Catching God's Heart: How Personal Devotion Fuels Pastoral Leadership

By WJ de Kock, ThD, Professor of Practical Theology | Educational Consultant, Partners in Ministry

~12 minute read

It is 5:30 in the morning and the day has not yet decided what it will be.

The autumn cold has settled in properly now, not theatrical winter-in-July cold, but the quieter, more honest cold of late April, the kind that doesn't announce itself but is simply there when you get up, like a patient fact. The dark is still thick beyond the window. The kettle is on. There is a Bible open on the table, or a journal, or both, and for a few minutes before the phone comes alive and the emails begin accumulating and the first pastoral emergency surfaces, for a few minutes, it is just you and the silence and whatever God might have to say into it.

This is not productivity time. This is not sermon prep. This is something older, stranger, and more important than either.

This is the source.

Four weeks into this series, we have named some uncomfortable things.

We have sat with the exhausted pastor on the Tuesday after Easter, running on empty in a season that has asked everything and returned the invoice. We have stood with Thomas, pressing fingers into the wounds of the resurrection, insisting on honest encounter rather than comfortable second-hand certainty as the ground of genuine vision. We have walked the Emmaus road alongside a leader who leads not through coercion but through presence—asking questions, opening the text, making as if to go further, trusting love over leverage.

These are not three separate problems with three separate solutions. They share a single truth.

Inspiration for leadership leaks.

Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily, quietly, the way a tank drains when the slow puncture is never found. The pastoral voice that was once alive and particular gradually begins to sound like leadership content. The vision that was once genuinely caught from God starts to look like rebranded strategy. The non-manipulative presence that walked the Emmaus road becomes harder to sustain when you are running on performance rather than encounter. And one day—not with a crash, but with a slow, dispiriting recognition—you notice that what you are doing on Sunday morning and what you are actually experiencing of God have quietly diverged.

You are preaching a resurrection you have not personally inhabited this week.

The inner life is not the backstage of your ministry. It is the ministry. And when it runs dry, everything downstream eventually tells the truth about it.

Easter is behind us. The Ascension has not yet come. Pentecost is further still. And in this precise liturgical window—these forty strange, intimate days, Luke records that the risen Christ is doing something quietly extraordinary.

He is not deploying his followers into their public mission. He is preparing them.

"He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." Private instruction before public commission. Intimate formation before worldwide deployment. The disciples who will, within weeks, turn the world upside down are, right now, in a room, receiving rather than doing. Learning to perceive what God is doing before they go out to participate in it.[i]

The command that follows is almost shocking in its simplicity: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised."[ii]

Wait.

In a culture that prizes speed, scale, and output, Jesus tells his newly commissioned world-changers to stop and wait for what only God can give. Not because there is nothing to do. Because what they are about to do will require something they cannot manufacture, cannot borrow, cannot produce by sheer pastoral willpower.

This is the curriculum of the forty days. And it is, I want to suggest, the curriculum your leadership most urgently needs right now.

The most intense act of devotion in the Gospels does not occur in the Temple, or on the Mount of Transfiguration, or in the synagogue. It happens in a garden, at night, with sweat like blood falling to the ground.

"My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."[iii]

Gethsemane is not a scene of spiritual triumph. It is honest, costly, undignified prayer—the kind where the preferred option is named first, where the will has to be surrendered rather than surrendering willingly. And it makes everything that follows possible. The cross is not despite Gethsemane. It is through it. The most public act in human history is carried by the most private act of surrender.

This is the same pattern Mark quietly notes in Jesus' ordinary ministry rhythm: "Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed." Before the crowds. Before the teaching. Before the healings. Before even the disciples could find him. In the dark, before the day had decided what it would be—the source was attended to.[iv]

The pattern is not incidental. It is the architecture.

Andy Hawthorne, who has led The Message Trust through decades of extraordinary urban mission in Manchester, puts it with characteristic plainness: "Good ideas are plentiful, but God-ideas are born in prayer." The leaders who finish well, he observes, are those who learn to wait on God before acting for God—not because action is unimportant, but because action without discernment is how leaders build impressive momentum around things God never asked them to pursue.[v]

"Do you not perceive it?" is Isaiah's challenge to a generation so busy managing the old thing that it has missed the new thing already springing up. Prayer is the practice of perception. It is how you develop eyes that see what God is doing rather than eyes that can only see what you are doing.[vi]

This kind of prayer is not a theological performance, not the pastoral voice doing its Sunday thing in a smaller room, but unhurried, soul-baring conversation with God. The most transformative pastoral insights rarely emerge from planning meetings. They surface in the spaces between asking and listening, in the silence where the noise runs out and something older and realer begins. Linger longer than feels productive. That discomfort is the doorway.[vii]

And then, slowly, deeply, letting a single passage settle into the bones over days rather than extracting its usable content in twenty minutes. The leaders who speak with genuine authority are not those who have read the most. They are those in whom the Word has taken up residence and started rearranging the furniture.[viii]

It is not performed devotion. Not polished theological articulation.

Presence. Peace. Hearing. "Apart from me," says Jesus, "you can do nothing."[ix]

This is not a warning. It is the most liberating truth in pastoral theology. The responsibility for fruitfulness belongs to the Vine, not the branch. Your job is not to produce. Your job is to abide. God is considerably better at the production than you are — and has been, quietly, the whole time.

Every thread of this series runs back to that single root.

We began with the exhausted pastor on the Tuesday after Easter — tending the wound before offering it, staying in the Holy Saturday room, trusting the God who was not absent on that silent Saturday. Where does that capacity come from? Not from resilience strategies. From a life that has learned to receive before it gives.

We asked whether your community is carrying a resurrection vision or running a resuscitation programme — whether you are in the boat or standing with Thomas, insisting on the wound-bearing encounter rather than the managed second-hand version. Where does Thomas's courage come from? From a life with God that has learned to be honest with God before it is honest with anyone else.

We walked the Emmaus road and asked whether you lead from love or leverage — whether you can make as if to go further rather than force the moment, whether you can trust love to do what coercion cannot. Where does that patience come from? From sitting with a God who has been practising it toward you, without manipulation, without agenda, every morning before you were ready.

The same source. Always the same source.

The interior life. Practised in the dark. Protected from the diary. Prioritised above the inbox, before the phone has opinions, in the pre-dawn cold when the day has not yet decided what it will be.

You are in the same forty-day season as the first disciples — between resurrection and ascension, not yet Pentecost, held in the between. And the invitation of this season has not changed in two thousand years. Before the deployment: receive. Before the words: listen. Before the public act: the private surrender.

God has been awake longer than you have.

The fire is already lit on the beach.

All we have to do is show up.

[i] Acts 1:3 (NIV). Luke's summary of the forty-day period is strikingly brief—a single verse covering six weeks of intimate instruction—suggesting the content was less important to record than the pattern: formation before deployment, encounter before commission.

[ii] Acts 1:4 (NIV).

[iii] Matt. 26:39 (NIV). The Gethsemane prayer is unique in the Gospel narratives for its honest expression of preferred alternatives—Jesus names what he would choose before surrendering to what the Father has chosen. It is an act of costly, unperformed honesty.

[iv] Mark 1:35 (NIV).

[v] Andy Hawthorne, Founder and Global CEO, The Message Trust, interviewed by Tim Tucker on the Follow Forward podcast, adapted in "Follow Forward in Prayer: Leadership Lessons from Andy Hawthorne," Biblical Leadership, February 22, 2026, biblicalleadership.com.

[vi] Isa. 43:18–19 (NIV). This passage serves as the founding scripture of The Message Trust. Hawthorne cites it as central to his theology of prayerful discernment: prayer is less about petitioning God and more about perceiving what God is already doing.

[vii] W. J. de Kock, "Renewing the Commitment to Spiritual Disciplines," Partners in Ministry Blog (2025): "The most transformative ministry ideas often don't emerge from the busyness of planning but from the quiet depths of prayer."

[viii] Ibid. "Instead of speed-reading your way through chapters, try slowing down... Think of it as marinating in God's Word rather than rushing through it."

[ix] John 15:5 (NIV).