Renovaré

What Renovaré is

Renovaré (Latin: "to renew") is a nonprofit Christian spiritual-formation ministry founded in 1988 by Richard J. Foster. Its stated purpose is to help Christians actually live the life Jesus lived — through engagement with the church’s long tradition of formative practices and through community with others walking the same road. Foster’s 1978 book Celebration of Discipline put the disciplines (prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, celebration) back into ordinary Protestant vocabulary, and Renovaré is the institutional outworking of that book.

In practice the organization is part publisher, part curator, part cohort school. It maintains a free library of articles and podcast episodes, runs the year-long Renovaré Book Club, offers the multi-year Renovaré Institute, sells the Spiritual Formation Workbook line, and publishes the Renovaré Bible Reading Plan. Everything is organized around the conviction that formation is a long obedience in the same direction, done with others.

Why pastors, spiritual directors, and serious readers prefer Renovaré

The single biggest practical difference between Renovaré and almost every other formation resource on the open web is that Renovaré is built around the assumption that you will read fewer things, more slowly, with other people. There is no infinite scroll. There is no daily push notification. There is no streak. The Book Club asks you to spend a full year on one book — currently rotating through texts like Augustine’s Confessions, Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, Julian of Norwich, and Foster’s own Celebration of Discipline.

That posture — slow, communal, classical — is what draws spiritual directors, working pastors, and ordinary Christians who have grown tired of being firehosed with content. Renovaré treats the historic church as a teacher rather than a museum, and it treats the reader as someone capable of doing real interior work over real time. That is the thoughtful person’s spiritual-formation home, and almost nothing else on the open web is built the same way.

The Renovaré Book Club: slow-reading classic Christian texts together

The Book Club is Renovaré’s flagship cohort experience and the easiest way to understand what makes the organization different. Each season — usually 36 weeks running roughly September through May — a single classic Christian text is read straight through at a deliberately humane pace of a few pages per day. Past selections have included Augustine’s Confessions, à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, Julian of Norwich, and selections from the Cloud of Unknowing. Members get the assigned text, a weekly reading rhythm, recorded video teachings from a facilitator (often a working scholar in that field), and access to a private online discussion space organized into small cohorts of typically 10–15 readers.

The point is not to finish the book. The point is to be changed by it, and to notice what God does in you while you read. This sounds like a small thing. In practice it’s transformative — the Book Club is the only widely available format in the English-speaking church that takes "read one classic well per year, with others" seriously, and people who do it for two or three years describe it as the single most formative habit of their adult Christian life.

The Spiritual Formation Workbooks and the six-stream framework

In 1998 Foster published Streams of Living Water, a book arguing that the historic church carries six distinct but complementary "streams" of Christian life and practice: the Contemplative stream (the prayer-filled life), the Holiness stream (the virtuous life), the Charismatic stream (the Spirit-empowered life), the Social Justice stream (the compassionate life), the Evangelical stream (the Word-centered life), and the Incarnational stream (the sacramental life). Renovaré took that framework and turned it into a curriculum — the Spiritual Formation Workbook line, designed for small groups of 4–7 people to walk through together over a year or more.

The workbooks are practical, not theoretical. Each chapter assigns a practice — a fast, a fixed-hour prayer rhythm, a confession exercise, a service commitment — and then asks the group to debrief what happened in their actual lives. The six-stream framework is the unifying spine: instead of arguing about which tradition is right, it assumes that a mature Christian life draws water from all six streams over time. That model is what allows Renovaré to be genuinely ecumenical without becoming generic — it has a structure, and the structure is large enough to hold the church’s historic breadth.

The Renovaré Institute: the paid intensive for serious formation

The Renovaré Institute is the organization’s most demanding offering — a two-year, cohort-based intensive in Christian spiritual formation aimed at pastors, spiritual directors, chaplains, counselors, and lay leaders who want to go deep. Cohorts typically run 30–60 students, meet for week-long residencies once or twice a year (in-person at retreat centers, with regional and global online variants), and follow a designed curriculum that moves through the disciplines, the six streams, the Christian classics, the formative role of community, and the integration of all of it into a personal rule of life. Faculty over the years has included Dallas Willard (before his death in 2013), Gayle Beebe, James Bryan Smith, Carolyn Arends, and Foster himself, alongside guest teachers from across traditions.

It is not cheap, and it is not fast. Total cost across the two years typically runs into the low five figures depending on cohort and travel, and the program asks for several hundred hours of reading, practice, journaling, and small-group work. For the right person — most often someone in vocational ministry or spiritual direction — it functions as the equivalent of a focused graduate program in formation, at a fraction of the time and cost of a residential seminary degree, and with a depth of practice that most seminaries do not actually require.

Pricing

Where Renovaré falls behind

No native mobile app. Everything happens on the website or in a podcast app. There is no offline article reader, no push reminders for daily practice, no streak tracking — and for a formation organization that is partly intentional, but it does mean readers who live on their phone will feel the friction.

No on-demand video library at scale. Unlike Bethel.tv or RightNow Media, Renovaré does not publish an endless catalog of recorded talks. Most video content is tied to a live cohort or course, which is great for accountability and bad for binge-watchers.

No single-tradition home base. By design, Renovaré will never be a one-stop Reformed, Catholic, or LDS resource — its whole identity is ecumenical breadth. Readers looking for a tightly confessional voice will need to pair Renovaré with a tradition-specific source.

No daily-rhythm product. There is no Renovaré daily devotional app, no daily prayer office, no fixed-hour audio companion. The Bible Reading Plan is the closest analog, and it is excellent, but it is delivered as a PDF/web schedule rather than a guided audio experience.

Limited youth and family content. Renovaré is built for adults doing adult interior work. If you need formation resources for children or teens, you will need to look elsewhere.

Renovaré vs. Seedbed vs. Bethel.tv

These three are often grouped together by curious readers, but they sit in quite different places. Renovaré is ecumenical and formation-first — its center of gravity is the historic Christian practice tradition (Catholic mystics, Orthodox fathers, Protestant Puritans, Anabaptist witnesses, Wesleyan revivalists) read slowly, together, over years. Its primary unit is the cohort. Seedbed is Wesleyan-Methodist in posture — a publishing and resourcing arm rooted in the Holiness-Wesleyan stream, with strong courses, study Bibles, and the Seven Minute Seminary teaching series. Bethel.tv is a charismatic streaming platform from Bethel Church in Redding, California — its center of gravity is the Spirit-empowered stream (worship, conferences, the supernatural ministry of the church) delivered as on-demand video.

Different strengths. Renovaré is broader (six streams, deep ecumenical reading, cohort practice). Seedbed is a focused Wesleyan-Holiness publisher with strong scholarly teaching. Bethel.tv is the streaming home of the Bethel charismatic world. A reader who wants to walk slowly with the historic disciplines should start at Renovaré. A reader who wants the Wesleyan-Holiness stream specifically should start at Seedbed. A reader who wants charismatic teaching and worship on demand should start at Bethel.tv. You can absolutely use more than one — they overlap less than the surface suggests.

One way to think about it: Renovaré teaches you how to read Augustine for a year with other people; Seedbed teaches you the Wesleyan reading of sanctification; Bethel.tv hands you a worship night and a Bill Johnson sermon on demand. All three are doing legitimate work. They are answering different questions.

Alternatives to Renovaré