A little more than a year ago, two couples, Jeromy and Debbie and Kyle and Phyllis, decided that there was more to being Christians than going to church. As someone told them "Church is not something we attend. It's something we are."

So they took a radical — in the literal sense of "of or pertaining to the root or root cause of the matter" — step and opted for a whole new way of life.

While things didn't turn out as they hoped, there was nothing wrong with their beliefs about what it means to live faithfully: the willingness to be different.

Their story was told in a recent Los Angeles Times article entitled "What Chores Would Jesus Do?" The couples' attempt to be, rather than merely attend, church took the specific form of creating a "communal home" in Billings, Montana.

Both couples, and their friend, Jake, exchanged their own "comfortable apartments" for a "peeling house" in proximity to a prison, pawn shop, beet factory and "derelict trailer park." They agreed to spend a year together in a mutual search for "simplicity" and "humility." They committed themselves to "give generously" and "love unconditionally."

The goal of these sacrifices and commitments was to become "true followers of Christ." While none of them could articulate exactly, or even approximately, what that meant, they all believed that the answer wouldn't be found in their "soft and self-centered" lifestyles. They expected that it had something to do with lives in which they "consume less, spend less, [and] ... give away more."

So they replaced their comfortable homes for a more "Spartan" one and limited their "splurging" to "kiwi fruit, reduced-fat Cheez-Its, [and] mint-chip ice cream."

Three months into the arrangement, their zeal had been worn down by debates over "whose turn it was to mop the kitchen floor." Predictably, the management and disposition of money was an issue the group never quite got a handle on.

By that summer the lack of "space" had worn Phyllis down. As she put it, "I'm never alone. I never have time to think.... There's no time to grow." That fall, she and Kyle announced they were leaving, partly to be able take in foster children and partly, as is reasonable to infer from the article, because of the lack of privacy.

The experiment in Billings isn't unique: It's part of a "trendy" movement within American Evangelicalism called the "New Monasticism." According to the Times, "perhaps 100 communities like the Billings house have been founded across the country, and hundreds of Christians have attended workshops to learn of the concept."

While I don't think that we need a "new monasticism" — the "old" kind has served the Church quite well for 1600 years, thank you — the "new monastics" are right about the need for a radical break with the modern world.

In the early 1990s Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio wrote a piece about evangelical responses to "modernity," the spirit of our age characterized by, other among other things, individualism, personal autonomy and materialism — characteristics that involve a "rejection of important Christian beliefs and practices" and, thus, render modernity "incompatible with Christian faithfulness."

According to Myers, some Evangelicals could be characterized as "pre-modern" in that they were unaware that modernity had occurred. (I have trouble imagining whom he had in mind.) Others were aware that modernity had occurred and thought that this was a good thing. A third group also knew that modernity had occurred but neither embraced nor rejected it. Instead, they viewed as the cultural equivalent of background radiation: It's the cultural context in which the gospel was preached.

Then there's a fourth group that rejects modernity. Not in the sense of becoming anachronistic, like the Amish, but, instead, holding the culture at arms length and allowing only those bits through that are not at odds with or corrosive of Christian faithfulness.

In my experience most Christians, at best, fall into the third group. They insist that many of the defining characteristics of modern life — technological, cultural, political and economic — are morally and/or spiritually "neutral" and the problem lies with how they are implemented. While they do object, sometimes strenuously, to what Myers calls the "artifacts" of modern culture — particularly movies, television shows, etc. — they don't question the underlying beliefs and assumptions that made these "artifacts" possible.

What they're missing is that you don't have to actively embrace a culture to become acculturated. Avoiding the worst excesses and the obvious bits of infidelity isn't the same thing as Christian faithfulness. Not questioning these beliefs and assumptions at their most basic level gives them a chance to transform you in ways you might not notice but are still deleterious to your spiritual health.

For instance, I recently noticed that I had to have the car radio on whenever I drove. I would hit the "next" button on my steering wheel in a desperate search for distraction. This was true of even the shortest car trips. Despite my high-sounding words about the monks in "Into Great Silence," at least part of me feared being alone with my own thoughts — a very typical fear in our media-saturated age.

Likewise, a friend of mine once described me as a "media omnivore." He meant it as a compliment: He was expressing admiration for my ability to keep abreast of trends in our mass culture and offer up some plausible analysis from a Christian perspective.

The truth is that much of this "knowledge" was what St. Augustine called curiositas, an "improper desire for knowledge" that distracts (there goes that verb again) us from what we ought to be focusing our attention on.

Thus, for a while now, I've made a deliberate, albeit imperfect, effort to not stay abreast with trends in mass culture. It's gratifying when friends or colleagues speak or write to me assuming that I know what they're talking about and I don't or, if I do, only vaguely. My goal is to be as close to clueless in these matters as possible.

If that sounds odd or peculiar, that's kind of the point: Our lives should be markedly different from that of our contemporaries. Not out of a desire to draw attention to ourselves — there's already plenty of that in the world — but, instead, for the sake of our souls and to draw attention to the Christian truths we profess.

In my favorite film, Ron Fricke's Baraka, there's a shot of sidewalk in Tokyo filled with people scurrying to wherever it is they need (or think they need) to be. The one exception is a Zen Buddhist monk holding a begging bowl in one hand and a small bell in the other. He moves exactly one small step a time, ringing the bell after each step.

The contrast is not only visually powerful, it's spiritually powerful, as well. By being literally out-of-step with everyone else, the monk forces us to ask "which of these is really out-of-step?" The (admittedly exaggerated) mindfulness of his actions helps to see how mindless everyone else's activity is.

The willingness to be out-of-step is an indispensable part of being a "follower of Christ." It's why I Peter calls us a "peculiar people." Not so as in being odd or unusual (although we may seem that way at times) but in the sense of belonging to a specific realm, i.e., the Kingdom of God.

The folks in Billings rightly intuited that self-centered individualism (is there any other kind?) was incompatible with faithfulness. They also seemed to understand that a whole-hearted pursuit of faithfulness (can there be any other kind?) required radical choices both for the sake of their souls and to help non-Christians see that there's nothing inevitable or inescapable about the state we're in.

It's true that these choices are usually easier said than done. But, in this case, the alternative to different isn't "normal" — it's mindless conformity.