Paula

Charis,

When you use a term that is identical with a mystical practice, you have to expect people to assume you mean the same thing. Not qualifying your belief, and not asking which kind of prayer the people who oppose it are talking about, isn’t helping. It would be as if I told everyone I was a Scientologist but didn’t believe anything like the teachings of Scientology; how should I expect people to react? If you don’t do the Contemplative Prayer of the mystics, it would be unwise to keep using that term.

Why not just call it prayer? How is it different from Biblical prayer? I can’t imagine a kind of prayer that doesn’t involve focus on the God I’m praying to, or thinking about his words, so why give it a special name? What you described is no different than prayer has ever been in the Bible, so why give it a new name, along with Spiritual Formation– another widely-used term for mystical pagan prayer? Sure, we all know about people just mouthing the words and not meaning them, but that isn’t prayer at all, it’s just going through the motions. So again I ask, why give ordinary Christian prayer a new name, unless something has changed?

The monks the proponents of Contemplative Prayer refer to did the opposite of thinking about God. They were doing the mind-emptying kind; that’s a documented fact. Their practices were identical to those of the Hindu gurus. So here again, you associate yourself with terms and people who do or did practice eastern mysticism. Why?

As “good Bereans”, we **must** read everything with a critical eye. We must “test the spirits” and look for error. To neglect this is dangerous and unwise. We cannot know the truth unless we test everything against the scriptures. Only when a writing passes the test can we look for what may benefit us or build us up. Test first, swallow second. I think that’s what Cheryl was referring to.

The church does not have “lost practices” or techniques; it has lost faith and doctrine. Jesus and the apostles never listed “practices” but beliefs. The “practices” of love, righteousness, joy etc., are the good “works” that flow from real faith. But what CP means by “practices” include “prayer walking” (labyrinth), repeating a word or scripture passage till a “new meaning” emerges, “the silence”, etc. Those are known occult techniques for entering an altered state.

What “practices” do you think have been lost? The “fruit of the Spirit” are still listed in the Bible, as are many other teachings about how Christians should behave. We are also told to pray like Jesus did, or like Paul, who called God “daddy”. Those have not been lost, so what are we missing?

It is our duty as Christians to discern error and expose it. We must stand for truth, and that can’t happen without standing against error. We must accept the “wheat” and discard the “chaff”, that deadly “mixture of truth and deception”, whether it is us or another who has it. We don’t condemn the people, Charis, but the teachings. We cannot ignore falsehood just because we aren’t perfect. The Christian life is a life of self-examination along with everything else, and we need to listen when other believers point out a dangerous or false belief in us.

Surely Paul never claimed to be perfect, but he nonetheless spent a great amount of time and many words to point out false teachings and name knowing false teachers. He warned, he taught, he scolded, he comforted. He never tolerated even the smallest “mixture”, the tiniest falsehood, and never used his own imperfection as an excuse to keep quiet.