New Barna Study Reveals Conflicting Views of Pastors, Congregants
The Barna Group conducted an in-depth study that revealed contradictory views between the church pastors and congregants on the level of commitment of the congregant.
The Barna Group conducted an in-depth study that revealed contradictory views between the church pastors and congregants on the level of commitment of the congregant.
Two new national surveys released on Monday suggest that pastors’ optimisms of the level of faith of their church members are unjustified.
Based on a representative national sample of 627 Protestant pastors, distributed proportionally across denominations, the study shows that pastors believe a large majority of their congregants place their faith in God as the highest priority in their life. On average, pastors maintain that 70 percent of the adults in their church view their faith as their greatest priority. Moreover, the survey showed that as many as one out of every six pastors (16 percent) believe that 90 percent or more of the adults in their church hold their relationship with God as their top priority in life, the Barna Group reported.
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However, contrasting the pastors’ optimistic view of people’s faith, a nationally representative sample of 1,002 adults was asked the same question – to identify their top priority in life – and only one out of every seven (15 percent) placed a relationship with God as their top priority. And among those who attend Protestant churches (to accurately compare Protestant pastor and congregants), the study found that less than one out of every four (23 percent) listed God as their highest life priority.
Some people groups were more likely than others to make God their number one priority, including evangelicals (51 percent said their faith in God was their highest priority), African-Americans (38 percent) and adults who attend a house church (34 percent).
The people least likely to put God first on their priority were adults under 30 years of age, residents of the Northwest and West, and those who described themselves as “mostly liberal” on political and social matters, the Barna Group reported.
The Christian research group concluded that “regardless of how the population was evaluated, though, there was no segment of the adult population that came close to the level of commitment that Protestant pastors claimed for churchgoers.”
The survey of Protestant pastors attempts to explain the discrepancy of why pastors have such a positive view of the faith commitment of their church members while their congregants deny making God their top priority.
Apparently, pastors mainly use one criterion to measure a person’s faith commitment – the number of people involved in a church-related volunteer activity or ministry. More than half of the surveyed pastors (54 percent) listed this as a measure of the spiritual health of their church.
The other two most listed standards are church attendance and some form of life change experience (usually meaning that the person has made a first-time commitment to Jesus Christ), which was named as an important criteria by more than one out of every seven pastors.
At the end of the report, the founder of the Barna Group commented on the findings and the potential impact it could have on American churches.
“It has been said that ‘you get what you measure’ and that ‘you see what you want to see.’ Both of those sayings go a long way toward describing the assessment problem that plagues churches today,” stated George Barna, directing leader of the group. “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.
“The nation’s adults deserve some credit for recognizing and acknowledging that God is not a top priority in their life,” Barna added. “The challenge to church leaders is to stop pandering for popularity and to set the bar higher. 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.
“There has never been a time,” the researcher continued, “when American society was in more dire need of the Christian Church to provide a pathway to a better future. Given the voluminous stream of moral challenges, and the rampant spiritual hunger that defines our culture today, this should be the heyday for biblical ministry.
“As things stand now, we have become content with placating sinners and filling auditoriums as the marks of spiritual health,” he concluded.
To read the complete report, visit: www.barna.org.
