As many of you will know, I have been on a journey over the last couple of years of immersing myself more in the spiritual disciplines, contemplative prayer and silence. It’s born out of a deep seated need to be closer to God and to truly have him fuel and guide my life. I want to be experiencing God in deeply personal ways. You also know that I am thoroughly evangelical, clearly being placed within the tradition that makes its way back to John Wesley, and have a great love for scripture.

Photo: Francis Ritchie. Candles in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

With that in mind I was dismayed to read a post by Tim Challies chastising mystical (a term that seems to cause a knee-jerk reaction for some but is actually quite simple) expressions and pursuits of the Christian faith and putting them at odds with evangelical Christianity. At the heart of the matter is a question of how we are experiencing God. I think the perspective he put forward was off base in so many areas. It was tempting to write a post in response but then in the comments I noticed Rachel Held Evans responding and now she has written a on it. She has outdone anything I could say. Her is worth reading.

With that in mind, I give the floor to Rachel:

While it is true that the Reformers occasionally used the word “evangelical” in their writings, most historians locate the roots of evangelicalism solidly within Wesley’s Methodism in England and in the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Evangelicalism was, at its heart, a movement, influenced not only by a strong emphasis on the authority of Scripture but also by a lively, impassioned, and deeply personal spirituality—an eclectic, ecumenical mix of elements from Pietism, Presbyterianism, Puritanism, and Pentecostalism. Evangelicalism’s mothers and fathers were mystically-inclined Christians like John Wesley, Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, William J. Seymour, and A.W. Tozer—people whose “hearts were strangely warmed” by profound experiences with God, by “a direct inner realization of the Divine.”

And indeed, mysticism—which I would define as practices intended to help connect a person to God through experience, intuition, contemplation, the devotional reading of Scripture, ritual, and prayer—has been a part of the Church from the very beginning.

From the events of Pentecost, to the practices of communion and baptism throughout Christian history, to the writings and teachings of the desert fathers and mothers, to the Reformation, to the divine offices being prayed continually throughout the world today, to the Azusa Street revival, to the spread of Christianity in the global South and East, the story of Christianity is the story of regular people connecting in powerful ways to the presence of God.

Evangelicalism and the mystical (experiencing God) are intimately connected. One of the foundational aspects of evangelicalism is the belief in a personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. Any attempt to argue otherwise is to reduce evangelicalism and strip it of a beauty that sits at its very heart.