These communities of men and women have voluntarily removed themselves from the status quo in order to seek justice and mercy with the poorest of the world's poor.
These outwardly oriented communities have been established in some of the highest poverty neighborhoods of the world, in places like Kolkata, India; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Caracas, Venezuela; and Los Angeles, California.
While these groups often parallel western communities who identify with the New Monasticism, the new monastic communities may be characterized by a centripetal force, renewing the church and the neighborhoods in which they exist by drawing people in, while the new friars by a centrifugal one, whose energy moves outward to the global margins, seeking to raise up and mobilize members to move into the cities of the majority world.
Neomonastic communities in the west are like domestic cousins to the new friars, who inhabit the slums primarily in the developing world.
But we must give God the freedom to do a new thing.” Others whose writings and work have influenced the movement include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Michael Duncan, Athol Gill, and Ralph Winter.