Summary: A brief overview of the role of spiritual formation in the Christian life.
One of the areas that I think that many Evangelicals have missed is the concept of spiritual formation. It is not that Evangelicals don’t do many of the things that make up spiritual formation. They pray, they read their bibles, they share the gospel, they study theology, etc. But there is a concern among at least some, that working on spiritual formation is a form of works righteousness. (In other words, it is a way of earning our salvation.)
Richella Parham is a board member of Renovare. This is an organization that was started by Richard Foster and Dallas Willard to change the perception about spiritual formation and to provide resources in that direction. Many of the authors that I have read around spiritual formation have worked for or with Renovare or Foster and Williard.
Parham is not a theologian or pastor. Instead she is an average lay person that was confronted with spiritual formation as a concept at a workshop and became interested and eventually a board member of Renovare. After working with Renovare for about 10 years, she was asked to write this short book.
Essentially this is an introduction to why it is appropriate to work on our spiritual lives and the very basics of how we can get started on that. There was very little that was new to me here. But at less than two hours, this is a good introduction to the subject. And Christianaudio.com has it as one of their free resources so there is no go reason to not pick it up if you have an interest in the subject.
I do think it is easy to approach spiritual formation for the wrong reasons. But because something is used wrongly by some does not mean that we should not use that tool at all.
A Spiritual Formation Primer by Richella Parham: free from Christianaudio.com