This statistician is changing the way pastors think.
What have you been reading lately?” asked LEADERSHIP.
“A lot of George Barna’s stuff,” the pastor replied.
Was this the pastor of a large nondenominational church in a burgeoning suburb?
No. This pastor shepherds a mainline congregation of seventy in a midwestern cornfield.
“What draws you to reading Barna?”
“Barna makes me think in fresh ways about the church,” the pastor said.
George Barna does that. An author, marketing researcher, and head of Barna Research Group, he burst onto the American ministry scene in the early ’90s with books like “The Frog in the Kettle and User-Friendly Churches.” He does not blush at using marketing and church in the same sentence. Nor does he hesitate in “The Power of Vision and Today’s Pastors” to tell pastors, as Ford Motor Company put it, to “lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
LEADERSHIP associate editor Dave Goetz traveled to George Barna’s offices in Southern California to meet the man behind the numbers.
WHAT DO YOU OFFER PASTORS?
George Barna: Most ministry resources are based on intuition, feelings, and experience: “My church did this; therefore, it will work for you.” But that isn’t necessarily true or helpful for other churches.
Barna Research provides a broad-based, objective assessment of what’s happening in the marketplace and in the church. One key thing we offer is objectivity.
We also take statistical information and break it into bite-sized pieces in a user-friendly format. Then we give a wholistic view: “This is happening over here, but you can’t understand that unless you connect it with the bigger picture.”
DID YOU GROW UP PLANNING TO HELP CHURCH LEADERS?
I grew up Roman Catholic. I was an altar boy who attended Boston College, a Catholic university.
While at Rutgers University working on a master’s degree, I decided to get married, so my fiancee, who is now my wife, Nancy, and I attended a weekend sponsored by the Catholic church for couples wanting to marry. At the end of the weekend, a priest decides whether the church will bless the union.
The weekend came to a close, and we sat down with a priest to hear his decision. “I think you’re great candidates for marriage,” he said. “We’re going to bless this union. Do you have any questions?”
That was the wrong thing to ask me. I had waited twenty-four years for a priest to ask me if I had any questions. I unloaded on him: “Why do Catholics believe this? Why do Catholics say that?”
The priest cocked his head like a dog when you blow a high-pitched whistle. His face reddened; he stood up and pounded his desk.
“Don’t you ever question the Catholic church,” he fumed. “Your job is to come here when we tell you to come, to do what we tell you to do.”
SO YOU’VE BEEN ASKING QUESTIONS OF THE CHURCH EVER SINCE?
 (Laughter) His response didn’t sit well with me. I was a graduate student studying the social sciences. I had been taught to tear everything apart, analyze it, and put it back together to see if it made sense.
That incident stirred up questions about what we believed. A short time later, several friends invited Nancy and me to their Protestant churches. Eventually we attended a church that did something we thought was so cool: The pastor preached out of the Bible. He also visited us and went through the plan of salvation.
“Would you like to accept Christ as your Savior?” he asked.
“I’m a little skeptical of this free lunch stuff,” I said. “You’re telling me I can live eternally with no cost?”
“Salvation is a gift,” he said.
“I’ll give this Jesus Christ of yours thirty days to prove himself,” I replied. “If he’s as powerful and as wonderful and as loving as you say, then in thirty days I’ll be absolutely convinced.”
“Okay,” the pastor said, “but you have to agree to go to church every Sunday, attend a small group Bible study and Sunday school class, and pray and read the Bible every day. And I’d like to talk with you during the month about what you’re experiencing.”
I have no recollection of those thirty days, except that we were blown away by the presence of God in our lives.
WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO RESEARCH THE CHURCH?
I started my career managing political campaigns and then became a campaign consultant and pollster. Eventually I ended up in California working for a large marketing research firm.
I’d go home at night and tell Nancy, “You can’t imagine what I found out today: This year 15 percent people like Chevies versus 12 percent last year.” We would look at each other and say, “Who cares?”
One day a client who represented a number of Christian ministries came to our firm. The research industry is primarily Jewish, and so, knowing I was a Christian, the firm assigned me to that account. Working with this account began to mean much more to me than the blue-chip accounts I’d been given. So I eventually left that company and went to work for a Christian agency in the Wheaton, Illinois, area for three years. After one too many brutal winters, I moved back to California and started Barna Research Group.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE HARDEST QUESTIONS PASTORS ASK?
Sometimes after my seminars, a pastor will say, “Here’s my vision statement. Is this God’s vision for me?” That question is not so much hard as frustrating.
I can judge a vision statement by certain characteristics, but can I judge whether it’s God’s vision for him? Hardly. I can take people only so far; then it’s between them and God.
Another question that frustrates me is “Will such-and-such idea work in my church?” How would I know?
Marketing is not a science; it’s an art, just like preaching. Everything we do in ministry is by definition an art, because our methods must be directed and empowered by the Holy Spirit. We can’t make ministry a science: “If you do A, B, C, and D, you will definitely get outcome E.” That removes God from the equation. There is no guarantee that if you do the world’s greatest mailing, expecting thousands of people to flood the doors next Sunday, that it will happen.
Another awkward question is “What is your personal opinion on such-and-such?”
I try not to give my opinion because I’m a public-opinion researcher. If I start telling my opinions, the line between facts and opinions gets blurred.
FOR EXAMPLE?
Do I have an opinion about the “Toronto blessing”? Absolutely. Does it matter? Absolutely not.
I once made the mistake of endorsing two books. Then people said, “You’re taking stands. How can we trust you’re going to be objective in your research?”
So I’ve backed off from making endorsements. At Barna Research we created a no-endorsement policy for any product, service, book, organization, or individual. If I spew my opinions, I hurt our ministry. What I’m trying to do is understand how other people see the world and how that relates to their moving closer to God. When people ask about things I care deeply about, I bite my tongue and say, “I don’t know. We haven’t done research on that.”
SOME PEOPLE, THOUGH, WOULD SAY YOUR SYMPATHIES LIE WITH THE CHURCH GROWTH MOVEMENT, THAT “SEEKER-SENSITIVE” AND “GEORGE BARNA” GO TOGETHER LIKE–
Like Hitler and Mussolini? (Laughter)
SOMETHING LIKE THAT. THEY MIGHT SAY, “BARNA IS NOT OBJECTIVE; HE’S INVESTED IN THE CHURCH GROWTH MOVEMENT.”
That is an abuse of my image. Yes, I am pro seeker-sensitive. But more than being pro seeker-sensitive, I’m pro people-sensitive.
But I’m never sure what people mean when they throw me into the church growth camp. If they mean that “George Barna believes big attendance numbers are the key to ministry as well as tracking those numbers,” something is wrong. That’s simply not true; I don’t believe that. There are wonderfully dynamic small churches. Some effective ministries are actually losing people. There are myriad ways to track whether a church is healthy and successful. Numbers is only one indicator, and not even the key one.
Throughout the country are many great traditional churches. A segment of the national population will never set foot in a seeker-sensitive church, and if they did, they’d be turned off. We’d do a great disservice to people to imply all churches should be the same. Churches weren’t the same in the early days of Christianity, and they shouldn’t be today, especially in a culture as diverse as ours.
SOME OF YOUR CRITICS HAVE CHARGED YOU WITH “SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY” BY BRINGING MARKETING INTO THE CHURCH. HOW YOU DO RESPOND?
The fight over whether to market is false. Every church markets. When a church puts its name on a building or prints up a bulletin for Sunday services or prints business cards for the pastor, it markets.
So the issue is: Are you marketing intelligently and intentionally? This is a stewardship issue. If a church isn’t consciously engaged in marketing, it’s probably not being a good steward of its resources.
Proctor & Gamble puts out a host of differently packaged soaps on the market that are basically the same soap. Why package them differently? Because different groups of people like the green wrapper instead of the red wrapper, or the small bar instead of the large.
We can do the same without prostituting our values, theology, or purposes. No church in the community is able or called to reach everybody in the community. So if a church has a particular group of people they can reach, why not try to understand that group and focus on them? Marketing is asking how you can communicate and minister most effectively to that group.
PEOPLE HAVE SAID, “IF YOU WANT THE MOST POSITIVE SPIN ON THE CHURCH, USE GALLUP’S STATISTICS. IF YOU WANT THE MOST NEGATIVE SPIN, USE BARNA’S.”
In most ministry books, the emphasis is “Be positive, be positive.” My emphasis is “Be honest, be honest.” My task in life is to exegete the culture accurately. I want to tell the truth in love, but that doesn’t always mean I can say things that will make people laugh or feel good about themselves. Sometimes it’s necessary to say, “Whoa, we are blowing it here.”
When you strip away some of the niceties, and talk with pastors on a deeper level, they know the church is not cutting it today.
But the criticism that angers me most is “Barna’s an outsider. He’s not a pastor; he’s a theorist.” For the last year and a half, I’ve been a part-time staff pastor. Through that experience I’ve learned a lot about ministry but nothing that would cause me to go back to the books I’ve written and say, “If I had known this, I wouldn’t have written that.”
In my writing I offer information stripped of my opinion, so it wouldn’t matter if I were a pastor, a Rhodes scholar, or a homeless person. I’m dealing with objective data about the people churches are trying to reach.
What perturbs me is when people with a particular style of ministry get upset because they hear somebody promoting a different style. Many of my critics miss the difference between theology and methodology. Scripture is abundantly clear theologically, but it gives enormous latitude methodologically. If your theology and your heart are right, you have many different ways to promote the gospel and penetrate culture.
When I consult with churches, I ask, “In your community, what are the five major activities people engage in on Sunday morning (and for most people, going to church isn’t one of them)?” There’s usually a long pause.
We can argue about the ill effects of modernity, but the reality is, the world is changing. We can stand still and continue to use models developed five hundred years ago, but we will end up reaching fewer and fewer people. What good is that?
WHEN DOES A CHURCH CROSS THE LINE AND VIOLATE SCRIPTURE BY ITS METHODS?
That’s a hard question. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis.
But before you engage in ministry, it’s imperative to define your values and key theological distinctives.
I’ve seen churches step over the line, for example, because they constructed a huge building and suddenly needed to raise money. So things started to get compromised.
You need a group that holds the church accountable, such as elders, who look at what the church is doing and ask, “Is this part of our church culture? Is it something that will help us achieve the vision God has given us and bring glory to God?”
ARE YOUR SUGGESTIONS BEST SUITED FOR LARGER CHURCHES? WHAT SHOULD A RURAL PASTOR WITH SIXTY MEMBERS DO WITH YOUR STATISTICS?
The same thing an urban or suburban pastor does. Rural pastors need to ask, “What is the underlying reality Barna is probing?” We’re trying to uncover the principles underlying the activities every pastor needs to be engaged in–vision, values, core beliefs, relationships, planning. The principles I convey are more important than the data.
The media call me up all the time asking, “What percentage are doing this? What percentage are doing that?” Half the time, I don’t have a clue. I can’t remember all those numbers, either. I wouldn’t expect any pastor to remember all my statistics. The reason for putting them in a book is to provide a resource. If you need them to shape an idea, the numbers are there.
Typically I paint a broad picture that won’t be absolutely accurate for any one church. Let’s say I’m evaluating how to improve the health of the church. The most important thing is not, for instance, the percentage of churches that grow after they do something to train their people. Instead, it’s better to take that statistic and ask, “What are we doing to train our workers?” I hope they’ll grasp the principle, not the numbers.
DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE, AS YOUR BOOKS HAVE SUGGESTED, THAT MOST PASTORS DON’T HAVE THE GIFT OF LEADERSHIP?
When we asked pastors about their gifts, 6 percent said they had the gift of leadership. If you throw in other terms like shepherding, pastoring, and administration, and assume that maybe they meant leadership, that bumps it up to around 30 percent.
But when we asked these pastors, “Can you articulate God’s vision for the ministry of your church?” we found that roughly 90 percent of them could articulate a basic definition of ministry. But only 2 percent could articulate the vision for their church.
I’m not saying the other 98 percent of pastors are not capable of articulating vision; I’m saying that to this point they haven’t. Given the centrality and the significance of vision, that’s one reason so many pastors are ineffective; they don’t know where they’re going.
ARE YOU SAYING THAT 294,000 OF THE 300,000 PASTORS IN THIS COUNTRY SHOULD RESIGN AND LET SOMEONE ELSE LEAD?
I’m not willing to overlook that as a possibility. It may well be that a large number of pastors are not gifted as leaders, will never be leaders, were never called to be leaders. They pursued a career model that wrongly valued being a senior pastor as its highest end.
That’s tragic. Professional career realities should not get in the way of your gift mix and niche in the kingdom. If it’s true, pastors must admit, “I’m really not meant to be a leader, but I am a great preacher. Maybe I can find a context where I can preach every Sunday and I don’t have to worry about leading.”
No one person has the myriad of gifts that in America we’ve come to expect pastors to exhibit. Why not recognize that person’s gift and team the person with other people with complementary gifts?
THAT WOULD BE DIFFICULT FOR SINGLE STAFF CHURCHES.
That’s precisely where the American model for ministry has gotten way off base. We assume that ministry has to be led, conducted, and evaluated by professionals–people who do this fulltime. And so, consequently, we’ve kept education from the laity; we’ve kept positions of influence and authority from the laity. It’s not a biblical model. In the Book of Acts, it was the laity who made things happen.
In small churches, pastors must surround themselves with people committed to use their gifts for the church–and then to turn them loose. I see no problem with having your primary communicator, for example, not being a fulltime staff person. If people are gifted in preaching and teaching, and theologically sound, let them preach and teach. To assume a senior pastor is the primary one to preach, teach, counsel, administrate, lead, raise funds, etc., is silly. It doesn’t work.
To some, that’s radical thinking; to me it’s just common sense.
HAVE YOU EVER DOUBTED WHAT YOU WERE CALLED TO DO?
Back in 1990 Barna Research did a lot of secular work to pay for our work with Christian ministries.
But I felt frustrated. The Christian ministries would read the research, say “That’s interesting,” and then shelve it. And then we’d have to call them ten times to get them to pay the bill.
So I thought, Why don’t we just work with secular folk? We’ll be salt in the secular arena.
So one day I announced to the staff, “Pursuing Christian ministries is not going to be our focus.”
A month later I went on vacation to Hawaii. During those two weeks, I was reading the Bible and praying about our direction for the future, when the voice of God came to me, which I’ll paraphrase: “George, do you really think I’ve given you this company and these opportunities, only for you to turn your back on churches because they’re hard to work with? Do you really believe you’re the first Christian leader who has found the church hard to work with?”
So I came back from my vacation and told the staff, “Did I say we’re not working with Christian ministries anymore? What I meant was we’re going to focus on Christian ministries.”
That change came in 1991. Since then we’ve stayed true to our vision: To help ministries make better decisions by providing them with current, accurate, and reliable information in bite-sized pieces. If Barna Research can help church leaders be more strategic, we’ve done our job.
I want to be a catalyst. I hope my writing challenges assumptions, causing pastors to think creatively, act intentionally, and know who they are.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
