ABP News Jeff Brumley Friday, March 21, 2014 Participants attend a Taizé service in Milan, Italy. (Taizé photo)
Contemplative practices gaining with youth, young adults
Youth are pulled in infinite directions simultaneously and have vast quantities of information at their disposal. Silence can be a rare and exotic experience.
By Jeff Brumley
Some contemplative spiritual practices may be as old as Christianity itself, but they are increasingly attracting younger generations hungry for alternatives to contemporary, flashy worship.
Case in point: portions of an international Taizé pilgrimage hosted by First Baptist Church of Austin, Texas, this weekend are open only to 18-35 year olds.
That’s because Millennials and even teens are known to be drawn to worship forms that emphasize quiet and mystery — precisely the opposite of what most American churches offer these days, said Joe Bumbulis, minister of students and missions at First Baptist Church and one of the event organizers.
“The age limit gives a certain amount of freedom to young adults who know they will be gathered with people in the same place in life that they are,” said Bumbulis, himself a passionate advocate of contemplative worship and prayer. “There is something affirming about that.”
Movement started by students
The age limits were not the church’s idea but that of the Taizé representatives, known as brothers, who are bringing their pilgrimage program to Austin and two other Texas cities in the coming weeks.
The ecumenical monastic order based in Taizé, France, has been largely a European youth movement since its founding in 1940. More than 100,000 young people make pilgrimages annually to the monastery, where they participate in the movement’s trademark services of silence, meditation and sung and chanted prayer.
Two years ago some of the brothers from the monastery began taking pilgrimages around the world in order to encourage those who cannot travel to France, and also those who have been there, said Brother John of the Taizé order.
“Taizé was started by students and young people coming to visit us,” he said. “We feel a special responsibility to that age group because in Europe they often don’t find a place in churches that appeal to them.”
Thanks to technology and social media, youth are pulled in infinite directions simultaneously and have vast quantities of information at their disposal. Their lives, Yaconelli said, are marked by constant distractions.
“So when someone invites them to pay attention to the present moment ... and turn their full attention to their soul and the presence of God, that is a rare and exotic experience,” he said.
“For them it’s rare to be in silence and to not be pulled in four directions at once.”
‘They hunger for it’
As a result a movement is taking shape since the late 1990s of churches integrating contemplative styles into their programming, and much of it for youth.
“It’s a slow movement, it’s a quiet movement, but I do encounter youth workers in every denomination and every part of the country who are doing this with youth,” Yaconelli said.
One of those youth workers is Bumbulis, who said he uses a variety of contemplative forms — including Lectio Divina and centering prayers — with his youth group.
“They hunger for it,” he said. “The middle schoolers even resonate with it.”
RNS is reporting the following at: http://www.religionnews.com/politics/election/black-churches-defend-obamas-faith. It's another story of a cleric without much of an education venturing into areas in which he's not trained--not to mention theology. I saw the original MSNBC clip. Pretty poor answers by Franklin. The NAACP ate his lunch, but turned to their standard race-baiting line to good effect. Fact is, Obama supports partial-birth abortion--homocide in the first degree--and Franklin coulda' and shoulda' taken an higher and more educated approach. Unfortunately, he's ill-equipped. Further, NAACP's claim of "bearing false witness" is a bit much. Even further, NAACP's claim about "political wedges" created by religious views is laughable. Poor Franklin, again, ham-handed and hapless. The danger of ill-educated and uneducated ministers. Here's RNS's story.
WASHINGTON (RNS) Evangelist Franklin Graham apologized Tuesday (Feb. 28) to President Obama for questioning his Christian faith and said religion has "nothing to do" with Graham's decision not to support Obama's re-election.
Graham's apology came after a group of prominent black religious leaders criticized the evangelist for saying he did not know whether Obama is a Christian and suggesting that Islamic law considers him to be a Muslim.
Graham, president of the relief organization Samaritan's Purse and the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, said he now accepts Obama's declarations that he is a Christian.
"I regret any comments I have ever made which may have cast any doubt on the personal faith of our president, Mr. Obama," he said in a statement.
"I apologize to him and to any I have offended for not better articulating my reason for not supporting him in this election -- for his faith has nothing to do with my consideration of him as a candidate."
Graham said he objects to Obama's policy stances on abortion and same-sex marriage, which Graham considers to be in "direct conflict" with Scripture.
More than a dozen members of a religious subgroup of the NAACP had accused Graham of "bearing false witness" and fomenting racial discord.
"We can disagree about what it means to be a Christian engaged in politics, but Christians should not bear false witness," the NAACP statement said. "We are also concerned that Rev. Graham's comments can be used to encourage racism."
When asked in a recent MSNBC interview if Obama was a Christian, Graham responded, "I cannot answer that question for anybody." He went on to say that because Obama's father was a Muslim, "under Islamic law, the Muslim world sees Barack Obama as a Muslim."
By contrast, Graham said there is "no question" that GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is a "man of faith" because "his values are so clear on moral issues." Santorum has also faced criticism for saying the president has a "phony theology" that is unbiblical.
"By his statements, Rev. Graham seems to be aligning himself with those who use faith as a weapon of political division," the NAACP said. "These kinds of comments could have enormous negative effects for America and are especially harmful to the Christian witness."
Signatories of the open letter included presidents of the National Baptist Convention, USA; the National Baptist Convention of America; the Progressive National Baptist Convention; as well as bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
