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Christianity Today, 11/1/05: NewJourneys on Well-worn Paths [Excerpts]—Rick Crocker wanted to go home. Two weeks into his sabbatical at a monastery in Pecos, New Mexico, Crocker felt uncomfortable. This was a strange place for a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor from Erie, Pennsylvania, to find himself.

“One of the instructors, Bruce Demarest, is a professor at Denver Seminary who had studied spiritual direction there at Pecos,” Crocker said. “To spend the time with someone who is thoroughly evangelical in the environment of Benedictine spirituality—ora et labora, prayer and work—with monks and nuns with a charismatic bent was thoroughly refreshing.” Six weeks among them changed the way Crocker views spiritual formation.

In the nearly 30 years since Richard Foster wrote the classic Celebration of Discipline, the study of the spiritual practices of the pre-Reformation church has enjoyed a growing audience. To many Protestants at the time, it seemed the Quaker theologian practically invented the disciplines, until his exhortations to solitude, fasting, contemplation, and the like fueled the study of the Desert Fathers, ascetics, and monastics whose teachings were mostly the domain of Catholic spirituality.

“A lot of Protestants have discovered we kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater in the Reformation, in terms of practices,” said Presbyterian minister Marjorie Thompson, director for the Pathways Center for Spiritual Leadership. “Now we’re coming back and rediscovering them, and turning to our Catholic sisters and brothers because they’re the ones with the expertise.” So Protestants in increasing numbers are bringing the classic disciplines into their spiritual practice. Bible-only Baptists are finding Lent, exuberant Pentecostals are employing silence, staid Episcopalians are walking labyrinths, free churches are following lectio divina, and iconoclastic evangelicals everywhere are bringing art back into the sanctuary. Why, after five centuries of stripped-down, theologically precise worship and three decades of rhythm-driven contemporary relevance, are silence and stained glass cool again?

[TBC: Why? Because experientialism is in, sound doctrine is out, and apostasy is nearly in full bloom.]