Hey, Bridgetown. Love and joy and peace to all of you. I'm John Mark Comer here with

the Bridgetown Daily for Wednesday, April 1st. And no, that is not a joke.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about monasticism. Let me give you a very brief church history

lesson. Just nerd out on you. In the 4th century, when the way of Jesus was legalized in the

Roman Empire, for the first time in church history, followers of Jesus were facing not the

danger of martyrdom as in the first three centuries, but the danger of things like compromise and

apathy and what C.S. Lewis called a contented worldliness. And there was a move of the spirit

all across the Mediterranean for men and women to kind of go out of the city and into the desert

and give their entire life over to prayer. It started with the desert fathers and mothers in

Egypt and North Africa, then moved up to Syria, and then all the way over by the end in Celtic

Britain with St. Patrick in Ireland. The gospel came to Ireland. This is interesting in the 4th century

after the persecutions were over. And believe it or not, this is hard for me to imagine, Irish

followers of Jesus were sad. They could not become what they called red martyrs, meaning they could

not bleed and die for Jesus. That's very hard for me as a Portlander to imagine. So they became

what they called green martyrs. They would go off into a hermitage in the forest and spend years

or decades in prayer. They would die, so to speak, to a normal life and marriage and family in order

to live for Jesus in prayer. And monastic life was always the minority from Ireland to St. Benedict

and North of Italy to North Africa. It was always for the minority, not the majority of followers

of Jesus in the church. But it played a key role in the church for well over a thousand years

until the Reformation where Martin Luther, who was a former monk and his wife, Katharina von Bora,

who was a former nun, were so turned off by the corruption in the monastic order by the kind of

16th century that they, in all honesty, threw out the baby with the bathwater. As a result, very

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