Rod Dreher’s 2017 bestseller The Benedict Option captured a wide Christian readership for two main reasons. The first was its wake-up call to conservatives trying to hold the line against an avalanche of anti-Christian animus. “It’s too late,” Dreher announced. “There’s no going back to Judeo-Christian America.” And in our collective gut, we knew he was right. Ready or not, things were about to change.

But Dreher’s second point was equally important: The way forward is to go backward. Constructing a new Christian culture is going to require drawing on the resources of the past. Who could have guessed that Benedict of Nursia, a sixth-century monk, would suddenly be our solution? Yet Dreher was right: The future is ancient. Christians have been here before, and we would do well to learn history’s lessons as we face a new Dark Age.

The subtitle of The Benedict Option promises “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.” But is it just our nation that no longer exemplifies basic Christian principles? What if the evangelical church has become post-Christian, too? Perhaps 40 years of trying to “contextualize” the faith to fit the zeitgeist actually transformed, not the social and moral fabric of our society, but the church itself. We became more like them, while relatively few of them became one of us. And pastors haven’t been immune to the pull.

When a pastor looks outside long enough—even with the noble goal of contextualizing the faith to unbelievers—he inevitably starts to change. “You are what you love,” James K. A. Smith says. More specifically, you become what you look at. When society worships power, money, and sex, you can only gaze at those idols for so long without being drawn in. When pop culture elevates glitzy superstars or the guru du jour, you start to follow their strategies. When corporations go global and birth new movements, your inner entrepreneur takes over. Somewhere along the way, the pastor become a celebrity, a globetrotter, a CEO. The world “out there” seems to matter more than the sheep in your pen.

But things weren’t always this way. It’s time for the post-Christian church to return to its parochial roots. The bishops and presbyters of the ancient church aspired to nothing more than faithful ministry—possibly ending in martyrdom—in their assigned parish. The paroikia was their focus: a “sojourning community” in a particular time and place. The early Christians knew how to live small lives. Inward lives. Local lives. Humble lives. Yet not ineffective lives. Despite their deliberate self-diminishment, those first believers upended an empire. Could their wisdom, steadily applied over time, do so again?

Augustine Project

Augustine exemplified the ancient pastoral vocation like no one else. Who was he, really? The narrative trajectory of Augustine’s Confessions has given many the impression he was nothing but a wild playboy who eventually found God in a Milanese garden. His conversion scene is indeed dramatic. Anguished and burdened by sins, Augustine quit resisting and bowed the knee to God. At last, his restless heart had found its true desire.

But what happened next? The truth is, Augustine’s remaining life as a pastor was anything but restful. To learn of it, we look not to his Confessions, but to his sermons and writings, and especially the biography of him by his secretary Possidius. What can pastors glean from Augustine that could guide us today?

Here are three admonitions that emerge from his pastoral practice, offering a wise way forward in a new pagan age.

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