Teddy James

AFA Journal staff writer

June 2012 – There is a long history of God using teens and young adults to change the world. Mary, Jesus’ mother, was probably no older than 16 when she gave birth to Christ. David was but a boy when he was anointed king. Billy Graham was 18 when he preached his first sermon.

But are teenagers today willing to take such great leaps of faith? Has the church created an environment of discipleship that helps them discern what direction to go? AFA Journal asked David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, to discuss the Christianity of today’s churches and the culture in which teens and young adults find themselves.

AFA Journal: What is Barna Group?
David Kinnaman: Barna Group is a market research company focused on the intersection of faith and culture. We help churches and the Christian community understand today’s society. Some call us the Christian Gallup. We offer free data on our website, www.Barna.org, that takes a broad look at several different trends within Christianity. We also do custom studies for congregations to help them understand their community or church culture better.

AFAJ: How did Barna Group start?
DK: George Barna felt there was an opportunity to serve faith and faith-related organizations with a knowledge that would give them eyes and ears to help tune them to what the Lord is doing in our times. In 1 Chronicles 12:32 the tribe of Issachar is described as a people who understood the times and knew what Israel should do, and that is consistent with our vision.

AFAJ: How has your research been received?
DK: Sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Some feel that we have a bent toward bad news, and there are some critics who say we are too critical of the church. I think that comes from the fact that we’ve written on house churches and try to understand the various ways Americans experience and express their faith.

Look at the human condition. Examine our fallen nature and the fact that every aspect of our culture has the fallenness of humanity imbedded in it. That includes the church, family, workplace and politics. What we try to do is shine a light on human frailty, on the challenges of the church, on the things that don’t always work and the things that do work. We try to give people a new vision for how their lives might be different were they to understand God’s grace in the midst of our brokenness.

We are not perfect people and we certainly have much to learn. We are very committed to being honest and being representatives of our kind of work and research. But we have to be honest and truthful as we examine tough realities.

We wrote a book called unChristian, in which we explored young, non-Christian people’s perceptions of Christianity. It was a very difficult book to write, a tough study to do and it was controversial because we were saying that there are all these negative perceptions about Christians out there. And yet, at the core, our goal was to try to say that there are some real perception issues out there, real things that we need to control. The truth is that we are a fallen people who are redeemed by Christ, but that doesn’t mean that we’re perfectly expressing Christ to people. Some people appreciate that [admission] and some do not.

AFAJ: You have a new book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church … And Rethinking Faith. What motivated you to write it?
DK: It’s no secret that young adults wander from their faith as they get older. That’s not a new phenomenon, but it does have new dimensions, contours and urgency. We wanted to do our best in exploring some of the issues that are preventing young people from sticking with their faith. We researched to understand 18-29 year olds who grew up in Christian homes but still left the faith. Our desire was to discover why they wandered from the faith at some point of their young adult or late teen years and if there is a way the church could understand its current cultural context, because it really needs to. It’s important for us in the church to understand our current culture in order to understand what the Spirit of God may be asking us to do in response to that.

AFAJ: Hasn’t every generation had its own period of exodus?
DK: I don’t know about every generation, but I think it is certainly consistent with human nature to say that as people get older, they rebel against their parent’s faith views or come to a place of personal ownership of them. But I think there are new dimensions to this that most people are ignoring. One is the fact that it is not necessarily true that a generation leaves their faith en mass as we are currently seeing. In You Lost Me, I make the observation that American teens are the most religiously active age demographic in the country, but college students are the least religiously active. That was not the case in past generations.

Another aspect is displayed when you look at the social change over the last 50 years. Look at the attitudes toward marriage; attitudes toward childbearing; whether you need to be married or not to have children; skepticism toward government and media; the proliferation of media, movies, internet, television and music. Entertainment is the most powerful social institution today and that wasn’t the case 50 years ago. How could all of this not affect the spiritual journey of this generation? On top of that, how can we see the institutions of media, government, music and marriage begin changing and expect that the church be the same as it has always been?

AFAJ: How do you think the church is responding to culture right now?
DK: There are pockets of churches, leaders and individuals who are doing amazing work; then there are exceptions to that. I would characterize American Christianity as a mile wide but an inch deep. It’s very easy for us to say that everyone else is shallow and we’re the deep ones, but generally speaking, so many of the things we embrace as American Christians are more about us as consumers than they are about true, biblical Christianity.

That gets translated into a vast majority of people who say they are Christians, say they have made a commitment to Christ that is important in their lives, and yet, there is something sadly lacking in what they believe. What that tells me is that we have done a good job of evangelizing, but we haven’t done a good job of discipling.

AFAJ: What do you prescribe for the church?
DK: I think the church needs to respond on a very practical level by being very committed to relationships, very committed to Scripture, very committed to helping young people discern and live out their calling. On a deep level, we need to understand our cultural captivity, our willingness to become influenced by the spirit of the age. We need to realize that each one of us is part of a system, part of a way of seeing the world that may or may not be very consistent with Scripture. And this generation is pushing us to rethink several of those things. That’s a healthy and good tension for us to recognize. However, it’s going to be a very dangerous place if we don’t respond and allow this generation to help push the church in some positive ways.

One of the strongest ways we can respond to this tension is multi-generational leadership. The most effective organizations, churches and families are the ones in which there is a commitment to shared leadership. Clearly there are different roles for parents and children, a pastor and a young person. But on the flip side, if we don’t fully partner with this generation and help them discover their gifts and skills, we will miss the opportunities to help them and have them help us become the kind of people we all need to be.

When you look at the sweep of Scripture, there is a profound way in which God works with the next generation. He is speaking truth to them. He is interested in giving them opportunities and He wants them to be leaders in their generation just as He wants us to be leaders in ours. Many churches are stuck in the mentality that how we do what we do is what God cares about. I think we end up prioritizing our traditions over our children. I’m not saying that Scripture shouldn’t matter or that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I’m concerned that we don’t fully understand how much God wants to use, wants to speak through, wants to employ younger people and people of all generations to accomplish His work. We have the privilege of working with the future generation, but often we get in the way of ourselves as we try to work with the next generation.

AFAJ: Is there hope for the church reaching the new generation?
DK: There is a trend of this generation separating from the faith, either for a long amount of time or just for a few short years, but there are also counter trends. In the midst of this secular and hedonistic generation there are some great examples of young people who are very passionate about the Lord and the church. They are living out a version of Christianity that is winsome and biblical, that orients around evangelism with all these things we would care to see young people do and embrace. Another way to put it is that as the darkness gets darker, these young people shine even brighter, and that is a greatly positive development.  

Barna Group
2368 Eastman Avenue Unit 12
Ventura, CA 93003
805-639-0000
www.barna.org

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You Lost Me
You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving the Church … And Rethinking Faith is a book every pastor, youth pastor and parent should read.

David Kinnaman, author and president of Barna Group, knows that teens and twenty-somethings are leaving the church en mass. Some will return, some will not. The book seeks to understand why they are leaving and what can be done to draw them back or prevent their exodus.

He classifies those leaving as nomads, prodigals and exiles. Each category has a distinct story that is important for the church to hear. But their common thread is a lack of discipleship while in church.

You Lost Me is not a formulaic book of 10 steps to a stronger church. It is filled with hard truths and honesty. One of these hard truths is a lack of multigenerational leadership and discipleship. But Kinnaman offers insight on how to reconnect with the lost generation with the hope that they will return to the faith.
Review by Teddy James