Spring 1991

ARTICLE TOOLS

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I bought The One Minute Manager. Then I bought Putting the One Minute Manager to Work. I like the idea of becoming a great leader in sixty seconds.

Given our ecclesiastical penchant for baptizing and marketing secular trends a few years after they've peaked, I've been waiting for someone to come out with The One Minute Pastor-a sixty-second guide to spiritual authenticity, vital prayer, and a fully-tithing congregation.

I wish it were possible. Sometimes I feel as if sixty seconds is all I've got. I went into pastoral ministry because I believe the quest to know God transcends all other pursuits. Yet I find the sheer busyness of this work hinders my pursuing God more than any other obstacle.

Often ministry actually reinforces my inattentiveness to God. And I have days when I feel if God really wants me to get all this work done, he'd better take care of his personal business with me in about a minute.

A phone call from a parishioner struck a chord. "I want to know God better, but prayer and reading Scripture always seems such an effort. Will that ever change?" I mumbled something about C. S. Lewis's insight that "what seem our worst prayers, those least supported by devotional feeling, may really be, in God's eyes, our best." But I didn't have much to say beyond that because she had asked the same question I was asking.

I began to wonder: Am I making any real progress in spirituality? Am I really any more like Christ today than I was five years ago? How do I even pursue that? I felt discontented and guilty about my own lack of spiritual development.

Then a statement in Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines nailed me: "My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing-by following him in the overall ...

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