The Urgent and the Important

When America’s thirty-fourth president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, began his administration, he instructed his aides and his executive assistant that there should be only two stacks of papers placed on his desk in the Oval Office. The first would be a stack of those things that were urgent, and only the extremely urgent. The other was to be a stack of the important, and only the extremely important. He said years later that it was interesting to him how rarely the two were one in the same. He was right.

The conflict between the urgent and the important is inescapable. How easy to get the two confused! It is common for us to think that by staying busy and working hard we’re dealing with the important things. But that’s not necessarily the case. Those things most urgent rarely represent the things most important. And therein lies the reason so many people today feel such a lack of satisfaction after working so hard for so many hours each day.

Not only is that frustration true in the world in which we live, it is all-the-more true in the churches we pastor. When we substitute the urgent for the important in the church of Jesus Christ, we emphasize work, activity, involvement, doing, producing, impressing, and accomplishing. But it leaves us feeling flat and empty within. Exhaustion replaces satisfaction. Furthermore, it smacks of the secularized world in which we live. Who knows how many people have been turned away from Christianity, longing for the true, living God but encountering at their church a secularized substitute?

I’m convinced that this explains why so many activities in so many churches have been distracted from the one essential ingredient that makes a church unique in this postmodern society: worship.

When we look at life with a horizontal perspective, the urgent takes center stage. It is loud. It is popular. It is product-oriented. It is impressive. The horizontal highlights all things human . . . such as human achievement, human importance, human logic, human significance, human opinion, human efficiency, human results. It drains our time and demands our attention. As that ever-present tyranny screams at us, the most natural reaction is to yield, giving it our first priority. After all, it’s urgent! We’re all-too familiar with its voice.

The important things, however, are different. They are quiet and deep. They are vertical in their perspective. They highlight the things of God—God’s Word, God’s will, God’s plan, God’s people, God’s way, God’s reason for living, God’s glory, and God’s honor. And the goal of all these? God’s worship.

The underlying objective of a church committed to the important things—rather than the urgent—is the cultivation of a body of worshipers whose sole focus is on the Lord our God.

 Is that your church’s objective?

—Chuck

Comments

[Kyle]

Chuck, as a young pastor of a small church, this article is particularly challenging. I must evaluate my priorities in this new light to be sure my focus is not on the urgent but on the important. What an interesting concept!