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Barna anticipates this criticism and replies: "The Bible does not tell us that worship must happen in a church sanctuary and therefore we must be actively associated with a local church." But to say the New Testament does not prescribe a form for worship (though its assemblies somehow all gather on the Lord's Day to read Scripture, pray, prophesy, and share the Lord's Supper) is not to say the New Testament allows us to disregard the church.

Not that I'm blaming Barna. His book merely reveals every thin spot in evangelical ecclesiology. We flamingly disregard 2,000 years of guidance under the Holy Spirit. We elevate private judgment above the collective wisdom of apostles, martyrs, reformers, and saints.

Granted, Christianity has always accepted non-congregational forms. Consider the fourth-century hermits who fled to the Egyptian desert. But precisely because those loose gatherings of ascetics fostered so many problems—including pride and dissension—John Cassian and others formed them into communities that were committed to the sacraments and under spiritual authority. In other words, Christianity has welcomed non-congregational forms, and it will welcome many created by today's Revolutionaries, but Christianity has wisely reserved the central and essential place for the local congregation.

The third question: Is this Revolution motivated primarily by the Spirit of God, advancing the kingdom beyond the walls of the stiff and often ineffective local congregation, or by the anti-institutional and individualistic drives of our time? Barna argues the former, and in the book's strongest chapter, he provides a relentless statistical indictment of the local church's failure to develop mature disciples. Barna is rightly incensed at the low level of spiritual maturity in the American church: "As the research data clearly show, churches are not doing the job."

Still, Revolution's emphasis on personal choice would make a marketer rejoice and an apostle weep. Barna expects to see believers "choosing from a proliferation of options, weaving together a set of favored alternatives into a unique tapestry that constitutes the personal 'church' of the individual." The phrase "personal 'church' of the individual" must be the most mind-spinning phrase ever written about the church of Jesus Christ. Could it be that we evangelical Protestants, who have done more to fragment Christendom than any other group, are now taking that to the logical extreme: a church at the individual level, each person creating a personal "church" experience? At any other point in church history, "personal church" would be nonsensical. In today's America, it's the Next Big Thing.

Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam argued compellingly in Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2001) that since 1960, Americans' involvement in social groups and churches has dropped 25 to 50 percent. So we can't help but wonder if this same societal withdrawal from institutions is now bringing us a do-it-yourself church. As Roger E. Olson writes in The Mosaic of Christian Belief (InterVarsity, 2002): "Nowhere in the Great Tradition of Christianity before the twentieth century can one find the uniquely modern phenomenon of 'churchless Christians.'"

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January 2006, Vol. 50, No. 1