Neither did Harper & Row, which decided to publish the unsolicited manuscript of an unknown pastor. The church of his youth supported him financially and in prayer as he made his way through college (George Fox) and seminary (Fuller), but little did it know what fruit would result. The idea for Celebration grew in the heat of pastoral work, as Foster explains below. Today you are almost as likely to hear an evangelical talk about Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ as Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. This book, arguably more than any other, introduced evangelicals not only to the disciplines, but also to the wealth of spiritual formation writing from the medieval and ancient church. That began to change substantially 30 years ago, with the publication of Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. Thirty-one years ago, not many evangelicals thought much of the "spiritual disciplines," and when they did, they thought of them negatively-as one more form of works righteousness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |