An Excerpt from Bill Hull's Blog

It is more important to be a disciple than to have a plan to make disciples

There must be a landfill where all unused and failed plans to make disciples now rest in peace. Those plans had been started with different motives-some to grow the church, others to reach communtiies, these are not always the same. Most probably intended to bring depth to the church members-so that anyone coming in contact with them would be changed. But for one reason or another, the plans went sideways, spun off into a ditch, or were shredded by the resistance of a threatened congregation at a late-night meeting. But most of them failed because the pastor was not developing as a disciple. How can one make disciples without practicing the very things he or she advocates?

Before you try to answer that question, let me do so. Hardworking pastors really care about their work and people, but they are too busy organizing, motivating, preaching, and putting out fires to attend to their own souls. So the fire gets low, and sometimes it might be but an ember. This has happened to me at times. It has made me feel like a creaking, old, broken-down car that is sputtering on the side of the road with smoke billowing from beneath and the water gauge on red. Usually I need to be towed back to the garage for repairs. The challenge for pastors is to be a disciple first, I don't mean technically or in theological terms, but in seeking God daily and practicing the spiritual disciplines he or she advocates. Yet that is getting harder to do. Thomas Friedman, the brilliant columnist for the New York Times, talked about his problem. His column's title was The Age of Interruption. He reflected on spending four days in a Peruvian rain forest: " I have to say, as a wired junkie myself, there was something cleansing about spending four days totally disconnected. It was the best antidote to the disease of our age, what the former Microsoft executive Linda Stone aptly labeled ' continuous partial attention.' That is, you are multitasking your way through the day, continuously devoting only partial attention to each act or person you encounter. It is the malady of modernity. We have gone from the Iron Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Age of Interruption."
The key to our souls is contemplation, the acquired habit of being alone with God to hear His voice. I find it hard to start my day with God if the first thing I do is check my email or phone. I hear all the other voices more readily than God's. Friedman points out that a wired society means that everyone is always "in" and never "out." that calls for artificially creating "out." My focus has been to rearrange my life around the practices of Jesus. Look at His life filled with the press of the crowd, the hatred of religious leaders, and the dullness of His disciples. How did he handle it? He prayed, he prayed alone, and he prayed at special times of pressure and decision. He lived a life focused on others, a life that was based on humility and sacrifice powered by love. What Jesus knew and I am beginning to know is that prayer is a relationship, not a transaction. Where do we get the patience and the trust to really do this?

By Bill Hull
Read more from him at: http://blog.bible.org/hull/