Friends of StBs, and co-belligerents!

There’s great joy in introducing good friends to good friends. One way or the other, these are some of the folks St. Brendan’s is connected to or whose work we want to further by highlighting them. It’s hardly an exhaustive list, but it sure is encouraging when taken together.

Google away!

St. Brendan’s in the City is a grateful daughter community of The Falls Church in Northern Virginia, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and gladly submitted to Christians in the 'majority world' through the Convocation of Anglicans in North America. Some of us had a part in founding the Kairos community, and are glad to be a sister to that community. We find deep theological roots in the work of Bishop NT Wright and the Reverend John Stott and Pope John Paul the Great, and increasingly Dalls Willard.

We find deep spiritual nurture through the contemplative website offered by the Irish Jesuits at Sacred Space, the Henri Nouwen Society, Jean Vanier and L’Arche, Ruth Haley Barton’s ministry of The Transforming Center, and Renovare.

We’re grateful to redemptively engage this hurting world with Word Made Flesh, a sort of Missionaries of Charity for young Protestants, and especially their communities in Bolivia, Calcutta, and Sierra Leone. A very important servant of justice is our dear friend and long partner, the International Justice Mission. We continue to share in the labor of loving Washington DC through the Southeast DC Partners and Central Union Mission among others, including deeply appreciating the ministries of L’Arche in Washington, Christ House and Columbia Road Heath Services, and the Servant Leadership School of the Church of the Saviour.

St. Brendan’s is deeply committed to relief and transformational development, manifested in our support and partnerships with the Anglican Relief and Development Fund, World Vision, and Five Talents International.

It’s a crazy American culture we live in, and Andy Crouch at Culture Makers, Catapult Magazine, the Center for Public Justice, and the Washington Institute help us make sense of it and learn how to engage it.

As best as we’re able given the strangeness of our metro Washington DC context, St. Brendan’s is all about intentional community among the poor for the sake of Jesus. So we count as friends and inspiration Circle of Hope in Philly, the Simple Way, Urban Neighbors of Hope, and Rutba House and their identification of the New Monasticism. It’s not particularly urban (!), but L’Abri has had a huge impact on us.

We're glad for these friends, and co-belligerents for the Kingdom. We look to God to lead us to our unique contribution to this wonderful list of his agents.

I'd love some responses to this post, sharing more people and ministries and communities we should be aware of, inspired by, or are already connected to that I left out.

posted by Bill