Yet, many brought up in conservative/evangelical and most mainline churches have no familiarity with spiritual practices. Recently my own congregation hosted a day of workshops on spiritual practices. My wife and I are both under 35 and were the youngest participants in sessions focused on centering prayer and the labyrinth. Each workshop was a wonderful example of the Christian spiritual practices young adults are supposedly drawn toward. Yet as a pastor of young adults, I was dismayed at their absence. Perhaps the problem is that spiritual practices haven’t been translated to a broader audience, i.e., to overly busy people who don’t have all day to dedicate to a spiritual practice workshop. Brian McLaren’s new book is well positioned to inspire the crowd that traditional practices unintentionally leave behind.
It doesn’t reference spiritual practices like centering prayer (or its cousin lectio divina), walking the labyrinth, or other practices, like the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. What McLaren does best is translate spiritual practices to audiences that either grew up non-religious or as evangelical/conservative. Most spiritual practices were either ignored or easily stereotyped as being too Catholic among my evangelical friends growing up in the South. McLaren dips into the long tradition of Christian spiritual practices and brings forth its more stripped-down essential elements. Surprisingly, this is not a book on centering prayer/labyrinth walking/etc. for the emerging crowd, but rather works to contextualize the rich resources of Christian practices into 12 words for the overly busy yet God-interested crowds — which defines mainline Christians.
McLaren groups 12 words into four groups or stages — simplicity, complexity, perplexity and harmony — and matches each group to a season. For simplicity (spring) there are the words: here, thanks, O; complexity (summer): sorry, help, please; perplexity (fall): when, no, why; harmony (winter): behold, yes, […]. Each word is grounded in a simple practice. For example for the word O, McLaren asks readers to marvel at God’s creation.
Truthfully I’m not completely sold on this seasonal cycle of spiritual movement. A person’s encounter with God may begin in any season, and according to James Fowler many people can stay in one stage of faith development all their lives (particularly stage 3, synthetic-conventional faith). However, for many readers the season of fall will prove to be pastoral and healing for those who had been previously afraid to doubt or question God on the problem of evil.
McLaren is good at connecting the material to narrative experiences, yet his writing is overly repetitive at times. One wishes he could get to the point!
The appendix is an excellent resource for those wishing to practice with a group and/or want to jump right in. “Naked Spirituality” could be the right sort of resource for the overly busy Christian, if they take the time to read it critically and slowly.
RYAN S. T. BYERS is coordinator of young adult ministry at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis.
