• A response to recent Episcopal Church General Convention resolutions encouraging every parish to adopt a spiritual formation program for adults
• Designed for individual and group use
What Is Your Practice? presents a variety of foundational Christian ascetical practices, translated into contemporary idiom. Instead of relying on imperatives and fixed answers, readers are encouraged to experiment with and commit to sustained practices that can help them to live faithfully with important questions during unsettled times.
A practice is most effective when it becomes a habit or disposition and a part of how we live day to day. This informative and inspirational book focuses on opportunities available within the normal patterns of everyday activity. Readers need not adopt all the suggested practices at once, but rather become acquainted with a menu of choices appropriate for spiritual nurture for differing temperaments and at different periods within a lifetime. Questions at the end of each chapter make the book suitable for parish groups, as well as for individual reading.
For Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and others — individually and in small groups — seeking spiritual growth
Read the first chapter of What Is Your Practice?
Forney and Vest have written a winsome exposition on Christian spirituality that is personal, practical, and welcome. Their exposition is deeply rooted in the great reference points of spirituality, but they bring to their reflection a good dose of contemporaneity, a ready honesty about their own experience, and practical guidance about how to live an alternative life. The practicality of the book is evident in their specific guidance for daily engagement in the habits they commend. They offer nothing exotic or magical, simply the core claims of a life of faith.
— Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary
This book offers mature understanding and practices for people wanting all dimensions of their lives to be guided and deepened by God’s enlightening love. The authors bring to bear their own seasoned, concrete experience, as well as well-chosen biblical, historical, and modern spiritual views of the life-time journey of response, as they put it, to Jesus’ call to live in God’s kingdom ever more fully. They realistically take into consideration our resistance as well as our unquenchable desire to follow that call, and our need for spiritual practices to help us reduce the resistance and respond more fully to the call.
Both serious beginners and those more experienced with following the Christian path toward ever fuller participation in God’s being can benefit from its many insights and suggestions, which engage an unusually wide range of human areas of experience that are called to be inhabited and transformed by that intention.
—Tilden Edwards, Founder and Senior Fellow, the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation
“How” is the key word for this book as it provides practical ideas about how to pay attention to God’s desires for us, trusting that God is going ahead of us to shape. Offering illustrations, cautions, and simple suggestions, What Is Your Practice? helps us move toward a deepened relationship with God and wholeness of life.
— Jan Johnson, author of Abundant Simplicity and When the Soul Listens
Spiritual practice is the life-blood that bridges our desire for God into actual experience of the Divine presence. What Is Your Practice? will be a welcome companion to men and women who seek a practical way to enter the Divine Mystery and a life that has meaning.
— Christopher McCauley, spiritual teacher, retreat leader, and host of international
pilgrimages; Executive Director Emeritus, Stillpoint: The Center for Christian Spirituality
