If you love the local church, you probably won’t like George Barna’s latest book, Revolution. If, on the other hand, you are a Christian who has quit local church involvement, you may welcome Revolution, which exalts the decision of many “revolutionary” believers to drop the church from their busy schedules.

Barna is well known as a researcher who tracks beliefs and practices in the church and nation, and as the author of more than 30 books on church growth and church health. I have enjoyed some of Barna’s previous books and was looking forward to his latest contribution. Sadly, what this pocket-size 144-page book provides is a burned-out, disillusioned Barna serving up more of a rant than a revolution.

In Revolution (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005), Barna predicts that by 2025 involvement in local U.S. churches will plummet to half its present level. It is an alarming prediction. What is more shocking, however, is that Barna all but applauds this dismal vision of the church’s future. In Revolution, Barna basically says, “Bring it on!” and chides anyone who does not join him in welcoming the decline of the church as we know it.

During the next twenty years, Barna predicts, local congregations will decline in importance as Christians increasingly turn to “alternative faith-based communities” and to “media, arts and culture” for their Christian education, fellowship, and ministry. Barna provides few details about these alternative “means of spiritual experience and expression,” which he says currently constitute 25% of how Americans express their faith, but will reach as high as 70% by 2020. He mentions house churches, the Internet, and such peculiarities as “marketplace ministries” and “Christian creative arts guilds.” It’s all rather vague. It is remarkable that Barna knows so little about what his revolution will look like, yet he is able to measure down to the percentile what its impact will be two decades from now.

Actually, according to statistics published on Barna’s own website, U.S. church attendance has remained stable for at least the last twenty years, with slightly less than half of all American adults attending a religious service during any given week. However, not only does Barna predict that significantly fewer people will be active in churches twenty years from now, but Barna describes those who are abandoning the local church as “revolutionaries” who should be applauded rather than exhorted to return to the fold.

Who is a “Revolutionary” ala Barna? The best example is the one with which Barna opens his book. Two men, both suburban CEOs in their 30s, are golfing on a Sunday morning. Both are “born-again Christian[s] who had eliminated church life from their busy schedules.” Nevertheless, these men regard themselves “as deeply spiritual people.” As they work their way through eighteen holes, David and Michael discuss the Bible, an upcoming missions trip, volunteer work at a homeless shelter, and they pause to admire the mountains on the horizon. Says Barna, “David, you see, is a Revolutionary Christian. His life reflects the very ideals and principles that characterized the life and purpose of Jesus Christ … despite the fact that David rarely attends church services. He is typical of a new breed of disciples of Jesus Christ.”

Many of us can sympathize with the fictional pair’s disillusionment with the local church. They were driven out, Barna says, “by boredom and the inability to serve in ways that made use of their considerable skills and knowledge.” I am deeply dissatisfied with the contemporary church, so when I first heard about Revolution, I was eager to read it, glad to know any suggestions Barna might have for changing the church for the better. Unfortunately, Barna has no suggestions, because he has all but given up on the local church.

Why has the local church become an increasingly empty exercise? Barna lays much of the blame on the megachurches. He observes that the contemporary church is or wants to be a supersized megachurch whose glory is its big-screen projection system. He lays into churches that are personality cults rather than proclaimers of truth and whose legacy is expensive “man-made monuments,” presumably a reference to the goliath church “campuses” we see popping up all over. “Jesus did not die on the cross to fill church auditoriums [or] to enable magnificent church campuses to be funded.”

By the way, one movement that rebels against the slick and glitz of the megachurches is the emergent church, which attempts to redefine church in a “postmodern world.” Emergents will be disappointed with Barna’s take on their community. He mentions them only in passing, and what he says is unflattering: “The ‘emergent’ or ‘postmodern’ congregations really are not new models but simply minor refinements of the reigning model.”

Among a glut of spiritually empty churches are Barna’s revolutionaries, “spiritual champions who have no spiritual homeland” and who feel like “the odd person out” in the typical contemporary congregation. To those revolutionaries Barna pronounces: whether you become “completely disassociated from a local church is irrelevant to me (and, within boundaries, to God).”

Barna attempts some sleight of hand, claiming that his purpose “is not to bash the local church. Christian churches have an incredible 2000-year legacy … It is horrifying to imagine what the world would be like if the local church had not been present to represent Jesus.” However, Barna concludes his book by chiding those who oppose his Revolution because they stubbornly cling to the old-fashioned notion that “the Bible disallows a believer to intentionally live at arm’s length from the local church.”

I certainly cling to that notion: that God has commanded believers to be active participants in a neighborhood church. Barna would dissuade us, saying:
* “The Bible neither describes nor promotes the local church as we know it today.”
* “The Bible does not rigidly define the corporate practices, rituals, or structures that must be embraced in order to have a proper church.”
* “We should keep in mind that what we call ‘church’ is just one interpretation of how to develop and live a faith-centered life. We made it up. It may be healthy or helpful, but it is not sacrosanct.”

As I read such statements, I get the impression Barna is carefully inserting some qualifying words to leave himself an escape, should anyone attempt to hold him accountable. Let’s step over the qualifiers and ask some straightforward questions. Does the Bible describe and promote the local church? Of course it does. Does the Bible define corporate practices, rituals and structures that we should embrace to have a proper church? Of course it does. Did we just make up the local church? Of course not. Is the local church “sacrosanct,” i.e., a holy institution? You bet it is.

I am the minister of a small nondenominational church. Our church is similar in most important ways to other Bible-believing, Christ-honoring churches. Some manifestations of our effort to follow the New Testament pattern are the selection of elders to shepherd the flock, observance of the Lord’s Supper each Sunday, and the preaching and teaching of God’s Word corporately and in smaller groups. Your church no doubt has similar practices and some practices that are different. If we were to sit down with an open Bible, we might enjoy a lively discussion about why each of our churches does things the way we do. In such a discussion, we would certainly have no shortage of Scriptures to turn to. The local church – its structure, its leadership, its sacraments, its meetings, its practices – is a primary topic of the New Testament. Barna, however, sweeps all these questions away with a couple of off-hand remarks claiming that the Bible simply gives us no instructions, and therefore it is entirely up to us to choose how we do church or whether we do church at all.

No question about it: the modern U.S. church desperately needs change. A true revolutionary wants to affect that change. But Barna wants to just give up and move on. Barna calls it revolutionary for a disenchanted Christian to focus on family gatherings, Internet hook-ups, and golf course worship – and leave the local church to us diehards who refuse to see the handwriting on the wall. I call that tempting, and easy, but not revolutionary.

Local churches have been assembling, teaching, shepherding, disciplining, equipping and encouraging Christians for two thousand years. The local church is God’s idea, and no secular culture or false revolution will prevail against it. Barna may be right that in modern America, involvement in the local church is on the decline and will only get worse. However, Barna is very wrong to become a cheerleader for that decline.

To any church leader or member who may be tempted by Barna’s words to throw in the towel on the local church, please be reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words to a struggling group of local churches in Galatia. “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest — if we do not give up.”

Tim Challies reviews and recommends What Ever Happened to the Gospel of Grace? by James Boice. According to Challies:

It was Boice’s conviction that much of what passes as Christianity today is anything but. … The author shows that where the evangelical church was once known for and defined by what it believed, today it is increasingly defined by its style. He is especially critical of the church growth movement, saying that this movement adjusts Christianity to the desires of our culture. The modern church does not understand that Christianity can only thrive by offering people not what “they already have, but what they so desperately lack – namely, the Word of God and salvation through Jesus Christ.”

Dr. Boice died in 2000, and What Ever Happened to the Gospel of Grace? was published after his death, in 2001. Boice is well-known as a Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) theologian, author of more than 50 books, and pastor of Tenth Street Presbyterian, Philadelphia, for more than 30 years. I remember him as one of the speakers on a promotional video for the Navigator’s “2:7 Series” Bible studies, a video I screened numerous times when Norma and I led several 2:7 groups during the 1990s.

Guess I’ll have to add What Ever Happened… to my Amazon wishlist.