Meet the New Missional Monk

I am beyond excited to announce that Missional Monks once again refers to two people

…instead of one guy using the Royal “We.”

Dr. Wes Magruder is an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church, is the Director of Missional Community Development for the Missional Wisdom Foundation, and is the founder and director of Daraja, a ministry which works to build bridges with refugees in the Dallas area. Wes and his family served for several years as missionaries in Africa. Since returning, he has worked to cultivate missional renewal in a large congregation as the Associate Pastor, he has helped launch missional communities, teaches a course on “Reading Scripture with Missional Eyes” in The Academy, and has developed incredible relationships with refugees from multiple countries. So, since he isn’t busy, I asked him to partner with me as a Missional Monk.

Wes and Bret serving Communion during worship with The Gathering

In addition to working together on the blog, Wes and I are relaunching the Missional Monks Podcast (hooray!) - with the addition of monthly videocasts. We already have several fantastic interviews lined up where we’ll be talking about the collision of the missional and the monastic with people in a variety of different contexts.

Through our work together in the Missional Wisdom Foundation, Wes and I have had multiple opportunities to speak and teach together. The “Bret and Wes Show” as it is often called within the Foundation, seems to work pretty well. Specifically, we have had a number of opportunities to work with individual churches and groups that are interested in cultivating the missional imagination. Missional Monks is the perfect context to continue developing and improving that aspect of our ministry.

As this marks an exciting transition for Missional Monks, you can expect a number of changes coming to the website in the near future.

Please join me in welcoming Wes, because I’m contractually obligated to limit the nice things I say to him personally…and I think I’m already over my quota.

But for now it is time to unveil the first ever Missional Monks Videocast…complete with too many closeups of someone who needs to shave.

For this inaugural episode we visited the Seattle’s Best Coffee in Burleson to tell ‘em…”Hi, I’m Bret.”

Check it out.