Friends University is a private nondenominational Christian university in Wichita, Kansas, United States. It was founded in 1898. The main building was originally built in 1886 for Garfield University but was donated in 1898 to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) by James Davis, a St. Louis business man. In the 1930s the leadership of the school was turned over to an independent board of trustees, with some representation of the Mid-America Yearly Meeting of Friends on the board. It operates today with "an amicable but independent relationship with the evangelical branch of the Society of Friends.
The Protestant Spiritual Formation Movement refers to the heightened emphasis on and increased receptivity to Christian spiritual formation among Protestants in the U.S. and Canada beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the present. This article traces the history of the movement across three developmental waves, situating it within a broader account of social and spiritual renewal movements and clarifying the value of studying such movements. We interpret this movement as one shaped by the Spirit’s convicting and illuminating work, while attending to the dispositions and sensitivities of those who have responded to God’s leading and stewarded the movement and to its evolving organizational dynamics, in order to discern how to respond to the Spirit in our own time and place. The article concludes by turning to our cultural moment and considering what might constitute a fourth wave of the movement.
As part of the Protestant Spiritual Formation Movement Project, this essay offers a window into how the Apprentice Institute for Christian Spiritual Formation at Friends University played a role in the spiritual formation movement. We develop some of the history of spiritual formation emerging at Friends University, with Richard Foster joining the faculty in 1979. We then trace how Friends University and the Apprentice Institute were involved in each of Keas Keasler’s three waves of the spiritual formation movement. 1
