500 years before us

I think I believe now in 'Godincidences' rather than coincidences. I hadn't planned to visit Wardown House museum, but unusually some students had persuaded me to take them to a First Aid Course there. I came across the details of this medieval guild. What stood out to me was: they banded together!

The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I think Christians have always desired to band together after all, this is what fellowship is, and we have the monasteries and convents as expressions of it. Fellowship is one of the four pillars of church; the four essential practices to make it happen and keep it going:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. — Acts 2:42

But what is intriguing is that the guild movement was a lay movement seeking to encourage their members to live a Christian way of life. We might be tempted to think that contemporary interest in lay orders such as the Franciscans, or the Order of the Mustard Seed, or come to it, fresh expressions of church, is edgy and new. Five hundred years before us, ordinary Christians were doing it, amazing... We stand on the shoulders of giants...