Inside the central London monastery where millennials are finding their faith No Netflix, no money, no cliques – but inside these 900-year-old walls, a community is finding an ordered life liberating

The most striking thing about Lambeth Palace is the silence. As the enormous doors in its Tudor gatehouse clank shut, the hullabaloo of central London is replaced by the rustle of leaves and the distant crunch of footsteps on gravel. It feels miraculous.

For the members of the Community of St Anselm – an ecumenical community for young people set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in 2015 – this tranquility is the norm.

It is here, behind the palace’s 900-year-old walls, that a community of Christians aged between 20 and 35 live for ten months, practising at least three hours of silence a day. On Wednesdays they rise at dawn and don’t speak until 2pm.

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Statistics suggest that the number of young people attending church is in “catastrophic” decline. A survey conducted in 2017 found that just 3 per cent of British adults under 24 describe themselves as Anglican and fewer than 5 per cent identify as Catholic. Almost three out of four 18- to 24-year-olds said they have no religion, a rise of nine percentage points since 2015.

Youth revival

Yet religious communities such as St Anselm are enjoying a revival and young people are driving it. This year, the community – whose members don’t pay a fee but are invited to make a donation to running costs – had hundreds of applicants for 16 spaces. A similar order, the Community of St Frideswide, that opened in Oxford in early September, was also oversubscribed.

Writing in the Church Times, Welby noted that young Christians were increasingly joining religious orders which he contrasted to social media platforms like Facebook.

“It’s not like just signing a contract for a year’s job, it’s a whole-life commitment and somehow the alb signified that.”

“Religious communities come at things from the exact opposite direction: small numbers of people living together and learning to accept each other, in real life, without the possibility of ‘blocking’ those whom they do not like, or whose ideas they find challenging,” he wrote. “Their impact can be enormous.”

But what would make a millennial give up all the trappings of modern-day life – a successful career, going out with friends, box set binges, Instagram – to go and live like a monk for ten months?

Katy Hirst, 31, had always wondered what it would be like to live in a monastery. It was that curiosity – coupled with a fascination with the idea of community – that led her to St Anselm last year.

She had been running a charity for eight years and when she left she knew she couldn’t go straight into another job. “I needed to give myself some time to reassess, to recuperate from a really intense eight years,” she says.

A whole-life commitment

Hirst has particularly strong memories of commitment ceremony which took place three weeks after she arrived at Lambeth Palace. Members were given their albs – floor-length white robes – which was “really emotional,” says Hirst. “It’s not like just signing a contract for a year’s job, it’s a whole-life commitment and somehow the alb signified that.”

Certainly, life at St Anselm is as much about learning to live in close proximity with strangers as it is about religion. The members – who come from all around the world – cook, eat, and clean together.

They have one communal area but no TV, so people of different ages and cultures have to meld together without security blankets like Netflix or computer games. Wi-Fi is available but it’s advised that internet is used sparingly: members are discouraged from spending too long talking to “outside” friends on social media.

Life within the community is structured. Days unfold according to a timetable, and even laundry is done as a shared chore. As well as the daily silences, a typical week is made up of Bible readings, personal prayer time, theological lectures, volunteering with charities and singing.

Sudden change of gear

“To go from living a busy life to allowing yourself to spend hours in silence and prayer is a tough thing” Andy Walton

Spare time? There isn’t much. Saturday afternoons are free and members can worship at their own church on Sundays if they wish.

It can be a struggle, as 36-year-old freelance journalist Andy Walton admits. He took time out from his job to join the community last year and says the sudden change of gear was the hardest part.

“To go from living a busy life to allowing yourself to spend hours in silence and prayer is a tough thing,” he explains.

Hirst agrees, citing the lack of freedom as the biggest challenge. “You don’t have the same freedom over what you do with your time, you don’t have freedom over what you eat because obviously the community eats together. You have very little financial freedom because you don’t have much money for the year. It’s all of those small things…”

Walton says he joined the community – which has a rigorous three-stage selection process – because he wanted to be “part of something bigger”. He believes religious communities like St Anselm have grown in popularity with people his age because they are bored of life’s quotidian options.

Not a perfect community

“It’s just work, go home, screen, sleep… repeat,” he says. “Life is more than that. At St Anselm, we learned the value of routine, but also the joy of volunteering, singing together, eating together.

“We’re so isolated and swamped in the 21st century – breaking that down is really liberating. So even though we follow a set of rules, you actually find that it ends up freeing you.”

St Anselm isn’t a perfect community, of course. Its dean, 38-year-old Rev Simon Lewis, stresses that the members are not so “holy” they are above bickering. “Obviously we share our faith together which is important but it’s not enough to stop us from arguing,” he says.

“Challenges come up in the simple things in life like when you realise that not everybody washes up in the same way or not everybody does the laundry in the same way. And that’s absolutely fine. We don’t need to be the same but we do need to choose a common life together.”

The group is also discouraged from forming close personal relationships with fellow members. They are asked not to change their relationship status during the ten months – for most that means arriving single and staying that way.

No close bonds

“Instead of saying: ‘I’ll have my little group here,’ you seek to offer yourself equally to everybody because in community life if you don’t do that it’s corrosive”

Romantic relationships aren’t the only sacrifice. Close, platonic bonds with individuals are discouraged. “Instead of saying: ‘I’ll have my little group here,’ you seek to offer yourself equally to everybody because in community life if you don’t do that it’s corrosive,” says Lewis.

This aspect of community life was a challenge for Hirst. “I think it’s really natural as human beings to want to form close relationships,” she says.

The safeguarding of young people is given high priority. Two people dropped out in the scheme’s first two years and the community has taken on a psychiatrist.

“Anybody who declares any dimension of mental health prior to entry will be sent to see a psychiatrist where they’ll get a plan in place for what how we respond to things if they do occur,” says Rev Lewis.

Would he have joined a community like St Anselm’s if one had been around in his twenties? “To be honest I don’t know if I would have done,” he says, frankly. “I don’t think I would have been brave enough.”