Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home
Richard J. Foster offers a warm, compelling, and sensitive primer on prayer, helping us to understand, experience, and practice it in its many forms-from the simple prayer of beginning again to unceasing prayer. He clarifies the prayer process, answers common misconceptions, and shows the way into prayers of contemplation, healing, blessing, forgiveness, and rest. Coming to prayer is like coming home, Foster says. He shows how prayer can move us inward into personal transformation, upward toward intimacy with God, and outward to minister to others. He leads us beyond questions to a deeper understanding and practice of prayer, bringing us closer to God, to ourselves, and to our community.
Endorsements
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There are hundreds of books on prayer, and much of the advice they contain is likely to be the same. So what distinguishes these books? Call it a kind of wisdom, a sense that here’s someone who knows something of God’s heart. A good example can be found in this fine book by the Quaker writer and teacher Richard Foster. The author of the bestselling Celebration of Discipline explores various aspects of prayer, which he defines in one place as “the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul.” Beginning with the simplest forms of prayer – what he calls “ordinary people bringing … ordinary concerns to a loving and compassionate Father” – he then explores the deeper places where prayer becomes not simply petition but a way of life. He writes of prayer of adoration and rest, sacramental prayer, meditation, and contemplation, and in the final section of the book moves outward into ministry, where prayer meets the needs of the world. In each chapter Foster defines, describes, and gives helpful examples. Above all he writes with grace – in both the artistic and spiritual senses.
Doug Thorpe
Richard J. Foster
Richard J. Foster is the innovative pioneer who reintroduced ancient spiritual resources to contemporary Christians, especially among evangelicals and other Protestants. The author of several bestselling books, including Celebration of Discipline and Streams of Living Water, he is the founder of Renovaré, an infrachurch movement committed to the renewal of the Church in all her multifaceted expressions. Having studied at George Fox University and Fuller Theological Seminary, Foster has served as a pastor and taught worldwide on spiritual formation. He and his wife, Carolynn, have two grown children, many grandchildren, and live near Denver, Colorado.
2002