Apprising Ministries has warned in posts e.g. Calvinist Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism? and Disciplines To Deception In Southern Baptist Convention that for years now Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) as taught by Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster along with his spiritual twin and Southern Baptist minister Dallas Willard has been rapidly spreading throughout mainstream evangelicalism under the guise of spurious Spiritual Formation.

What follows is yet another sad case in point. Yesterday in More Problems with Prayer in the LCMS – Commission on Ministerial Growth and Support Endorses “Centering Prayer,” by Pr. Rossow which ran at Steadfast Lutherans LCMS Pastor Tim Rossow informed us:

A few months ago we alerted our readers to the problematic theology behind the LCMS’s special prayer events. We posted these concerns on July 27 and July 28. Now we have the Commission on Ministerial Growth endorsing an ancient and heretical practice of mystical centering prayer. Here is what was sent out from the International Center of the LCMS this morning.

Encouragement for Busy Church Leaders, Sleep During Meditation“By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.” Psalm 42:8 (ESV)

There are times during meditation and extended prayer such as Centering Prayer that we can lose awareness.  When we regain awareness, it is as if we are waking up from a period of sleep.  We have no recollection of what happened during the period of unconsciousness.  This experience initially was of concern to St. Teresa of Avila, 17th century Christian mystic.  She wondered what might have happened while she was not able to consciously monitor her experience.  Was the blank time a result of being too undisciplined?  Was it sleep?  Was it of God, or was it a time when her mind was taken over by the Devil? 

Teresa discussed her concerns with her spiritual mentor, none other than St. John of the Cross.  Their standard became, “You shall know them by their fruits”.  Her experience, and that of the nuns in her care, was that the result of these times seemed to be spiritually and mentally beneficial.  Teresa came to understand these periods as one stage of prayer, which she described in her classic roadmap of prayerful experience, The Interior Castle…

If this all seems odd to you it should. If you do an internet search on “centering prayer” you will find plenty of helpful critiques of this less than orthodox practice.

This is another example of how there is poor doctrinal supervision in the LCMS. This endorsement of this Buddhist-like mystical prayer is coming right out of the International Center. President Kieschnick has created an environment in the LCMS which has allowed this sort of thing to go on even in the highest levels of synod. (Online source)

In addition to AM, among those doing Internet research in this area is the online apologetics and discernment ministry Lighthouse Trails Research (LTR). Years before I showed up LTR has long been exposing the rise in popularity within Protestant evangelicalism of practicing the neo-pietistic “spiritual disciplines” i.e. asceticism-lite of CSM. As I’ve said before, you need to know this a rapidly spreading—and very dangerous—fad; and if left unchecked, it’s soon going to be the cause of much division within the church visible.

CSM flowered within the antibiblical monastic traditions of apostate Roman Catholicism (anyone remember the Reformation?) and this type of SF, sweeping throughout evangelicalism, is rooted within the spurious spirituality of the Counter Reformation e.g. such as that advanced by figures like Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the militantly pro-Roman Catholic Church spiritual Gestapo Unit known as the Jesuits. But it’s these kinds of very wrong approaches to proper Christian spirituality that would cause Jesus to raise up His Reformers in the first place. 

If you don’t know, the primary vehicle of CSM is a type of meditation in an altered state of consciousness called Contemplative/Centering Prayer (CCP), the terms are interchangable; and it’s found its way into the heart of the visible church through its embrace of the Trojan Horse of the egregiously ecumenical Emerging Church aka Emergent Church that morphed into Emergence Christianity (EC)—and which is now a cult of a postliberalism firmly within mainstream evangelicalism. CSM was a core doctrine of this EC from its very inception in hell.

As we close this out for now, I’ll share a bit of Keeping You Apprised Of: Contemplative/Centering Prayer concerning its actual origin:

You may recall that in a Christianity Today article called The Emergent Mystique that Guru McLaren has cited Foster along with his spiritual twin Dallas Willard—“with their emphasis on spiritual disciplines”—as “key mentors”of the Emerging Church rebellion against Sola Scriputra. And then we have this further corroboration concerning John Cassian and the desert hermits by Benedictine monk, Dom Laurence Freeman, Director of The World Community for Christian Meditation whose “spiritual teacher was John Main”:

One day, about 1700 years ago, two young Christian monks living in the Egyptian desert visited an abba, an elder. They asked him what prayer really means. Abba Isaac then gave them one of the clearest and most powerful explanations of prayer in the whole Christian tradition. He said there are many forms of prayer but that all of them point to the same source and goal: the “Prayer of Fire”. He meant the living prayer of Jesus present in the human heart through the Holy Spirit.The ‘prayer of fire’, Abba Isaac explained, consumes self-consciousness. It is the goal of all spiritual practice: union with ultimate reality, loving union with God, divinization. The question is – how can we find this mystery of love in our own centre; how do we pray at depth; how do we enter the transformative experience of union? It is the question many people today are asking and the question is the spiritual hunger of our age.

Meditation is “pure prayer”. Pure of thought, images and words. We leave all these behind to enter purity of heart. Pure of egocentricity because we are not asking for anything. We take the searchlight of consciousness off ourselves. We do this simple – but not easy – work by taking a single word, a prayer word. We repeat the word continuously. In Latin Cassian called it a “formula”, Main a “mantra”. (Online source) 

So now you know. This is where the antibiblical practice of Contemplative/Centering Prayer originated; it was not practiced or taught by Jesus Christ nor by His Apostles, and it truly has no place at all in the life of the Christian. And that Lutherans would want to encourage mystic practices that were part of the Counter Reformation, and which are the antithesis of Luther’s correct emphasis on Sola Scriptura, is further evidence that evangelicalism is likely as apostate now as Rome was when Luther stood hammer in hand.

See also:

CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY OF RICHARD FOSTER ROOTED IN THE EASTERN DESERT AND THOMAS MERTON

MEDITATING ON CONTEMPLATIVE/CENTERING PRAYER

JOHN MAIN: INDIAN SWAMI A HOLY MAN OF GOD

DANGERS OF CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY/MYSTICISM: LECTIO DIVINA

PETER SCAZZERO PROMOTED BY RICK WARREN

DELUSIONS OF DALLAS WILLARD

DONALD WHITNEY AND EVANGELICAL CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY/MYSTICISM