#114: Dr. George Barna: Christian Worldview & Culture
Dr. Barna is a world-class researcher who specializes in studying the Christian worldview and culture.
In our conversation, we talk about him coming to Christ, theology, and how the world shapes us.
Get your pen and paper ready for this one!
Read the full transcripts here.
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Full Transcripts
Tony: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the reclamation podcast, where our goal is to help you reclaim good practices for faith and life. I'm Tony. And today is episode one 14 of the podcast where I sit down with cultural researcher, George Barna, George Barna is a genius when it comes to the ministry of research.
Right. And what does it mean to look at the culture? Look at the biblical worldview and put it all together. This was such a fun in deep conversation about the way that the world is seen. I really am join this dialogue and I know you will as well. And if you do do me a favor hit that subscribe button. So you don't miss any future episodes.
Also be sure. To leave a rating or review on iTunes, we're trying to get to a hundred by the end of the year, and we need your help. Every review is like another way that people can help find the podcasts because of your four or five star reviews. We're so thankful to be in this relationship with all of you.
And we're really thankful for our podcast network, the spirit and truth podcast network, which is all about bringing like-minded individuals to. Propel the gospel in different platforms. So without any further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. George Barna. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited today to have author a researcher and speaker Dr.
George Barna on the podcast. Dr. Barner. Thank you so much for being here today.
George: Well, thanks for having me, Tony, looking forward to it.
Tony: You know, you have kind of a famous name as a, as a world-class researcher. How does somebody get called into what appears to be the ministry of research?
George: This can only be the work of God.
Let me tell you that now, you know, and some people ask me, well, how did you even get started and all this? And again, it's God just directing your steps. When I was a kid, I used to love. All the statistics for baseball. And so I had a giant baseball card collection and my friends and I would get together.
We'd, we'd pour over the cards. They love the front of the cards that had the pictures. I love the back of the cards, the add all the numbers, you know, and I eventually started recalculating the numbers to figure out did they get it right? And so I think that was probably the first inkling that my mother had a nerd on her hands.
And you know, it just went from there when I got to college. Found out that you could actually make a living, working with numbers. I was all in.
Tony: So let me ask you this. Not related to research favorite baseball player of all time, because I'm a big reds fan. I love the big red machine. I love, I love baseball in general, but the favorite baseball player
George: I was born and grew up in New York.
So he used to go to Yankee stadium a lot. Mickey mantle was always my hair.
Tony: Okay. It's hard not to like manual it's hard barrier. And for me, who's now he was now calling some games for the reds, but now keep in mind when I was born in 80. So when I was 10, when the reds won the world series with the nasty boys and they went wire to wire and you know, and so that was the, that was the peak of my baseball life.
And now all my kids play baseball and we have apps. Give stats for my kids and I love it.
George: They're trying to put me out of business.
Tony: It's it's, it's quite the experience scoring a baseball game on my cell phone and watching the stats in real time. I gave it a spray. I get a spray chart for a ten-year-old.
It's probably a little too much, but I'm here for it.
George: Wow. Yeah. Well, new era got to keep up with it. Yeah.
Tony: Keep up with it. So how does, how does one get into cultural research and the kind of research that you do is cultural and it's worldview related and it's ministry related and you've done this. A number of years.
Thank you. Thank you. That was intentional. How does one get into like, okay, so statistics is one thing, but ministry statistics or church statistics is, feels like an island all unto itself. How, how did you end up there?
George: Well, again, it's just the hand of God. And if you're sensitive to that, he'll direct you to where you need to be and where you can do the greatest good for his kingdom.
So in my case, I was working in politics, doing polling and managing campaigns and writing speeches and doing all that. And went back to grad school, got some degrees and all the research ends of things. Came out, started working for one of the largest market research firms in the country. And while I was there, a Christian media management company came in as a potential client.
And because I was the only one. Christian. And I was a brand new Christian, but I was the only Christian in the entire company at that executive level. They said, well, give the project to that kid Barna, you know, maybe he knows what these people want. And I didn't because I was a new Christian, you know, and, and this company was coming in.
They have Billy Graham and youth for Christ and oral Roberts and all Bob Schuler, all kinds of people. Who I never heard of. And so I'm being asked to research their ministries and how they're doing, and I'm thinking, I don't know what they're about. So they gave me a tape of an oral Roberts television program.
And I went home and my wife and I sat down and watched it and we were like, whoa, you can do that. Yeah. So it was, it was quite an eye opener for us, but that led to me being hired away from the market research company, by the Christian media management group. And, you know, I built up a research and direct marketing division for them.
And then eventually it was able to start the Barna research group because I saw there was a need for that kind of information. You only make good decisions if you have good information. And my observation up to that point was that most ministries did not have good information at that point in time, you know, back in the eighties, they didn't have much information.
And so we were trying to give them something they didn't have so that they could make better decisions. And God has blessed it for many years. So I'm really.
Tony: Now I always love to drill down on a conversion experience stories. Can you, do you mind sharing about how you came to Christ? It sounds like it was later in life.
I would love to hear the details behind that.
George: Yeah, it was actually while my wife and I were in grad school and We got married while we were in grad school at you know, Princeton university chapel. And we were married by my cousin, the priest, you know, and, and we had all kinds of, you know, things going on there, but just prior to the wedding happening you know, we, we had to go through the Catholic churches, premarital training system.
And we had completed that up in Boston where I've been doing some polling and managing a campaign just before we came back down to Princeton. And we came down to Princeton. The priests in Princeton wouldn't accept the fact that we had completed the training in a different diocese and different state.
And so we had to go through it again. And at the end of all, that. He said, do you have any questions? I've been waiting all my life for a priest asking if I had questions. So I started unloading all these things. Why do we believe this? You know, what does it mean when we pray this? You know, why do we stand here?
But Neil, there, all these things. And, and he got very upset. I'll make a long story short, but he, he got really upset and kind of yelled at me and. Don't you ever question the Catholic church, you do what we tell you to do you believe what we tell you to believe? Everything will work out great. And for me, that wasn't a real helpful answer.
So, and I went out and told my wife, I can't do this, you know, but we were close to the wedding. So he said, all right, we'll get married in the Catholic church. But, but I can't be part of this afterwards, if they won't let me question what's going on, what we believe in, why. I, you know, there's something wrong here.
And so afterwards, we went on what my wife called our search for God to see if he was real, to see who he was, to see how he works. And we discovered a lot of things, but ultimately what happened was we got invited to a very small fundamentalist Baptist church that was meeting in a school gymnasium.
Twenty-five miles away from where we lived. We thought, well, we'll give it a try. We've tried other stuff that didn't work. So and, and it was there that we, we saw the past or do something we'd never seen done before. He, he took out his Bible, stood behind the pulpit, read a passage of the book. Then describe what it meant.
He went back, read another passage, describes what it meant, and he kept doing this. And we'd never seen anything quite like that before. And I remember driving home afterwards with my wife and, you know, she said, oh, w what'd you think of that? Did you like it? And so I don't know about all the religious stuff they were doing, but that thing he did where he read the Bible.
And then he described what it meant. I don't know if anybody else has ever thought of doing that before, but if they have, and I think that that's marketable, we should see if we could take that and run with that. I mean, people would like that, you know, it shows how naive we were. I was, and we kept going back week after week.
He did that. Eventually he invited himself over to our house and had a notebook and an elder with them and he went through the notebook and we know now it was the four spiritual. We'd never heard of that. And, and so he started going through it and at the end he says, so do you want to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?
I said you know, I don't think so, but, but I tell you what, if this Jesus is anywhere near as incredible as you just described. I bet within the next, let's say month, he could prove that to me, he could prove himself. He could become real in my life. You know, and if what you're telling me is just a lot of religious hogwash, well, then it's not going to happen.
And I'm out of here. Well, I tell you what my wife and I went on that journey, you know, and, and Jesus became so real to us during that month. There hasn't been a question since as to whether or not we would want to devote our life to follow her.
Tony: Could you share any of the examples of, of how real that looks?
Cause I think people are often looking for signs and so anytime God shows up like that, I love those kind of windows into, into the miracle.
George: There were a number of things that happen. I mean, one was to the pastor's credit. He said, look, if you're going to do this where, you know, God has to prove himself to you.
I want you to do five things during the course of this month that you're giving him, you know, I want you to read the Bible every morning. I want you to start with the book of John. I want you to pray every day that he'll reveal himself to you. I want you to come to the midweek Bible study. I lead. I want you to come to church every Sunday and I want to be able to call you every week.
About how the journey is going. And I thought, wow, that's great. Somebody cares. Yeah. I would love that. And so, as we got into this, you know, started reading the Bible and I'd read parts of the Bible before and a new Testament class. I'd had an old Testament class that I'd had as an undergraduate. And you know, it, it was, it was just kind of a book, but now suddenly we're reading through John.
And I can't even describe how, but it like transported us to a whole different place of understanding and, and empathy with what was happening there. So suddenly the Bible became really significant to them. It was a book that we now treated as a sacred text that was written for us by God, given to us by God.
During the course of that month, there were things that were going on. I was working at Rutgers university in, in the research area and there were some relational things. There were some occupational things that happened that. Didn't make any sense. I mean, they, they worked out in my favor, but I couldn't understand why.
And it occurred to me. Well, you know, my wife and I had had been praying as we'd been asked to start praying about the things that were important in her life. We've been praying about that and suddenly things were turning around. And the only thing I could attribute that to was suddenly God was hearing my prayers.
He, he knew who I was. He cared about what was going on in my life. It's like, whoa, this is really cool. W w w we started doing something that they'd asked us to do, which was to tie we'd never heard of that before. And we thought we probably we're going to be out in the streets, unable to pay our rent within a month or two, you know, because now we were going to give God 10% of, of the money.
And what we discovered was not only was it kind of cool and kind of freeing to give that away. But suddenly money started coming in from places that we had no idea why that was happening. I'm not saying that's always going to happen, but I mean, we were in this discovery phase or we were testing God and God's message to us was, Hey, trust me, I got you covered.
And so for us, it was this remarkable. Continual set of circumstances that we'd never gone through before. Some of the kinds of people we met, the conversations that we had, there was all kinds of stuff happening with whoa, why didn't we do this earlier? It was so cool. And it's been a heck of a ride for 40 years.
I'll tell you.
Tony: So I'm curious one of the things that we say around here a lot is that if you're not dedicated to your disciplines, you'll be destroyed by your district. And it sounds like your pastor really set you on a course for some disciplines. I'm curious, what disciplines do you still do today?
And you know, kind of what's, what's held, held the course of time over the last 40 some odd years.
George: Well of course. I like to think I've learned a few things over the years, too. So like I added to the original disciplines, but of course, of course yeah, I mean, regular Bible reading, you know, not just reading, but I mean really studying it, trying to understand the context and you know, how it relates to other passages, not just blowing through a chapter a day.
That's one of the disciplines. Another one is. Praying every day though, my prayer life has changed pretty substantially. I'm not just constantly telling them what I need when I want what's going on. It's more about asking God to consistently show me his. For my life and to give me the courage and the strength and the wisdom to follow that and nothing else.
The tithing, we've not just continued that cause we, we now having read a lot more in studying a lot more are not of the opinion that it's, you know, 10% that that's exactly what God wants. Our, our, my understanding of it at this point is that it's all God's, he's entrusted it to me to invest for his kingdom.
And 10% is probably like a minimum boundary. And so my wife and I try to give as much of our income and resources away as we can. And, you know, that varies from year to year. It's not terribly consistent. It hasn't gone below 10%, but I think so far we've gotten as high as maybe 30 a percent year. And my wife keeps telling me, come on, the goal is 50%.
We want to give half of it away, you know? And then of course, when we die, we'll give all of it away to ministries. But so I mean that, that whole giving thing has become not so much. A question mark, or even a fear in our life, it's become part of a joyful experience. We're supposed to be joyful in our relationship with Christ and, and I think we've really found the joy of understanding, wow, this isn't ours anyway.
And what he's asking us to do is to give it away to people who are going to use it in ministry and in blessing people in a variety of ways. And we can have the joy of. Of being part of that. So that's part of it. I guess the other thing that that's become much more significant to us and is the whole issue of service that if we're called to know love and serve God, you serve him by trying to take care of other people.
People who need help in a variety of ways. So there's a whole. Group of different types of ministries that we're engaged in that, that for us really kind of rounds out a lot of what it means to be a Christian. It's not just about knowledge. It's not just about going to worship events, et cetera. It's about being Christ.
To other people in the world. And so for us that entails everybody from people we know like our grandkids, we take it as a personal responsibility to do whatever we can to make sure that our grandkids are going to be raised with a biblical worldview. It may have to do with people who we know who are in the throes of addiction.
So, you know, we're working with a lot of. My wife has started and runs a ministry over in Uganda, which has been doing incredible stuff. So she's going back and forth throughout the year. You know, putting her businesses on hold while she'll go over there and, and take care of matters. So any there's a wide variety of things that we've been privileged to get involved in.
Plus all the kinds of work that I get to do, where I work with churches and para-church ministries across the country, trying to help them understand the culture and what it might take to turn that culture around. So you know, if we aren't two of the most blessed people on the face of the earth, I don't know who is.
Tony: I love it. I love it. Well, you know what, I appreciate it. Listen to your story and kind of the arc of it, right. It started in that biblical worldview and that's only gotten stronger. It, you know, it's, it's you know, in this I'm in a Methodist tradition, you know, sanctification, right. We it's that process of trying to become more like Christ all the time.
Right. But you know, it's, it's interesting as I read your research, which is wonderful. One of the things I see is. Feels like the biblical worldview is, is waning. Even amongst Christians. I'm curious your, your thoughts on that and, and what have we. Where did we go wrong? Dr. Barnett, that's kind of what I want to ask.
You know, what, what, what happened? What happened to the zealous you know, fervor of the new Christian, like you and your wife had and how come some people go, right. And some people fall away from that biblical world.
George: Well, there, there are a number of things involved in that. Tony w you know, one of those that I think is important to put on the table is this idea that if you're going to have a biblical worldview, whatever your worldview is, it forms between 15, 18 months of age and 13 years of age it's during that period of time where you're trying to figure it out.
Who you are, where you fit in the world, what kind of a life you want to have and how to make good decisions that coincide with those things. Now, worldview is simply your intellectual moral, spiritual, and emotional filter. That you take into every situation. Everybody has a worldview. And the only question really is which worldview do you have?
You have to make decisions. And it's that filter that helps you make every decision that you make. So where did we go wrong? We stopped paying attention. First of all, to worldview, you know, thinking biblically thinking and acting biblically. We do what we believe. So what you believe matters tremendously.
But the reason it matters is because that dictates your behaviors, how you're going to live. And it's your worldview that really drives all of that. We have ceased to believe as parents across the country, that the single most important thing we can do is raise our children to be. In the pursuit of God, himself.
And so rather than raising spiritual champions, we're trying to raise athletic champions, academic champions, and all other kinds of champions. But spirituality in that regard with children has fallen by the wayside. So parents drop the ball, but part of the reason that the local church exists is to equip parents to do that job.
To give them, you know, the substance, the content, they need to encourage them to give them some measures of accountability maybe to assist them in that process with the children, but that hasn't been happening because churches have been focused on adults. We tend to use children as bait to get adults into the church and that's illegitimate, but that's what's happening.
We know this partly because when we've done our research with the senior pastors of Protestant churches across the country, we ask them, is your ministry, is your church effective? And what we find is more than four out of five of them say, oh yes, we're effective. Say, great. How do you know that? What, what is it that you look.
That gives you the sense that you're effective in ministry. And we found that across the country, there tend to be five common elements that churches are measuring. How many people show up, how much money they raise, how many programs they offer, how many staff, people they've hired and how much square footage they built out.
Now I'm a measurement guy. I'm glad they're measuring stuff, but you've got to measure the right stuff because you get what you measure when you measure those things. You don't get discipled. You get crowded auditoriums, you get you know, a bigger campus. You get all these other things that have nothing to do with what Jesus told us to do.
Which is to make disciples, you know, and he said, you'll be my disciple when you love one another, when you follow my or obey my principles. And when you produce much spiritual fruit, well, the measures that we're looking at have nothing to do with those things that Jesus said, this is when you're my disciple.
And so the church has dropped the ball. And then I would say that, you know, individual Christians as well, we have not been very focused on growing deeper in our relationship with God. We've, compartmentalised our faith. And it's just one of many things that we try to keep as balls juggling in the air.
And that's not how it's supposed to be. God should come first in our lives. He tells us that his word tells us that you know, and, and, and when you get into this, it's pretty apparent that when we put ourselves first, as we're doing in America, it doesn't work.
Tony: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I feel really passionately about is that we, as the local church for several decades have done a really good job of teaching people, how to come to church, but not actually how to follow Jesus.
Right. And, and we, we ran into a huge issue here in our local church. When I told our children's ministry, I didn't really care if, if he or she liked kids, that's not what they're here for. It's they're here to equip the parents, right? The ultimate measure of a disciple is if you made another decision, That should be the metric.
I, in my opinion, about the maturity of disciple-making. And so we want to measure anything let's measure generational. Are you a spiritual grandparents, great grandparents. And do we really believe that our descendants will outnumber the stars as the promises made from God? You know, those are the kinds of things that I think is I feels spot on with what you're saying.
So what worldview kind of has America. Adopted as its its dominant worldview. You recently wrote an article about it on your, on your website. I'm curious if you could kind of elaborate about how we've kind of lost the biblical word view and what's picked its place.
George: Yeah, we do this nationwide.
Survey every year called the American worldview inventory to try to figure out what's going on with worldview among Americans at large and what we discussed, we discovered a lot of things, but you know, one of them is that only 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview. Now that's in the context of, you know, 65 to 70%.
Of Americans calling themselves Christian, and yet only 6% have a biblical worldview. So that raises the question. Well then what do the other 94% have as their worldview? And we went into that study. It's the first time, any, as far as I know, anybody's ever looked at, what are the alternative worldviews that people are embracing?
And I went into it, assuming that maybe postmodernism will come out on top or maybe secular humanism. You know, and then you'd have other things, Marxism, Eastern mysticism, all these other things that would come out as well. What we discovered was something that actually did surprise me. You asked before, what am I surprised by?
This was one of the few things that surprised me recently and that's that 88% of Americans. Have a worldview that can best be described as syncretism. And all that means is that you don't buy into a single, comprehensive, coherent worldview, postmodernism, biblical, theism, whatever it may be. Instead what you're doing is you're not latching on to any one of those, but you're.
A few elements from each one. So you've got some ideas that you like from secular humanism, some ideas you like from nihilism, a few things out of existentialism that makes sense to you. A bunch of stuff from a, you know, Eastern mysticism that you kind of like, and what you're doing is you're putting all these disparate elements together into a customized world.
And when you look at the totality then of what any given individual across America believes, at least among these 88% who are synchronous, their worldview doesn't hold together. It doesn't make sense. In fact, it's inherently contradictory. They believe some things that contradict each other. And so we asked them about that.
And what we found out is when we point these contradictions and conflicts out to people as well. Never thought about that. And Tony that's the key is that Americans are not thinking about what it is they're buying into as a worldview. They're accepting things that make them feel good that make them look good, that make them feel like they're attached to some kind of a community of like-minded people.
They're doing things that fit what might be the, the central element. In common, across most St protests, which is they believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. And that success in life is when they achieve happiness or they feel good or, you know, they're able to produce what makes them feel like they're the kind of person they want to be, or they should be it's me, me, me, me, me, it's us at the center instead of God at the center.
And that's really the core of this whole syncretistic thing.
Tony: Yeah, as you were kind of talking through that, one of the interesting things that came to mind is that it reminded me of a buffet. Like, you know, like around here, we have these old country buffets, right? You go to a buffet and you can get whatever you want off the buffet.
But the only goal of going to the buffet is to leave feeling. I want to be fat and happy. Right. But it's not, I mean, and this is, this is what we're talking about, right. Is that we're not really talking about being healthy. We're talking about just being full. Is that
George: right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. And so the idea here, you know, you go to a buffet and, and the idea is.
I'm not going to keep myself from experiencing anything that looks appealing to me. It may be bad. It may clog my arteries. It may give me a heart attack. I may have a stroke on the way to the parking lot, but man, that banana cream pie looks good. So I'm going to have one, not a piece, the pond, you know,
Tony: the hole and I paid for it.
So therefore I get it. And that's that's that's my right
George: eye. I did what it for me to get it. I am justified in this because I have done what I think ought to have been done for me to get it. And that's how we think about life in general.
Tony: So what impact is that having? I mean, obviously there's, there's so many impacts it's having on the local church, but what impact is it having in our cultural relationships and the way that.
You know, w what does our worldview effect when it's, you know, basically put together in the same way of a buffet?
George: Well, there are a lot. Wow. I mean, there, there's a lot of impacts. One of those is that keep in mind that when we're trying to create disciples, one of the most important things for us to do is to be consistent between what we believe and how we live, because people may not hear our words, but they'll see our actions.
Then they'll listen to the words and if they're inconsistent, they blow us off. They say a that's part of that religious act. And that's largely the reputation that we've gotten, particularly with millennials to a significant extent with generation X as well. They don't think that we really live the Christian faith.
But we don't necessarily live it. And so they've written it off. They've said, well, you know, that's not for me because it's, it's not true. It's not right. It's not genuine. It's not authentic. Another element that happens in this kind of situation is that people give up on the idea of absolute moral truths.
You know, what the Bible gives us is God's absolute truths for our lives. And the problem is most Americans, two out of three Americans say there is no such thing as absolute moral truth. I'm the center of truth. If I want to know truth, I look inside myself and I feel it. I intuited, I figured out I'm the only one who can know what's true for me.
There's no external resource or. That can tell me that I'm right or wrong. It's all up to me. Well, I mean, that's a dramatic shift away from the things of God. Cause right there, you've written off the Bible. You've written off Jesus. You've written off God. You've written off Christianity. You've pretty much written off the church as, as God intended it to be.
And, and so that that's a very big deal. And of course the other thing that's changed is our perceptions of God. What we know is that today, less than, well, just about half, maybe a little bit less than half of Americans. Believe that God exists. And that he's the all knowing all powerful, just creator of the universe who still rules it today.
What we've got is the fastest growing faith group in America today, or what I call the don'ts. And these are people who don't know if God exists, don't care if God exists or don't believe that he exists. That group now has gone from 8%, 20 years ago to 34% today, a massive growth in a relatively short period of time.
And when we look at it generationally, we can see that the millennials are the tip of that sphere because 43% of them do not believe that. I mean, they're part of that donor group and that's huge.
Tony: Now, how old are millennials today? I mean,
George: 18 to 36.
Tony: 18 to 36. So those are the people that hopefully, you know, we're, we're kind of working on in, in the, to make disciples of, and to reach out into the community and to start really trying to build the kingdom.
How, how does the church fight back against this kind of worldview and, and, well, I mean, honestly, just for the pastors who are listening, how, how do we fight back against cultural leaks? Since, you know, when it's, it's really difficult to say that this is a sin anymore, or at least it feels difficult.
George: Yeah. I think there, there are several things. When you say the church, if you're talking about the local church you know, I would say that there are a number of things that have to happen. One is that our churches typically suffer from lack of godly leadership individuals who have been called by God, gifted by God and prepared by God to actually lead.
Which means first and foremost, having a sense of God's vision for that congregation. If you're the pastor and you're telling me what you think you, our vision for the congregation is I'm walking out. I don't care what your vision is. If God called you to this place, he called you because he has a particular vision for that group of people.
And if he's called you to be the leader, it's your job to, to know, to grasp that vision, to know that vision, to implement that vision and to bring people into it as part of the process. So what we know from our research is that less than one out of five, Protestant churches in America actually have a leader in the primary position of leadership.
A lot of people have the title. Very few people have the calling and gifting. Secondly, I'd say we need to take a closer look at the teaching that's going on in our churches. First of all, realize that it's a minority of senior pastors who have a biblical worldview again, based on our research. And you can't give what you don't want.
So part of the reason why we have biblically illiterate and congregations and people who are not really devoting themselves to Christ is because we've got leaders and teachers in our churches who really don't embody what needs to be embodied. A third thing that I can talk about as another piece of research we did, where we discovered that a large majority of people in.
In this case, in the research, conservative Protestant churches, conservative, meaning that these were churches where they believe the Bible is God's word. It's true. It's reliable. It's trustworthy. What we found is a large majority of the, of the congregants of those churches were pretty much begging their pastors to teach them how to think biblically about the issues that are germane in our culture today.
What they were telling us is we're getting sermons every week. We're getting all kinds of other stuff. We can't engage the culture because we're uncomfortable speaking about these issues. We don't really know what the Bible teaches on them now. That's, that's another issue as well. The fact that most Christian individuals aren't willing to dive into it on their own to figure it out.
Let's talk about the teaching. That's taken place in these churches. These are people who are coming every week, hungry for wisdom. God's wisdom about what do we think about immigration? What do we think about racism? What do we think about gay marriage? Why do we think about abortion? What do we think about taxation?
What do we think about freedom? All of these kinds of issues that are in the news on the front page every day. And our research has shown that the people least likely to be talking about these issues in the marketplace are conservative Christian individuals, because they don't want to misrepresent God.
They don't want to get themselves in a debate that they feel they're going to lose because they don't know how to communicate God's truths related to those issues. It's a real mess. And so I would say, yeah, let's, let's rethink a lot of what we're teaching as well.
Tony: So with, with all that in mind, what, what are, and I don't know if you have any thoughts or if the research shows how to, how do we, how do we use.
These pastors who, who, you know, maybe called to this, how do we, how do we move the train forward a little bit on this issue? When it feels, I mean, the numbers are staggering. It feels pretty big.
George: It is big, but we have to remember Tony that we didn't get in this mess that we're in overnight and we're not going to get out of it overnight.
So we got to dig in for the long haul and realize, okay, we need a long-term strategy. For how we're going to turn this around. And part of that is going to have to do with families, you know, raising up parents who are equipped to give their children a biblical worldview grandparents to give their grandchildren a biblical worldview and, and really be focused on that part of it's going to be that we have to rethink what the local church does.
If we know as we do that, a person's worldview, which is the key thing that shapes everything they do and believe for the rest of their life is formed before the age of 13. And it rarely changes very much after that during the teens and twenties, we tinker with it. But I mean, it's basically the same. We know that most people die with the same worldview they had at the age of 13, did a longitudinal study on that.
And so knowing that, what that says to me, if I'm the leader or, or a pastor of a church, My primary function has to be to minister, to children. And so rather than treating them as bait, I've got to treat them as the focal point of what we're doing. And I've got to rally the adults around the children so that they recognize they need to be ministering to the children at all times as well.
They need to be getting what they require. To build into the lives of those young children. You know, that's part of it. Part of it's going to have to be that we're going to have to redo the whole seminary process. Cause that's been broken for a long time, in many different ways. We can talk about it another time.
Yeah. Don't get me on that soapbox, you know, but yeah, I mean that that's got to change as well because they're the ones who are, who are facilitating the system and place. There are quote unquote paid professionals in that system to keep that system going, the system's broken. So we need, you know, what's creating that to also change.
Tony: So I, I do want to take a moment of personal privilege and ask you your opinion on denominations because I, I'm a a conservative, Orthodox Methodists. If, if if that exists anymore or Wesleyan, for sure. So you know, what we're watching in front of us right now is, is our denomination kind of well, it's crumbling, obviously, you know, if you, I'm sure you've seen some, yeah.
It's imploding, that's even better way to say it. So you know, what are your thoughts on denominations and, and what does that mean? For the next generation. And are they an important part to this process of spiritual formation?
George: Denominations are manmade institution. So just like any other man-made institution, they will come and they will go, they serve a purpose, they'll outlive their purpose.
And so, you know, given denominations are probably going to have different timeframes within which. That coming and going happens and that's okay. I mean, we can't get hung up on that. The thing we've got to get hung up on is Jesus. He's really all that matters. And so, you know, if the denomination is serving our ends of really making disciples of all the words.
Great. Let let's keep the dominations around if they're standing in the way. And if they're creating barriers more than they're creating opportunities, they need to go. Time is short people. Don't, you know, don't last on earth forever. We've only got a limited time to reach them and to help them find their, their fullness in Christ.
And so, you know, I would say not just the nominations, but you know, seminaries, any other institutions that are manmade. Let's not think that they're sacred. They're not, we made them, they may have been useful for a period of time when they seized to be very valuable. Let's move on and create something better.
Tony: I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's, it's simple, but it's not easy. I, I'm curious in your own family are there anything that you're doing with your kids that we, our grandkids, that we could steal from you to help form that biblical world?
George: I don't know about stealing anything unique or special, but you know, for, for my wife and I, it's important to us that we see those children as part of our spiritual heritage.
If we're not building in the right stuff to them, we have kind of failed God. You know, and he'll get over it, you know, and he'll get around it. But, but I know that he would want to use us in that process. So when we talk with our kids, we're always thinking about how do we connect this with either biblical principles or their relationship with Christ when they're engaged in different activities.
In addition to encouraging them and, and, and instructing them are always again, trying to bring it back to what does this have to do with who Christ made you to be you know, everything that we're doing with them. We're trying to take through that filter whether it's the television programs that we would allow them to watch the conversations that they have with each other at the lunch table.
The things that we experienced when we go out into the marketplace with them you know, I was at a burger king recently and we were having lunch and there was a, a homeless guy who wandered up outside the window. And my grandson and I were sitting there and the, you know, the guy was on the other side of the window and the man came into the burger king.
And I said to, you know, my grandson, wait here just a minute. Okay. I'll be right back. And I went over and I bought the guy a hamburger and it, and it. And I came back and, and you know, his eyes were real wide. He said, grandpa, what were you doing? Who is that man? I said, well, I don't know who he is, but I can tell that he's really struggling.
And my sense was because he, you know, I mean, he lives on the streets, JD. He sleeps on the sidewalk. I mean, he's having a tough life. And so he needs some people to love him and that's why Jesus brought us here. And so he came in a restaurant, I know he doesn't have any money. And, and I had. And I know that God gave it to me.
I bet God gave it to me so that I could use it for that man, so that he would have something to eat today. Isn't that cool. God put us together so that we could do these things and he's like, whoa, that's so cool. You know, I mean, it, it's those kinds of things where we're trying to be a living representation.
To them of what does it mean to be Christ-like, it's one thing to spout the verses, memorize them and, you know, call them out. But it's another thing to take them and put them into practice. And that's what I want our kids to see.
Tony: I love that. That's so good. I know that that my listeners are going to want to learn more about your research and how to follow you on the interwebs.
Where is the best. To get all of all the information about the ministry that you're doing and the research and and were where to get that details that,
George: The best place to go is, is probably cultural research center.com. So at Arizona Christian university, where I teach and we have a research center.
All the research that we're doing on worldview and on cultural transformation, we put on that website, cultural research center.com. You can download it for free. You can mail it to friends. You can sign up to get an alert as to when the next report comes out. We put them out every couple of weeks. And so that, that would be a good place to go.
Tony: Awesome. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time today. W one of the questions I always love to ask people is kind of the last question is a, is an advice question. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice, except I'm going to I'm going to take you back to a very specific time that, that your first day on the job doing Christian research back when you didn't know who oral Roberts was, or Billy Graham, if you could go back and talk to that young version of yourself, what's the one piece of advice.
George: Think about the biggest possible picture of how, what I'm doing could potentially add value to the kingdom of God and spend my entire career building toward that. It took me probably 10 years. Maybe 15 years. I don't remember exactly, but it took me a long time to get to the point where I thought, you know what, rather than just doing project after project for different ministries and churches and whatnot, and they're all good work.
They're all helpful to the kingdom, but instead have the big picture of, yeah. But what do we want it to look like in the end and how could the information gathering and the analysis and the strategic. Thinking and planning and the strategic relationship building. If I could start that from day one, moving toward that big picture, that that would be probably the most advantageous thing.
I could've told myself.
Tony: Praise God, praise God. Dr. Barna, thank you so much for your wisdom and your insight and what you do for the kingdom. I truly appreciate it from the bottom.
George: Well, thanks so much, Tony. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.
Tony: Right? Incredible conversation with Dr. Barna. I love the way he talked about worldview and the way he talks about theology and how young our worldview has really formed. That was a really big takeaway for me and my hope and prayer is that I can use this information to help the next generation do a little bit more with their biblical world.
Again, thank you guys so much. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, leave a rating or review on iTunes, and maybe even share this episode with a friend. I love being able to bring this information to you chin every week and next week, we've got another new episode with two of my favorite people, Roz and Cali.
Picardo all about their new book. Money talks. At the end of the day, we're doing all of this to help you follow Jesus, because if you want to follow Jesus, you must be willing to.
