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The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus Hardcover – September 15, 2020
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WINNER OF THE CHRISTIANITY TODAY BOOK AWARD
Most believers live in the state of “being a Christian” without ever being deeply formed by Christ. Our pace is too frenetic to be in union with God, and we don’t know how to quiet our hearts and minds to be present. Our emotions are unhealthy and compartmentalized. We feel unable to love well or live differently from the rest of the world—to live as people of the good news.
New York pastor Rich Villodas says we must restore balance, focus, and meaning for our souls. The Deeply Formed Life lays out a fresh vision for spiritual breakthrough following five key values:
• Contemplative Rhythms Value: slowing down our lives to be with God.
• Racial Justice Value: examining a multi-layered approach to pursuing racial justice and reconciliation.
• Interior Examination Value: looking beneath the surface of our lives to live free and love well.
• Sexual Wholeness Value: exploring how our sexuality connects with our spirituality.
• Missional Presence Value: living as the presence of Christ in a broken world.
The Deeply Formed Life is a roadmap to live in the richly rooted place we all yearn for: a place of communion with God, a place where we find our purpose.
Praise for The Deeply Formed Life
“The Deeply Formed Life is a book for our time. Honest, wise, insightful, funny, and—above all—deep. The way Rich and New Life Fellowship hold emotional health and racial justice together is beyond inspiring. This is spiritual formation for the future of the church.”—John Mark Comer, pastor of teaching and vision at Bridgetown Church and author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
“I’ve studied the Bible under Pastor Rich’s leadership for close to a decade. The core values he shares in this book serve as guidance, not only for how we should live as Christians in an ever-changing world but also for how we can live a life of purpose—that consistently and enthusiastically points to Jesus.”—Susan Kelechi Watson, actress from the awardwinning television series This Is Us
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWaterBrook
- Publication dateSeptember 15, 2020
- Dimensions5.8 x 0.89 x 8.55 inches
- ISBN-100525654380
- ISBN-13978-0525654384
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The evidence is everywhere—Christians have been formed by our culture for shallowness. The way to a more deeply formed life is no great mystery, but it is, as Rich Villodas shows, filled with countercultural practices that require intention, purpose, and vision. These pages cast a vision for not only deeper, holistic formation of each of us as individual believers but also for a more deeply formed church as well.”—Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist
“Rich Villodas writes from the wellspring of a monastic spirit that has been woven into the fabric of his life for years. I know very few Christian leaders who embody the contemplative life in such a way that connects the complex social, cultural, and spiritual realities we face today. The Deeply Formed Life invites us to journey with God toward personal wholeness and a new moral imagination that creates a better world of justice, peace, and reconciliation. I highly recommend it!”—Brenda Salter McNeil, author of Becoming Brave: Finding the Courage to Pursue Racial Justice Now
“The Deeply Formed Life is a powerful call to a holy pursuit away from the temptations of a shallow discipleship that encumber our generation. Rich masterfully weaves the experiences and disciplines of both personal and communal formation that inspire and empower us to a contemporary discipleship, which leads to spiritual health and flourishing. This book is a gift that enriches us as we open every layer.”—Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero, pastor at Calvario City Church and president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition
“Rich Villodas understands that a pastor’s primary task is not to gather a crowd but to form people in Christ. Spiritual formation is not a practice reserved for the spiritually elite; rather it is the very heart of all Christian discipleship. He embodies my hope for the contemporary church in the Western world—for us to a shift toward spiritual formation. The Deeply Formed Life clearly marks the path we need to follow, making the essential practices of formation accessible to everyone.”—Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri, and author of Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God
“My friend Rich Villodas has been marked deeply by the spiritual directors of church history. And yet this book is not only about a call to engage in ancient practices so that we can have a more fulfilling life. Rich calls us to both personal refreshment and missional engagement, the kind of engagement that challenges injustice. I believe The Deeply Formed Life represents a new genre of spiritual direction, a kind modeled after Jesus, who both went away to pray and engaged the marginalized.”—Dr. Bryan Loritts, author of The Dad Difference
“The Deeply Formed Life tackles the endemic issue of non-discipleship within the Western church. The book is theologically rich, pastorally sensitive, and wonderfully practical. Rich does not shy away from addressing some of the most pressing issues in our day and how they affect our discipleship. This is much-needed!”—Deb Hirsch, missional leader, speaker, and author of Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship and Redeeming Sex
“In a captivating and moving way, which is profound and personal, Rich Villodas shows us how we can be formed by God into a masterpiece. With shimmering insights and poignant stories, this rare and powerful book will take you deeper into God and make the world more beautiful.”—Ken Shigematsu, pastor of Tenth Church, Vancouver, BC, and bestselling author of God in My Everything
“Revealing our shallowness with grace and helping us see there is so much more to living, Rich Villodas leads us patiently into The Deeply Formed Life. Step by step, this pastor walks us through the malformations that plague our modern existence. He challenges us with content that has a personal spirituality and with nothing less than a full-orbed Christian discipleship. A powerful summons to the deeper life.”—David Fitch, Lindner chair of evangelical theology at Northern Seminary Chicago and author of Faithful Presence
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Contemplative Rhythms for an Exhausted Life
In 1901, an American doctor named John Harvey Girdner coined the term Newyorkitis to describe an illness that had symptoms including edginess, quick movements, and impulsiveness. At the time, he said it was “a disease which affects a large percentage of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island.” As a native New Yorker, I can’t help but laugh and also gasp at these words. I laugh because Girdner is describing a world long gone: a world without the internet, high-speed cars, and other technological advances that inform everything we do. I gasp, however, because if Newyorkitis is what Girdner observed more than one hundred years ago, where does that leave us today?
Girdner saw something in 1901 that captured the dangerous pace at which we often unwittingly live. Our world hasn’t slowed down. Our world continues on, faster and busier, and we are reminded that our souls were not created for the kind of speed to which we have grown accustomed. Thus, we are a people who are out of rhythm, a people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. This illness is no longer a New York phenomenon—it has infected people around the world. And I see it every day.
Recently on a Saturday morning, I was walking through my neighborhood, and as I neared my apartment building an older man frantically shouted across the street, “Are you Jewish?” He waved his hands at me as if he had been stranded on a deserted island and I was his ticket back to civilization. He repeated again as he drew closer, “Are you Jewish?” This was a strange question, but it occurred to me I had been growing out my beard, so that might explain the question.
I responded a bit too loudly for an early Saturday morning, “No, I’m Puerto Rican.”
“Okay, great,” he said as he tried to catch his breath, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I need your help. I have to get my ninety-year-old mother downstairs.”
It was a slow morning for me, so with curiosity I followed him into his apartment building. When we got to the elevator, he pointed at the buttons while distractedly looking in the other direction. “Press six, please,” he said—another strange moment, but I willingly did so. On the ride up, we exchanged names and then awkwardly stared at the numbers. His breathing was heavy and labored. I looked at him from the corner of my eye to see him talking under his breath.
We took the elevator up six stories. Then as he was about to step into his small apartment he shouted, “Ma, Rich is here.”
His mother shouted back with irritation, “Who’s Rich?” (This was quite a New York moment.)
I stepped in and saw a frail, well-dressed elderly woman grasping her walker. She had on a large pearl necklace and heels that looked a bit too big for her. With exasperation, she grumbled things like, “I’m so busy,” “There’s never enough time,” and “How am I going to finish everything?”
Soon I found out that this mom-and-son duo were heading to the local synagogue but that he couldn’t press the elevator button due to Sabbath prohibitions. All he wanted me to do was press the elevator button—nothing more, nothing less.
I look back at that moment and chuckle. But what struck me most in this whole encounter was that this elderly woman was stressed out because of the fullness of her life. Here she was, overwhelmed, on the Sabbath, of all days, with too much to do at ninety years of age.
New York, it is alive and well.
Dangerously Depleted
Our lives can easily take us to the brink of burnout. The pace we live at is often destructive. The lack of margin is debilitating. We are worn out. In all of this, the problem before us is not just the frenetic pace we live at but what gets pushed out from our lives as a result; that is, life with God. Educator and activist Parker Palmer makes a compelling case that burnout typically does not come about because we’ve given so much of ourselves that we have nothing left. He tells us, “It merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
What would it look like to live at a different pace? What if there were a rhythm of life that could instead enable us to deeply connect with God, a lifestyle not dominated by hurry and exhaustion but by margin and joy? As long as we remain enslaved to a culture of speed, superficiality, and distraction, we will not be the people God longs for us to be. We desperately need a spirituality that roots us in a different way.
As long as we remain enslaved to a culture of speed, superficiality, and distraction, we will not be the people God longs for us to be.
No matter our walks of life or professions, our struggle is all too real: single parents trying to find just a moment of oasis from the incessant bickering of children, doctors caught in the unending pressures of life-and-death choices, and pastors over-functioning to the point of breakdown. There are schoolteachers whose work never really ends, sleep-deprived students floundering through exams, immigrant small-business owners struggling to make ends meet, and therapists and social workers overwhelmed with the bottomless crises they need to resolve daily. The pace of our lives can be brutal.
Without denying these realities, we are invited to a different way of being in the world. The late Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama wrote a book titled Three-Mile-an-Hour God. Dr. Koyama was trying to convey that if we want to connect with God, we’d be wise to travel at God’s speed. God has all the time in the world, and as a result he is not in a rush. Thus, Koyama’s claim that God travels at three miles an hour is not an arbitrary figure. On average, humans walk at this pace. And it’s in just such ambling, unhurried, and leisurely moments that we often encounter God. N. T. Wright similarly affirmed, “It is only when we slow down our lives that we can catch up to God.” This is the paradox of contemplative rhythms.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not advocating that we go back to dial-up internet service and take boats instead of airplanes to our destinations. Speed has helped remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating. But speed has also caused our connections with God and others to be incredibly superficial. There’s a severe lack of depth in our lives and communities because we have allowed ourselves to be swept up by a world under the influence of addictive speed. And as philosopher Dallas Willard famously said, “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.”
In the face of this crisis of speed, distraction, and superficial spirituality, there is a way that has been tried and tested through the centuries. It’s a way that has marked my life from the time I became a Christian as a young adult. It’s the way of the monastic, contemplative life. We live in a time when we must learn from the monastery. We desperately need a way of thinking and living that isn’t captive to the powers of efficiency, speed, and performance. We need a way of living according to a different understanding of time and space. We need the treasures of monastic imagination.
A Monastic Imagination
Before you dismiss this notion as an old, irrelevant idea from the Dark Ages, let me attempt to reveal the monastic approach as an important correction to our way of life and faith. As pastor Ken Shigematsu stated, “Every one of us has a monk or nun ‘embryo’ inside of us.” Deep in our souls, we crave space with God that is defined by silence, stillness, and solitude.
My first experience of this kind of monastic spirituality was in college, and it forever changed me. As a student at Nyack College in Rockland County, New York, I was required to take a personal spiritual-formation class my senior year. Part of the class was to go on a weekend retreat at a Franciscan monastery. During the weekend, the students were placed in different parts of the grounds for about eight hours to just “be with God.” In my case, I was told to remain on the platform of an outdoor chapel, with no Bible, only a journal. My assignment was to remain in solitude and write about the experience. This was one of the most challenging and exhilarating days of my life.
I would close my eyes and listen to the beautiful sounds of birds chirping and then in the next moment stare into the ground and see a colony of ants working diligently. In the stillness of the moment, every part of creation somehow connected me to God.
I’d look out into the empty rows of wooden chairs, wondering about my future life of preaching. I’d fix my gaze on the statue of baby Jesus being tenderly held by Joseph at the center of the platform. As I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, I imagined God holding me in that tender embrace. There were moments of delightful contemplation when I heard words of God’s grace spoken deep within my heart. I journaled many pages of prayers, fears, and requests, and when I got tired of writing, I just stared out into the monastery grounds.
Now, I don’t want you to get the idea that it was all heavenly; it wasn’t. There were also times of sheer boredom and dread, when I was disinterested and wanted to be somewhere else. I mean, after just an hour of solitude and silence, I was ready to go home. But I was stuck there.
Product details
- Publisher : WaterBrook (September 15, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525654380
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525654384
- Item Weight : 13.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.8 x 0.89 x 8.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #109,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #211 in Christology (Books)
- #437 in Christian Discipleship (Books)
- #3,301 in Christian Spiritual Growth (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Rich Villodas is the Brooklyn-born lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, a large, multiracial church with more than seventy-five countries represented in Elmhurst, Queens. He is also a key speaker for Emotionally Healthy Discipleship—a movement that has touched hundreds of thousands of people. Rich graduated with a BA in pastoral ministry and theology from Nyack College. He went on to complete his master of divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary. His award-winning book, The Deeply Formed Life, was released in September 2020. He and his wife, Rosie, have two beautiful children and reside in Queens.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2020
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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For those even mildly contaminated with its curse, Rich Villodas offers an effective antidote in this engaging book. The spirituality described touches on every aspect of the Christian life--devotional reading, prayer,fellowship, accountability, family, even sex.
The author's style is easy to read, authentic, and transparent. He offers practical suggestions that communicate the importance of habit-forming discipline. In a market filled with fluff and feel-good religiosity, this book is an important voice calling for depth and significance.
It was refreshing to see a book about Christian discipleship from an evangelical perspective that actually includes chapters on pursuing racial justice and sexual wholeness under the umbrella of spiritual disciplines, and with appropriate nuance to boot. A rare thing in our day, as many resources either ignore these topics or take a very one-sided or agenda-driven approach. Pastor Villodas offers a wise and balanced perspective, and considering our cultural moment Christians cannot and should not shy away from discussing these subjects in the context of spiritual formation.
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but as I was reading this book I feared that many of the people who most need to hear Villodas's advice are the kinds of people who would dismiss it as soon as they got to the chapter on race, thinking it sounded too "liberal" or too much like CRT or something (which it's not). But that means there is definitely an audience that needs this message. And the conclusions taught here are all orthodox -- which is the real reason why they're uncomfortable for some.
I do wish Villodas had gone into more detail in offering practical action steps for each of the five "formative practices" offered. It certainly felt weighted more toward theory than application. Still, the theory taught here is great, and as far as discipleship books go, this one fills a much-needed slot in explaining how to marry contemplative spiritual practices with active/social practices to cultivate a "deeply formed life," so I'd say it's worth a read for anyone interested in Christian spiritual growth. Great for groups or classes, or just for personal enrichment.
Rich writes with the pen of a pastoral-theologian. He explores deep concepts about God (and ourselves) in language the non-scholar can understand. Yet, he also uses his skills as a practitioner to help us live out those deep truths. Rich transparently shares his own story trying to live for Jesus as the pastor of a large multiracial church in Queens. He freely communicates his own struggles and victories that help us apply these foundational truths to our own lives. You may not agree with all his conclusions, but this book will make you think deeply as you come to your own.
In his introduction, Rich lists the foundational values for us:
1. Contemplative rhythms for an exhausted life.
2. Racial reconciliation for a divided world.
3. Interior examination for a world living on the surface.
4. Sexual wholeness for a culture that splits bodies from souls.
5. Missional presence for a distracted and disengaged people.
Most books dealing with spiritual formation mention one or two of these values, but it is highly unusual to deal with all of these issues together. As we look at our current trials of COVID, racial division, economic upheaval, political unrest, forced isolation, and soul-crushing trauma, Rich could not have been more prophetic in dealing with exactly what we face right now.
Rich often gives credit to his mentor, Pete Scazzero, author of "Emotionally Healthy Spirituality," among other books. Fans of Pete’s work on the subject of emotionally healthy discipleship will relate well to Rich’s approach. While some of the same topics are discussed, Rich builds upon Pete’s ideas in a very complementary way.
In the afterword, Rich summarizes:
"So to come full circle, when I speak of being deeply formed, I’m specifically referring to a way of being in the world that’s marked by new rhythms, contemplative presence, and interior awareness, which results in lives that work for reconciliation, justice, and peace while seeing the sacredness of all of life."
Rich does a terrific job helping us focus on the “be” of who we are in Christ so that the “do” of how we serve Him flows out of that new Christ-centered identity. I cannot recommend a book more highly to those who want that type of relationship with Jesus Christ.
Top reviews from other countries

Firstly the good:
- There is some absolute gold in this book.
- If you've read any emotional healthy spirituality books, you'll know the emphasis on deep integration and growth, which Villodas continues. And in light of continuing Christian leader fails and the US led deconstruction of faith a deep life is vital.
- The section on sexuality is v good - it's not about what you would think but about how all of us are sexual beings needing a place to belong. Similar to the small book "purposeful sexuality" by Ed Shaw
- The references are broad and diverse - lots of non Eurpean names and female writers, and the bibliography could provide some great reading I think.
- The questions around our feelings were the parts I found most challenging and want to come back to. Again if you have used EHS material this won't be totally new but it is so important I keep revisting it and actually do the work not just read it !!
- There are lots of good practical practices he encouraged us to have a go at.
My 'dissatisfaction'? :
- I felt in many ways it felt quite disjointed. 5 values are chosen to explore: contemplative prayer, racial reconciliation, interior examination, sexual wholeness and missional presence. All are interesting, but unless I missed it, Villodas doesn't explain why he chose these 5 and why these 5 "must be held together". I agree they are important, but there is no biblical or cultural reason given why to focus on these 5 specifically.
- The section on racial reconciliation is more nuanced and gracious looking towards hope, which is better than many on this topic. Yet He says he focuses on the West, but to single out those who are white and completely ignore racism in other contexts, the historic North African slave trade, Chinese treatment of uyghurs etc etc etc and to use the explanation on white and whiteness along with the definition of racism involving power felt like reading others with a particular agenda.
- The section on evangelism feels a bit dismissive of ways that are simple and reproducible and are growing movements around the world. It is not just transactional to use his languge.
- Finally like EHS I'm surprised how much Thomas Merton is mentioned, as from what I know of his story and writing his theology is not where I'd want to be drawing from (reading yes, but positively commending no).
All in all a good and challenging book, worth reading, I hope my negatives are not straining out negative gnats whilst swallowing positive camels 😄 As Villodas desire to see Christians deeply formed into the image of Christ is definitely what we need.

Deeply practical in terms of reflective thinking and directional questions in answer the question how then should we live and function as Christians, as embodied created beings, as image bearers, as people in a certain time and place with other people in a certain time and place.
Definitely one to return to mull over and ponder - the anecdote about being a Christian in the workplace had me sniggering and cringing as that was naive, tho well-meaning, zealous me in my first job. More bomb-like than winsome...


