New Barna Summary

Well, the Barna Group has released a summary of current trends in American Christianity.  Some of these are bound to cause some tongue wagging, but frankly, very few of them should really surprise anyone.

Based on eleven months of collected survey data, Barna makes the following observations:

1.  The Christian Church is Becoming Less Theologically Literate.  Given the rise of mega-churches emphasizing entertainment and self-help style teaching, this isn’t really a surprise.  However I’m curious what this actually means.  Their data is based on interviews with random people – more than 5,000 of them in the last eleven months.  How many of those folks were Christian?  The example Barna cites is that while “most” adults know that Easter is a religious holiday, only a “minority of adults” know that it has to do with Jesus’ resurrection.

This wouldn’t be surprising if the people interviewed were a mix of Christians and non-Christians.  Their wording in this summary paragraph is very vague and leaves me wondering if this is more an effort to grab headline attention.  Again, I don’t doubt that this is a very real trend, but I’m wondering how their data supports the observation when their synopsis of the data seems to be very vague and potentially misleading.

2.  Christians are becoming more ingrown and less outreach oriented.  I’m not going to necessarily argue this, but I’d be interested how this comparative statement is derived.  I’d also observe that it probably isn’t just Christians who are less inclined to invite others into a part of their lives widely understood to be a ‘private matter’.  Although there are small and highly vocal groups who are unabashed in the proclamation of their message (atheists, and supporters of LGBT issues), overall we are culturally being conditioned not to risk this sort of personal connection with others.  We’re far more comfortable poking each other on Facebook and liking status updates than we are to invite someone to participate in something that we are personally very invested in.  

Of course, the fact that there are some vocal groups directly attacking the foundations of Christian life and faith means that this is really a poor time for Christians to be pulling inwards.

3.  Growing numbers of people are less interested in spiritual principles and more desirous of of learning pragmatic solutions for life.   Given number one above, this is no surprise at all.  If people don’t understand the core of their faith, they can’t know how that faith ought to shape and form their lives.  So they’ll go looking for this information elsewhere, assuming that their faith doesn’t have anything to offer because their pastors aren’t teaching them these things.  

4.  Among Christians, interest in participating in community action is increasing.  This is good, but I wonder how this is distinguished from number two above.  I wonder if some people have made this issue and number two above synonymous.

5. The postmodern insistence on tolerance is winning over the Christian Church.   See all of the above trends.  Duh.  

6.  The influence of Christianity on culture and individual lives is largely invisible.   Duh.  And unless pastors and theological educators are prepared to engage their parishioners and students in some hard thinking to show them how to counter the claims of humanists who advocate that goodness or ethics is not dependent on God, this is going to continue.  If we continue to treat faith as a compartmentalized aspect of our lives primarily engaged on Sunday mornings, this should not surprise us at all.

As I’ve maintained for some time, and as the name of this blog seeks to convey, if we do not live out our faith in our daily lives, we have no one to blame for our culture’s rejection of our faith and our own lukewarmness about it but ourselves.  

Again, none of these should surprise anyone in touch with current events and pop culture.  The question becomes how are we going to respond to these trends as pastors, parishioners, and congregations?  I’ll give you a hint – simply lobbying against gay-marriage or protesting for the display of nativities at Christmas isn’t going to cut it.  We need to get better at #2 above, which will require a reversal of #1 above.  This should lead to a reversal of #3 above.  All of this will result in affirming and Biblically grounding #4 above, while pushing back against #5 involving a reversal of #6.  

I think that about does it.  Now off to cure the common cold.  G’night.