Revolution or Reprobation?

 A Review of Revolution by George Barna
(©2006, Tyndale House, ISBN: 978-1414310169)

George Barna, Christian pollster and researcher, writes in his latest book, Revolution, “One of the greatest frustrations of my life has been the disconnection between what our research consistently shows about churched Christians and what the Bible calls us to be…if the local church is comprised of people who have been transformed by the grace of God through their redemption in Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit, then their lives should be noticeably and compellingly different from the norm.”(31) I appreciate the frustration he is feeling. Like Barna, I want to know, “…why are most churched Christians so spiritually immature and desperate?” (30) It was with a sense of anticipation that I hoped to find some answers to the question we shared. However, Revolution failed to deliver on the implied promise of finding a solution to the problem of shallow Christianity and immature, desperate believers.  

The definition of a problem is when expectations are unmet. If I buy a car, expecting it to run and it fails to start, then I have a problem. Barna bought into the pulpit portraitures of a Church that is to be a revolutionary force living a markedly different life than the surrounding society. So when his statistical analysis shows that Christians are indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, he is right to say there is a problem. However, identifying failed expectations is not the same thing as analyzing a problem. For years, I expected to get a pony for my birthday and never did. The problem, it turns out, did not rest with my parents’ gift-giving abilities, but rather with my unrealistic expectations. Like many other Christian pundits, Barna fails to analyze whether his expectations are reality-based or biblically centered. We might ask (even though Barna never does) what is the source of these unfulfilled expectations? It could be that he has been reading press releases promoting the Christian Life as something it was never intended to be. It is possible that he has been drawing unwarranted, ahistoric conclusions from what amounts to glorified marketing hype. Had he explored the source of his deep disappointment, he may have arrived at some different conclusions, but that is getting ahead of ourselves.

If Barna had confined himself to his specialty - quantifiable data, polls, and scientific surveys - I would have found his book far more compelling. Unlike his previous works like The Frog in the Kettle, and Real Teens; Revolution is more of an anecdotal opinion-fest than it is rigorous research. To be sure, he does quote a few statistics, but most of the book contains the familiar refrain of how bad Evangelical Christianity is and how the doom of the Church As We Know It is nearly certain. Had I not heard the same song back in the 1970’s with the rise of the Jesus People movement and their concomitant integration into mainstream Evangelicalism, I would be more inclined to dance to the tune. Instead, I am more likely to treat him as one more prophet of impending and certain doom who may see the current statistics clearly but is viewing neither the cause, nor the cure, nor even the statement of the problem all that clearly.

First of all, he is looking at the broad sweep of Christianity which blurs distinctions and minimizes detail. I would submit that he is looking for a societal transformation within the scope of Christianity when the Bible offers us first of all an individual transformation. On an individual basis, there are many people who have experienced radical, profound transformation in their lives. Yet Barna seems to ignore both where individuals came from prior to becoming Christian and where they were headed before salvation. A lack of social change does not negate the amazing impact of the gospel in the life of individuals. The reason he doesn’t see a difference between mainstream Christianity and mainstream society is because he is looking through a telescope instead of a microscope. That is not to say that his observations are off base, however. On the whole, his conclusions are correct that the great mass of Evangelical church-going public has bought into what Dick Staub calls “Christianity Lite” in his book, The Culturally Savvy Christian.

However, the discerning reader needs to ask the question, are Barna’s expectations biblical? What outward societal distinction did the apostle Paul manifest from his Jewish counterparts who were unsaved? I can’t find anything in the Bible to document his sociological and cultural distinction. In fact, some scholars have even proposed that Paul may have been divorced, possibly as a result of his conversion. Ananias and Sapphira were less than perfect as Christians. The Corinthian church seemed to have some issues with “carnality” and resembling the surrounding culture, and in fact manifested some excesses that were beyond the pale even for the pagan culture they were in (1 Corinthians 5). It is possible that Barna is looking for a sociological distinction between the “Christian culture” and the surrounding culture that may be somewhat unwarranted based on the Bible. In such a case, the proper “solution” to the problem may be to examine the original expectations. The discerning reader will note that Barna never questions his expectations to see if they are biblically valid.

But let us entertain the possibility that Barna is right and that Christians should be different. The next question would be to ask in what way are we to be distinct from the surrounding culture? This should be relatively easy to answer in the context of a pagan culture given over to idol worship, avarice, and licentiousness, but what happens when one is living in a post-Christian culture deeply influenced by more than 200 years of religious Christian heritage? One of the things modern Christian cultural critics ignore is that the Roman world of the First Century was a little different than post-Christian America. It was a lot easier to be distinguishable from “the world” when the vast majority of people worshipped pagan deities. In America, we are still nominally and culturally Christian, even those who are unconverted to the cause of Christ. It’s harder to tell the Christians from the non-Christians in today’s culture in large part due to the powerful influence of Christians in founding and shaping the culture we are in. Joel Kilpatrick’s A Field Guide to Evangelicals and their Habitat may lampoon the Evangelical subculture, but the message is clear in his book, that it is not always easy to tell Christians from non-Christians in America. So maybe Barna (and the rest of us) have some expectations that are unrealistic.

But setting that aside, Barna’s solution to his ill-defined problem is even more disturbing than his lack of rigorous root cause analysis. How does he go about fixing what he thinks is wrong with the Church? He doesn’t. His recommendation is just to chuck it all. Toss out the building, the institutions, the support structures, the whole thing. Surprising even himself, Barna appears to have fallen head over heels in love with the Emerging Church concept and has become a strident advocate for the home church movement and the non-traditional church model. This is good news for Emergents who will benefit from having a heavy hitter like Barna in their corner, but many in the traditional church are going to feel far less sympathetic towards his courting of the newest Christian countercultural fad.

Suffice to say, beginning from an unexamined source of disappointment and moving to conclusions that are unsupported by rigorous data, Barna proffers a solution that encourages us to abandon our traditions, turn loose of our affection for the institutional Church as we’ve come to love it, and establish a new paradigm for church planting and evangelistic work. His book feels like it starts with a predetermined conclusion that is looking for an argument to support it.  While I would agree with the need for doing something different, I’m not sure tossing out the baby with the bath water, and the bathtub as well, is the most advisable alternative. True, the Emergents are asking questions that Evangelicals should be at least asking themselves, but hastily jumping on the postmodern/Emergent bandwagon is hardly a solution fit for everyone. Those who do not learn from history, Santayana says, are doomed to repeat it. Barna should at least apply his statistical genius to examining whether the postmodern/Emergent “conversation” is a Jesus People redux or a genuine revolution.

by Rick Presley