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A holistic wellness retreat in a glass-sided building overlooking the East River recently kicked off on Saturday with hot tea, an opening speech and a meditation. Brunch was followed by an afternoon of workshops with themes such as ‘eat your way to calm down’, ‘somatic healing’ and ‘intuitive art making’.

Everything was about what you would expect, except that instead of ending the opening meditation with “Namaste,” the leader ended with, “In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.”

The Well Church NYC – more often referred to simply as “The Well” – describes itself as a “church where wellness and spirituality come together in community.” The congregation, which worships on Sunday mornings in a rented space at the Scandinavia House on Park Avenue, also hosts wellness retreats, rooftop dinners and pop-up meditations throughout the city throughout the year. Although rooted in the Presbyterian tradition, Well Church NYC hosts events geared toward those on a broader spiritual quest.

“A normal New Yorker is not a Christian,” said the Rev. Aaron Bjerke. “A normal New Yorker is probably driven by success or money, but ultimately tries to find purpose in life. I thought if I ever started a church, it would have to be a church for the average New Yorker.”

Bjerke, 41, founded The Well in 2018, but got an early taste for the idea as he watched the popularity of spin classes morph into the quasi-spiritual self-care of brands like SoulCycle. Meanwhile, Buddhist practitioners like Sharon Salzberg brought meditation into the mainstream. In 2011, Bjerke began his own study of Christian meditation under the guidance of a spiritual leader.

Bjerke, who was working in public relations but still figuring out his true purpose, then attended Redeemer Presbyterian Church, part of the network of churches founded by the late Tim Keller. Bjerke was inspired by Keller’s project to spread Christianity in New York’s secular mission field by meeting the city’s seekers where they were.

Bjerke was ordained in 2013 and became assistant pastor at Redeemer. Worried about what his new congregation would think, he hid his ideas about welfare and Christianity for years. When church members eventually began asking questions about whether practicing yoga and meditation was compatible with their faith, he began sharing his spiritual practice with his community.

The Well isn’t the only place where traditional faith is combined with holistic health. With church membership declining and yoga studios more crowded than ever, some religious spaces are beginning to emphasize the elements many are looking for in the wellness world: community, support, peace, silence, breath, wisdom and song. The Well goes one step further. Each Sunday sermon is followed by a 10-minute meditation. In addition to a prayer team, there is an internal health coach. A church app offers guided meditations.

The post-sermon meditation came about after Bjerke noticed that people, including himself, were having trouble remembering what the sermon was about. “The Protestant version of church services is about the sermon,” says Bjerke. “It’s boom, boom, done.” By then adding the 10-minute meditation, people can “transfer what is in their mind into their heart.”

But The Well’s innovations don’t simply import modern wellness techniques into the church. Bjerke said that when he began studying what a spiritual Christian community might look like, he was struck by the long history of meditation in the church. The desert mothers and fathers, early Christian hermits and monastics who lived in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, combined prayer and meditation as early as the third century.

“The church was Eastern before it was Western,” Bjerke said. “I thought: let’s modernize a number of theologians and thinkers from the past. Instead of 30 days in the desert, it’s 30 minutes in a meditation studio.”

But while modern Western meditators focus only on themselves, Bjerke says, Christians bring God in because “we need help seeing ourselves.” His technique is inclusive: “Maybe I quote Buddha and Jesus, but I always quote Jesus,” he said. “The Buddha has insights; The spiritual path of Jesus has insights. They all overlap, but they are different.”

Rev. Matt Reeves, national coordinator of the World Community for Christian Meditation, who said his “heart swelled” when he heard about The Well, said some Christian churches have integrated Christian meditation and contemplative prayer, but that this is typically only a small part of Christian meditation. will adopt the practices of a municipality. The WCCM is trying to find ways in which these techniques can become the entire character of a church, as with The Well.

“When people start meditating, the practice leads them to ask different questions about their lives,” he said. “It is logical that you want to have more connection with your body. The Source seems to be an embodied answer to the question we (WCCM) ask.”

Rina Raphael, author of “The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care,” said that while the goal of commercially driven exercise programs is to keep the participant moving, the main reason for a church to integrate wellness activities are designed to connect members and help them live healthier lives.

“Faith has had centuries to perfect their systems, which often makes them more immune to some of the issues we see in the wellness industry,” says Raphael. “They have a built-in community, purpose, meaning and guidance.”

Bjerke finds it encouraging that of the 115 people who came to The Well’s retreat in early June, half were not congregants, even though nearly 90% of the retreat was subsidized by volunteers. And Bjerke is cautious, he said, and lets newcomers “come to their own conclusions,” he said. “All I care about is that if we are part of the same spiritual community together, then we can just relate to each other somehow.”

David Zahl, author of the 2019 book “Seculosity,” about the many replacement religions in today’s society, warned: “A spirituality of well-being can quite easily fall into ‘prosperity theology,’ once you start equating physical health , or even spiritual health, with holiness. What hope is there for the sick, paralyzed, decaying, and dying among us, or for those who can’t seem to get better no matter how hard they try?”

But Zahl hesitated to pass judgment in a world where people are hurting more than ever. “We need more than just a new diet or exercise regimen to address our pain. A real integration could be really cool.”

The Rev. Daniel Castelo of Duke Divinity School said churches like The Well are catching on as people start taking more seriously what a holistic approach to caring for people can look like. “Christianity does not have a central theme of self-care in its work, aside from the language and understanding of the Sabbath,” Castelo said. “But in a culture like ours where people are exhausted, stressed and burned out, this approach has logic and appeal, especially for city dwellers.”