Exhibit C.

A while back, on a Sunday morning, I was sitting in church, listening as the sermon began. The topic that day was serving in the church. The preacher started by relating a few humorous anecdotes—the icebreaker. He then commented that Christian service in today’s church is not what it used to be, and not what it should be. He made mention of the “80-20 rule”—you know, the old saying that 80 percent of the work done in the church is accomplished by 20 percent of the people, and vice versa.

However, when the preacher stated the 80-20 rule, something happened that I thought was very strange. The congregation responded with an array of scattered clapping, many knowing nods with “mmm-hmmms” and chuckles, and several hearty “Amens.” Apparently, almost everybody in the church had heard of the 80-20 rule. In my estimation, a large majority of the congregants had reacted as I’ve described.

When I heard this response, something dawned on me. “Wait a second,” I thought. “How is it that about 80 percent of the people here reacted knowingly and approvingly to what the pastor just said? If only 20 percent of the people here are doing 80 percent of the work, then only 20 percent have the right to be laughing or saying ‘Amen,’ correct?”

Now, there could conceivably be several explanations for why people reacted the way they did to the “80-20” statement. Maybe they were not really paying attention, and just continued responding in the same manner as they did to the humorous anecdotes that preceded it. Or, maybe a large portion of the congregation underwent spontaneous conviction of their paucity of active church service, and felt the only appropriate response was to verbalize this conviction in some way. But I don’t think that these accurately describe what was going on. I think that a lot of folks in the pews that morning are people who have attended church for quite some time. They have heard the 80-20 rule on many occasions. And they agree with it. That is, they agree that they are part of the 20 percent that is doing the large majority of the work.

But here’s the problem that is presented by this situation. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were 100 people in the church that morning.

- In reality, 20 of those people are doing 80 percent of the work, and 80 of them are doing the other 20 percent.

- But, 80 of them think that they are in the select group (of 20) who do most of the work.

- But all 80 can’t be part of the 20. At least 60 of them are not part of this group.

- These 60 people, in reality, are collectively doing 15 percent of the work in the church (if 80 are doing 20 percent, then 60 of them are doing 15 percent).

- So the problem is this: these 60 people see themselves as part of a group that does 80 percent of the work, but in reality they are part of a group that does 15 percent of the work. That’s a huge difference!

Now, of course, these calculations are based on old sayings, estimations, and various other conjectures. But, I suggest that it helps to make the point that there can be a large gap between the way people perceive themselves, and reality.

So, in a sense, this situation is similar to that of common sense and good driving. That is, most people (in church, in this case) correctly recognize the problem—that there is a general lack of service within the church today. Yet, most people feel like they are not part of the problem, but rather among those who are teaching, singing, leading . . . basically doing more than their fair share of the things normally associated with serving the Lord as part of the local congregation.

Up next: Exhibit D.