Becoming Dallas Willard

The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower

By: Gary W. Moon

Narrated by: Joe Geoffrey

Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Dallas Willard was a personal mentor and inspiration to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers. His presence and ideas rippled through the lives of many prominent leaders and authors, such as John Ortberg, Richard Foster, James Bryan Smith, Paula Huston, and J. P. Moreland. As a result of these relationships and the books he wrote, he fundamentally altered the way tens of thousands of Christians have understood and experienced the spiritual life. Whether great or small, everyone who met Dallas was impressed by his personal attention, his calm confidence, his wisdom, and his profound sense of the spiritual. But he was not always the man who lived on a different plane of reality than so many of the rest of us. He was someone who had to learn to be a husband, a parent, a teacher, a Christ follower. The journey was not an easy one. He absorbed some of the harshest and most unfair blows life can land. His mother died when he was two, and after his father remarried he was exiled from his stepmother’s home. Growing up in Depression-era, rural Missouri and educated in a one-room schoolhouse, he knew poverty, deprivation, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression. Though the pews he sat in during his early years were not offering much by way of love and mercy, Dallas, instead of turning away, kept looking for the company of a living, present, and personal God.

In Gary W. Moon’s candid and inspiring biography, we read how Willard became the person who mentored and partnered with his young pastor, Richard Foster, to inspire some of the most influential books on spirituality of the last generation. We see how his love of learning took him on to Baylor, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Southern California, where he became a beloved professor and one of the most versatile members of the philosophy department. The life of Dallas Willard deserves attention because he became a person who himself experienced authentic transformation of life and character. Dallas Willard not only taught about spiritual disciplines, he became a different person because of them. He became a grounded person, a spiritually alive person as he put them into practice, finding God, as he often said, "at the end of his rope." Here is a life that gives us all hope.

©2018 eChristian (P)2018 eChristian

context of the life of Dallas Willard

This is my 3rd book about or by Dallas Willard. I highly recommend the divine conspiracy and also life without lack. After reading both of those books, this biography of Dallas Willard gave me a better understanding of the man.

Amazing man!

Read everything you can by or about Dallas Willard. Thank God for God for making mind like Willard's.

Thank You

To myself and all the world, go and do likewise. Become the disciple of Jesus that he made you to be and experience his inexpressible riches as you bring his light to the world. You and I will rejoice together with Dallas and all the saints, for all eternity, with Jesus Christ as the Cornerstone, Prime Sustainer, and Most Glorious Inhabitant of our eternal community of love. I have this vision because I opened my heart to God and asked him daily to help me give myself to him - to experience the joy and peace that he builds and sustains through his loving righteousness. God has sent me wise teachers, such as Dallas, who point me to the written and living Word through their words and example, which testify to the absolute and wonderful reality of the Kingdom presently available to us. I pray that the reality of Christ grow in me and in you and we in him forever. I pray you open your heart and ask Jesus to fill it. Come and see... You will discover the source of our hope in Christ Jesus. Until we meet again, go in peace and serve the LORD. Amen!

Must read/listen

This is a masterful work by Gary Moon about a man I’ve long admired and wished I could meet. Thanks to Gary’s work I know so much more about how Dallas Willard became Dallas Willard and I wish even more that I could have known him. Yet in a way I feel like I did know him, thanks to this work.

I listened to the audio version and highly recommend it.

Currently Marked as My Favorite Book (MaMFB)*

This is a note to self! (NTS!)

Self, come back and tell why this book deserves the status of MaMFB.

WHM!

*MaMFB

Inspiration to all

I loved this autobiography of Dallas Willard. I am inspired of how the process of his life’s transformation was portrayed in this book and his discipleship to Jesus. I highly recommend this book to all who wants to really follow Jesus and needed a real person as an example of what Jesus is like.

Inspiring Book! Highly Recommend It!

Dallas' life was so inspiring and provokes us to live well and go after God!

Fills in the holes

Having read most of Dallas’ works, I found this book fascinating in tying his life to his writings. So interesting and informative. I understand Dallas’ works in a different light now.

Review

Thanks to Gary Moon for this account. While it does not capture as much of his daily practices, personal spiritual disciplines, or anecdotes about how he would relate to his family, friends and colleagues as I had hoped, it did inspire me to seek the Kingdom and to learn to live in God’s presence in an experiential way.

Great insights into the life of a great man.

Gary Moon was a close friend of Dallas Willard, which makes his account all the more compelling. I got a very good sense of how he came to be the gifted and sensitive teacher he became.

The best man of faith for the 21st century!

Dallas Willard was the most profound teacher or what it means to be a Christian, or as I and he would put it being a disciple of Christ.
this book brings the man of such amazing teaching into the true human he was full of love flaws and vulnerability. but most of all the love and joy he found of loving God and helping others to do so.