AUTHOR: Robin Dugall DATE: 6:00:00 AM ----- BODY:

This is the latest of the Barna Group's assessments on the state of the contemporary church in America. As usual, it shows that pastors don't always have the most accurate "take" on the health of the Body of Christ. I don't know why so many clergy live in denial...I don't know if it is just naivete or simply wishful thinking. Since congregant's "spiritual depth" is often tied to their self-esteem and sense of "success", maybe it reflects something that is deep seeded in most leaders...a stronger desire to find significance in their position and not in their own faithfulness and community. If Barna's research would be taken seriously, a wave of desperation might overtake the collective clergy of our country...who knows where that would lead? Maybe, just maybe, pastoral leaders would open their eyes to reality and start to assess their ministry style, theology, and ecclesiology and join the 21st century. The world is different pastors! It's time to wake up and begin to see that what many people have been telling the "church" in America about its fascination with consumerism, pragmatism, egocentricity, and modernity. I don't know about you, but if Barna is right, things have got to change. Here's a snippet of what Barna shares...you can check it out for yourself @ www.barna.org. Pastors Believe That All Is Well Spiritually Based on interviews with a representative national sample of 627 Protestant pastors, the Barna study discovered that pastors believe a large majority of their congregants deem their faith in God to be the highest priority in their life. On average, pastors contend that 70% of the adults in their church consider their personal faith in God to transcend all other priorities. Amazingly, as many as one out of every six pastors (16%) contends that 90% or more of the adults in their church hold their relationship with God as their top life priority! Adults Are Lukewarm About God In contrast to the upbeat pastoral view of people’s faith, a nationally representative sample of 1002 adults was asked the same question – i.e., to identify their top priority in life – and a very different perspective emerged. Only one out of every seven adults (15%) placed their faith in God at the top of their priority list. To make an apples-to-apples comparison, the survey isolated those who attend Protestant churches and found that even among that segment of adults, not quite one out of every four (23%) named their faith in God as their top priority in life. Some population niches were more likely than others to make God their number one focus. Among those were evangelicals (51% of whom said their faith in God was their highest priority), African-Americans (38%) and adults who attend a house church (34%). The people groups least likely to put God first were adults under 30 years of age, residents of the Northeast and West, and those who describe themselves as “mostly liberal” on political and social matters. Regardless of how the population was evaluated, though, there was no segment of the adult population that came close to the level of commitment that Protestant pastors claimed for churchgoers.

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