Barna keeps track of the real stories behind religion

So churches don’t answer the phone. Who cares? George Barna does. And passionately.
   
Released last summer, the discovery that it is “virtually impossible” to reach nearly half of the country’s Protestant churches by phone made it to Barna Research Group’s top-12 list of its year 2000 findings. Founded in 1984, Barna’s marketing research firm conducts polls on religious issues, then interprets the data for the consciences of the nation’s evangelical leaders.
   
Barna’s list included more somber findings than telephone snafus.
   
Like the greater chance born-again adults will divorce than non-born-again. Or that born-again Christians are much busier keeping themselves entertained than devoting time to “spiritual activities.”
   
What drives Barna is a passion for truth, even when the resulting religious picture is unflattering. His goal is to help church leaders “understand the context in which God has placed you to minister,” he said. “We’re just trying to help them understand reality.”
   
Tucked into an out-of-the-way business park north of Los Angeles, Barna’s firm has a karate studio as one of its closest neighbors. The professional surroundings mirror Barna’s own unassuming style.
    
“He’s somewhat of an introvert,” said Ron Sellers, a Barna employee from 1987 to 1992 before becoming president of Ellison Research, a Phoenix-based marketing company. Now in “direct competition” with Barna and his staff, Sellers was quick to add, “one thing I will happily do is vouch for their integrity.”
   
Fresh out of Boston College in the late 1970s, Barna was working on political campaigns when he had his initial contact with polling. “Heck, I can do this,” he said, eventually moving from managing races to conducting political polling.
   
Barna’s first experience connecting number-crunching with Christianity came when he was working at a large marketing-research company in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. When the secular company was perplexed about the needs of a Christian client, the management remembered the “new kid” Barna was a believer.
   
“I kind of translated back and forth for the two sides,” said Barna, adding that he himself was a newcomer to the Christian faith at the time. He recognized Oral Roberts’ name, he said, mainly because he had heard Oral Roberts University had a good basketball team.
   
“I had seen Billy Graham on TV once, but assumed he was unique,” Barna explained. “It was a whole new world for me to get to know.”
   
Asked if he sees himself primarily as a market researcher or an evangelical Christian, Barna affirmed his faith without hesitation.
   
“Definitely an evangelical Christian first,” said Barna, who says he’s not affiliated with any denomination. “Marketing is just a research tool.”
   
While some bring more traditional gifts to ministry, “I just happen to have a fairly unusual tool that I’m bringing to the table.”
   
Barna describes himself as a regular churchgoer, but prefers not to disclose the church he attends.
   
People who know Barna and his work see no conflict between the researcher’s spiritual commitment and his quantitative objectivity.
   
To assume that accuracy requires researchers to jettison their value system is misguided, believes the Rev. Kevin Mannoia, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE).
   
“Is there a conflict? Absolutely not,” said Mannoia. “To assume that we have to not be a Christian in order to do an effective job of objectifying statistics is … to separate identity from performance, and that’s an exercise in futility. It’s an impossibility.”
   
Nationally known pollster George Gallup finds fellow researcher Barna “very insightful.” Noting he and Barna are “good friends,” Gallup said Barna “really has a heart for helping the churches.”
   
Seeing his work as primarily descriptive, not prescriptive, Barna hopes his findings will give a better sense of the U.S. population’s spiritual attitudes and religious practices. By providing data about people’s religious needs, then observing programs that effectively meet those needs, Barna wants to “short-cut the learning curve of a church leader.”
   
“We’re simply trying to open the eyes and sensitize the hearts of God’s people to the opportunities that God has given to us,” Barna said.
   
“My job is to give an accurate representation of reality,” Barna added, noting, “if that representation doesn’t cast the church in a very positive light, then deal with it.”
   
Barna’s organization is split into two entities. Barna Research Group, a for-profit marketing firm, conducts “a lot of primary research on a variety of topics” for religious and secular clients. The firm also publishes findings on Americans’ religious habits and releases them to the public.
   
The Barna Institute is the second organization Barna leads. Supported by donors, the institute, created in 1995, explores one major topic a year, such as the state of the black church or the effect of the Internet on people’s faith experiences.
   
“It’s an attempt to do large-scale projects that Barna Research Group cannot afford to do,” Barna said. While Barna’s numbers “may not be able to exhaustively evaluate or define the nuances of the inner spiritual journey that an individual leader … or even the community of the local church or denomination is on,” said NAE’s Mannoia, “he is certainly able to measure the degree to which that inner journey affects outward behavior.”
   
“If Christ is in us, then he will make a difference in how we act,” Mannoia added. “And Dr. Barna is measuring how we act as a reflection of Christ in us.”
   
The commitment to truth that propels Barna shows up in his willingness to let his company respond to its own changing reality.It’s constantly evolving,” Barna said.
   
“We tend to develop the company around the people that God brings.” The organization’s young employees are “passionate about what this company can do.” (RNS)