The first contrast is how the historical soil of many formation practices and disciplines is Catholic or Orthodox, and these practices are now being transplanted into Protestant soil. This is an obvious point, and much of the list that follows this initial contrast is really just getting specific about the differences between Catholicism/Orthodoxy and Protestantism. But this initial contrast is really more about culture than theology.
So, let's start at the beginning.
As is well known, most low-church Protestant traditions, severed as they are from a monastic history and tradition, do not have robust or thick spiritual formation practices. Bible study, petitionary prayer, and worship about exhaust Protestant practices. Given that impoverishment, books like Richard Foster's seminal The Celebration of Discipline, published in 1978, attempted an intervention in evangelical spaces. Foster, and those who followed him, mined the riches of the Catholic/Orthodox spiritual formation tradition and shared those with low-church Protestants.
Practices like contemplative prayer, silence, fasting, Sabbath, spiritual direction, the liturgical calendar, and Lectio Divina were embraced. The trend continues with people like John Mark Comer introducing "a rule of life," of monastic origin, to Protestants. I'll turn to the monastic issue later in this series. For today's post, we're going to keep our focus simply on culture: how Catholic practices are being transplanted into Protestant spaces.
What are issues here that can create "transplant shock"?
Well, the "protest" part of "Protestantism," for one thing.
Culturally and theologically, Protestantism defines itself as being, if not "anti-Catholic," then at least "not-Catholic." This creates a deeply ingrained bias in Protestant spaces against anything that appears Catholic. Growing up, for example, my father once used candles during one of our worship services. This triggered an allergic reaction among some in the church. There wasn't any real doctrinal or biblical issue at stake. The problem was wholly cultural. Candles were "Catholic." And we were not Catholic. Therefore, no candles allowed.
This was a silly conflict, but it illustrates the point: spiritual practices native to one ecosystem can struggle when transplanted into different soil. Saying aloud words like "examen" or "Lectio Divina" can cause similar allergic reactions. As can trying to introduce liturgical seasons, like Advent or Lent, into low-church Protestant spaces. It's all too Catholic. And these allergic reactions have to be managed when you try to introduce many spiritual formation practices in Protestant churches.
A different issue here is exoticism. Things that are culturally exotic appear to us to have magical potency and mystical depth. You see this a lot in how wellness culture poaches practices from the East or from indigenous cultures. Simply by being exotic, the practice is assumed to be better. It's the reason so many run away from proven "Western" medicine to embrace exotic remedies that are unproven and even harmful.
A similar romanticism can happen when Protestants meet Catholic and Orthodox practices. A church starts celebrating Advent, and it's all so new, cool, and exotic. And, to be clear, celebrating the liturgical calendar is, I believe, a needed and necessary intervention, a way of reclaiming time from the secular forces that stole time-keeping from the church. But there is a real temptation that we're just doing things simply because we're looking for something exotic and novel. Our adoption of a practice can be thin, ornamental, and consumeristic, a form of liturgical cosplay.
Let me give an example from my own church. We're low-church Protestants who have started to celebrate the liturgical year, but not wholly or consistently. Two examples. At our church we do a great job of celebrating Advent because Advent is celebrated mainly on the Sundays when we gather for worship. But we do a horrible job celebrating Christmas, because Christmas doesn't generally fall on a Sunday. So it's a strange situation. We celebrate Advent but not Christmas, and Christmas is the whole point of the season!
A similar thing happens during Lent. We've started celebrating Ash Wednesday because our churches have historically gathered mid-week for Wednesday night Bible study. So we celebrate Ash Wednesday wholly because of a calendrical coincidence. Trust me, if Lent started on, say, Thursday, we'd not be celebrating it, since we don't gather on Thursdays.
The point here is that we can be taken by the exoticism of a new practice, as it freshens things up, but the transplant can be piecemeal, superficial, and perhaps even deeply problematic. For example, always celebrating the groaning and darkness of Advent while never celebrating Christmas together might malform us as a church. Liturgically, year after year, we're eating an unbalanced diet, all Advent and no Christmas.
In short, exoticism can tempt us to adopt practices simply because they are fresh and new, and being exotic full of magical potency. But as we see in wellness culture, exoticism itself is no reason to adopt a practice. And even if the practice is healthy and good, we have to attend to its historical origins or the transplant will be ineffective, inept, and possibly even dysfunctional.
