In the Summer of 1992, I was 18 years old, had just finished my first year of college, and was serving in my first ministry position as the summer youth intern for Varnville Baptist Church in Varnville, SC.  The pastor in Varnville was named Mark Chapman (he currently pastors First Baptist Church, Winnsboro, SC).  It was a great summer and I learned a lot under Rev. Chapman’s leadership.  While there, he gave me a copy of a book I had never heard of before by an author I had never heard of before:  The Spirit of the  Disciplines by Dallas Willard.  I was immediately intrigued by the fact that Willard was (a) an ordained Southern Baptist minister and (b) the head of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.  Having started reading C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer a few years before this, I was hungry for intellectually satisfying Christian writings, and was anxious to see who this Dallas Willard was and what he had to say.

I read that book over the next number of nights there in the green church parsonage that the church was letting me live in during that summer.  It shook me to the core.  I recall walking into Rev. Chapman’s office and hugging his neck to thank him for giving it to me.

In The Spirit of the Disciplines I was introduced to the core of Willard’s teaching, a core that he would articulate time and again in his books:  namely, that it really is possible to follow Jesus, that this actualized discipleship was the missing component in modern American Christianity, and that the spiritual disciplines were God-given tools to help us become more like Jesus so that our hearts might be renovated to the extent that we would naturally do the things Jesus wants us to do and be the types of people he wants us to be.

I found Willard to have insights that were so penetrating all I could do was nod in stunned amazement.  “That’s it!” I would say, or, “That’s the thought I think I’ve been chasing all these years!”  His writing was clear, his analysis was poignant, his illustrations were provocative, his questions were probing, and his logic was relentless.  To use a phrase from Nietzsche, “all truths were bloody truths” to Dallas Willard.  He wrote out of conviction and out of his own life experience.

The books I read following this only heightened my appreciation for him.  The Divine Conspiracy (a book and video series I’ve used in counseling) is likely the best, overall, though Renovation of the Heart (another book I’ve used in counseling and a book through which I’m currently taking my staff and through which I will be inviting our church to journey this Fall) may bump it out of that spot on my list.  The Great Omission remains one of the more devastating critiques of the discipleship-less church ever penned.

Willard stands firmly in the tradition of Bonhoeffer and others who argued against “cheap grace” and for actual discipleship.  For this reason, his books are not always pleasant to read, or easy, but they are always worth reading.

In many ways I find it odd that I’m so drawn to Willard’s writings.  After all, I cannot say that I have personally lived out the truth to which he bears eloquent witness with any great consistency.  I am not the disciple I should be.  Yet, in so many ways, it seems to me that Willard’s books are vitally important and are ignored to our own peril (or, at least, his contentions are ignored to our own peril).  For who can deny that what the church of Jesus Christ needs more than anything today are people that actually follow the Lord in whom they claim to believe?  I sure can’t.

Dallas Willard died yesterday at the age of 77.  A friend in our church with whom I journeyed through Renovation of the Heart texted me that the news brought tears to his eyes.  I told him that it felt like losing a friend.

Requiescat in pace, Dallas Willard.

The disciple has met his Master.