World renowned expert in trends concerning worldview and the Christian church, George Barna, has done an in-depth analysis of information and data which has enabled him to provide an answer to the question of what the biggest challenge facing the modern-day church is, and according to him, it’s “Christian invisibility in our culture.”
And let me just say, I completely agree with what he’s saying. Many Christians from a wide variety of denominations and beliefs have decided to withdraw from the world, to go bury their heads in the sand and just hope for the rapture, rather than investing time, energy, and resources into making the church visible to the world, which is currently crumbling and tumbling deep down into a pit of immorality.
It’s easier to hide than it is to do what the early church did and participate in every part of life and culture, spreading the gospel and living out the principles of God’s Word in a public way. Doing that, following Jesus’ commands and applying His law publicly, requires a steel spine because you’re putting yourself at risk. In some places your life might be in danger for sharing your faith. In others, your career, social standing, and even family relationships.
During an interview with the Christian Post, Barna, 69, who is the founder of The Barna Group, which is a market research company that specializes in the study of religious beliefs among Americans and the behaviors that result from those beliefs, stated that over the course of the last several decades, he’s witnessed specific negative trends increasingly infecting Western Christianity.
“People have become more selfish, churches have become less influential, pastors have become less Bible-centric,” Barna, who now works as the director of research at the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, went on to explain. “Families have invested less of their time and energy in spiritual growth, particularly of their children. The media now influences the Church more than the Church influences the media, or the culture for that matter. The Christian Body tends to get off track arguing about a lot of things that really don’t matter.”
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On a wider scale, one of the most troubling trends Barna highlights is the decline in discipleship and a lack of solid, biblical training from seminaries. He criticized the prevalent metrics used by churches to gauge success — attendance, fundraising and infrastructure — which he stressed have little to do with Jesus’ mission.
“There is poor leadership in seminaries that mislead local churches into thinking that they’re actually training individuals whom God has called to be leaders and are qualified to be leaders and certifying them to lead local churches, not knowing any better bringing them on,” Barna continued.
The market research expert then further clarified that there are many seminaries who have “good intentions,” yet they’re still setting young ministry leaders on a path doomed to send them directly to failure.
“You get what you measure,” he said during the interview. “So if you measure the wrong things, you’ll get the wrong outcomes … [pastors] measure how many people show up, how much money they raise, how many programs they offer, how many staff persons they hire, how much square footage they built out. Jesus didn’t die for any of that. So we’re measuring the wrong stuff and, consequently, we get the wrong outcomes.”
In order to tackle these issues, Barna has been advocating for churches and pastors to make a massive U-turn and head back to the church’s biblical roots. However, he said such an endeavor might mean rethinking how the church is structured.
“If we were to go back to the Bible, I think we’d recognize the local church, the institutional church, as we’ve created it, is man-made. It’s not in the Scriptures,” he remarked. “The programs, the titles, the buildings, all the stuff that has become sacrosanct in American culture and around the world is not necessarily biblical.
“Jesus didn’t come to build institutions, He came to build people. And we see that model in His life. He devoted the ministry portion of His life to investing in individuals. And that’s what each of us who are followers of Christ need to be doing,” he told the Christian Post.
Instead of focusing on programs and buildings, Barna, a father and grandfather, urged believers to invest in children, whom he sees as the future of the Church. This includes prioritizing spiritual education, modeling biblical principles and creating accountability structures within the family.
“We make a huge mistake by simply using children as bait rather than as the primary focus of who we want to build up through whatever ministry, impact or influence we can have,” Barna stated. “We need to back and recognize it starts with families; parents have the primary responsibility to raise their children to become spiritual champions … local churches need to support parents in that endeavor. Our primary focus needs to be on children … and growing their biblical worldview. If we do that, we’ll be able to grow the 3 percent of adults who are disciples in America today to a larger proportion.”
Barna said that today, he’s focused on worldview development and cultural development more than ever before. The Church is at a critical juncture, he warned, and the path to a thriving Christian community lies in returning to the core biblical principles, the empowerment of parents as spiritual leaders and the intentional discipling of the next generation.
“All the other stuff is noise,” he further explained during the interview. “If we don’t do those things, we’re going to lose even more in this war … this is our moment, we’ve reached a time of Christian invisibility in our culture. What I’m seeing now is that we’re getting to this place where the typical American … will not have anyone in their circle of influence who has a biblical worldview. You’re not going to be influenced with God’s truth.
Disciple-making means being involved in culture making, not just engagement. It’s not enough to tell people what’s rotten and what’s not in the arts, in business, or any other area of life. We must also be about the business of building structures within society and interacting with what’s there in order to demonstrate a very important truth: Christianity was, is, and always will be relevant.