Sacred Spaces: Drawing Near to God

[Originally published September 29, 2026]

Monastic movements are centuries old. About the year 250, devout Christian men and women began to withdraw from their families to live alone or with others in community, just so they could pray and concentrate on knowing God better. For almost eighteen hundred years, monks and nuns have spent their days living, praying, and working full time in monasteries, earnestly mindful of God and learning His ways. When we think of solitude with God, we sometime think first of monasteries and retreats as special sacred spaces for this kind of continuous contemplation. 

Throughout Christian history, however, laypeople who also love God deeply have started several movements to practice the same kind of devotion. These non-ordained Christians are not called to vocational or full-time ministry, although they witness of Christ's love each day within their circles of influence. They are called to uphold responsibilities in the world, to care for families, and serve God in the marketplaces. But they cannot retreat for lifetimes or years or even months.

Three distinct movements successfully brought the practice of a structured, daily "quiet retreat" to the public. The first is called the Ignatian Movement, named after its founder, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). When Ignatius founded the Jesuit monastic order in the 16th century, he wrote Spiritual Exercises, a rigorous thirty-day silent retreat to help train its new brothers. Recognizing that ordinary working people could not abandon their families or jobs for a month, but wanting to help them too, Ignatius explicitly created a loophole in his manual, called the "19th Annotation."

The 19th Annotation adapted the intensive monastery retreat into a "retreat in daily life." Laypeople committed to setting aside sixty minutes of quiet, structured prayer every day at home (while maintaining their regular jobs) and meeting weekly with a spiritual director. It remains one of the most widely practiced daily retreat frameworks in the world today. Over the years, Ignatius wrote more than 1,000 letters about spiritual growth. His collected insights, prayers, and suggestions in Spiritual Exercises have become one of the most influential volumes on the spiritual life ever written. Many Christians have been touched by Ignatius's life-pattern, which he called “contemplatives in action.” His famous prayer speaks of his heart's utmost desire: "Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, All I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, That is enough for me."

The second movement took place during the early 17th century under the leadership of Francis de Sales (1567-1622), who lived near Geneva where Calvin was living and preaching. Called the "Devout Life" movement, this pattern of private prayer and sacred space swept Europe after Francis was ordained and elected a leading priest in Geneva, and then Bishop. He was an effective administrator and powerful preacher, who spent his days hearing confessions, teaching children, and modeling how to be like Christ in the world. His gentle character was a great asset in winning souls. He practiced his own axiom, “A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel full of vinegar.” He wrote Introduction to the Devout Life, many pamphlets, and carried on a vast correspondence. His writings, filled with his characteristic gentle spirit, are addressed to lay people. He wanted them to understand that they too were called to be saints.
 
Francis argued that holiness belongs to the shopkeeper, the soldier, and the busy housewife just as much as to the monastic hermit. This loving shepherd-pastor pioneered a structured method of daily morning meditations requiring about thirty minutes of complete interior quiet. When church members began practicing this, it transformed their lives and sparked a massive counter-cultural movement across Europe. Ordinary families began to build "quiet corners" in their homes specifically for the purpose of meeting with God. Despite the controversy of the Reformation era, the historical legacy of de Sales testifies to a time when Europe collectively sought refuge from bloody religious wars by turning inward, using his pattern of spirituality to build an unshakeable, quiet sanctuary within the human heart.

The last movement, which is called either the "Morning Watch" or "Quiet Time," began in the late 19th century and continues today. In the late 1800s, a massive student and lay revival movement took hold across America and Great Britain, heavily influenced by the Princeton Revival and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. In the late 1870s and 1880s, students at Princeton University, led by Robert Wilder, formed a dedicated group called the Princeton Foreign Missionary Society. Wilder and his friends toured college campuses across the United States to urge students to dedicate their lives to foreign missions, forming a core foundation of what would later become the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) in 1886 under evangelist Dwight L. Moody and leader John R. Mott. 

These devoted Bible students then popularized the "Morning Watch," which later evolved into the modern Evangelical concept of the "Quiet Time." It encouraged ordinary Christians to start their day with a personal, private "mini-retreat," typically thirty minutes of silence, unscripted prayer, and Bible reflection, before the rush of the world began. By the mid-20th century, the original Student Volunteer Movement began to fade, but its spiritual DNA directly birthed modern evangelical student movements. A real boost came in 1945, when InterVarsity Christian Fellowship published a highly influential booklet titled Quiet Time. This popularized the routine among university students, and it was quickly absorbed by other para-church lay organizations like The Navigators and Campus Crusade for Christ (now called "Cru"). Evangelist Billy Graham ultimately institutionalized it in mainstream evangelical churches during his crusades in the 1950s. Laypersons by the hundreds of thousands began to incorporate this pattern of "private retreat with God" into their daily lives.

To this day, in their own sacred spaces, Christians read their Bibles. Some read it through each year, using a guide for the passage to be read each day. They meditate and reflect quietly, pondering how the text applies to their personal lives. Finally, they respond to God through conversational prayer (often using frameworks like ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) and log reflections in a notebook or journal. This month, even as we navigate the cultural chaos that threatens our solitude and privacy, we spotlight the historic and helpful Christian movements that have offered encouragement to create "sacred space" in the heart. It is our prayer that we will recommit to this valuable discipline of seeking God in the silence, and perhaps build tiny private retreats in our homes where we can meet with Him daily.

-Karen O'Dell Bullock

1. Ignatian Model - Spiritual Exercises, 19th Annotation

2. De Sales - Devout Life

3. Intervarsity and Billy Graham - Quiet Time