Revolution

A book review
By Dr. Bob Wenz

In Hunt for Red October, the whole Soviet navy is deployed in the north Atlantic to look for a missing Soviet submarine. The observation of the U.S. intelligence services is that sailing at full speed, the hunters would be going too fast for active sonar to detect even “a stereo system playing rock music full blast.” In the introduction to Revolution, George Barna promised a “quick read.” He delivered on that promise. However, it was as if he wrote Revolution intentionally so that readers, like the Soviet navy at flank speed, would sail through it quickly. Then they might not hear the blaring noise in the headphones and stop to ask questions.

He promised that the book would either encouraged me or make me angry. It did not do either. Instead, three words come to mind: befuddled, betrayed, and besmirched.

First, I’m befuddled by George Barna. Isn’t this the face that launched a thousand megachurches; and, did he really grasp what he was saying? George was the Pied Piper of the church growth movement -- and we paid him very well in the coin of the realm. A whole generation of baby boomers bought and read every word of nearly three dozen insightful books based on his research. Bill Hybels, Mr. Megachurch himself, acknowledged he anticipated and read every word George wrote for his books and later website. As a generation, we took George’s words to be right up there with the Word, and some even put George’s truth on a par with God’s truth. Many churches were structured or restructured, positioned or repositioned, staffed or re-staffed according to what George told us about the demographics of our communities and the cultural frogs in the kettle. As a result, it is bewildering to watch the Pied Piper attempt to now lead out from the church some of the same American believers who he help lead into the church a generation ago. George, is it really you?

I am bewildered by some of the data presented. For years George Barna has pointed to his data that less than 10% of those claiming to be Born Again Christians have a Biblical world view. His message was that clear enough – less than 4 million of 40 million born again Christians give evidence of having been truly converted. The rest, according to Barna’s research, demonstrate lifestyles that do not differ significantly from the un-churched population. As George unpacked his data, we listened and were alarmed -- knowing that there was solid evidence behind the summary statements on his website. Perhaps there are not really 40 to 60 million evangelical Christians in the U.S. (a tally often cited in the media).

Now, by George, we learn that there are actually 20 million Christians who have been truly converted -- and who (having become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ) have now outgrown the congregationally formatted church and joined the revolution. They have left the institutional conventionally-formatted church and become part of the Church. These 20 million superior Christians have all realized that the church of the late 20th century was actually an old wine skin and needs to be replaced by hundreds of thousands of house churches.
Who should know better that the numbers don’t quite work than Dr. Barna. It is difficult not to recall the old adage that if you torture the numbers enough, you can make them say anything. So, this appears the first glaring contradiction that might be easy to pass over. For this migration of 20 million Christians to have happened and continue to grow, Barna would have us believe that all of the evangelicals with a Biblical world view (the 10% of 40 million), joined by 16 million other deeply devoted Christians constitute his revolution. If so, where did the other 16 million come from? It would appear from the Barna Group website data that if a person attends a small group while attending a conventional church as well, they are numbered among the revolution. This is misleading. I am one of those who, like many, is part of a small group under the auspices of a conventional church. No one in my home group/cell group considers this as a half-way house for the transition out of the church. In fact, most conventional church leaders would earnestly desire that 100% of their congregations would participate in a small group of this kind. Could it be that most of what George Barna is tracking is merely a very welcome spike in small group participation?
And if there are 20 million house churches in the United States in perhaps 1 million locations, where are they? If there were 1 million house churches (with an average size of 20) I think we all would have noticed by now. The internet sites for house churches yield a significant number [several hundred], but only a small fraction of the house churches are needed [tens or hundreds of thousands] to account for all those claimed by the revolutionaries.

No doubt, church attendance in the United States, sadly, is down in the past twenty-five years as a percentage of the population. Yet, Mr. Data offers almost no data in the book itself to support of his primary assertions. In fact, the only documented revolutionaries in the book are two men who play golf on Sunday with pagan neighbors [we used to say “unchurched,” but Revolution would certainly question the use of that term] and Barna himself. [To be fair, the Barna website offers the supporting data, so the book is more of personal appeal based on George Barna’s credibility.] Moreover, if all this were all true, could there be any true evangelical Christians left in any of our churches? Barna must believe there are at least some, otherwise why bother with his encouragement to these superior saints to get with it, join the revolution, and leave the church, too.

So, I’m befuddled trying to square the reality I see either with Barna’s Revolution-ary claims or with the data from the Oracle of Ventura. I must admit, however, that I am not bewildered by George Barna’s critique of the local congregationally- formatted church. I have pastored four of those over 25 years, and I think that many of the criticisms of Barna are valid. I remember pastoring a fairly large church in California where we had to nominate 180 different people to serve on committees each year. We soon discovered that many people were eager to serve on a committee because they believed that a church committee was the epitome of serving God. Actually, it was only a safe place in a bureaucracy to mimic serving God without every having to have contact with a non-Christian.

Clearly, the church has been infected with the models of leadership and values of corporate America; it has been inundated with vision statements that had little to do with true discipleship; and, genuine community is fairly rare. It is not a surprise, then, that George Barna would have more reasons than most people to sour on the 20th century church having it studied it so closely for so long. But with all its warts and freckles, it is still the bride of Christ, still loved by him as well as some of us serious Christian-worldview holders. Barna’s distinction between the American church that is so badly flawed and the Church to which he and millions of others is fleeing is artificial at best and condescending at worst. One hundred tired old saints in an old cathedral singing The Old One Hundredth, or ten thousand young saints in a warehouse megachurch are no less the Church (or at least true part of it) than those gathered in the idealized house church that Barna belongs to and invites us all to discover.