The role of church leadership

If you are a church leader—perhaps you are a pastor, or you lead a small group—you would do well to concentrate on this point. Leading people to live Christianly comes down to this: leading people into the habit of a Christian Quiet Time.

I can summarize Christian living as one habit: the habit of the Quiet Time. There is much that will come after this—service and evangelism and all kinds of character development. But, it all flows out of the time alone with God in prayer and in His Word.

If we can get people to get the Quiet Time right, there is a good chance that all else will follow. If we don’t get the Quiet Time right, we might do more harm than good. What do I mean by that?

There is always a danger of inoculating people against the gospel rather than infecting them with it. We give them a small dose of the gospel and they think they have the real disease. Thus, they are not interested in true Christianity because they think they have experienced true Christianity.

But, what they have experienced is a country mile from true Christianity. It is churchianity. It is bootstrapianity. It is the stuff of the Pharisees—the stuff that Jesus railed mercilessly against.

There is no Christian living without the Quiet Time. There is no Christian living without prayer. There is no Christian living without being transformed by the renewing of our mind. (Romans 12:2) This is done through time in the Word.

If you are a pastor, you can boil your job down to this: get people into the habit of a Quiet Time. If you are a small group leader, you can distill your job to this: help people form the habit of a Quiet Time. Once you do that, discipleship will follow as surely as night follows day. Simple, right?