Ancient Monks, Modern Missions

From a presentation at The Everything Conference 2026

The Everything Conference equips Christian leaders for the work of cultural renewal based on Psalm 24v1, "The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it."

David Stroud, leader of Christ Church London and founder of the Everything Conference, spoke at the 2026 conference on 'Ancient Monks, Modern Missions: Unlocking the Power of Prayer & Community'. Here is an abridged version of his talk:

David argues that Christian monasticism helped shape Western civilisation - not through power, strategy, or public influence, but through radical devotion to God.

It begins with Anthony, a young man who took Jesus’ call to leave everything literally. He sold his land, walked into the Egyptian desert, and gave himself to prayer, fasting, solitude, and spiritual discipline. What began as withdrawal, became a movement. Anthony’s life drew attention across the empire. People came seeking wisdom, healing, prayer, and a model of holiness. Many stayed. By the end of his life, the desert had become, in Athanasius’s famous phrase, “a city.”

The first point is clear: renewal starts with worship. Anthony did not set out to change culture. He set out to seek God. Culture changed anyway.

From there, David widens the focus. For the next thousand years, monasteries became engines of prayer, learning, work, beauty, and public good. The aim is not to romanticise monasticism or ignore its flaws, but to ask what modern Christians can learn from it. The core claim is that spiritual depth can create cultural depth. When communities are rooted in worship, Scripture, discipline, and service, their influence can spread far beyond the walls of the church or monastery.

Cassiodorus provides the second key example. As Rome collapsed, he saw cities destroyed, libraries burned, and education disappear. The old Roman systems that had preserved learning, law, administration, and public order were crumbling. In old age, rather than simply lamenting the decline, he founded a monastery built around a library. Scripture sat at the centre, but classical learning was also preserved and put to use. Monks copied texts by hand, safeguarding knowledge that might otherwise have vanished.

This made monasteries more than places of private devotion. They became centres of education, memory, and intellectual renewal. David presents Cassiodorus as proof that Christianity is not anti-culture or anti-learning. Properly understood, faith gathers truth, orders it around God, and passes it on. The monks did not treat knowledge as a threat to devotion. They treated it as a gift to be stewarded. Their libraries, copying rooms, and schools became quiet but powerful acts of resistance against cultural amnesia.

Benedict adds the third lesson: prayer and work belong together. Benedictine communities transformed Europe through disciplined labour. They cleared forests, drained wetlands, cultivated land, bred animals, brewed beer, made cheese, kept bees, developed fisheries and vineyards, and built sustainable local economies. Their work was not secular distraction; it was worship in action. They showed that ordinary labour, repeated faithfully and offered to God, can reshape both people and places.

They also shaped beauty. Monks built abbeys and cloisters, created art, developed music, and helped pioneer musical notation. Their faith did not shrink life; it enlarged it. Prayer flowed into farming, learning, architecture, business, and song. David suggests that this matters because culture is not changed only by arguments or institutions. It is also changed by habits, rhythms, buildings, songs, tools, meals, and shared ways of life.

So three key lessons:

1. From Anthony: start with God, not strategy.
2. From Cassiodorus: put Scripture at the centre of knowledge.
3. From Benedict: do ordinary work for the glory of God.

Together, they show that cultural renewal is not produced by frantic activism, but by worship, wisdom, discipline, community, and faithful labour over time. The monks were not chasing relevance. They were pursuing faithfulness. Yet precisely because they were faithful in prayer, learning, work, and service, they became deeply relevant to the societies around them.

So how is that relevant today?

David notes renewed interest in Christianity among young people in the UK, France, and the United States, and suggests that spiritual renewal may again precede cultural renewal. Scripture is described as living power - like “rewiring the house with the fuse box still on.” If the Bible is placed at the heart of life, it can energise every sector of society. The implication is that Christian faith should not be pushed to the margins as a private hobby. It can shape imagination, vocation, ethics, education, business, art, politics, and public life.

David's final challenge is direct: modern Christians are called to be today’s culture-makers. Writers, artists, teachers, business leaders, politicians, musicians, filmmakers, parents, and workers all have a role. Like the monks, they are invited to seek God deeply, work faithfully, and help renew the world from the inside out.

Therefore, there is a call to imitation, not nostalgia. The point is not to flee to the desert or recreate medieval monasteries. It is to recover the same spiritual seriousness: worship first, Scripture central, work dignified, beauty valued, community strengthened, and every part of life offered to God.

View the 14 min talk here: