What Percent of Your Church Ministers?

The percentage in most churches of those that minister is 20%.  Twenty percent of the membership in a local church is doing eighty percent of the ministry.  We are blessed at Nags Head Church, I think as the result of years of teaching from the Bible about what ministry is and who ministers are, and we have over 90% of our membership involved in ministry in the church. 

There has been some confusion in the church.  For years many believers have grown up in churches where the ministry is to be done by the "ministers", meaning the paid pastor.  But this is far from how the Bible teaches that ministry is to be done in the local body of believers.

This morning I read a great article that addresses this issue.  If you are in church leadership you need to take a look-see at this article, especially if your church is under the impression that the ministry is to be done by the pastoral staff.

Ed, Group's church leadership unit has a vision of 80/20 by 2020. We want to flip the 80/20 rule so that by the year 2020 eighty percent of regular church attendees are actively serving in some ministry. Unfortunately, our State of the Church '09 study indicated that currently it's more like fifteen percent of the people who are active in ministry right now. Why do you think that is?

Part of it is that we have to recognize that we've created the system that we loathe. I don't think the reason 15 percent serve is because 85 percent are lazy. We've created a system that glorifies the clergy and marginalized the laity. We got the outcome we created programs for. We've become "clergified." There's a 3-tiered structure: laypeople, clergy and missionaries.  (Read the entire article here)