PEOPLE IN PRINT
January 1, 1993
A Tour of the Terrain
Prayer by Richard Foster, HarperCollins, $17.00
Reviewed by Steve D. Mathewson, pastor, Dry Creek Bible Church, Belgrade, Montana.
As a boy, I visited the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I struggled to understand its significance until my folks splurged and hired a personal tour guide from the National Park Service. For a modest fee, this guide took the keys to our car, drove us through the battlefield, pointed out key sites, and answered our questions. I got the tour of a lifetime!
Richard Foster's most recent book, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home, offers its readers a personal tour through the terrain of prayer. I immediately warmed up to him as my tour guide when I read his humble admission: "I am speaking for all the prayerless persons I have been and all the prayerful persons I hope to become."
Untangling the inside
Soon into the tour, I realized how my own prayer life has been stifled by a hardening of the categories. Many of the twenty-one categories through which Foster guided me, I had before neglected or misunderstood. In each chapter, Foster leads us by the hand, identifying and describing a different feature of prayer.
"By naming our experiences," says Foster, founder of Renovar‚ and author of Celebration of Discipline, "I hope to increase our understanding of what God is doing among us so we can be more intentional in our practice."
These various chapters on prayer hold one thing in common: they all pulsate from "the heart of God, which reaches out in utter accepting love and woos us into the intimacy of prayer." Foster, also Jack and Barbara Lee Distinguished Professor of spiritual formation at Azusa Pacific University, groups these features into three sections, suggesting ...
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