George Barna 23:59

First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. Unfortunately in America today, the primary parenting approach is what we call outsourcing, where we hire whoever to do our job as parents and grandparents. No, no, no. We're responsible for it, so we've got to get on to that.

His contemporary research is quoted many times, but coming up now, we get to hear from George Barna himself as he talks about his latest research into how parents are doing at instilling a biblical worldview into their children. Stay tuned for the conversation. And welcome to First Person. I'm Wayne Shepherd. It's great to have you listening now.

Before we turn to our guests, let me encourage you to join us online for these interviews where they are archived long after they're heard on radio. Go to FirstPersonInterview.com where you can scroll through the list of programs by clicking on the red Listen button. Or another way to listen is with our free smartphone app, which also allows you to download the programs for convenient listening. Search First Person Interview in your app store.

Researcher George Barna has written dozens of books on all sorts of topics. His latest, titled Raising Spiritual Champions, is aimed at challenging parents to take seriously their responsibility for the biblical training of their children.

We'll talk now with George about that, but first I ask him about his own faith journey. You know, Wayne, I really didn't become a Christian until I was in graduate school. And it was driven by the fact that my wife and I, we've been going out together since high school, went to college together, grad school together. And we decided to get married and we were both raised as Catholics.

And so we were required to go through a premarital training session. We did. At the end of it, the priest asked if I had any questions. I did. And he didn't like that. So we wound up leaving the Catholic Church and trying to figure out, is there any other alternative? We didn't know anything. Yeah.

And so, I hearken back to a history class I'd had where we talked about a reformation or something like that. So, there must be some other people around. So, we started talking to our friends, asking, where do you guys go to church? And to our surprise, we found none of them went to church. We finally found a few co-workers who went to church. We visited some churches.

went to one that was a very small fundamentalist Baptist church meeting in a gym auditorium, and we got saved there. And so from that point forward, we really began taking faith seriously. It was the first time we read the Bible, and we were astounded by what was in that. And so it's been an amazing journey over the last 40-plus years, and

But, man, I can't thank the Lord enough for counting me worthy to, you know, forgive me for my sins and allow me to serve him. It's been great. That says it well, George. It really does. But your research has been legendary all these years. Did it start that way? I mean, not that it started right at the top, but did you always want to do what you're doing? Well, you know, when I was a kid, I used to love baseball cards.

And my friends loved the front of the baseball cards that had the pictures. I love the back with all that tiny print. Me too. It's all numbers. You know, my friends say, boy, what a waste that is. Let's put it on the spokes of our bike tires. And I said, no, no, no. There's important information there. You know, and I would memorize the numbers. I recalculated the numbers.

I wrote to the top baseball card people and told them when they had errors in the numbers. So you were that guy. I was the one. Yeah. All right. Can you spell nerd? Okay.

Well, of course, you went on to found the Barna Group, which is still in existence, right? You've moved on, but it's still in existence? Yeah, I sold them about 15 years ago, and they've gone down one path, and I've kind of moved down another one. We're both doing things, I think, that are helping the church. Right, right. So it's great for me. Yeah. So what are you doing these days, besides writing books, which we're going to talk about here? That's right. And memorizing numbers on baseball cards. Yeah, right. Yeah.

I work at Arizona Christian University. I run the cultural research center there. I'm a professor there, but the prime thing I do is do the research. It's a university that's geared to biblical worldview development leading to cultural transformation. So all the research that we're doing relates to those two topics, worldview and cultural transformation.

And in addition to that, I work with Family Research Council. I'm a senior research fellow there, helping them not only with research, but a lot of predictive modeling and other types of things that we're doing to help grow the Christian body and bring it together as a community.

and to help them understand public policy and governance and all those kinds of issues. So, I mean, I'm like a pig in slop between these two organizations. I'm just so thrilled that in my latter years, the Lord has given me the opportunity to not have to worry about administrative details, but just to turn me loose doing research. And I'm so grateful for that. I know exactly what you mean. Isn't it great to be in that sweet spot where the Lord wants you?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, what else could you ask for? So, you know, there are still nasty things written about me, but that makes me think, great, I'm doing something that people care about, you know, things that matter. It's like, bring it on. This is wonderful. Wait a minute. You deliver bad news sometimes to people? Well, on occasion, I've been known to do that. And then when I speak publicly, I can't help myself but to, you know, put some commentary to it. So, yeah, I get in trouble. Yeah, yeah.

Well, through the years, you have been so helpful. And I mean, even today, you're quoted perhaps more than anybody else by the church leaders of the world in terms of the findings that you've done over the years and continue to do, George. Let's talk about this latest work you've done. You've written a book called Raising Spiritual Champions, Nurturing Your Child's Heart, Mind, and Soul.

But this isn't the first time, I'm sure, that you've tried to measure how we're doing in terms of biblical literacy and that sort of thing, is it? Hardly. But, again, getting up there in years, I'm figuring, oh, man, I don't have much time. I've got to give it my best shot before the Lord brings me home.

And as I looked at the landscape and, you know, as I mentioned, I'm grateful to be working at Arizona Christian because they focus on worldview. So every year we do an annual study called the American Worldview Inventory where we measure the worldview of people in America. But in doing all of that, it brought me back to some of the work I'd done earlier at the Barna Group. I had put out a book called Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions 20 years ago and

And that book was a life change book for me because I had no interest in looking at what was going on in the spiritual lives of children. I'd bought into the lie that it's all about adults. What you've got to do is focus all your energy and resources on adults. But through doing that research 20 years ago, that was when I first discovered and reported on and wrote about the fact that a person's worldview begins forming at 15 to 18 months of age and

and is pretty much completed in terms of formation by the age of 13. That is remarkable. Yeah. I mean, it's mind-boggling when you think about it, and it changes everything in terms of ministry.

So rather than devoting all of our time and energy and teaching and other resources to adults who essentially don't change unless the Holy Spirit enters their life, gives them a crisis to cause them to rethink some things. And thank God that happens.

Yes, praise the Lord for that. You know, and by the way, for adults who are listening, when you get a crisis, please think of it as a calling from God. Think of it as an opportunity to reconnect with him and reinvestigate some things that you're doing or thinking that really trouble him. It's a great moment in time. It's not a problem. It's not something that you're going to suffer through. It's a great opportunity to turn your life around and allow him to transform you.

But children go through that consistently from 15 months to 13 years of age.

And so that's when we really need to be devoting ourselves to the development of their worldview. Because by the time they're 13, between 13 and maybe their mid-20s or so, they simply try to refine it, figure out how to articulate it. But they've already decided what they believe. All the major decisions for their life have been made. Their philosophy of life is in place.

After that, it's just kind of cleaning it up a bit and then going out and trying to get other people to believe the same things as them. So those early years really are the key. Well, without me getting too nerdy on this, what was the methodology of determining these? I mean, 15 to 18 months, 13, I can wrap my mind around. I sort of can.

But as early as 15 months? Well, see, the thing that you need to do is to go back to figure out what is a worldview. Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about that. Well, a worldview is your decision-making filter. Everybody has one. You have to have one to get through the day.

But you think about a 15 to 18 month individual. It's at that point that they're starting to make critical decisions in their life, how they're going to respond to different stimuli, how they're going to begin to recognize who they are in this new environment that they're in. And so it's at that point that we start making those kinds of decisions.

And we begin to solidify them later on during our adolescent years. But it really starts at that early time because we're trying to answer questions like, who am I? Why am I here? Who do I want to be? What's life all about? What do I make of these bigger people around me? How should I relate to them? Should I relate to them? You know, all these kinds of things and more start coming up very early in our life. And the questions become more and more profound as we age. And

And by the time we're 13, we've wrestled with most of the profound questions. An interesting conversation with George Barna today on First Person. It will continue in just a moment.

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My guest is Dr. George Barna, whose latest book is Raising Spiritual Champions, Nurturing Your Child's Heart, Mind, and Soul. Dr. Barna, as he said, is a professor at Arizona Christian University and director of research at the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. And we're talking about this amazing study about reaching children and developing their worldview as a Christian worldview early on in their life.

You talk about these cornerstones of worldview. And by the way, we've been kicking around this term worldview for a long time, haven't we? For a couple of decades or more now. And I'm glad to hear you kind of pinpoint what it is. That's very helpful. Well, and for me, it's such a big deal because after I came to Christ, we went to a church. And, you know, I mean, we got some of the usual churchy stuff. But looking back on it now, I can say, but we still really didn't get what the Christian life was all about. Right.

It wasn't until I actually took my first job working with a ministry back in the Wheaton, Illinois area that I had the opportunity to go back to an NRB conference. I didn't know what NRB was. I didn't know what most of these Christian churches or ministries were.

And so the place that had hired me, to their credit, said, wow, you need to learn a lot. We're going to send you back to NRB. Just go to all the sessions you can. National Religious Broadcasters, right. Okay, I know it well. Yeah, you do. You do indeed. And so when I was there, the first three Christian speakers I heard were Francis Schaeffer, Charles Stanley, and Chuck Colson. Okay, all right.

I didn't know who any of them were. That's like a Yankee slugger lineup, isn't it? It is. This is the hall of fame of recent Christian leaders. And Francis Schaeffer was the first one I heard, and he started talking about worldview.

And I was taking notes, worldview, what's that? And that like got me on the path. The next day, Charles Stanley starts talking about, you know, studying the Bible and here's how you think about it. It's like, whoa, that's new information for me. And then the third day, Chuck Colston gets up there and starts talking about his journey and the development of his worldview and

And I'm like, wow, this worldview thing must be really important. So I got to focus on it. Yeah. So you're getting clean up. Yeah. Well, I don't know about that. I hope I get up to the bench, you know, but yeah, it's a great thing. So let's talk about some of these cornerstones of worldview. This is a fascinating thing to me because now for years, more than 30 years, I've been doing national research on worldviews.

And it wasn't until a few months ago when I was doing my nerd thing, tinkering with data, looking for different kinds of patterns and things that I could talk about. And I discovered, wow, there are seven particular beliefs that if you really fully believe these seven things, you have an 83% probability of going on to develop a biblical worldview.

But if you don't believe deeply all seven of these things, you've only got a 2% probability. Wow.

So I started calling them the seven cornerstones of a biblical worldview. They're not a complete biblical worldview, but what a great foundation. And for parents and grandparents, as we're working with kids, we need to know where do we start? This is a great place to start because they're very simple. They're very fundamental. They're very biblical. And if kids will buy into these, then you've got a tremendous opportunity to build on that foundation. So we're talking about simple things like,

believing not only that God exists, but that he's the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe who's still involved in our lives today. Secondly, believing that when we're born, we're sinners. We're not good people. We're sinners, and there are consequences to being sinners. Thirdly, believing that the only antidote to that sin problem that we're born with is Jesus Christ.

asking him to forgive us for our sins, repenting for the fact that we're sinners and that we don't want to do that anymore, asking him to send his Holy Spirit into our life to change the way that we think and live.

Fourthly, believing that the Bible was given to us by God and it's his truth for humanity. And knowing that it's reliable, it's relevant to the way that we live today. And then fifthly, buying into the fact that the Bible contains absolute moral truth.

Truth is not up to me. It's not based on my feelings, my situations, my conditions, what my group thinks, what the media teaches me. No, only God knows absolute moral truth, and he's dictated it to us in his word, so I can rely on those truths.

Sixthly, knowing that the only reason he gave me breath is so that I would be here to know him and to love him and to serve him with all my heart, mind, strength, and soul.

And, and therefore, as I'm going about trying to do that, I have to evaluate how I'm doing, but knowing that the measure of success in life isn't, well, I must be doing well because I got a big house. I got a Porsche. I got, you know, the trophy wife. I got all this. No, none of that matters. The only way to measure your success is whether or not you are consistently and constantly being obedient to God.

And when you are, then you are a successful human being. If you live on the street, if you've got tattered clothing, if you have no education, it doesn't matter. As long as you know love and serve Jesus to all your heart, mind, strength, and soul. And that's what you wake up every morning to do.

That is fantastic. But I have to say, those are the fundamentals. Those are the things we often take. We take them for granted, don't we? Yeah. But are we instilling them in our children? When I first saw these seven, I laughed. I said, I'm

oh my gosh, I can't tell people this. They're going to say, what are you, a new Christian? Did you ever go to Sunday school? Because that's Sunday school 101. Wake up, Barna. It's like, yeah, I know. I'm sorry. But it turns out that there were some people who came before us who knew a few things. So, I mean, that's really all this is. Go back to basics. There's nothing wrong with that. Well, the whole point of this is our...

are we instilling those fundamentals in the generation behind us? That's the point of all this, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And in the book, Raising Spiritual Champions, I talk about all the research we did. We did seven original research projects that the book is based on, looking at parents, looking at churches, looking at children, looking at adults, looking at media content that our children are exposed to. We did some content analysis studies.

You know, so looking at all that, and one of the things that we found is, number one, there are very few churches that take children seriously as spiritual entities. Secondly, most churches do not teach children the fundamentals. But wait a minute. We have Sunday school. We have –

children club programs. We have this, we have that. We're taking care of our kids. Yeah. Let me say this. One of the things we discovered in our research with senior pastors is that most pastors think they're very effective at developing the worldview of people in their church.

And we asked them, well, why do you think that? They say, well, because we measure things. And there are five things they measure. Attendance, giving, number of programs, number of staff hired, and square footage. Those are the five things we found that pastors across the country consistently measure. And if those numbers are going up, they say, yeah, look how effective we are. The numbers prove it. And they say, and if you need anecdotal evidence,

I can point you to people in my congregation who take notes every time I teach. All right. Now you're stepping on toes, George. Yeah, well, welcome to my life. You know, I mean, the thing we've got to do is go back and look at people's worldview. And, you know, when you measure that, which we do in America today, only 4% of adults have a biblical worldview. Only 37% of

of pastors of Christian churches have a biblical worldview. Only 12% of the pastors of children in churches have a biblical worldview. And that's why we're losing the culture war, much less the spiritual war.

We don't really have cultural problems in America. We have a spiritual crisis. And if we don't deal with worldview, we're not going to be able to deal with that crisis. You know, I can relate to this in my little world of radio because I've always felt that, you know, we're looking at the ratings and seeing how many people are listening and tuning in. My question is, how many lives are being changed and how deeply are we affecting the people who are listening? It's the outcome of what we're doing that's important. That's what you're saying as well.

Yeah, and so I work with, you know, a lot of ministries and churches, fewer and fewer churches as I continue to speak. But, you know, what I find is that they do have those kind of numbers. And I tell them, like I tell the students at Arizona Christian, look, most important question for you to always ask in research when you have a number is, so what? Hmm.

So what? 37% of the people in a community listen to your radio program. So what? How many lives did it change? Because that's why you're doing the program. You want them to draw closer to the Lord. And if your program does that, yeah, you're being obedient and your program is successful. But if they're just listening, they're entertained, it's background noise, it's like nice information, but they don't act on it, you

It didn't make a difference. Man, I wish I had more time to ask more questions. But in the time we have left, let me ask a couple. One, who's responsible for discipling these children? Is it the home, the parents, the grandparent, the church, the school? Who has the responsibility? Biblically, it's the parents, God.

God is going to hold them responsible for that. Unfortunately, in America today, the primary parenting approach is what we call outsourcing, where we hire other people to raise our kids for us, whether it's hiring tutors, hiring coaches, hiring youth pastors, hiring whoever to do our job as parents and grandparents.

No, no, no. We're responsible for it, so we've got to get on to that. All right. You mentioned media. You did some research into the effect of media on children and discipling children. What are some of the findings? Well, media has more impact on the worldview of every American, especially children's, than anything else we studied. More than parents, more than the government, more than churches, more than schools, more than peers.

All of those have some impact, but nothing compared to the media. So one of the key things that parents have to do is to minimize the media exposure of their children. They have to mediate it, tell the children what they're hearing, what it means, what's right and wrong, you know, moralizing it so they understand the context of what to do with it. And this is an uphill battle now because it's not just turning off the television any longer, is it?

No, social media is huge. Video games are huge. Those are probably the two biggest. But then you've also got television, movies, music, books, all kinds of other things. So it's a multi-orbed war that we're fighting in terms of the arts and entertainment medium. That's George Barna, today's first-person guest and the author of Raising Spiritual Champions. He's a professor and director of research at the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University.

This interview can be heard online at FirstPersonInterview.com, where we've also placed a link to the research and the book we discussed. Again, go to FirstPersonInterview.com.

These programs are made possible by the Far East Broadcasting Company with the hope of challenging you through the lives and testimonies of others who are Christ followers. FEBC's broadcasters around the world are equipping believers every day with the truth of God's Word through radio programs, social media podcasts, and personal interaction. You can learn much more about FEBC at febc.org. Now a thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson. I'm Wayne Shepherd. Thanks for listening to First Person.