Worth Celebrating

Summary: A book biography of Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.

I have been aware of Miriam Dixon (Mimi) for a while. I assume it was a Renovare podcast that I first became aware of her. She was a pastor for 40 years, retiring in 2019, 34 of those years as the pastor of a single church in Colorado. She has been on the board of director for Renovare for quite awhile.

And I have been aware of Celebration of Discipline for decades. I think I read it while I was in college or seminary for the first time. And I think I read it again about 15-20 years ago. And I have read portions of it when I needed to refer to a spiritual discipline since then. But it wasn't until Worth Celebrating and Celebration of Discipline where choosen for the Renovare Book Club that I picked it up again.

As is clear from Worth Celebrating, Celebration of Disciple was a very influential book. Many evangelicals and other conservative protestants were resistant to spiritual disciplines because they felt "too Catholic" or thought they were a repudiation of the concept of grace. Foster as an outsider to the evangelical world, but with enough awareness of the evangelical world was able to frame spiritual disciplines in a way that was attractive and helpful.

I have listened to a number of interviews with both Richard Foster and Mimi Dixon. Foster did not want an academic to write the book biography of Celebration of Discipline, he wanted a pastor who had worked to form people spiritually to write it. I think there is some wisdom to that, but I also think that I have appreciated book biographies by people like Alan Jacobs, George Marsden and Martin Marty. I am less reluctant to have academic who are familiar with the subject write book biographies than Foster is and I am not sure at the end if I think Dixon was the right choice. She is enthusiastic, she was personally formed by Celebration of Discipline. She already had a relationship with Foster being on the Renovare board of directors.

It is more in the inteviews than the book, but Dixon was tickled by the idea of a book biography. It was new to her. She did real archival research and a ton of interviews. Worth Celebrating isn't a bad book, but I also don't think it is a great book. That being said, I reread all the reviews of book biographies that I have written about and the concept is pretty formulaic and the quality mostly pretty dry. I think Jacobs' biography of the Book of Common Prayer is probably the best, but it also has the longest history.

I do think it is interesting to understand context and how a book was recieved. CS Lewis was not naturally a darling of American Evangelicals, but he became one. Bonhoeffer has been distorted by many, but that story of how he was introducted to the large Christian world after his death does matter to how he is read now. And in the case of Worth Celebrating, if you are under 50, you probably have always been aware of the spiritual formation movement, but it is a fairly recent movement and it is unlikely that we would have Eugene Peterson or Dallas Willard or the host of younger authors and pastors and speakers without Richard Foster.

I do think that a bit more distance may have helped Worth Celebrating be a little bit better of a book. But, again, there is some value in writing about the book of an author who is still alive and who known well. Worth Celebrating is a short book. If you haven't read Celebration of Discipline I would recommend that over jumping into Worth Celebrating first. But there is value in understanding the context and culture to which the book was published and how it has impacted people in the nearly 45 years since it was published. For those who find that interesting, this is worth reading.

Two quotes that I think sum up why it may have been important for Mimi Dixon to have written it as opposed to a more academic author:

As Richard Foster reflected on what he was seeing and hearing from readers, he drew the same conclusion. People were mistaking the means for the end. They were centering on the Disciplines themselves as though they were the most important thing. Richard found himself repeatedly stressing, “When we look at the Bible, we don’t find a great amount of discussion about the spiritual Disciplines. Oh, it’s there, and it’s important—but the one thing that is overwhelmingly important in the Bible is hearing and obeying God. The Disciplines are only a way of helping us to do that; they are a way we set ourselves before God. It is God who accomplishes the work of transformation in the human heart.”

and

"Always insist that the focus be your relationship with God, the with-God life that we’re after, and not on how to master one practice or another. One practice might help this individual; another practice is what will help that individual. We learn the heart of the person, and spiritual Disciplines appropriate for the individual will flow out of this life together. We don’t try to nail any of this down too tight. In my opinion, it is futile to try to measure this or that. We can know that a person is growing spiritually when they are more loving. That’s how we know."

I think Dixon did discern and write about the problems of mistaking the disciplines as seeking after God and she was well aware that Foster is not trying to overwhelm people, but introduce them to the range of spiritual disciplines.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/worth-celebrating/