The key ideas

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

John Mark Comer, 2019

A megachurch pastor preached six times in one Sunday and one day realised he was turning into someone he did not like. John Mark Comer shows how hurry differs from busyness and why it robs us of love, joy and peace. You will learn the symptoms of hurry sickness and the four practices Comer finds in the life of Jesus.

Who it is for

For anyone who lives on the run and more and more often feels not tiredness inside, but numbness. And for anyone curious about what the Christian tradition says about the pace of life, even if faith is not their thing.

The solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It's to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.

Six sermons in one Sunday

Sunday evening. The pastor has no strength left at all. That day he has preached six times in a row: the church has just added another service, and more and more people keep coming. From the outside it looks like a great success. But inside, as he will later write, he feels like a ghost: half alive, half dead, more numb than tired.

That pastor is John Mark Comer, the founder of Bridgetown Church in Portland. His congregation grew by more than a thousand people a year for seven years in a row and became a megachurch, a church with thousands of members. In 2019 Comer published a book about what he understood after that Sunday. His conclusion is simple and uncomfortable: the great enemy of his life is not sin in the usual sense, nor laziness, but hurry.

The book is openly Christian. Comer writes as a pastor and an apprentice of Jesus, and his answer to hurry is the way of Jesus: silence, a day of rest, simplicity and slowing down. But his diagnosis is for everyone who lives in a modern city with a phone in their pocket, believers and non-believers alike.

You will see how hurry differs from busyness, how to recognise it, why it takes away love, joy and peace in particular, and which four practices Comer offers in its place. This is not a book about time management. It is about the kind of person you become while you rush.

Why hurry to become someone you don't like?

After that night Comer asked himself a question that would become the axis of the whole book: who am I becoming? He looked at himself honestly and saw a man who rushed through every day and was so busy with life that he was missing it. There was hardly any time left for his wife and children. He noticed he was in a hurry to become someone he did not like.

Hence the main idea of the first part: you can be a successful pastor and a failing apprentice of Jesus. For Comer this was more frightening than any tiredness. Faith, for him, is not a set of beliefs but apprenticeship: a life lived beside a teacher that gradually changes your character. And apprenticeship has no shortcut.

Then Comer did something that from the outside looked like a step backwards. He demoted himself: he left the leadership of a large church and took charge of one small congregation in central Portland. He started working less and began keeping a day of rest once a week.

His new life looks almost ordinary. In the evening he builds Star Wars Lego with his children instead of answering emails. It is exactly these ordinary things that he calls coming back to life.

What matters here is not the scale of the decision but the question that led to it. Comer invites the reader to ask it before tiredness does: not “What am I getting done?” but “Who am I becoming at this pace?”

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About the author

John Mark Comer is an American pastor and the founder of Bridgetown Church in Portland. He has written several bestsellers on the spiritual life and created Practicing the Way, a project on spiritual practices.

All books by this author: John Mark Comer

Terms from the book

  • Paul
  • Edison
  • Sabbath
  • Portland
  • Oliver
  • Bridgetown: Bridgetown Church in Portland, founded by John Mark Comer.
  • Megachurch: The American name for a Protestant church attended by thousands of people every week.
  • Ortberg: John Ortberg, an American pastor and author of books on the spiritual life, and Comer's mentor. He wrote the foreword to this book.
  • Willow Creek: Willow Creek Community Church, one of the largest Protestant churches in the United States, in the suburbs of Chicago.
  • Willard: Dallas Willard (1935–2013), an American philosopher, a professor at the University of Southern California and an author of books on the Christian spiritual life.
  • Gospel: An account of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. The New Testament has four: according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
  • Hurry sickness: A pattern of behaviour in which a person is always rushing, anxious and irritated by any delay. This is how Comer describes it. It is not a medical diagnosis.
  • Han: Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-born philosopher who lives in Germany. He writes about tiredness and the acceleration of modern society.
  • Fruit of the Spirit: The qualities which, according to the apostle Paul, the Holy Spirit grows in a person: love, joy, peace, patience and others.
  • Yoke: A wooden crossbar used to join two oxen so that they pull a plough or a cart together.
  • Rabbi: A teacher and interpreter of the Scriptures in Judaism.
  • Rule of life: An expression from the book: a set of repeated practices around which a person deliberately builds their life.
  • Trellis: A lattice or support on which climbing plants such as vines grow.

All terms

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