WHAT WOULD IT look like to extend radical hospitality to the “other,” spend less money in order to give more away, reclaim the Sabbath by practicing intentional rest, embrace simplicity by downsizing material possessions, and seek the renewal of ailing cities and neighborhoods by living in them rather than fleeing them—all while holding jobs and raising a flock of kids?
In The Year of Small Things, Sarah Arthur and Erin Wasinger set out to discover the answer. Inspired by the New Monasticism, a movement that integrates ancient Christian values into modern life, the two friends and their families embark on a year of small but intentional steps of faith and action, devoting each month to a different theme, whether prayer, sustainability, or serving the needs of the under-resourced city in which they live and worship.
What they find is that their project’s biggest challenge—and its saving grace—is their choice to approach the year in committed community. They call it covenantal friendship. Each week, their families eat dinner together. They catch up on each other’s lives, and they ask hard but good questions. When Sarah and Tom commit to carving out a nightly prayer time before bed, Erin and Dave ask how it’s going. When the couples share their grocery budgets, Sarah and Tom feel inspired to cut costs by creatively using the food in their freezer before going out to buy more.
The dinners are messy in more ways than one: The hosting couple’s house may not be perfectly picked up, the children’s game of hide-and-seek may add an element of chaos, and the ad hoc menu may reflect what happens to line the pantry shelves. But the two families discover an unexpected holiness in the bustle and imperfection, and the simple tradition they embrace of ending the evening with a candle and a song speaks to the project at large—a year of small things.
Those unfamiliar with the New Monasticism will find in this book a helpful explanation of the movement’s tenets and an honest, at times amusing, picture of what embracing those tenets can look like. With leading Christian thinkers such as Brian McLaren inviting us to consider Christianity not merely as a program of beliefs but as an invitation to live those beliefs in relationship, the Arthur and Wasinger families are doing the work of pioneers. They are reminding us of Christianity’s roots in the beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and they are calling us back to the faith of the early believers who inherently understood that small acts counted for much in the kingdom of God. Indeed, the two families learn that small acts are almost always more radical than they appear.
Abigail Carroll is author of A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim (Eerdmans).
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