By Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Missional Consultant

It’s St. Patrick’s Day-week, and March 17 gives me pause. I’m grateful for the opportunity to intentionally reflect on several trips to Ireland. I think I’ve been there seven times and four of those involved leading groups on pilgrimage. The “golden age” of Irish Monasticism (roughly the 6th-9th centuries) was a time when Christianity functioned in Ireland in ways that evoke curiosity in me.

My post-Ireland ponderings are about what it means to be Christian and what it means to adapt as community in ways that provide refuge, celebration, and interdependence with the earth and all living beings (and maybe even those who have passed on).

By the 6th century, monasteries had become the primary organizing unit of Irish religious and civic life. Figures like St. Columba (Ulster), St. Brendan (County Kerry), St. Brigid (County Clare), St. Kevin (Glendalough – pictured here), and St. Ciarán (Clonmacnoise) founded communities that grew into genuine urban centers.

These “monastic cities” were not merely places of prayer — they were the towns of early Ireland. They housed craftsmen, scholars, farmers, pilgrims, and dependents alongside monks, nuns, abbesses and abbots. They functioned as economic hubs, hosting fairs and markets though without money exchange. They served as places of refuge for the stranger and as sources of peacemaking between rival kings and tribes.

Within these “cities” residents communed not only with one another, but they were also in relationship with non-human life and even with those who had died. In essence, the Irish monks did not see a division between the sacred and the natural. The earth was holy ground, creation was a living act of ongoing divine generosity, and attentiveness to the world around them was inseparable from attentiveness to God. Female and male energy were both valued in theology, leadership and in the created order. As for death, Irish monastic culture had a strong sense of the communio sanctorum — the communion of saints and the faithful, living and dead, as a single community. The cemetery was not a place of exclusion or fear but of belonging. Death did not remove you from the community; it changed your role within it. There was a sense of life and continuity and connection with current residents, the natural realm, and those who had passed on.

I know there are no perfect systems, and I can easily create a romantic idea of what this time was like on this verdant island. Even so, this vision of community compels me.

This month, the FaithX team has been reflecting on the topic “Why I do this work.” Truth is, I don’t know how to answer that question some days. I am grateful for the team of people I get to work with, and I am proud of the tools and resources we have developed (and continue to develop) for the sake of faith communities. So, part of why I do this work is because I care about the well-being and faithful witness of these communities, AND this is often not enough to spark a fire in my belly.

Here is the question that keeps me engaging this work with FaithX (and on my own): What are we doing to create systems and structures, neighborhoods and communities that move the dial toward more interdependent relationships (individually and corporately) – connections where the diversity of life is nurtured and celebrated and gifts are called out for the benefit of the whole?

So often, churches engage resources and consultants to help them become more vital and sustainable, yet they do this within a vacuum that doesn’t recognize or honor or nurture the way their sustainability and vitality is connected to that of the larger community. Faith communities hone their mission so they can serve the community, not recognizing that what most people want is not to be served, but to be connected in relationship – relationships that recognize and invite their gifts in ways that involves shared resources, shared struggles, shared victories.

As I hover over our world at 10,000 feet and seek to discern where we are as a culture, country, and/ or church, I sense anxiety, exhaustion, confusion, anger, and isolation. Yes, there is also hope, and laughter, and connection, but it feels harder to tap that deep well consistently. Who are you and I becoming individually and communally in the midst of all that “is” right now?

There is an Irish quote that reads: Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” Thinking back to that golden age of Irish history 1500 years ago, the word “belonging” resonates across the years. Irish monastic cities were places of belonging, where people found both refuge and connection. I hold a vision where my local community, and yours too, is awake, aware, and informed of the challenges ahead of us, and we move forward together anyway because we also recognize the amazing resources and assets we have in one another to address these challenges. May we nurture a connection within our faith communities, neighborhoods, and towns in ways that we find an ever-increasing sense of interdependence and belonging.