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Despite that confusing beginning, something momentous had happened to the Barnas. Upon graduation George took a job with a media research firm in Los Angeles. His new employers put him on an account working with televangelists Rex Humbard and Oral Roberts. To Barna, "Oral Roberts" was a basketball team. The first time he watched an Oral Roberts television special, "words of knowledge" and faith healing utterly confounded him. He loved working for a Christian cause, however, and soon quit his secular job to work for a Christian media company headquartered in Wheaton, Illinois. "I loved the people, loved the ability to get out of bed in the morning and do something [more significant than] another ad to sell Kleenex." The work involved fundraising campaigns, which for Barna "wasn't even about raising money" in itself but about "knowing that there's money there to see a kid's life changed" and "alerting a constituency to the potential to use the resources that God has given them to good ends."

The Barnas tried dozens of churches in Southern California and later in Wheaton, coming away unsatisfied until they visited an upstart congregation in the Chicago suburbs known as Willow Creek. The church, led by Bill Hybels, sought to communicate the gospel on seekers' terms, even if that meant abandoning some church traditions. It was dynamic and savvy. Its leaders seemed to apply good marketing strategy to church life, in just the way that Barna had learned to apply it to television or fundraising. "That gave us a whole new understanding of what the local church could be," he says.

In 1984 Barna moved back to Southern California to launch his own company, Barna Research. He intended to offer his research and marketing expertise as a service to Christian ministry.

Jim Engel, who taught marketing at Wheaton Graduate School and Eastern College, says that Barna "does very good work, and his work can be trusted. He is a very competent researcher, and he has integrity." Similarly, pollster George Gallup says that Barna has "a really good research mind."

Market research does, however, see the world from a particular angle, which is both Barna's strength and his blind spot. Marketing begins by analyzing the target audience and trying to understand what communicates effectively. As Leadership Network's Carol Childress points out, good missionary anthropology offers many parallel insights. How do we reach a particular group of people with our message and draw them into appropriate action? For example, if you learn that your target audience finds church robes repellent, you will consider other clothes. If movies are a fount of meaning for your audience, you will bring movies into your message.

Market research is not a neutral tool, however. It grew as a business technique, and reflects some of the biases of business. While missionary anthropology knows a lot about spontaneous revivals, business focuses on planned action: strategy, market segmentation, and communication techniques. While acknowledging the unplanned and unexpected, business concentrates on what it can control. Market research thus tends to project a closed system where every action has a consequence, and mysteries are rare. Some refer to this approach as "scientific," but genuine science leaves plenty of room for the awe and mystery at the center of things. Market research rarely inspires wonder.

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August 5 2002, Vol. 46, No. 9