Our Mission
The mission of the Abbey at New Garden Park is…
To serve and equip God’s Kingdom by building a network of support to business organizations and ministries living out their faith.
What is the Abbey?
The Abbey is a network of connections based out of Church of the Redeemer at New Garden Park, an Anglican church in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s an extension of the local church—a connected entity looking outward rather than inward, seeking to minister to “the last, the least, and the lost” (Matthew 18-25). The Abbey extends the church’s missional reach further with an assortment of external “marketplace ministries” which interact with a wider audience, often made up of those who might not hear the Good News of Jesus Christ or have relationships with Christians otherwise. As our Abbey ministries are already working alongside these groups of people and have relationships with them in their own contexts, we believe our ministries are uniquely positioned to reach these individuals right where they are—and we want to support them as they do so!
Our Abbey ministries meet for monthly times of connection and enrichment!
We currently have a wide variety of Abbey ministries, from an outdoor gear making business, to a non-profit providing legal assistance to refugees, to a global missions organization, and beyond! Our Abbey Director, Sam Cox, serves as a liaison between these independent marketplace ministries and the church and facilitates connection among the ministry leaders. Our Abbey ministries can be led by both members of Church of the Redeemer as well as individuals whose organizations are based in the wider Triad community.
Why is it called the Abbey?
Beginning in the first century, and continuing throughout the middle ages, the Christian church saw local parish ministry as a way to spiritually form both new and mature believers. At the same time, parallel but separate missional outreach ministries were established to serve their respective communities both locally and abroad, spread the Gospel, and to be ambassadors for Christ in a fallen world. In the medieval European church, this was done largely through the monasteries, or, an old English word: abbey.
These abbeys became vital for spiritual growth, the preservation of learning, and spreading the Gospel. They were where people lived, worked, and worshiped in community. They gave birth to the modern university and, in the Celtic monastic tradition, in addition to the monks and nuns, the abbeys included lay people, too: farmers, artisans, scholars, tradesmen, and families. The parish church and the monastic abbeys were inextricably linked, shaping and forming Western culture for centuries until the influence of the Reformation began to tear this relationship apart.
In more recent American history, the evangelical arm of the church often became separate para-church ministries, which often worked in conflict with one another and with the church rather than in tandem. At Church of the Redeemer we seek to revive the Abbey ministries to serve and equip the greater community by spreading the Gospel through various tent-making, marketplace ministries. We want to be equally committed and vigorous to prayerfully solicit the help of the Holy Spirit in the spiritual formation of our church members and visitors in our Parish—those coming to church on Sunday mornings, while also providing outreach beyond the confines of the church proper with our Abbey. While the Parish focuses more heavily on discipleship and fostering spiritual formation of those worshiping with us, the Abbey is an extension of the church, a connected entity looking outward rather than inward, seeking to minister to “the last, the least, and the lost” (Matthew 20, 25). The Abbey extends our reach further with an assortment of external marketplace, both formal and informal, ministries to reach a wider audience, often those who might not hear the Good News of Jesus Christ.