(Note: These blog posts are transcripts of the podcast for mochi monastery. For more information and to subscribe, you can visit the Podcast section of our website, or click here.)
Hello and welcome to the mochi monastery podcast, a virtual chapel hosted by mochi monastery.
I’m Brother Kris, the chaplain for mochi monastery.
For this first episode of the mochi monastery podcast, we will introduce mochi monastery.
So what is mochi monastery?
mochi monastery is a Christian ministry with a focus on providing spiritual care to unmarried men.
At mochi monastery, we believe there is a male loneliness epidemic in the world today, with many men unable to form families and as a result are drifting through life, lacking direction and purpose. This is especially true in churches, which are often focused on meeting the spiritual needs of families, leaving unmarried men to feel like second-class citizens with their needs unmet.
So at mochi monastery, we want to provide a much needed ministry for the growing population of unmarried men in the world.
The mission of mochi monastery is three-fold:
- To provide community and comfort for unmarried men
- To guide unmarried men in spiritual and practical formation
- To help unmarried men discover their mission and purpose, and to move forward in life
So whether you are a younger or older unmarried man, and whether your season of being unmarried as a man is temporary or lifelong, you are welcome here at the mochi monastery.
History
mochi monastery began as a communal living experiment of several unmarried men at a house in Long Beach, CA about 5 years ago.
Over the years, different unmarried men lived at the house, and several other unmarried male friends would stop by on a regular basis, joining our community for regular fellowship and spiritual edification. We would host stuff like Bible studies and theology classes, but we also had a lot of spontaneous spiritual conversations and prayer and ministry to one another as we lived life and lived out the way of Jesus together.
Of course, we also had a lot of fun, hosting pizza parties and movie nights, playing dungeons and dragons, a McDonalds-themed Thanksgiving potluck with hundreds of Chicken McNuggets. And Brother Phil led a muay thai class for a while, that was pretty cool. We even did some fun wacky projects like making a video game about the Bible, and a podcast about ranking mochi ice cream flavors.
Oh yeah, we also ate a lot of mochi, which is how we came up with the name for mochi monastery. We reverse-engineered an acronym for it:
mochi stands for “Ministry of Christ-centered Healing and Integration”
As you can see, we believe Christian fellowship and following the way of Jesus should be a lot of fun.
All of this was hosted at a physical location, but over the years several brothers moved to different states (Utah, Arizona) and other brothers entered the missions field (Japan, North Africa). Recently, everyone moved out of the house, and mochi monastery is currently in a season of physical diaspora. So we wanted to build this digital community to maintain fellowship and keep the mission going, but we also recognized it as a great opportunity to build out the mission and minister to the larger diaspora of unmarried men across the world.
So if you’re an unmarried man struggling to follow the way of Jesus in this postmodern, post-family culture, you are welcome here.
What to expect
The current idea is for this podcast to serve as a virtual chapel service, where the brothers of mochi monastery, as well as any visitors can listen to devotional messages for spiritual comfort and edification. Down the road, we might expand the podcast to also feature conversations about various topics that are relevant to unmarried men. So subscribe and stay tuned to find out!
Conclusion
All right, well that’s going to wrap up this introduction to mochi monastery.
In addition to this podcast, you can find our website at mochimonastery.org, where we will link to everything else we are working on.
At the moment we’ve got a blog up there, eventually we will also have a discord you can join, led by Brother Phil / Friar Phil, who’s also our Director of Spiritual Formation.
We will also build out a social media presence, you can follow our IG at @mochimonastery, it’s barebones at the moment but Brother Anthony / Abbot Anthony, the nominal head for mochi monastery, will take charge of our social media in the near future and get that going.
If anyone else has ideas or ways they want to participate in building out this ministry, you can let us know, there’s a Contact section on our website to reach us, again that’s mochimonastery.org
You can also submit any topics you’d like to hear about for a chapel message, especially in regards to the unique challenges faced by unmarried men in our world today.
Other than that, you can support our ministry by subscribing to this podcast and leaving a 5-star review in whatever app you’re using to listen to this.
That’s it for now, next time we will kick off our mochi monastery chapel, but until next time this has been Chaplain Kris, see you next time.