Top Recommendation:  Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster

There are a lot of books out there on discipleship.  From small group efforts to step by step approaches.  This book will take you past all of that and allow you to be changed as you practice the various disciplines outlined in the different chapters.

This is not a quick read.  In fact, I would recommend taking one chapter at a time, maybe over a full year.  For a while I read, and tried to implement, one chapter a month, until my natural sanguine personality took over and I wanted to do something else for a while! 

This book is never far away from me, and I have enjoyed other material by this author too.

You can find this book online at these locations:

Christian Book.com

Powells books (I love the store in Portland!)

Amazon

Online Review:

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In the twenty years since its publication, Celebration of Disciplinehas helped over a million seekers discover a richer spiritual life infused with joy, peace, and a deeper understanding of God. For this special twentieth anniversary edition, Richard J. Foster has added an introduction, in which he shares the story of how this beloved and enduring spiritual guidebook came to be.

Hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality, Celebration of Disciplineexplores the "classic Disciplines," or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith. Along the way, Foster shows that it is only by and through these practices that the true path to spiritual growth can be found.

Dividing the Disciplines into three movements of the Spirit, Foster shows how each of these areas contribute to a balanced spiritual life. The inward Disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study, offer avenues of personal examination and change. The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service, help prepare us to make the world a better place. The corporate Disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration, bring us nearer to one another and to God.

Foster provides a wealth of examples demonstrating how these Disciplines can become part of our daily activities-and how they can help us shed our superficial habits and "bring the abundance of God into our lives." He offers crucial new insights on simplicity, demonstrating how the biblical view of simplicity, properly understood and applied, brings joy and balance to our inward and outward lives and "sets us free to enjoy the provision of God as a gift that can be shared with others." The discussion of celebration, often the most neglected of the Disciplines, shows its critical importance, for it stands at the heart of the way to Christ. Celebration of Disciplinewill help motivate Christians everywhere to embark on a journey of prayer and spiritual growth.

Synopsis:

Timed to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the book of "Celebration of Discipline, " this substantially revised bestselling guide uses the classical spiritual disciplines to achieve an enriched, joyful inner life. Abridged.

Synopsis:

Reclaims such classical spiritual disciplines as meditation, prayer, fasting, study, solitude, confession, worship, and celebration for the modern Christian meditative life.