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TruthBook Religious News Blog



Monday, February 06, 2006

Barna research finds discrepancy over spiritual health

A huge gap exists between the perception of pastors and the reality of people's devotion to God, a new report by The Barna Group has revealed.

Barna found that, on average, pastors believe that 70 percent of the adults in their church consider their personal faith in God to be the highest priority in their life.

But when similar questions were asked of those who attend church, Barna discovered that only one out of every seven adults, or 15 percent, placed their faith in God as the top priority.

Barna research indicates few pastors rely on criteria that reflect genuine devotion to God, opting instead to evaluate the spirituality of their members by whether they are involved in some form of church-related volunteer activity, whether they attend church regularly or whether they made a public profession of faith.

Among the criteria Barna said was used too infrequently to assess the spiritual health of a church: stewardship, evangelism, lifestyle changes, and community service.

Pastors, Barna found, are "nine times more likely to seek reactions to their sermon than they are to assess the congregation's reactions to visitors," and pastors are "21 times more likely to evaluate whether people show up for church than to determine whether people experienced the presence of God during their time at church."

"It has been said that 'you get what you measure' and 'you see what you want to see,'" researcher George Barna said in an online analysis. "Both of those sayings go a long way toward describing the assessment problem that plagues churches today. The only way to explain the enormous gap between the perceptions of pastors and the reality of people's lives is to understand that pastors evaluate spiritual health from an institutional perspective — that is, are people involved in keeping the system going — while people are aware of their unmet need to have a deeper and more meaningful relationship with God.

"People only live up to the expectations set for them. When the dominant expectations are that people show up, play nicely together and keep the system going, the potential for having the kinds of life-changing experiences that characterized the early Church are limited, at best. If churches believe in the life-changing power of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit, they must hold people to a higher and more challenging standard."

By Erin Curry Roach

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