Perspective: What makes Renovation of the Heart different from The Divine Conspiracy and your other books on spiritual formation?

Dallas: There is a great deal of difference. In none of the other books do I go into the details of how the essential parts of the human personality must change in the process of spiritual formation in Christ. That’s what is distinctive about Renovation of the Heart. There are a number of other concerns, but the heart of the matter is saying we know we can’t be spiritually transformed by just focusing on the will.

In one way or another, it is a common mistake to think transformation is all in the will. And it isn’t! It’s in the mind– how we think, what occupies our minds, and so forth. It’s in our feelings. It’s in our body. What is distinctive about Renovation of the Heart is the idea that we renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can’t do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality.

Now, there are two other really big concerns that go along with this. One concern is the many alternative forms of spiritual formation that are now coming forward. In the first chapter I set the project in the field of general human concerns that have been here forever and, therefore, concern any culture and any person. I recognize that there are alternative answers to the same question, and that these are very big now and growing, everything from Oprah to Deepak Chopra to the really inadequate ideas of education that dominate the secular world.

In the last two chapters the other concern says to the Church, “You really can’t justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.” If that is done, most of the rest of the stuff that churches are generally about will not matter or will come along. But if we do not make formation in Christ the priority, then we’re just going to keep on producing Christians that are indistinguishable in their character from many non-Christians.

Like Renovaré, all of my books focus on specific kinds of questions. The Divine Conspiracy is really about the gospel: What is the Good News? What does it mean for human life? The Spirit of the Disciplines is the biblical and theoretical framework of the disciplines starting out with the idea, “What are we trying to do? What is salvation?” with the answer: “It is a life, and this life is not something that is imposed upon us; we receive it and work with it.” One chapter focuses on the means, the specific disciplines. Hearing God is about the very specific issue of what it means to live with guidance in our life.

P: It seems in one way or another all of your books have tried to interact with contemporary culture, but Renovation of the Heart may be the most intentional in its very structure in doing so. Is that a fair statement?

D: Oh, yes, I think that’s true. It’s so important to urge this point, you know. If we reject the Christian answer, we still have the problem. We’re going to adopt some alternative,

because the questions will not go away, the questions of, “What kind of person am I becoming?” and “What is my role in that?” and so on. We have a whole range of extremely inadequate answers to these questions, and what we need to push as Christians is to say, “Look, we’re not here to prove we’re right; we’re here to help people.” If they can do as well going anywhere else, then God bless them. That’s the issue.

P: What do you feel a person misses if they do not read Renovation of the Heart?

D: What they’re going to miss is a picture of the dimensions of their own life and how they fit together and how they can be made to work toward the end of glory to God and human fulfillment.

All of the spiritualities that are now clamoring for attention, from explicit Satanism to what we hear on Oprah, are concerned with the two issues of identity and empowerment. Who am I? How can I have the power to live? Those are the questions everyone has to deal with. If we don’t come to terms with these, we lapse into some form of human decadence and failure. Renovation of the Heart is simply an attempt to say, “Here’s the Christian picture. It’s all true. It works. It’s accessible to everybody. And there’s nothing that compares with it on earth.”

Also I emphasize at the beginning and end of the book that it doesn’t take a budget, we don’t have to be brilliant, it’s very simple. Anyone–any church or any individual–can do this because God is in favor of it and he will meet us and help us.

From a practical point of view, Renovation centers around chapter five which is the VIM formula. We have to have the Vision. And we have to form the Intention. And we have to adopt the Means. Vision. Intention. Means. And if we do that, then it works! Every individual, every church, every organization . . . that’s all we need to do. We don’t need to do fancy stuff and create mega programs. This, that, and the other. Just simple, straight-forward practice.

P: Why did you write Renovation of the Heart? Was there an experience in your life or some similar motivation that created the need in you to write it?

D: The motivation was seeing all of these other forms of spirituality and formation blundering down the road, and the Church sitting there with really nothing to say on the subject, and the members of the Church getting more out of Oprah than they get out of their church. For example, there are large evangelical churches that have large contingents of the people who come on Sunday that are really big into A Course in Miracles and Conversations with God.

P: Oh, yes. Kind of stream of consciousness stuff?

D: Well, guides in these kinds of books profess to be writing under the guidance of the spirit world. That’s “automatic writing.” It is stream of consciousness stuff, and you just attribute