Breakpoint Worldview Magazine: Quiet Flirtation: Monasticism and Evangelicals
About eight years ago, I found myself in a convent in Bogotá, Colombia. I had not planned to get me to a nunnery. But it just so happened that I had signed up for a women’s retreat with the Baptist church where I was serving with youth that summer, and since the local convent had a bit of extra space, they hosted us for the weekend. My room—quiet, clean, white—lacked only one thing: distractions. It was perfect. It felt like I had entered rehab for the chronically over-stimulated. That weekend, I got a taste of something that hordes of evangelical Christians are flirting with today: monasticism.
Be it Baptists, Presbyterians, or Pentecostals, evangelicals of all stripes can be found flitting around the ancient pathways of the Franciscan, Dominican, and Benedictine orders. What’s the attraction? I decided to investigate. It seems the frenzied and the frenetic are finding stillness and order; the alienated are discovering the richness of belonging; and the non-committal are jumping headlong into the freedom of vows. ...
