MANY MARVELOUS MENTORS

In the movie Forrest Gump, the main character, Forrest, is an ordinary—somewhat challenged—man whose life is nothing special except that he has a good heart. Along the way, this “nobody” meets a lot of “somebodies.” Forrest is an accidental bystander who stumbles into some of history’s greatest moments (Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) and greatest people (several U.S. presidents, celebrities, innovators). When I look back on my life, I feel like Forrest. I came from a Christmas-and-Easter-only Methodist family, and did not actually become a Christ-follower until my senior year of high school. I liked sports, pretty girls and Jesus—in that order. I was utterly average academically. I was literally three hundredth in a graduating class of six hundred. Not something to jazz up a resumé.

During my freshman year of college at a state university where I was playing sports and still pursuing pretty girls, Jesus began moving up the list. By the second semester he took over the top spot in my heart, so I decided to transfer to a Christian college. I chose a school called Friends University (I assumed they would be friendly at least) in Wichita, Kansas. I was an average student attending a small school in an out-of-the-way town, with no idea of what the future would hold. All I knew was that my yearning to know God was growing each passing day.

I did not know who Richard J. Foster was, or that he had written one of the most significant Christian books in the last hundred years (Celebration of Discipline). All I knew was that I had a class with him on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30-12:00. He was unlike anyone I had ever known. He was really smart, but also funny. He loved to laugh, and he knew God in a way unlike anyone I had ever met—like he was a friend. He would teach me ways to know the God he knew.

Years later a mutual friend told me that Richard had been praying for a student to come along in whom he could invest his life and wisdom, and that apparently, not long after meeting me, he told this friend I was the one God had chosen for this Paul-and-Timothy-like mentoring. All I knew was that Richard was giving me additional reading assignments, praying with me, allowing me to babysit for him and his wife, and taking me on trips where he was speaking. It was during those personal times that I learned the most from him.

During my senior year, Richard connected me to Henri Nouwen, the great spiritual writer, as I was trying to decide which seminary to attend. At Henri’s suggestion I applied to Yale Divinity School, and I got in. (Obviously, I had improved academically.) After seminary I served as a pastor in a local church, got married to Meghan, the prettiest and most down-to-earth girl I have ever seen (thank you, Jesus), learned some about how to lead a church, and found out quickly that being a pastor is really difficult. The one primary mission for a pastor should be to make disciples, but there are a thousand other pressing needs, problems and agendas that easily throw us off-track. Thankfully, my long association with Richard kept me focused on staying grounded in my own spiritual life.

A few years later I took a job teaching alongside Richard in the religion department at Friends University. While working as a professor I had another Forrest moment: a man named Rich Mullins, a famous Christian recording artist (he wrote and recorded “Awesome God” and “Step by Step”), took one of my classes. Having Rich in a class about God was like having Einstein in your math class—I was intimidated. But we became close friends, and eventually he lived in the attic apartment of our home for a little over two years. Through Rich I met Brennan Manning (author of The Ragamuffin Gospel). Brennan would also become a mentor and friend, and perhaps no one has taught me more about the love of God than he.

In 1987 Richard Foster invited me to help him build and launch a Christian spiritual renewal ministry called RENOVARÉ. He told me the name he had chosen for this ministry one day while eating a plate of spaghetti. No one could say the name or knew what it meant. We would spend the next twenty years, along with some other amazing men and women, traveling across the country leading conferences, retreats and seminars in an attempt to help people learn how to live a deeper, more balanced life with God. Some people thought we were “New Age” because of our funny name and because Richard used foreign terms like contemplation and social justice, and sometimes we were even picketed. Oh, the joys of serving Jesus!

Through Richard and RENOVARÉ, I met Dr. Dallas Willard (author of The Divine Conspiracy), who teaches philosophy at the University of Southern California. I have never known anyone as brilliant as Dallas. He, like Richard, is a true disciple of Jesus. In 1994 Dallas invited me to coteach a class with him at Fuller Seminary in the doctor of ministry program. I accepted, and went on to teach that class with him for ten years. The class met for eight hours a day for two weeks each summer. I was just a glorified teaching assistant; Dallas taught 90 percent of the class. This meant that I was able to sit and listen to him teach for about seven hours a day over the course of ten days—about seventy hours. And I did this for ten years, which means I have heard Dallas teach on God, the kingdom of God, the Bible, the spiritual disciplines and life in general for over seven hundred hours!

Some of the finest teachers have poured their lives and their teaching into me, a nobody from nowhere, and I am most blessed. I suppose that is the way Christianity has worked from the beginning. Jesus took twelve nobodies on a three-year camping trip and invested his life in them because he believed in them. The influence of all of these people—Richard, Henri, Rich, Brennan and Dallas—on me is so strong that I am not sure I have any ideas that were not shaped by theirs. Their fingerprints are all over the book you are holding. I have studied all of their books, listened to their sermons, songs and lectures on tapes and CDs, but I can honestly say that it has been the one-on-one time spent with each of them that has influenced me the most. The long hikes with Richard, letters exchanged with Henri, nightlong discussions with Rich Mullins, lingering dinners with Brennan and ice-cream-eating sessions with Dallas (he likes vanilla—who orders plain vanilla?) are deeply imbedded into my soul.

HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE

This book is the culmination of twenty-five years of learning from these great men. In particular, the idea for this book started soon after I began working with Dallas. He kept talking about the need to create “a curriculum for Christlikeness” for individuals and churches. His blueprint for such a curriculum can be found in the ninth chapter of his great book The Divine Conspiracy. Even as he was developing that chapter, I kept pressing him with the question, “Can this really be done, Dallas?” He would say, “Yes, of course.” Then I would ask, “Why don’t you do it?” and he would say each time, “Because I think you should do it, Jim.”

No pressure.

In 1998 I began creating a curriculum based on Dallas’s simple blueprint for a course in learning to live as Jesus taught us to live. In 2003 I went to the church leadership board of the church where I attend (Chapel Hill United Methodist Church, Wichita, Kansas) and asked them if I could invite some people in the church to go through this curriculum with me. They eagerly agreed, and the first year I led twenty-five people through the thirty-week course. Midway through that year I began to suspect that Dallas was right all along. Genuine transformation into the character of Christ really is possible.

Since that time I have led another seventy-five people through it, and the results have always been the same: significant life change. In church, spouses come up to me and say, “What are you doing to my husband—he is a different person! He is more patient and more attentive to our whole family than ever before. I don’t know what is going on, but you can be sure I am taking the course next year.” In addition, this curriculum has been used by high school students in youth groups and college students on campus. When people ask me who the target audience is for this material, I always say, “Anyone who longs for change—young or old, new Christian or mature Christian, male or female, it doesn’t matter.”

THE BEGINNING OF A SERIES

The book you have in your hand is the first book in The Apprentice Series, which along with two other books form a “curriculum for Christlikeness.” The aim of this first book is to help people discover the God Jesus revealed.

Each chapter deals with false concepts and the true one, namely, the narrative of Jesus. Each chapter also contains a soul-training exercise to help imbed the narrative of Jesus more deeply into our minds, bodies and souls. These exercises are not meant to make you more religious or impress God. They are meant to help you see and understand the world as Jesus did. At the end of the chapter there is a page that highlights the main ideas in the chapter. Throughout each chapter are questions that can be used for individual reflection or group interaction and discussion.

This book is titled The Good and Beautiful God because the focus is on the character of God and how we move into a life of intimacy with God. The second book in The Apprentice Series is titled The Good and Beautiful Life, which introduces the reader to the kingdom of God and focuses on our inward character, dealing specifically with the vices that cause ruin: anger, lust, lying, worry, judging others and so on. Following the Sermon on the Mount, this second book will look at the narratives behind these character flaws (for example, What are the narratives that lead to anger?) and will replace those narratives with Jesus’ narratives about life in the kingdom of God. As with this book, each chapter will contain an exercise that is aimed at helping imbed the proper narrative into our souls.

The third book in this series is titled The Good and Beautiful Community. The focus of this book is to help us learn how to live as apprentices of Jesus in our ordinary, everyday lives. How do I live out Jesus’ kingdom vision in my family? What impact will my life with God have on my life at work? In what ways can I, as a Christ-follower, change the world I live in? What will loving my enemies and blessing those who curse me look like in my daily life? Ultimately it all comes down to this: “the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6), at home, at work, in our community and on our planet.

But it all starts with knowing the God Jesus knows, and loving God with every fiber of your being. This is the spring and the foundation of the other two books, and in fact the entire Christian life. This may be the only book you read in this series, and if so, I pray that somehow your “love of God” ring brightens.