Richard Foster was born in 1942 in New Mexico and grew up mostly in California. While still a teenager, he lost his parents, and the small Quaker church that had welcomed him into the faith took on the cost of his education, a gesture he would carry as a mark for the rest of his life.
After earning a degree in Pastoral Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, he became pastor of Woodlake Avenue Friends Church in Canoga Park, California. There, in a Sunday school class, he struck up a friendship with a parishioner named Dallas Willard, a philosopher who would become his closest conversation partner for decades.
In 1974, he moved with his wife Carolynn to Oregon, where he began teaching at George Fox College and joined the pastoral staff of the Newberg church. It was there that the material on spiritual disciplines he had already been teaching for years came to maturity.
In 1978, he published Celebration of Discipline, a book that reintroduced the evangelical church to historic practices such as fasting, silence, study, and simplicity, then viewed with suspicion by many Protestants. The work would go on to sell more than a million copies and be remembered decades later among the most influential books of the twentieth century.
The book’s success led him to Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, where he began teaching in 1979. In 1986, he decided to step back from public ministry for a season of silence, out of which the call to found a new kind of ministry would be born.
In 1988, he founded Renovaré, a movement dedicated to the spiritual renewal of churches, bringing together friends such as Dallas Willard and James Bryan Smith. In Streams of Living Water, published in 1998, he laid out six great traditions of Christianity that, in his view, should coexist within a single church.
His use of contemplative practices linked to Catholic and Orthodox mystics, such as Thomas Merton, drew criticism from more conservative sectors of Protestantism, who feared an improper blending of Christian prayer with meditation techniques from other religious traditions. Foster has maintained his emphasis that the disciplines are a means of grace, never an end in themselves.
He retired from the presidency of Renovaré in 2008, remaining on the organization’s board. Today he lives near Denver, Colorado, with Carolynn, with whom he had two children, and remains a living reference point in evangelical conversation about spiritual formation.
