In “The Third Coming of George Barna” Christianity Today’s Tim Stafford writes,
[Barna] had hoped to push church leaders to revitalize the church, to make it as beautiful and powerful as God meant it to be. His ten-year campaign had failed. “The strategy was flawed because it had an assumption. The assumption was that the people in leadership are actually leaders. [I thought] all I need to do is give them the right information and they can draw the right conclusions
.Most people who are in positions of leadership in local churches aren’t leaders. They’re great people, but they’re not really leaders.”
Again, later in the article it returns to the assertion by saying,
[Barna] spent untold hours interacting with pastors and church leaders, and he’s convinced that the majority of them aren’t leaders. Most are admirable people whose gifts lie in Bible teaching or pastoring. Those are valuable gifts, Barna affirms, but they are not leadership. By leadership he means the ability to motivate and lead institutional change.
There’s leaders and there’s maintainers / sustainers. Psychologists have pointed out that “masculine” influences will tend toward entrepreneurial changes, forging ahead and changing the world and “feminine” will be nest builders, sustainers and carers. Drawing my own lines between Barna’s opinion and the psychological model, and I would conclude that there’s a “feminine” character to the leadership.
Looking at the demographics of an average church you’ll see the feminine outweighing the masculine in the pews. In today’s culture it’s increasingly rare to get the men to see the relevance of “religion”. I don’t think that’s the religion per-se, I think it’s the way that religion has been packaged; a masculine presentation of the gospel would differ to a feminine one when you want to appeal to the psyche of the listening audience. Preachers will preach to their congregation and their ministries be colored by the influence of the people they’re leading. So, if there’s a feminine aspect to the leadership of the church that simply reflects the gender difference in the pews.
Back to Christianity Today,
When Barna first heard fundamentalist Bible teaching during his graduate student years, he told his wife with great excitement, “That, I really believe, is marketable!” A market research mindset was also implicit in his reasons for leaving the Catholic Church: “They’re saying don’t you dare question it.” Market research leaves no place for authority; it assumes everything can be taken apart and analyzed.
Though Barna left the Catholic church I don’t see the problem as being limited to that one group. “Don’t dare question” is a phrase heard from many pulpits the world over, either explicitly in the preaching or implicitly through the “code of silence” within certain churches. One of the red-flag phrases to listen for would be “touch not the lord’s anointed” — it’s surprising how many preachers claim invulnerability from the questioning of their flock, from other leaders or the culture at large.
“[Market research] assumes everything can be taken apart and analyzed” — not quite everything. There are some untouchables, the bedrock of the faith, but it’s surprising how much can and should be opened to scrutiny. The institutional church has been sending missionaries out into foreign countries for centuries. Their mandate in every case has been to preach the gospel in a way that makes sense of locals and to plant churches. To accomplish this feat, they had to question very deeply the practices of their home. In strictly missiological terms, this is known as contextualizing the gospel — placing into a context that makes sense of local folk.
I believe that in the 21st century we need to adopt a more missiological mindset to local churches. I believe that God is calling us to have a missional mindset that asks the touchy questions, that strips out deadwood from the organization, and raises the (perceived) relevance of the faith. The church needs to rise to Barna’s challenge, to analyze and take apart methods of “doing church” that ceased to be effective decades ago.
Finally,
One might question Barna’s analysis. Drawn from the business world, it assumes an entrepreneurial model of the church, which requires a certain kind of leadership.
The “entrepreneurial model” of doing church could very easily be renamed a “missional model”. Missionaries traditionally went from the comforts of home out to the (geographical) frontiers of the faith. Today’s challenge is less geographical and more sociological, but it remains essentially the same as ever (Matthew 28:19-20):
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
“Nations” here is from the Greek “Ethnos” - tribe, ethnicity, race, nation. Jesus never gave us a geographical commission, he called us to go to all people groups and that means crossing cultural boundaries. The Missionaries of yesteryear and the church planters of today share similar challenges and a similar commission.
In my opinion, Barna is calling us back to the great commission: to stop servicing the increasingly irrelevant organizations and to start planting living and vital communities of faith which will speak to today’s culture.
