A statement dropped on a Tuesday. I do not remember which Tuesday. There have been many Tuesdays like it. Something breaks into the news: A shooting. A Supreme Court ruling. A pastor’s fall. Within hours, the internet is fully awake.
Soon, we see statements appear. Positions are declared. Silences are cataloged. Lines are drawn. By Wednesday morning, the sorting has already happened, with the righteous on one side, the complicit on the other. By the following week, the algorithm has moved on to something new, leaving behind the usual debris: strained friendships, flattened nuance, and the aftertaste of having just performed something that looked but did not feel like faithfulness.
Most of us have probably seen this happen a million times. As a pastor, I have seen it up close and personal. I have sat in rooms where church staff wrestled over whether we needed to post a statement within 48 hours of national controversies or tragedies. We didn’t lack conviction, but we knew whatever we said would be examined for what it did not say.
One then begins to realize the clock is not really measuring time; it is measuring suspicion. I have watched thoughtful, Bible-reading, Spirit-seeking Christians reduce the work of discernment to the speed of a news cycle. I have done it myself. I have mistaken urgency for obedience, letting the clock tell me when to speak and the crowd tell me what to say. But one day, I opened my Bible to Exodus 34 and met a God whose behavior, by his own description, is slow.
Imagine the scene for a moment. Moses has already seen plagues swallow an empire. He has watched the sea divide and close again. He has climbed a mountain wrapped in cloud and thunder. And still he asks for more: “Show me your glory” (33:18, ESV throughout). It is one of the most audacious prayers in Scripture. And what happens next is not what we might expect. There was no storm. No earthquake. No cosmic display meant to overwhelm the senses. God answered with a description. He passed before Moses and declared his name: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (34:6).
If you read the Bible long enough, you notice something. Israel returns to this moment again and again. The line echoes through the Psalms, through Jonah and Joel and Nahum and Nehemiah. Whenever the people need to remember who God is, they return here. And one of the first things God says about himself is that he is slow to anger. The Hebrew phrase is erekh appayim, which literally means “long of nostrils.” The image is earthy and human. The God of Abraham introduces himself as someone who draws a long breath before responding and inhales slowly when others would flare with anger.
Scholar Paul R. House wrote that this description of God can serve as an interpretive lens for the entire Old Testament story. Once you see it, it’s easier to notice the pattern everywhere. The centuries between the promise of the Messiah and the coming of Christ are not empty space. They are the long patience of a God who was forming a people and building a lineage that would produce his anointed one instead of merely putting out a fire. Caught between this promise and its fulfillment, Habakkuk cried out, “How long, O Lord?” (1:2, NLT), and God answered with something that almost sounds like a contradiction: “If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come; it will not delay” (2:3).
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In The Justification of God, John Piper noted that God’s patience is not weakness but power. The one who could end the story at any moment chooses not to, and that choice reveals something about who God is. The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama spent years sitting with that same realization and arrived at a conclusion I find disarming. “Love has its speed,” he wrote. “It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. … It goes on … at three miles an hour.”
Three miles an hour is the pace of a human being walking down a road. Nazareth to Capernaum is roughly 26 miles. At that pace, it takes a bit more than a full workday to make the trek. Jesus has walked that path. But he was rarely in a hurry in all his journeys. He stopped for interruptions. People reached out and touched his cloak. A stranger called his name from the roadside, and he healed. Koyama called this the three-mile-an-hour God.
The phrasing was meant as a critique of a world drunk on technological speed. But it lands just as sharply on the church. As I’ve noted, we have built an ecclesiastical culture that assumes faster is more faithful and the first to speak wins. Yet the God who spoke the universe into being chose to arrive as a baby in an occupied village and spent 30 years in obscurity before speaking a single public word.
There is a word for this kind of slowness buried in the middle of Galatians 5. When Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit, the word he uses for patience is makrothumia. It is a compound word that means something like “long-tempered,” the capacity to take a long time before a flame appears. Paul could have chosen a different word. Greek had hupomonē, which means endurance under hardship. But he chose the word that describes patience with people.
Patience is a discipline. It should not be mistaken for passivity, cowardice, or the absence of conviction. It is simply the refusal to let the person who provokes determine the speed of the response. Said another way, it is the decision to burn at the right moment, in the right way, for the right reason. The hot take rewards immediacy and treats reaction as courage. But makrothumia waits.
In Galatians, Paul does not describe this type of slowness as a personality trait. It is a fruit, which means it grows slowly and quietly over time. The Holy Spirit produces patience the way roots spread through soil. And it is supposed to flow through us toward a society that desperately needs it.
The need, however, isn’t new. Most of us know about the story of the woman who was caught in adultery and dragged before Jesus (John 8:1–11). The crowd had gathered. The religious leaders wanted a verdict from Jesus, and they wanted it quickly.
The urgency was manufactured, designed to force a quick answer under pressure. Condemn the woman and appear righteous, or show mercy and appear soft on sin. But Jesus just bent down and wrote in the dirt. The Gospel writer never tells us what he wrote. Commentators have wondered for centuries. But the silence may be the point. When Jesus finally spoke, the words were simple: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone” (v. 7).
Then, the accusers left—first the oldest, followed by the rest. The woman remained standing with the one person who had the authority to condemn her. And he did not.
Patience here looks like the most powerful presence in the room refusing to let the crowd set the terms. Centuries later, family therapist Edwin Friedman would give language to dynamics like this. After studying families, congregations, and organizations, Friedman observed that anxiety spreads through environments quickly, and once it does, the group orients around the most reactive voices.
Friedman’s prescription for this problem was not withdrawal but what he called a “non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence.” Essentially, what the group needed was someone who was connected to them but refused to be governed by the volatility around them.
When we approach the Gospels with that language in mind, certain scenes begin to look different: Jesus asleep in the boat while the disciples panicked. Jesus silent before Pilate while the crowd shouted. And of course, Jesus writing in the dirt while the Pharisees demanded a verdict. In each moment he was fully present but not controlled by the anxiety around him. Isaiah named the posture underneath it all: “In quietness and trust is your strength” (Isa. 30:15, NIV).
But our lives are not only personal. They are also cultural. In his book The Prophetic Imagination, theologian Walter Brueggemann warned that our consumer culture depreciates memory and ridicules hope, “which means everything must be held in the now,” either urgently or eternally, seeing the present world as our sole reality.
When the church adopts that pace, it looks like the culture around it. What appears to be courage becomes compliance with the algorithm’s demand for speed and with the crowd’s demand for a verdict. But a church that reacts at the speed of the culture is not prophesying to it. It is echoing it.
The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “the rarest and purest form of generosity is attention.” To pay attention is to allow a question to remain open long enough for truth to arrive. Discipleship works the same way. Christians who are patient and can hold tension without collapsing into tribal reflex are not made overnight. They are formed slowly, in communities where disagreement does not immediately fracture relationships.
Scripture has always known this. We can see not only in God’s silences, but in the watchman waiting for the morning and the farmer waiting for the harvest. Fruit does not grow on the timeline of the anxious. It grows in the darkness, patiently, at the speed of roots.
Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.
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