When we closed the monastery in April, 2004 we had made the decision to go out to lead the New Life, as we decided to call it. The final bonfires - tomato boxes and everything that was ‘useless’ - typified our ruthless determination to go ‘out’ from a work successfully completed and now to be left behind. Looking back to that time it is possible for ourselves and others to see two quite different scenarios. On the one hand we were, and were seen to be, 'religious' in the traditional understanding of the term. We were recognised by the Church of England as a Cistercian community - and accepted by the Cistercian Order as such. The integration of work, worship, prayer, study and the reception of guests to share in the life, were our Cistercian hallmarks. In the language of the present, it was 'great'! On the other hand we were also more like a research laboratory - and in that sense quite in line with the original Cistercians! - beavering away at hi-tech glasshouse growing and reaching into the depths of study in theology and philosophy. Both those activities were revealed in our worship - simple but deep and concerned with relationships with God, with each other and our guests.

Five years on it is really good to be here in London surrounded by so many people. Life in the monastery was not, however, a retreat from 'ordinary' life, as has sometimes been assumed. Prayer and worship as well as our connections with the tomato industry, are features which grounded our life as Christians. As one person said, 'To be in monastic community life is to be at the heart of the world' - despite seeing only a very small microcosm of it. But as the Christians who have always lived here must know, it is possible to pray in the busyness of life - on the tube and trains and buses and among the people you meet in going to and fro.

It is startling to be faced with so many changes in London - which I knew as a student in the late 1940s. I have to have a map to find my way around the unfamiliar post war buildings! It is always quite an adventure ... But what hasn't changed is the structure and worship of the churches, and that is what worries me most. And this despite the changes from the Book of Common Prayer. I have the feeling that what changes have been made are really only cosmetic. I don't mean to be critical. But in the past half century there has been quite a lot of unease about some of the traditional doctrines of the churches in a world which has changed so much. Many people have walked away from Christian faith on that account - although the roots of the present decline of the churches goes back to the Industrial Revolution.

For me, with our freedom and gentle but persistent researching into ideas of God and Christ at Ewell monastery, our present time requires a living faith and a living worship to enable us to be freed from an inward looking stance which has, through the centuries, been the hazard of being 'church'. It must seem paradoxical, but our 'enclosed', monastic community had those elements of freedom in faith which carried us through the changing periods of the 60s-90s to a positive outlook today as Christians. Transitions and change, regarded in the right way, have always been the means by which Christians have renewed their faith.

The greatest change, which some churches have experienced, lies in the choreography of worship. When the pews of the Reformation period have been swept away and people can once again be in relationship with one another - and with God! - remarkable things can happen. At least one is able to look again at the worship one has inherited with new, experimental eyes of faith and love. It is people and relationships which matter in faith and worship.

For over four centuries our worship in the churches has been encouraged by ideas of faith and doctrine which have in many ways focussed on salvation viewed in an individualist way. In the sight of the Father, and in the presence of the living Lord, perhaps we need to return to a 'community' emphasis both in the idea of church and in worship. 'Church' becoming small communities of disciples which enables worship to be people 'in relationship' with each other and the risen Lord. And, rather like Paul with his mission churches in Asia, the vicar or pastor, enabling all this to happen. We have no idea how Paul's churches were 'run'. But this is what he writes about living and worshipping in faith -

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:23-28)