Community Building Books!

One of my good friends and I are making tentative plans to start an intentional community house starting September 2010! We're incredibly excited, and are going to start reading as many Christian books on community as we can this summer. She backpacked through Europe this Summer and Fall and something she became a part of was 24/7 - a movement in Britian involving a community that has prayer going on 24/7 (if I understand properly). She is friends with the leader, who wrote the book Punk Monk : New Monasticism And The Ancient Art Of: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing. For the past decade, his life has been all about community, so she asked him what books he would recommend for us. I thought some of you might be interested! Here is what he said:


Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (Touchstone 1948). Bonhoeffer’s call to new monastic communities has echoed through the whole of this book.

Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water (Harper 2001). Foster explores the five great traditions of the Christian taking biblical, ancient and recent case studies of people who expressed them.

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in 10,000 Places (Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2005). Peterson’s ‘conversation in spiritual theology’ has become one of the central books on our Transit training year and in particular helped us think about ‘incarnational’ communities.

Abbot Christopher Jamison, Finding Sanctuary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2006). Written by the Abbot of Worth Abbey - featured in the TV show The Monastery – this is a helpful, readable and practical journey through monasticism and the rule of St.Benedict.

Jean Vanier, Community and Growth (Darton, Longman and Todd 1976). Written by the founder of the L’Arche community, this book is the one I regularly go back to in looking to learn and live out simple community. His chapters about meals and hospitality are especially helpful.

BAH! I'm SO excited! :D