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Emerging Trends Affecting Ministry

Whoever Gets There First, Wins
George Barna | posted 10/24/2007
This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

There are two key principles that are relevant for every leader who wants to emulate both the style and substance of Jesus the leader:

1. You cannot get the right results from the wrong people
   
2. You get what you measure
   

You Cannot Get the Right Results from the Wrong People

The church today is stagnant, no matter what areas we look at. The Barna Group put out a report, The State of the Church 2005, where we looked at 45 different beliefs and behaviors related to people's faith. We discovered that the Church has plateaued in all areas, including attendance, giving, evangelism, prayer, and Sunday School involvement.

What we have is a nation in which Christians are being affected more by the culture than Christians are affecting the culture. Or as I pointed out in a book I wrote in 2003, Think Like Jesus, we have a church in the U.S. in which people do not act like Jesus because they don't think like Jesus, and they don't think like Jesus because they do not possess a Biblical worldview.

We may try to combat this problem by focusing our ministry efforts on adults, to teach them how to have a Biblical worldview. But the research is proving this to be near impossible. We are focusing on the wrong people. We cannot get the right results from the wrong people.

It wasn't until I started doing this research that I began to recognize that we've all missed the boat. We should be focusing on children in our ministries, prioritizing them. We have made profound discoveries in our research:

1. We have come to realize that the moral development and foundations of a person are in place by the age of nine years old. Very little changes in the moral perspectives of individuals after that age.
   
2. We have also discovered that faith commitments of a vast majority of Americans are already solidified by the age of 13. This includes their perceptions about the existence of God, their perspective on the Bible, the means to salvation, making a commitment to Christ based on grace or deeds, and their role in the local church.
   
3. The most efficient ministers of the gospel in America today are kids. We find that a large share of the kids who accepted Christ did so because one of their friends, who has just done the same thing, got so excited they couldn't contain themselves.
   
4. Many adults who accept Christ do so because their children have accepted Christ. Their children were so transformed by the experience, and through their ongoing relationship the parents could no longer ignore the significance of it.
   
5. What you believe by age 13 is what you will likely die believing. We came to this conclusion after doing a couple of major national studies looking at the theological beliefs of children through people in their 90s.
   

See also:

 Biblical worldview, culture and faith, mission and strategy, moral development in children, spiritual development