Dallas Willard came into the lives of Michael Cassidy and the rest of the African Enterprise team when he was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Beyond that, he was not only a profound and highly effective Christian apologist but he was a man who had been led in-depth into the field of Christian spirituality. African Enterprise South Africa and some others brought him to South Africa for a number of week-long seminars on “Christian Spirituality and Conscientious Discipleship”.
In these seminars and in his book The Divine Conspiracy Dallas always presented the challenging notion of true discipleship. This is how he put it in The Divine Conspiracy, “As a disciple of Jesus I am with Him, by choice and by grace, learning from Him how to live in the Kingdom of God. This is the crucial idea. That means . . . how to live within the range of God’s effective will, His life flowing through mine. Another important way of putting this is to say that I am learning from Jesus to live my life as He would live my life if He were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything He did, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner that He did all that He did.”
Dallas and Michael became good friends, a friendship particularly deepened when they were both plenary speakers in Oxbridge ’98, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of C. S. Lewis. His book Renovation of the Heart also deeply affected Michael.
Recommended Reading:
- The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
- Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God
- Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ
- A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions