Why I Wrote the Book
What are the key experiences that have shaped your life as a Christian? A pastor posed this question to me and a handful of other Christian leaders in preparation for an upcoming retreat. He was only looking for a page or two in response and it seemed like an interesting question, so I started writing. As I wrote, I sensed that taking this time to reflect on how God had been at work was a very valuable exercise. But when I finished, I was both puzzled and fascinated. The causes of my spiritual growth were not what we usually talk about in churches when we discuss Christian formation and discipleship. Was I just weird? Or is it possible that we are overlooking some significant causes of Christian spiritual growth?
I didn’t do anything about these questions right away, but I kept thinking about them. Finally, a year later, I took my write-up with me on a long airplane trip so I could think about it some more. I became even more curious about the causes of spiritual growth, and I wondered what other people had experienced. So, on that flight, I planned out an interview project to ask other Christians what had caused their spiritual growth. Then I would be able to look at the interview results to determine the most significant causes of spiritual growth. Over the next fifteen months, I did two hundred such interviews.
At first, I had no intention of writing a book. But after completing the interviews, I became convinced that the results were important, both for individual Christians and for our churches. So I set out to write a book in order to share what I had been learning from the interviews and from thinking about the cumulative results. Note that although the book does include some results from the interviews, it is not written as a full report on the project. Rather, it is written as the beginning of a discussion, to provoke thinking and discussion about spiritual growth.