Order of the Common Life

Bodily Labor

Ordinary physical work becomes a setting for prayer and acceptance of bodily capacity and limitation. Members discern suitable practices individually: household tasks, cooking, cleaning, or gardening can ground prayer in embodied life. Healthy labor and adequate rest belong together.

Residents should be ready to accept work suited to their skills and abilities that sustains their community’s operations or livelihood. Nearby members discern with the community what they can contribute. The examples include food preparation, maintenance, farming, beekeeping, baking, and making things; these illustrate possibilities rather than a universal job assignment.

Prayer

Members discern a daily prayer pattern with a spiritual director. The rule specifies an examen at midday and before sleep, and prayer for the Order’s people and communities. Prayer is approached as an invitation into relationship.

Residential communities establish common prayer times with their leadership and spiritual director, accounting for local needs. At least one fixed-hour prayer uses a liturgy or prayer book selected by the community’s spiritual director. Members living nearby discern participation around their other responsibilities.

Regular Scripture reading and meditation belong within each member’s prayer. The rule reads Scripture through Jesus’ life, from Incarnation to Resurrection. It commends lectio divina and the Daily Office without prescribing either as everyone’s exclusive method.

Study

Learning is directed toward the formation of desire and service. With the Director of Learning, each member chooses or designs study appropriate to their current circumstances and reasons for entering the Order, then reserves time for it every week.

No single curriculum covers every vocation. Options include informal investigation of a commitment or ministry, vocational training, and accredited degree or non-degree education. Discernment and imagination guide the choice.

Rest

Rest includes positive practices of replenishment. Each member develops suitable sleep, rest, and Sabbath rhythms with a spiritual director, considering personal needs, formation, and service.

Residential communities discern quiet hours, silence, and Sabbath under their spiritual director’s leadership, and must respect the resulting rest arrangements. Nearby members join this rhythm where possible. The rule gives no universal bedtime, sleep duration, or designated weekday for Sabbath.

Silence, Solitude & the Contemplative Life

Silence reduces external and internal distractions so that members can attend to God. Solitude exposes desires and dependencies that become noticeable when familiar people and possessions are absent; these can then be opened to God’s reordering.

Contemplation gives God undivided, receptive attention, sometimes without speech or activity. Its intended fruit extends into work, relationships, and ordinary tasks. The source’s reflection prompts explore what surfaces in quiet, what being alone reveals, and which relationships awaken attentiveness to God. No common minimum number of silent minutes is specified.

Spiritual Direction

Direction supplies the ongoing setting in which every other commitment is discerned. A trained companion helps members notice patterns across prayer and everyday experience and attend to their response to God.

Each member meets a trained spiritual director monthly in a continuing relationship. An established director may be retained, or the Order can help provide someone from its network. Directors unfamiliar with the Order are asked to have an orientation conversation with its Lead Spiritual Director. The accompanying prompts focus on God’s movement, growing intimacy, and responses to perceived invitations.

Spiritual Friendship

Members intentionally nurture a small number of close friendships grounded in shared devotion to God and care for others. Such friendships may be inside or outside the Order. They should develop freely and honestly rather than through manufactured intimacy.

The rule encourages friends to practice acknowledgment of their own faults and concrete affirmation of one another. Its reflection questions examine vulnerability, possible friendships to cultivate, and the way shared loves shape life together.

Discernment Within Community

Obedience is understood as responding to the Holy Spirit, including invitations or challenges recognized through trusted relationships. Members bring costly or consequential decisions affecting themselves or loved ones into communal discernment.

After postulancy, each member selects five or six people as a discerning community. They may be members or non-members, including the spiritual director; the preference is for people who know the person well and listen carefully. A clearness committee can be convened for a decision or a sense of spiritual impasse.

For a particular issue, a member may freely decide in advance, through prayer and discussion with their director, to accept this community’s judgment in the traditional role of a superior. This provision concerns a single case. The rule expects communal listening often to clarify or confirm desire rather than contradict it. The formative purpose is humility and relinquishment of control, with the quality of the listening process valued beyond its outcome. Reflection examines honesty, trust, resistance, and openness to either answer.

Simplicity

Members discern simplicity with a director, practicing humility without comparison. Clothing may express beauty, but purchases should consider attachment, consumption, labor exploitation, ethical production, reuse, and owning less; no uniform is imposed.

Food choices consider bodily health and the justice and sustainability of agriculture and supply chains. Eating and fasting enter spiritual direction. Residential communities favor wholesome, simple meals, their own produce and local supplies where possible, and a fasting-and-feasting rhythm discerned with community and Lead Spiritual Directors.

Wealth and possessions are examined through prayer and examen for their formative effects. Fewer belongings, loose attachment, intentional ownership, and generosity are encouraged without a universal prohibited-items list. Technology is assessed for its effects on freedom and relationships; neither blanket rejection nor uncritical adoption is prescribed.

Voluntary poverty is a possible vocation, not a superior spiritual rank. It requires discernment with the director and community, beginning with the director. Members with children are strongly discouraged from poverty practices that impair provision for their families. The aim is readiness to retain or relinquish possessions as discerned in love.

Consecration of Love in Celibacy & Marriage

Both celibacy and marriage are understood as vocations whose freely embraced limits can shape love for God and others. Single people, including those widowed or divorced, are invited to discern both possibilities with friends and a director. Married people examine their original motivations and continuing formation within marriage.

The rule presents celibacy as a witness to ultimate union with God and availability for service, and marriage as a witness to Christ’s union with the Church. Neither vocation is treated as exempt from ascetic discipline.

Its stated sexual ethic confines sexual expression to a lifelong partnership with someone of the opposite biological sex. It requires sexual abstinence of single members, and sexual and emotional fidelity of married members. These are the Order’s published commitments. Reflection asks how a person discerned their vocation and how it is shaping their capacity to love.

Hospitality

Hospitality begins with attentive, unhurried presence. Members also examine opening their homes, their motives, and the balance between private and shared space in spiritual direction. They deliberately seek relationships across racial and ethnic differences.

Residential communities welcome people seeking rest and direction regardless of status, connection to the Order, or ability to pay for food and accommodation. Communities discern boundaries together so that welcome remains safe and respectful as well as generous. Each manages its own finances while seeking to assist other communities in need. Reflection examines receptivity to strangers, distraction, hurry, and availability to others.

Expression of Faults & Affirmations

Members name their own failings and affirm goodness in other people. Disclosure should fit the setting: publicly witnessed or consequential faults may warrant acknowledgment to those affected, while private matters belong with a safe friend, mentor, or confessor.

Affirmations identify specific occasions of grace, service, patience, kindness, or growth. The practice aims at responsibility without shame and encouragement without self-promotion.

Members arrange regular opportunities with family, housemates, or community as appropriate, while cultivating both habits in daily interactions. Residential communities reserve a weekly time for voluntary sharing after reflection on the preceding week. The source’s examples model apologies for impatience or hurtful speech and appreciation for identifiable acts of service. Reflection explores reluctance to admit mistakes, trustworthy listeners, and people to encourage.

Formational Healing

The rule connects healing with inherited patterns of belief and relationship, including early family formation. Members pursue peace with themselves, others, and God, treating conflict as an opportunity for honest reflection, humility, and reconciliation.

They support movement away from reactive self-defense toward thoughtful response and mutual understanding, making room for differences and honoring gifts. Harmful recurring patterns are addressed actively through prayer, spiritual direction, supportive community, and professional counseling where appropriate.

Trust grows through openness and vulnerability. Personal integration serves reconciliation in the wider community, explicitly including confronting implicit racism in oneself and systemic racism around oneself. Members undertake prepared exercises concerning formational healing within their study rhythm.

Shared Economy

Generosity and meeting members’ needs guide economic life. The Order does not pool everyone’s money into one common fund. Members regard their resources as God’s, communicate needs to one another, and trust God’s provision.

Each residential community administers its own economy and seeks to assist others in need. Reflection considers opportunities to give, nearby practical needs, resources available to share with neighbors or the poor, and growth in generosity. This section specifies no universal contribution percentage or requirement to surrender all assets.

Shared Work

Members discern their employment and vocation with others, seeking work that serves God’s kingdom in churches, the Order, neighborhoods, and the wider world. Occupation does not determine a person’s identity, but its effects matter: members should choose work that avoids contributing to human enslavement or exploitation.

Where possible, they seek opportunities to work together or support one another’s work, with decisions shaped by prayer and spiritual direction. A single common profession is not prescribed.

Service to the Church

Every member belongs to and actively serves a local congregation, which may take the form of a traditional church, priory, or abbey. The Order seeks healthy local Christian communities and offers collaboration and equipping across different structures and denominations.

Members discerning vows consider their service to the Order in relation to its wider vocation of supporting local churches. Although membership is not restricted to one denomination, this section explicitly places the Order under Vineyard USA’s authority and leadership. Its ecumenical participation therefore coexists with a specified institutional relationship.