The Pursuit Of God

The Pursuit of God reads like the private notebook of a man who could not stop reaching for something just past his own grasp, and in a sense that is exactly what it was. A. W. Tozer wrote much of it during an overnight train ride to Texas, a slim book of chapters urging readers toward a felt, experiential nearness to God rather than mere correct belief about him. It became, almost immediately, the book he is still remembered for.

Tozer was not an outside admirer of the Christian and Missionary Alliance looking in. The denomination's own website says so plainly: he "was a key figure in The Christian and Missionary Alliance," a pastor whose message was shaped by A. B. Simpson, the man who founded the movement. By 1948, when the book appeared, Tozer had pastored the Alliance's Southside Church in Chicago for two decades, sat on the CMA's own Board of Managers, been twice elected the denomination's vice president, and would soon take over as editor of its own Alliance Weekly. The book's original publisher, Christian Publications, was the Alliance's own press.

More than seventy five years later, Moody Publishers still keeps The Pursuit of God in print, calling it "this beloved classic" and citing a panel of Christian magazine writers who named it among the all time most inspirational books written. A single overnight train journey, and a denominational officer's own restlessness for something more, produced the book that carried the Alliance's deeper life theology to readers who had never heard of the denomination itself.