The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

What The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is a short pastoral book on spiritual formation, structured around the claim that hurry is "the great enemy of spiritual life in our day." Comer’s argument has two halves. The first half is the diagnosis: modern life has accelerated to a pace that is incompatible with the way Jesus actually lived and the way human beings actually grow in love. The second half is the prescription: four ancient practices — silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing — that retrain the soul to operate at a sustainable speed.

Stylistically it sits between memoir and manual. Comer tells the story of his own ministry burnout in Portland, his decision to step away from the megachurch trajectory, and the practices he and his family rebuilt around. The structure is loose: four big movements, short chapters, lots of pull quotes, generous white space. It is intentionally written to be read on an airplane, in a coffee shop, or in the back of a sanctuary — not in a seminary library.

Why readers across traditions keep recommending Hurry

The single biggest reason this book traveled so far is that it gives readers permission to name something they already felt but couldn’t articulate. Most Christian readers know they are tired. They suspect that the tiredness is doing something to their faith. What they didn’t have was a vocabulary for it — and they didn’t have a pastor figure saying, "Yes, the speed is the problem, and you are allowed to slow down." Comer supplies both, and he does it without scolding.

The other reason it travels is that the practices Comer recommends are catholic in the small-c sense. Silence, solitude, Sabbath, simplicity — these belong to no single tradition. Reformed readers can find them in the Puritans, Wesleyan readers in the holiness tradition, Catholic readers in the desert fathers and Ignatius, Orthodox readers in the hesychasts. By rooting the prescription in pre-modern Christian practice rather than in a particular post-Reformation theology, Comer wrote a book that an unusually wide range of churches could put on their reading list without controversy.

The Dallas Willard thesis: hurry as the spiritual enemy

The book opens with the story behind the title. A young pastor — eventually understood to be John Ortberg — asks Dallas Willard what he needs to do to stay spiritually healthy in vocational ministry. Willard pauses and says, "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." The pastor asks what else. Willard says, "There is nothing else." Comer takes that exchange as his thesis and spends the first half of the book defending it: hurry, not sin in the abstract, is the operating condition under which most modern Christians become anxious, distracted, and slowly de-formed.

The move that makes this work pastorally — rather than just rhetorically — is Comer’s insistence that hurry is incompatible with love, because love requires presence and presence requires unhurried time. Once that connection is made, the practical implications cascade. Calendar management becomes a spiritual issue. Phone use becomes a spiritual issue. Saying yes to a third commitment becomes a spiritual issue. The Willard thesis is not original to Comer, but Comer is the one who carried it from the formation guild into the mass-market church.

The four practices: silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, slowing

The back half of the book is organized around four practices that Comer offers as a starter rule of life. Silence and solitude is the practice of regular time alone with God, off the phone, without input — Comer suggests starting at minutes per day, not hours. Sabbath is a weekly 24-hour stop, framed broadly enough that readers from very different denominational backgrounds can adopt it without forcing one specific theology of the fourth commandment. Simplicity is a posture toward possessions, consumption, and ambition — less Marie Kondo, more Richard Foster. Slowing is the most underrated of the four: it’s a set of small disciplines (driving in the slow lane, picking the longest grocery line, leaving your phone in the other room) designed to train you out of the reflex to optimize every moment.

None of these are new. Comer doesn’t claim they are. What he does — and does well — is make them feel actionable rather than aspirational. Each practice gets a chapter with examples, suggested starting points, and honest acknowledgment that the early weeks feel uncomfortable. Readers who finish the book usually walk away having tried at least one of the four, which is a much higher conversion rate than most spiritual-formation books achieve. The companion workbook turns these into a structured eight-week experiment for groups.

Practicing the Way: the successor book and the formation ecosystem

Hurry isn’t a standalone artifact anymore. In 2024 Comer released Practicing the Way, a fuller treatment of the same formation vision, plus an extensive free curriculum (the Practicing the Way Course) designed for churches to run small-group cohorts, plus an app, plus printable rule-of-life templates. If Hurry is the diagnosis and the on-ramp, Practicing the Way is the long-form apprenticeship guide — and most churches that adopted Hurry as a book-club read in 2020-2022 have migrated their formation programming to the Practicing the Way materials since.

That changes how to think about Hurry in 2026. It’s no longer "the Comer book" — it’s the introduction to a much larger body of work, and it’s the easiest entry point. Many readers do Hurry first (because it’s short and finishable), then move to Practicing the Way for the deeper system, then pull in the church-wide curriculum if they’re leading a group. The order matters less than knowing the ecosystem exists; reading Hurry alone gives you the thesis, but the practices land deeper when paired with the structured Practicing the Way materials.

Pricing

Where The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry falls behind

No deep theological exposition. Comer is writing as a pastor for general readers, not as a theologian for theologians. If you want a careful biblical-theology treatment of Sabbath or simplicity, this book will frustrate you — pair it with something like Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance or Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline.

Heavy reliance on a single influence. Dallas Willard’s fingerprints are on nearly every chapter, and readers who have read Willard directly sometimes feel they are getting the trade-paperback version of material they already own. That’s not a flaw if you haven’t read Willard; it’s a feature. But if you have, the diminishing returns are real.

Light on the harder Sabbath questions. Comer’s Sabbath chapter is broadly evangelical with formation-tradition flavor — a weekly 24-hour stop, framed flexibly. It does not engage strict Sabbatarian arguments (Seventh-day Adventist, some Reformed) or strict anti-Sabbatarian arguments (some dispensational and new-covenant theology readers). Different traditions read the fourth commandment very differently; Hurry stays inside one register.

Limited application beyond the individual. The practices are framed largely at the personal and family level. The book has relatively little to say about how communities, churches, or institutions should be restructured to be less hurried — that work has shifted into the Practicing the Way curriculum, which is church-shaped from the start.

No engagement with the harder edge cases. Single parents, shift workers, caregivers, and those in acute seasons of crisis often find the Sabbath and solitude prescriptions hard to implement as written. Comer acknowledges this in passing but doesn’t spend serious time on it; readers in those seasons may need to do significant translation work.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry vs. Practicing the Way vs. The Common Rule

These three books are the most-recommended modern formation reads, and they’re close enough in territory that readers regularly ask which one to start with. Different strengths. Hurry is the diagnosis and the on-ramp — short, story-driven, and the easiest to finish. Practicing the Way is Comer’s longer, more systematic follow-up — broader scope, more developed framework, designed to be run as a cohort. The Common Rule (Justin Whitmel Earley) is the most concrete of the three — it gives you eight specific daily and weekly habits and tells you to just start.

If you’ve never read a formation book, start with Hurry. It’s short, it lands fast, and it gives you the vocabulary to understand what the others are doing. If Hurry resonated and you want the longer system, move to Practicing the Way — same author, same vision, more structure. If you want something even more practical and less narrative, The Common Rule is the most regimented of the three and the friendliest to people who like checklists.

All three sit in roughly the same theological neighborhood — broadly evangelical, influenced by Dallas Willard and the spiritual-formation tradition, ecumenical enough to be used across Reformed, Wesleyan, and Catholic readerships. None of them is doing systematic theology; all three are doing applied formation. Pick based on length and format preference more than theology.

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