Becoming Dallas Willard: The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower

ECPA Christian Book Award Finalist; Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist

Everyone who met Dallas Willard was impressed by his personal attention, calm confidence, wisdom, and profound sense of the spiritual. But he was not always the man who seemed to live on a different plane of reality than the rest of us.

Dallas 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 didn’t offer 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 see how Dallas’s love of learning took him to Baylor University, 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 as well as a personal mentor to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers.

Richard J. Foster (DThP, Fuller Theological Seminary) is founder of Renovaré in Denver, Colorado. He is the author of many books, including Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, which has sold over two million copies worldwide, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World, and coauthor (with Gayle Beebe) of Longing for God: Seven Paths of Christian Devotion.

Gary W. Moon (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is the founding director of the Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Center for Spiritual Formation at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He continues to serve as the director of Conversatio Divina for the Martin Institute. He also serves as distinguished professor of psychology and Christian spirituality at Richmont Graduate University. He is the author of numerous books and curriculum resources including Apprenticeship with Jesus and Falling for God.

John Ortberg is teaching pastor of Menlo Church and author of many books, including God Is Closer Than You Think.