Marylyn Mandeville sits crossed-legged on a mat in front of 11 of her students. Her hands are folded as if in prayer, framed by the slogan on her T-shirt: “Know Yoga, Know Peace.” A gold cross rests on the Om symbol emblazoned on her shirt.
“Namaste,” she says to the class, bowing deeply while offering the Sanskrit salutation “I bow to the God within you.”
No one in the Parkwood Baptist Church, Annandale, Va., not even the pastor, reacts to Mandeville’s T-shirt, gesture or the New Age flute music playing in the background. They’re lying flat on their backs in Savasana, the corpse pose, having endured two hours of stretching.
“Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is light,” she continues. “Jesus said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Yoga will free your body, let God free your life.”
Mandeville, who has taught yoga at Parkwood Baptist for more than a year and has some 75 participants per class, is part of a growing movement to reformulate yoga, a 5,000-year-old practice originating in India, in a Christian context.
But while fans marvel at the growing success of the movement, others are seeking to draw more distinct boundaries between the Christian faith and New Age practices.
Daniel Akin, dean of the school of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said Christians should avoid yoga’s spiritual downsides.
“Yoga is rooted in Eastern mysticism, and Eastern mysticism is incompatible with Christianity,” he said. “There are some people who are looking for relaxation in the form of meditation, but I don’t see the need to go to yoga to do that,” Akin said, saying the Bible holds ample opportunities for meditation.
Others say it’s impossible to extract the physical benefits of yoga from its spiritual roots.
Laurette Willis of Tulsa, Okla., a yoga veteran of 22 years and a born-again Christian, said the feeling of euphoria she got from yoga left her vulnerable to “psychic influences” she believed to be demonic. “Yoga led me down a false rosy path,” Willis said. “It opened the door to 20 years of involvement in the New Age movement.”
After becoming a Christian in 1987, she developed “PraiseMoves, Fitness for His Witness,” a series of 20 stretches set to Scripture, in 2001. Willis has been so overwhelmed by requests to teach that she is in the process of certifying 20 new PraiseMoves teachers around the country and has produced a video set for release this August.
Willis says many yoga postures are based on ancient Hindu worship of the sun and moon as deities, and rejects the notion of redeeming them with a Christian spin. “Christian yoga is an oxymoron,” she said. “It’s like the fellow who says, ‘I’m a Christian Buddhist.’”
In the introduction to her book, which details the PraiseMoves postures and the corresponding scriptural passages, Willis argues that yoga’s emphasis on cultivating divine energy within oneself conflicts with Christianity’s goal of finding salvation through Christ.
While some argue that taking up a yoga practice might lead Christians down the dangerous path of New Age mysticism, Mandeville says she considers it part of her ministry to teach other Christians how to look after their bodies. “There’s an important Scripture that says we are God’s temple and we’re supposed to take care of that temple, but we don’t do that,” she said.
Jim Hamacher, the church’s pastor, who was back on the yoga mat after recovering from back surgery, said he was apprehensive at first about introducing yoga classes. “You call yourself a Christian church, a Southern Baptist church no less, and then you start offering yoga, well, there are some people who are going to wonder what you’ve turned into,” he said.
But Hamacher said bringing relaxation and meditation techniques into the church might help to revive a strain of spirituality that had been filtered out of Christianity over the years. He also saw health benefits to offering yoga classes.
“I’ve always believed that the salvation that Jesus brings is to make a person whole, and this is part of that,” Hamacher said. “When you talk about ministering to the whole person, you’re ministering to body, mind and spirit.”
Yoga is increasing in popularity, with an estimated 15 million practitioners in the United States according to a recent study by Yoga Journal. At least half of those people come to yoga from a Christian background, says Thomas Ryan, Catholic priest and author of “Prayer of Heart and Body: Meditation, Yoga as a Christian Spiritual Practice.”
“There are an enormous number of people engaging in Eastern practices like yoga and meditation who need assistance making the points of connection with their Christian faith,” Ryan said. “There is a sense among some that this comes from Hinduism, but when one looks at yoga, it really belongs to world spirituality,” he added.
Others in Christian Yoga say they have been overwhelmed by the growth as it spreads. Susan Bordenkircher of Mobile has gotten requests for her yoga video “Outstretched in Worship” from Christians in Indonesia and Singapore and missionaries in Chad. She said that although some yoga concepts may conflict with Christianity, much can be gained from it.
“There is some of the history of yoga that involves worshiping different gods that is contradictory to Christian concepts,” she said. But rejecting the yoga practice altogether would be a mistake, Bordenkircher warned.
“It’s kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water, because the postures themselves are so good,” she said. In her video and classes, Bordenkircher injects yoga postures with a Christian flavor by teaching “moving mantras,” during which students silently recite scriptural passages as they stretch.
A United Methodist, Bordenkircher said yoga practice has taught her to pray Scripture in a visceral way. (RNS)
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