Pam and I have been listening to sermons by Pete Hise, pastor of a highly-evangelistic church in Lexington, Kent. We became aware of this church through someone we met at the ChurchMedia.net conference in June. I wrote earlier about this church, how they’ve had 1300 conversions during the past seven years. Anyway, we really enjoy Pete Hise’s messages. He’s very humorous, very informal, very engaging. He seems to have a lot of fun when he preaches.

We listened to three of his sermons a few weeks ago as we returned from vacationing in Michigan. In one message, Hise told about his annual month-long getaway…to a monastery! He eats and worships with the monks, while planning the coming year at his church–vision, sermons, etc. He mentioned one monk whom he described as the Simon Cowell of the monastery, the guy who decides whether or not a prospective monk gets in. Hise asked him, “What are some of the reasons you would not accept a person who applied to become a monk?”

The monk told about one young guy who seemed like a perfect fit for the monastic life. But before becoming a full-fledged monk, you spend several years as a novice (with a different colored robe). You see if the monastic life suits you, and other monks watch you.

As time passed, this novice kept dropping ideas about how to do things a little better. They could turn down the temperature a bit to save some money. During singing, they could bunch of a little to make it sound better. He had a number of such ideas. And when he came to the end of his novice period, he was told, “We’re sorry, but we don’t think this life is for you.”

This puzzled Pete Hise. “You mean you turned him down for offering suggestions?”

“No,” the monk told Hise. “He simply cared too much about this world.”

The monastic life is a life of denial–of possessions, of ambition, of sex. The monks live not for this world, but for the next world. That is what they set their minds on. This fellow so much wanted to improve the here-and-now. And that disqualified him. Now, you can argue why it’s not a bad thing to improve this world. But it does give something to think about.