The new 80/20

Julie, my wife, and I attended a motorcycle safety class recently. I came to what Henry Blackaby would call a crisis of belief when I discovered the course would require a Friday evening, entire Saturday, and, bum bum-bum... most of a Sunday. Suddenly I was confronted with some guilt-think: "Can I go hang out with people other than the church on Sunday? Is that okay?"

Having worked full time in churches for 12 years and being engaged in ministry-related work for 22 years I've regularly come face to face with the idea of the 80/20 principle. In the context of the church we typically applied it to leadership and stewardship. You understand the concept: 20 percent of the people provide 80 percent of the volunteer-force, or 20 percent of the people give 80 percent of the budget.

I overcame my guilt-think and we participated in the motorcycle safety course. It was awesome hanging out with a group of folks who had a goal to learn to ride a two-wheeled vehicle for the first time or wanted to be more safe while operating their bikes. That weekend, an amazing thing happened. On Sunday morning as I was on the driving range and later that afternoon in the classroom it occurred to me (read: "God spoke to me" here) that I was hanging out in a room with some folks who, no matter how appealing a church made its activities, would likely not come even check out a church.

This set me to considering a whole new angle on the 80/20 principle. While I'll openly acknowledge that the scale would slide some from organization to organization, I'll just call it the 80/20 knowing it could be 95/5 or 60/40 in some cases. In those moments and since, reflecting on my own life I realized my time was so tied up in good things at church and in ministry I spent little time engaging with people outside my church in the community or my even my own neighborhood.

As part of His final instructions before ascending to be with His Father, Jesus told his apostles "Go and make disciples". It's been said that the phrase could be rendered "make disciples as you are going" or something like "as you do life make disciples".

It seems churches invest 80 percent of themselves in stuff just to keep thmselves going and 20 percent to engage the people outside their churches. What if those tables were reversed? Assuming 100 percent of a believer's time is focused on the Kingdom, what would it be like if the collective believers in the world focused only 20 percent of their "as you are going" time on sustaining the collective itself and 80 percent of their energies engaging the world as a disciplemaker during their day to day life.