This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program originally aired on June 10, 2022. To listen to the program, please click HERE.
Sam Rohrer: On the Stand in the Gap Today program, our Stand in the Gap minute program and our Stand in the Gap weekend program, and all of our Stand in the Gap TV programs, as well as all of our AP emphasis, including our current return to God emphasis on our upcoming July 3rd Liberty Sunday emphasis, there is one core that runs through them all, one thread. And that is to the best of our ability, we try to present a clearly articulated biblical world view, which shapes our commentary and shapes our presentation. We talk about it a lot, and if you’ve been watching us, if you are alive right now on Facebook live or listening to regular radio, you recognize that, there’s a reason for that, we talk about that often. But in the case of the Stand in the Gap Today program, it is the presentation of prioritized headline news that we try to do on this program, which then brings about why a biblical worldview filter is so clearly essential if we’re going to understand it.
Now, my guest today is our monthly culture update focus guest, and that is Dr. George Barna, Professor at Arizona Christian University, and Director of Research at their cultural research center there at Arizona Christian University. Now for several years, Dr. George Barna, in his current focus, has been measuring various degrees of biblical worldview awareness within American culture. On previous programs, we’ve shared the results of research on various groups within our culture. Today, we’re going to hear from George, the very latest findings within the category of pastors and how many of them who weekly stand and preach from their pulpits, can actually be described as possessing a true biblical worldview.
And I’ll say upfront that if I were to ask you listening to me right now, for instance, if you were to say, “Okay, what percentage of self-identified evangelical pastors leading evangelical churches, would you say possess a biblical worldview?” My guess is you probably would say, “Well, probably all of them, if not 100%, then probably at least 99%.” All I’ll say right now is sad to say, that is not the case, not even close. And the implications of this fact are extensive as we consider our culture, the decay of our culture and the necessary action if our culture is in fact to ever return to God. So the title I’ve chosen for today’s program is this, the church, triumphant? Sadly, not in most churches and pulpits. That’s the title. Isaac Crockett and I, will engage now Dr. George Barna on these shocking findings, including, well, we’ll talk about in just a little bit, about how few evangelical pastors actually possess a biblical worldview. With that, I welcome back to the program, George Barna. George, thanks for being back with us.
George Barna: Oh, Sam and Isaac, it’s good to be back with you. I missed you guys.
Sam Rohrer: Well, we missed you too, for one reason or another, me or you, whatever, so it’s almost like a reunion. It’s great to have you back as we are right now, streaming live here on Facebook, people across the country can see that, as well as on the radio program, which will go out to just under 500 stations across the country. But that being said, George, before we get into the substance of this most recent focus on your research, pastors in the pulpit, could you briefly share the primary reason why you and the cultural research center there at Arizona Christian University, are spending so much time trying to ascertain the level of biblical worldview awareness among the varying segments of American culture? Why are you doing that?
George Barna: Yeah, that’s a good question, sometimes I ask myself that, given the results. But the reality is everybody has a worldview, you have to have them because it’s critical to getting through every day in your life. Why is that? Because it’s the decision making filter that each one of us has. We make thousands of decisions every day, big and small, and every one of those decisions flows through our worldview. And so the reality is if you’re dissatisfied with what’s going on in the United States today, if you’re dissatisfied with your life, if you’re dissatisfied with what the future looks like, it’s really a worldview issue.
I would argue that we do not have a political crisis in America, we do not have an economic crisis in America, we don’t have an education crisis, we don’t have a family crisis, et cetera. What we have is a worldview crisis, because when you look at our political and economic and educational and family and all the different systems of situations in our country, we are in those situations because of the accumulation of the worldview of Americans, because that determines the choices that we’ve made that have put us in those situations. So all of the challenges in America really come back to it being a worldview challenge.
And I’ll just close out my comment here by saying, and this is important for those of us who are Christians, because we’ve been praying for years that there would be spiritual revival in America. And I would argue, based on all the research we’ve put together now over the last three years about the state of worldview in America, in many different ways, shapes and forms, we are not going to have revival until we get renewal within the body of Christ. The church in America is a mess, whether we’re talking about the pulpits or the pews. And so I believe that God would want us to get our act together, to refine and renew our relationship with him, before he’s really going to turn us loose on the culture.
Isaac Crockett: That is so important, and we’ve been emphasizing a return to God. But in just these couple of moments here, we’re going to get into the pastor’s biblical worldview right now in this program. But real quickly, maybe some of the other groups that you’ve studied lately, could you just kind of list some of the other issues or groups of people that really don’t maybe have the biblical worldview they ought to have?
George Barna: Well, yeah, I mean, Isaac, when we look nationally, only 6% of adults have a biblical worldview. But when we look at the parents of pre teenagers, kids under the age of 13, that’s important because you develop your worldview before the age of 13 and yet parents who have the primary biblical responsibility for shaping that, only 2% of the parents of preteens have a biblical worldview. We could look generationally, we see millennials, the largest and right now probably the most powerful generation in America, only 4% of them have a biblical worldview. We could look at the people who call themselves Christians across the country, only 9% of them have a biblical worldview. And if we were to identify people who theologically, we would say qualify probably as born again Christians, only God really knows, but based on the questioning that we do, those that we would classify as born again, regardless of how they call themselves, less than one out of five of those theologically defined born again Christians, just 19% have a biblical worldview. So no matter what group that we look at in the country, it’s a minority who have a biblical worldview.
Sam Rohrer: And ladies and gentlemen, that is a description of our culture here in America today. Now you’ve heard it, 6% of parents, 2% of preteen parents, 4% millennials, 9% of those who call themselves Christians, have a biblical worldview. When we come back, we’re going to begin looking at now pastors in the pulpits and what the recent research shows about them.
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Sam Rohrer: Well, if you’re following with us right now on Facebook live, we thank you. And if you are listening to us, whether it’s live or delayed on this program, we thank you as well for being with us. This is today, we do once a month, we try to, we call it a culture update. Our honored guest is Dr. George Barna, Barna Research, you know that is him, he’s sold that group, but he’s now with and leads the Arizona Christian University there as director of research.
And as we just covered in the last segment, a lot of time has been spent on measuring world view, and so that’s where we’re going today. And the latest research that George has done, focuses on the pastor in the pulpit. The title I’ve chosen today is the church, triumphant? Sadly, not in most churches and pulpits. And that’s what we’ve discussed on this program before with George Barna, our guest, a biblical worldview awareness is of critical importance as George has said in the other segment, because in the end, there are only two distinct worldviews in play. One has God in the center, as defined by the word of God, then dictates and shapes that person’s thinking, their choices, their actions, and their behavior. Now the other has God in truth defined as they want it to be defined, with some aspects of God, maybe in truth, possibly mixed into that mix. But in some respects they’ve been compromised or redefined or perhaps completely reshaped, not according to what God in the Bible say, but what they or someone else wants.
And this contrarian worldview can really run the gambit from the clearly demonic, as would be represented, I would say, by anti-Christ globalists, which obviously are in that category or atheistic communism, obviously in that category, or tyrannical and cultic Islam, which would be in that category. Now they can run that way or they can run even to those who would hold views that you might not define as overly harmful, but they still end up defining truth to themselves as being opposed to God, the Bible, and Jesus Christ as the son of God, being the final authority. So as a worldview does, worldviews dictate and shape a person’s thinking, their choices, their actions, and when you put it into the civil perspective, public policy, law and the interpretation and definition of justice. So it is all encompassing.
George, in your recent report, you define and identify the percentage of Christian pastors that possess a biblical worldview, by denominational family, if that’s the way you put it. Can you break down these denominational segments as you found it to be and correspond, if you could, the respective percentage of those who hold to a biblical worldview within these denominations, just paint us a bigger picture at this point.
George Barna: Well, sure. Sam, we could start with the fact that across the country, only 37%, just about one out of every three pastors of Christian churches, has a biblical worldview. But then we can look at it across the different denominational families, as I described it, and so we could look at all of the non-denominational and independent churches. They fared the best, they didn’t fare well, but they fared the best, 57% of the pastors of those churches have a biblical worldview. Then it drops down to the pastors in evangelical churches, where only 51% have a biblical worldview. Then we drop below that 50% mark. And we have to remember that being above 50% doesn’t mean you’re doing great, it means that a majority have it, but if we’re supposed to be worshiping God with our churches and honoring him, all pastors should have a biblical worldview.
So all these numbers are low, but then we can look at the churches that are part of the charismatic or Pentecostal community of churches, many different denominations there, but only 37% of those pastors have a biblical worldview. In the mainline churches, the six dominant churches for much of the history of United States, only 32% have a biblical worldview. We can look at a group called the holiness churches, that west end Methodist or square, assembly of God, many others are part of that, only 28% have a biblical worldview. Then we can look at traditionally Black Protestant churches, where it drops down to 9% of those pastors have a biblical worldview. And one of the largest denominations in the nation, non Protestant of course, would be the Roman Catholic church, where only 6% of the priests in Catholic churches have a biblical worldview.
Isaac Crockett: George, I find your studies always so helpful, but this one in particular has been fascinating. I’ll tell you, even before the program aired today, interviewing you today, Sam and I were in a meeting with several pastors, preachers and other ministry people, and the study came up. And one of the pastors who’s been pastoring, I think almost five decades, he was just starting to just kind of spit out some of these different facts that you’ve uncovered here. And he was, maybe you could say surprised, but he wasn’t disagreeing with it. He could go through himself anecdotally and talk about people in these different things that do fit this. And it’s just sad, and it led us to prayer, to the point of praying for our churches, for our nation this way.
But in this report, so you’re saying that out of the seven denominational groupings that you evaluated, you just went through those, there’s only two of them that have about half their pastors, none of them have 90% of their pastors get a good grade on this, some of them have a little bit above 50%. So what does this mean, in those two groups, what does this mean for the people who are attending those churches? What do we take away from that?
George Barna: Well, if you’re going to a nondenominational and independent Protestant, an evangelical church, basically what it means is you got to be careful. You can’t just sit there and mindlessly take notes and believe what you’re hearing, because there’s basically a 50/50 chance that what you’re being taught at any given moment, is actually biblical. One of the insidious things that we discovered here is that it’s not that these pastors are bad people, it’s not that they’re trying to lie, it’s not that they’re trying to advance evils, that they don’t know any better. They’re not much different than the rest of the people in America as it turns out.
And so, yeah, they’re going to teach some good biblical truth, but they’re probably also going to mix in some cultural truth. Some things that they’ve bought into because they’ve encountered it in the world and it felt good to them, it seemed right to them, it was popular with the people around them, for whatever reason they’ve bought into that. So we can no longer assume that because a pastor in the pulpit is teaching us something with a Bible open in front of him or her, that it’s necessarily biblical truth. The bottom line is that you and I, and everybody else in America who wants to be a follower of Jesus Christ, has to be a wise, informed, alert consumer of faith. We can’t just assume that because of somebody’s position, they’re going to teach us the right things, we’re probably going to get a mix of good and bad.
Sam Rohrer: George, I think that’s a really significant challenge there, ladies and gentlemen, understand for each believer, what is our authority, the word of God. How do we know if we’re hearing truth or error from wherever, could be the media, could be anything on the internet or it could also be in the pulpit. It doesn’t make any difference. What do we compare it against, the word of God? That’s what George is saying, it’s very important. George, this is a statement that I found in your last report, I thought was so interesting. You said this, “Baptist churches are widely regarded as among the most likely to embrace the Bible as God’s inherent word,” but you found that even they did not live up to that stereotype. What were your findings within this group, Baptists, which historically tend to be the most Bible believing?
George Barna: Well, Sam, it’s interesting because in America today we’ve got more than 30 different Baptist denominations, so it really depends at which group you’re looking at. For instance, we looked at the Southern Baptist convention and the churches that are still left in that accumulation of churches, about three out of four of them, the pastors from those churches have a biblical worldview. So that’s about the best that we saw in different denominations, but among all Baptist churches across the country, looking at all those pastors, less than half of them have a biblical worldview, just 48%. So even being Baptist in America these days, doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily Bible believing, or if you’re a pastor, that you’re Bible teaching. We’re finding that denominational labels mean less and less, and the other label that may mean less and less, is that of pastors. So again, the onus, the burden is on our shoulders as followers of Christ, to know the Bible and to be vigilant about what we’re hearing and what we’re believing.
Sam Rohrer: George, we don’t have too much time before the break, but somebody listening to that and they say, “Well, I don’t know if I’m hearing a true biblical worldview or not.” And we say, “Go to the word of God.” But part of the purpose of the pulpit is to instruct people in the word of God, so that’s a real dilemma for the average person in most locations though, isn’t it?
George Barna: Well, it sure is. And I mean it’s one of those things that can cause us to feel anxious, cause us to feel unsettled about our faith, but we’ve got to remember that our faith is not in a local church. Our faith is in God. Our faith is in Jesus Christ. Our belief is that the Holy Spirit can quicken our minds to discern between truth and the lie. But to do that well, we have to spend a lot of time reading the Bible, understanding it and comparing what we’re being taught, what we’re hearing, what we’re experiencing, to what the Bible itself teaches us.
Sam Rohrer: When we come back, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to continue our discussion with Dr. George Barna and this focused research results of what do pastors in the pulpits, how do they stack up against biblical worldview? You’ve been hearing it, we’re going to come back, we’ll further unpack this in the next segment.
Sam Rohrer: When the broad denominations of American churches, including those who are evangelical and even Baptists who are historically most likely to embrace the Bible as authoritative, are all either 50% or less, as we were just been talking about, hold a biblical worldview. Well then a logical question arises, where do these pastors in the pulpits actually go astray? Where does their view of God or the Bible or how the plan of redemption is set up according to the Bible, salvation of the gospel, those things that go into making up what is in fact, a true biblical worldview, where do they then go wrong? How do they get off base?
George, I want to go here first of all, since it seems that the denomination itself is not the determiner. That question I just posed right there, Isaac will pose that to you. But since it seems that the denomination itself, as you said in the last segment, is not the determiner of whether a pastor holds a true biblical worldview or not, is there any other factor that you discovered where perhaps some other grouping of churches or grouping of pastors caused them to, for instance, exceed that 50% approximate level? For instance, maybe the size of the church, maybe the geographical location of the church, does that vary by location in this country, as an example, or maybe the age of the pastor, where does some of those things come into this?
George Barna: Well, when we look at all these things, there are several patterns that I think are relevant to that question. One of those has to do with the size of the church. As we did this research, we broke down the size of the church according to attendance, and found that churches that typically attract less than 250 people on a given weekend, are about three times more likely to have pastors who possess a biblical worldview than are churches that attract more than that. And it was interesting because when you look at the numbers, whether you’re talking about a church with 250, 300 people, 600 people, 1,000 people, 4,000 people, the numbers didn’t change very much after you got above that 250 mark, it hovered into 14 to 15% range of the pastors from those larger churches, having a biblical world view.
That’s about one out of every seven pastors or so, as opposed to about four out of 10, 42% of the pastors of churches under 250. So that was certainly one demarcation, the other one had to do with the racial configuration of the church, racial and ethnic background of the congregation. When we look at churches where they are mostly white people in the congregation, what we found is about 42% of the pastors of those churches, have a biblical worldview. That was the highest. When we look at churches that are all Black people or mostly Black people, about 27% of those churches have pastors with a biblical worldview. The lowest was among the Hispanic congregations, where all or most of the people in those congregations are Hispanic, only 7% of the pastors of those churches tend to have a biblical worldview.
And of course, a lot of that is influenced by the fact that such a large proportion of Hispanic Americans attend Catholic churches, and we know that only 6% of Catholic priests have a biblical worldview. So there is that demarcation. The only other thing that I might point out here is that we did find that worldview varies according to the position of the pastor. And so for instance, when we looked at the lead or senior pastors in churches across the country, 41% of senior pastors have a biblical worldview, not good, but that was the highest on the list. Then when we looked at those who are currently associate or assistant pastors, only 28% of them, that one out of four have a biblical worldview. And that’s important because these tend to be the future senior pastors in our churches, they’re kind of the senior pastors in training. Then we can look at teaching pastors, now that’s a much smaller category, there aren’t as many teaching pastors.
Why? Because they only happen to be in larger churches. They’re the only ones that can afford somebody whose primary function is going to be teaching. Only 13% of the teaching pastors have a biblical world, because that, to me, is very shocking because again, their primary thrust is to teach biblical truth, and yet only 13% have a biblical worldview. The worst one of all that we found, not in terms of numbers, but the one that breaks my heart the most is children’s and youth pastors, where only 12% of them have a biblical worldview, that’s one out of eight. Why does that break my heart more than the others? Because you develop your worldview between 15 to 18 months of age and 13 years of age.
So these are the pastors where parents are taking their children to churches and trusting them to these particular pastors so that they can learn biblical truth. And yet only one out of every eight children’s and youth pastors have a biblical worldview. In seven out of eight cases, they’re more likely to lead those vulnerable young children astray than they are to lead them to Christ. I’ll just throw in the fifth category of pastors, are executive pastors again, you typically find them only at the larger churches, only 4% of executive pastors have a biblical world.
Isaac Crockett: George, this is so serious, and when you start adding the layers here of study that you’ve been doing for decades and decades of research so now we have that the parents of pre-teen children, parents my age and younger, all of my kids are pre-teen, they are the lowest category of parents in generations to have a biblical worldview. If somehow our kids go to church though, where there is a youth pastor or children’s pastor, that pastoral position, who’s going to interact with those kids and hopefully be that chance for them to hear the biblical worldview, he’s least likely of the pastoral staff, like you said, more likely to lead them astray than to lead them to Christ. So this is really drawing us into a very serious condition, not just right now, but for our next generations.
And if you’re listening right now, please share this program, share our ministry, share George’s ministries with other people that you know, maybe a small group leader, maybe your pastor, you could share this with them, that they could hear it. George, as we look at this biblical worldview then of pastors, now let’s look at the categories of belief and behavior. What were the areas where the greatest departure, I guess, from where we should be with the biblical worldview and where we go when we don’t have it?
George Barna: Well, the areas of weakness were really intriguing to me because two of the three weakest areas, what we do is we have 54 different questions that we use to measure worldview, and we divide them into eight different categories, and we also divide them by beliefs and behaviors, because you do what you believe, so you’ve got to measure both. But we found that two of the three weakest areas for pastors, one of those was the category of Bible, truth and morals, and the other was the category of sin, salvation and relationship with God. Now I got to tell you, when I take my family to church, those are probably the two areas that I most want to be assured that there is a solid, deep biblical foundation in the mind, the heart and the teaching of our pastors, in terms of the Bible, what do I make of it?
What does it say? Truth, does it exist? What difference does it make? Where does it come from? Morals, how do I make decisions about what’s right and wrong? And in specific instances, what is right and wrong? Sin, does it exist? What difference does it make? Salvation, is it possible? How does it happen? What role did Jesus Christ play in that what role does my confession of sin play in that, if any? Personal relationship with God, is it possible to have that, does he care? Is he involved in our lives today? I mean, all of these are essential questions, really, of our faith. And what we discovered is that in all the different categories of worldview thinking that we measured, those were two of the three weakest among pastors in Christian churches today. They were strongest, not strong, but strongest in areas like knowing our purpose and calling in life, understanding family and the value of life, having an understanding of who God is and how creation works, those things, we’re not good at, but we’re better at that than some of those more fundamental realities.
Sam Rohrer: George, that causes me to raise a question though, if a person is not biblically straight on matters of Bible truth, sin, salvation relationship to God, the heart of the gospel, then it would cause me to say, I can’t believe then that these people would actually truly believe that the word of God is authoritative. How does that factor into this?
George Barna: Well, it certainly does, and we’ve got a lot of pastors who would say that the Bible is a great book, it’s an influential book, it’s good for teaching, but that it contains errors. And here’s the insidious part where Satan has gotten his hooks into many pastors, of causing them to think that they know better than scripture. And so it’s up to the pastor to discern what is truth and what is not truth in the scriptures, as opposed to recognizing that it’s all from God, it is all true, it’s filled the truth principles and they were given to us so that we could thrive in life, not so that we could be the judge of life. That’s God’s job, that he’s given us what we need to know in terms of how to live a life that honors him and enables us to be who he made us to be.
Sam Rohrer: And ladies and gentlemen, it comes back again, the authority of scripture, who is the definer of truth in your life, in my life? It’s either God in the Bible or it’s something else, we’re called [inaudible 00:30:24]. When we come back, we’re going to talk about and say now, how do we take and apply these things we’ve learned? Well, we thank you for being with us today on the program, we’ve got one more segment to go. We often call this our solution segment or somehow bringing the meat of the program, which we have done a lot today, to a point where we can say, “Right, now what do we do about it?” And that’s what we’re going to get into George with in just a moment. But before I do so, for those of you, again, who are watching us or listening to us on regular radio, most Fridays are set up, what we call and ask Sam Friday.
Isaac Crockett, who is my cohost today is the lead on those Friday programs. And he asks me generally questions for further explanation, things that have come up during the week in various programs or questions that we have gotten from you, the listener. Now, as we do this program right now, just in the last few days, there have been multiple questions that have come in from listeners across the country, wanting us to address. And we will do that. So I want to just ask all of you who are listening right now, that if you have a question based on this program, the application or anything that we’re talking about today, or the previous programs that we have done this week, jot down that question, go to our website, standinthegapradio.com. You can put in the question, direct it to us and say you’d like Isaac and I, to be able to cover that on our Friday Q&A. We live stream at 12:05, Facebook alive is what we’re saying, you’d remember that, on Fridays, and then we do this.
Now this program today, the culture update we do with George Barna, one of those Fridays a month, and so that’s how it all fits together. So note your questions, we love them, and we will try to answer them our next time up. Let’s get into this George, because you always, you’ve taught us a lot, I’ve repeated it, and I give you credit for it almost all the time. And that really is this, when confronted with significant information, truth, something that challenges the way we think or act or whatever, we need to ask that question, okay, at the end of the day, what difference does it make? I’ve tried to tell people when you stand on a pulpit, you preach the sermon, they need to be in [inaudible 00:32:38] what difference should it make in the lives of you who were listening to me? Because that’s what God would ask us, if we don’t have a change in life, there’s a problem.
So in this case, given the very low percentage, proportion of key populations within the pastoral segment that have a biblical worldview, where do we start? In all these other ones that you’ve mentioned as well, parents, generally pre-teen parents, that kind of thing, when it’s all so low, most of it is single digits, where do we go in an effort to raise those numbers overall of people who have a biblical worldview? Because most people would think like, man, we’re so down low, I don’t know how we even turn it around. So put some of those together in your response please.
George Barna: Yeah, great question, and I would say the place we’ve got to start is with ourselves. As Americans, we have a tendency to analyze the situation out there and to identify what we think are the weak points and to say, okay, we got to fix those things. We got to help those people to get it together. As opposed to recognizing, we got in this situation because to some extent, each of us allowed it to happen. Whether it’s because we don’t have a biblical worldview or we haven’t been focused on helping other people to develop a biblical worldview, particularly our children, maybe we haven’t been busy assessing what’s going on in our churches. So it’s going to start with us, all of those other things we really can’t do much about until we have our own act together. The problem isn’t the church, capital C, as much as the problem is I am the church, and so I’ve got to get it together first.
And one of the ways that I recommend that people do that is by evaluating our own worldview. Now in about a month or two, we’re going to have our worldview inventory available online for people to take. So they can go through the same evaluation that pastors and parents and all these other groups that we’ve measured, have been measured by, and then people will be able to assess themselves. So that’ll be helpful. But regardless of what your score is in that, what I would say is that as I’ve looked at the patterns of data from all these different studies, these thousands and thousands of people that we’ve been interviewing across the country, I’ve identified what I would call the seven cornerstones of a biblical worldview. And these are seven beliefs and the related behaviors, that it appears if you do not have these as part of your personal spiritual foundation, you’re not going to be able to build a biblical worldview because then your beliefs begin contradicting each other.
And so those seven cornerstones are very simple things, and by the way, all of these measures, we’re not looking at the fine points of theology here, we’re looking at basic biblical principles. But perhaps the seven most basic that are critical are things like understanding who God is, knowing that he’s the all powerful, all knowing creator of the universe, is pure and holy and involved in our lives today, knowing that we, as human beings, are born into sin, we’re sinners, we are not good in nature, and so we need to be redeemed by a Holy, perfect, righteous, loving God. Thirdly, that we recognize that Jesus Christ is the only way that we will ever be able to achieve that outcome, the only way that we will ever be able to live in God’s presence, eternally. Fourthly, knowing that there is absolute moral truth, it’s not relative to the person and the situation. Fifthly, recognizing that that truth comes from the scriptures, which of course originally came from God, and knowing, and believing and living like the Bible is true, it’s trustworthy, it’s reliable, it’s relevant to our lives today.
Sixthly, recognizing that success is not about what you achieve, it’s not about who you know, it’s not about how many people know you, it’s not about your reputation. Success is consistent obedience to God. And then finally, understanding that your purpose, the reason that God put you on earth is to know him, to love him and to serve him with all your heart, mind, strength and soul. Each of those has behavioral implications we don’t have time to go into, but those are the kinds of things that people need to be thinking about and testing themselves regularly to make sure that we’re on track.
Isaac Crockett: George, when you talk about that, those seven key principles like that, it reminds me of Acts 17, and of course you and Sam know, we talk about the Bereans, and Paul and Silas on their missionary trip, they get to this synagogue in Berea, and unlike some of the other places they went, there was a lot of fruit here because these people, it says, search the scriptures daily to take the teaching that they were hearing and to say, is this true or not? And if it meant what scripture says, then they believed it. How do we do that? If we’re looking for a church or we’re wondering about our own church, whether it’s got a biblical worldview, are there signs that would suggest to us, you know what, we need to be really careful with what is being preached here. How do we search and know what we are hearing is true or not?
George Barna: Yeah. Again, a great question, Issac, and I think one of the things that we’ve got to do is have benchmarks like these seven cornerstones that I just identified, and to be listening very carefully to what’s being taught, not even just in terms of beliefs, but what it looks like in practice. These kinds of beliefs have implications for every social issue of the day, whether we’re talking about abortion, whether we’re talking about debt, whether we’re talking about crime and policing solutions, whether we’re talking about national security and immigration, whether we’re talking about inflation and the economy. I mean, any issue that you bring up, there are biblical worldview principles that relate to it.
And so that’s what we have to be looking at in terms of our church. Are they teaching things directly from the Bible? Do they have biblical applications? But also the scriptures talk about teaching us the full counsel of God. And one of the things that I’ve found in churches and especially in children’s ministries, again, important because children are developing their worldview, is that we do not teach the full council of God. We hopscotch around and pick the things that we like to talk about and think about.
Sam Rohrer: And George, we’ve got to go, we’re just out of time. So glad to have you on board. Ladies and gentlemen, again, go back and listen to this program again, share it with your friends. Standinthegapradio.com. Standinthegapradio.com. Embrace the truth and stand in the gap.
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