I’m sure at some point in your leadership training or experience you’ve heard someone talk about the 80% rule—if someone on your team can do a thing 80% as well you, delegate that thing to them. I would like to offer a tweak to that rule and lower the threshold to 70%. The 70% rule, if you will.
Quite simply, if you’re not letting your people perform the work of ministry, you’re not doing your God-ordained job.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but the 80% is a rule adapted from secular business leadership, which isn’t a bad thing; however, church production leaders function in a different context. While we can learn a lot from business leadership, we must remember that our goals are different. In business, especially the corporate environment, the goal is profit and the enrichment of ownership, but in church, the goal is the enrichment of the soul and drawing nearer to Christ.
Sometime in the late 90s, as the modern mega-church movement started ramping up, non-denom church leadership started losing their minds about excellence. This obsession was justified to a certain degree because I think anyone that’s been around the church for a while has found themselves in some environments where excellence was not a priority. Think of weird smells, unbearable audio, tacky decor, and a healthy amount of clutter collecting dust and cobwebs. I think any leader worth their salt understands that an eye for excellence is absolutely essential to leading a church or a church ministry.
But while excellence is a priority, it’s not the priority.
The Apostle Paul charged church leaders with their priority, saying “...he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…" [Ephesians 4:11-13] Quite simply, if you’re not letting your people perform the work of ministry, you’re not doing your God-ordained job.
...in church work, quality is never as important as being.
Obviously, this means people need to be trained properly, but a big part of our role is letting people minister while being their safety net. My team operates within a spectrum of skill levels, but I can say that I’m proud of what they do week after week to help our in-person and online community engage in worship and the word, and my job is to be there to help them do that.
Now, lowering the threshold means that I have to be consistent in my messaging. I’m often repeating myself on Sunday mornings when it comes to things like transitions and certain camera shots, but I’m ok with that. Just like a baker kneading dough, I’m working good excellence into their psyche, and they get to worship with their service at the same time. It’s a win-win.
Production leaders are necessarily passionate about the quality of their output, and they should be, but in church work, quality is never as important as being. We are called to be with our teams more than we are called to perfect our teams. Through our care and leadership, they come to know the care and leadership of the Father, and we know from the parables of Jesus and stories about Jesus that the Father loved being with his people even if they were imperfect. That’s why he sent Jesus in the first place, to reconcile us to himself, and so Paul reiterated to us: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” [2 Corinthians 5:11-2]
[1] Ephesians 4:11-13 ESV
