Encounter Classics

Reader’s Edition

Forty Readings from the Letters of Gerhard Tersteegen

You do not need to climb to God. He is already here.

If you have wanted a closer walk with God and found that the distance would not close, no matter how you prayed, Gerhard Tersteegen has one thing to tell you: God is not far. He is nearer to you than you are to yourself, and He is glad to be found. This book is about living in the presence of God in an ordinary life, by a man who did it for nearly fifty years and taught thousands of others how.

For nearly fifty years, from his rooms in Mülheim, the ribbon-weaver answered merchants and servants, widows and young preachers, a countess and the dying, with one unhurried counsel: Turn inward. Become like a child. Tell Him everything. When it is dark, go on believing. If prayer has gone dry, if you cannot stop accusing yourself, if your life is too crowded to hear God in, you are exactly the person he wrote to.

“Just tell Jesus simply that you cannot pray, and already you are praying.”

Forty readings, each the length of a cup of coffee. Every reading gathers what Tersteegen said on one subject across his letters, with every sentence of counsel his own, drawn from the first complete English translation of all 605 of his letters. Each opens with a line of Scripture he himself reached for and closes with a short poem from his Spiritual Flower Garden. The book runs in an order — the nearness of God first, the cross in the middle, courage at the end — but it was made for returning, not finishing.

The Protestant who walked the same road as Brother Lawrence

Tersteegen is the man whose hymns John Wesley brought into English, the voice behind “Lo, God is here!” The troubles his correspondents brought him have not aged: a grief that will not close, a self you cannot stop accusing, doubts that will not argue themselves away, a body that fails and a courage that fails with it. What he gave every one of them, he gives you: not a method, but a Friend, nearer than you have dared to believe and easier to reach than you have been told.

A book to keep, and to give

An Encounter Classics Reader’s Edition, with a preface on Tersteegen’s life, a table naming the letters behind every reading, and a list of the poems and where they come from.

Open anywhere. He is already here.

Kindle $7.99 · Paperback $12.99 · Hardcover $19.99  |  192 pages  |  ISBN 978-1-971776-23-1 (paperback) · 978-1-971776-24-8 (hardcover) · 978-1-971776-25-5 (eBook)

The complete correspondence stands behind this book: all 605 of Tersteegen’s letters, free in English at gerhardtersteegen.com.

Publishing Fall 2026

The Fiery Soliloquy of Gerlac Petersen

Complete Edition

This book was supposed to be ashes.

In November of 1411, in a priory near Zwolle, a young canon lay dying. He was thirty-three years old, half blind, and on fire with God. In his cell lay everything he had ever written — prayers, confessions, cries of love set down on loose leaves, for no eyes but God's. He asked his prior to burn them all.

The prior refused.

His closest friend gathered the rescued pages into a book. Printed at Cologne in 1616, its title page made a claim bold enough to stop a reader cold: Alter Thomas de Kempis — “a second Thomas à Kempis.” For generations it was treasured beside the Imitation of Christ itself; the censor who approved it wrote that it inflames souls “like little sparks.” Then it faded from the shelves and waited in Latin — never once given to readers in the English of our own day.

Until now.

A man who kept leaving good company

Gerlac Petersen was not writing a book. He was talking to God. His brethren remembered how, walking with them at the edge of town, he would sometimes stop, and excuse himself with a single sentence that has followed him down six centuries:

“Brethren, I must return to my cell, for there is One who awaits me there.”

What he said to the One who awaited him is this book. Nothing in it was written to impress you. Every line was written to reach God — and it did, and it still does. To read him is to be lent one man's private conversation with God, with a standing invitation to stop eavesdropping at any line you choose, and begin to speak yourself.

“As from eternity Thou hast loved Thyself, so from eternity Thou hast loved me.”

In this edition

The first new English translation in over a century, rendered directly from the Latin of the 1616 Cologne edition. With the story of Gerlac's remarkable life, drawn from the Windesheim Chronicle — the half-blind eyes, the friend who hand-copied choir books so he could sing, the fire that was refused. A brief guide, How to Read Gerlac, prepares you for his boldest sentences before you meet them. Thirty-nine short chapters, each named for the hungry heart — Prayer in the Dark. Iron in the Fire. Face to Face. The Unburdened Heart — one chapter to a morning. A glossary keeps his luminous vocabulary; endnotes trace the Scriptures and church fathers standing guard behind his most daring lines.

Who this book is for

If you have tasted enough of God to know there is more — if you are hungry for the walk with Him that the old saints seemed to know — this book was saved from the fire for you. Readers of Brother Lawrence, Thomas à Kempis, and Gerhard Tersteegen will recognize the country at once.

A volume in the Encounter Classics series — the recovered devotional classics of Encounter Press.

The door stands open. A light is burning inside.

Paperback · Hardcover · eBook  |  196 pages  |  ISBN 978-1-971776-20-0 (paperback) · 978-1-971776-21-7 (hardcover) · 978-1-971776-22-4 (eBook)