What's 70 and what's 30.

I’m sitting at Melbourne airport waiting my flight to Adelaide. Another good day with some great Salvation Army Officers eager to see church/corp transformation.

We talked many things included Sample’s 70/30 rule.
This rule states that you will spend 70% of your time doing trivial, routine tasks and only 30% of your time on the big, major, significant leadership issues.
This goes against the grain.
Most of us think we will spend 70% of our time on the big, important issues and 30% on routine, menial tasks.
Steve Sample says it’s the other way around.
To quote him “many people want to be leader but few want to do leader.”
This rule is always a reality check to leaders wanting to see growth and development. They imagine that when their church puts to bed silly arguments and specializing in trivial things they will spend all their time on the real stuff.
Not so.

Not long after teaching that rule today I received a 70% kind of email. The kind of email you want to ignore.
The kind of email you think a healthy church leaves behind.
The email was a guest who had visited our church several times telling me the things she/they did and didn’t like ……with obviously more that they didn’t like than like.

Two things bothered me.
Firstly – there’s no name. They have some weird email address and they omitted to place their name at the bottom of their essay! They didn’t care to tell me who they are.
Always sad.

Normally we immediately bin anonymous mail – but this one warrants a reply …..because of the second thing that bothered me.
They strongly disagreed with us putting our Scripture verses on the screens in both English and Spanish.
And I quote “by this time the Spanish community should be able to understand what it looks like to read the names of the books of the Bible, the reference verses and page numbers.”
We live in a community that is 70% Latino with many in our church fluent in both but eager to invite friends or family who only speak Spanish to explore faith and Jesus Christ.

I have to tell you I initially thought I had misread what they were saying and they must have been thanking us for having English and Spanish. But slowly I reread and yes – there are supposed Christians who are racist and bigoted. Simply put they are arrogant, proud and elitist. Or, to say it another way – they are not living the way of Jesus.

So I will count to 10, or maybe 10,000 or maybe I need to count to ten million and then compose an email reply that stops me from sinning in my reply.

I would count this as part of the 70% but perhaps this is more of a 30% work. This is one of the big, major issues – the Gospel is at stake, the truth of Christ is at stake, the testimony of His Name is at stake.

So ……… I sit in Melbourne Airport contemplating my words.

Tomorrow another day of teaching and another group of Salvation Army Officers.
Tomorrow I will be writing an email reply fully in Spanish!!!!!!!! LOL.