to Reba Place Fellowship, an urban, income-sharing community founded in 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. Since coming to Reba […]

Episode 28—David Janzen of Reba Place Fellowship: Nurturing Communities Old and New

Laird Schaub (community and consensus blog) and Ma’ikwe Schaub Ludwig (www.maikwe.net) are members of neighboring Sandhill Farm and Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, respectively, in Rutledge, Missouri. Laird co-founded Sandhill Farm in 1974 as an egalitarian, income-sharing farming community, and is one of the creators and current administrator of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, an organization committed to nurturing […]

Episode 27—Laird Schaub and Ma’ikwe Schaub Ludwig: Community and Emotions

Imagine Benedictine monasteries hosting conferences and providing help to lay people looking to incorporate monastic values and practices into their lives. Nothing new, you say. People have been flocking to such monasteries, especially over the past couple of decades, gleaning wisdom and guidance on contemplative prayer, Lectio Divina, liturgy of the hours, and other portable practices. For now, though, […]

Episode 26—Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove of Rutba House: Family Economics in the Household of God

Having just come from Koinonia Farm and gleaned from conversations there that, among some in the New Monasticism movement, there is a growing interest in connecting more deeply with the classic monastic tradition, I was eager to bring “old-school” monastics into the conversation. Here I speak with Cistercian monk Michael Lautieri, OCSO, current vocation director […]

Episode 25—Michael Lautieri, OCSO: Bridging the Gap, Monasticism Old and New

“I don’t know whether you’ve ever walked over a piece of ground that could almost cry out to you and say, ‘Heal me, heal me!’ I don’t know whether you feel the closeness to the soil that I do. But when you fill in those old gullies and terrace the fields and you begin to feel […]

Episode 24—Brendan Prendergast: Permaculture Design at Koinonia Farm

In this second half of my conversation with Bren Dubay, we speak of the rich tapestry of relations Koinonia Farm now enjoys, with communities already mentioned in the previous episode (Jubilee Partners, Reba Place Fellowship, Church of the Servant King) as well as with the Bruderhof, an early 20th century addition to the Anabaptist communal family […]

Episode 23—Bren Dubay, Part II. Koinonia Farm: Toward a New Monasticism

Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, was founded in 1942 by Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England, with the intention of being a “demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God” and helping the region’s poor, struggling farming families. Foremost among the biblical values they sought to embody were economic sharing among themselves and […]

Episode 22—Bren Dubay, Part I. Koinonia Farm: Rebirth and Renewal

Mike Brantley returned to New Orleans, his native home, during Hurricane Katrina and, at the instigation of his wife Susanne, planted roots there a year later to pioneer Communitas, an ecumenical order of missional communities affiliated with InnerCHANGE and CRM. Up till this point, Mike had wrestled for years, as an Army officer and a […]

Episode 21—Mike Brantley of Communitas, New Orleans: Christian Community on the Margins of Christendom

InnerCHANGE emerged in the mid-1980s from the aspiration of John Hayes. While living and ministering with his family among immigrant neighbors in the most poverty-stricken, overcrowded street in Orange County, California, John recognized the urgent need to better enable missionaries to share more concretely in the lives and struggles of the poor to whom they […]

Episode 20—Catherine Rundle of InnerCHANGE Los Angeles: “No Such Thing as Mess-Free Art”

My encounter with the Nehemiah House was one of those happy accidents one learns to treasure, and perhaps even rely on, during extended excursions on the road. I was biking down the Southern California coast with a still unformed idea of what I would do or who I would meet once I got to Los […]

Episode 19—Sarah and Scott Yetter: Nehemiah House, Pico-Union Los Angeles

In this second half of my conversation with Lois Arkin, having introduced the general landscape of ecovillages and the Los Angeles Eco-Village in Part I, we now hone in on lessons she’s learned along the way. Specifically, Lois addresses the issue of structural conflict, reflecting on her own experience in light of the insights of ecovillage and intentional […]

Episode 18—Lois Arkin, Part II: Addressing Structural Conflict

Lois Arkin is the founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit CRSP (the Cooperative Resources & Services Project) Institute for Urban Ecovillages. In 1993, she co-founded the Los Angeles Eco-Village as a project of CRSP. Other organizations that she’s co-founded or have grown out of CRSP include the Eco-Home Network, the Southern California Association of […]

Episode 17—Lois Arkin, Part I: Introducing Ecovillages and the Los Angeles Eco-Village

By the time I arrived in Oakland, California, a question had grown in me that I now sought to address more directly: what makes evangelicals tick? Having grown up Catholic and returned to the Catholic Church by way of Buddhism, the differences between my self-identity as a Catholic Christian—from how I read the Bible, to how I […]

Episode 16—Dan Schmitz of New Hope Covenant Church: Evangelical Formation in a Post-Christian World

Paula Huston has been an Oblate of New Camaldoli Hermitage since 1999, after encountering the monastery during a period of acute spiritual crisis and having her life’s direction turned in an entirely new direction. She is the author of The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life, By Way of Grace: Moving From Faithfulness to […]

Episode 15—Paula Huston,Obl OSB Cam: Monastic Life as Source of Creativity and Countercultural Witness

A Christian Exploration of Contemporary Intentional Communities

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Podcast – emerging communities · ancient roots

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