Those who guide this people mislead them, and those who are guided are led astray. (Isaiah 9:16)

The Broad Contemplative Road Leads Right Back Home To Rome

This video clip below is essentially a long commercial for the book Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing The Presence of Jesus by Mark Yaconelli, co-founder of the Youth Ministry & Spirituality Project, who is–surprise–published by Zondervan.

You’ll also note that this book has a foreword by potty-mouthed Anne Lamott and we’re also told it will help “you create meaningful silence, covenant communities, and contemplative activities that allow your students recognize the presence of Jesus in their everyday lives. Lovely, teach our young people how to practice “meaningful” meditation and perform other acts of religious bondage in order to try and create an experience with God.

I will warn you that this video itself is rather dull as it’s just a voiceover by a few people set against images and pictures of icons, candles, pagan imagery, labyrinths and even someone praying as a Muslim on a prayer rug. Such is your $evangelical$ future of contemplative mysticism. The first words are Yaconelli’s:

And so this contemplative approach was really how do I help kids pay attention to the moment, pay attention to the God that they already know in some ways; and how do I help them notice that, name that and begin to nurture that, ah, relationship.

This is where the Emergent Church, the cult of new post-liberal theology, is taking the mesmerized $evangelical$ community. It is taking the American Christian Church right back into the superstitions and religious bondage of the apostate Church of Rome through so-called “spiritual disciplines” such as “Christian” meditation. You’ll even hear one man say, “Their eyes are open enough to see what’s happening there to know there’s life there and are now starting to say, ‘Maybe this is a model for the rest of the Church.’”

At 2:34 a female youth worker illustrates this highly subjective and existential form of psuedo-Christanity for us when she says:

It’s almost a sense of relief when, um, it’s hard to let go of wanting to impart your wisdom on the kids; um, but them it’s a great, ah, relief to–for instance we’re doing a prayer exercise–to watch kids in silence [read: meditation] and pray over them going: They’re having their own encounter with God and God is doing God’s work in them, and I’m not having to do it.

Can’t you see what was just said? “I don’t have to teach because people want to have their own encounter with God and ‘experience’ Him their own way.” O sure, it plays great to a narcissistic culture but it also negates one of the gifts Christ gave to His Church–teachers. Since we’re told to grow in the knowledge of Christ (see–Colossian 3:10)–not some existential subjective experience of Him–take a wild guess just which slimy serpent would be behind this idiotic idea.