Concerning Changes in “Churchgoers” Beliefs and Lifestyles

Concerning Changes in “Churchgoers” Beliefs and Lifestyles

November 21, 2025

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Co-host: Dr. Isaac Crockett

Guest: David New

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 11/21/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Friday edition of Stand In the Gap Today. And it’s our monthly focus on the culture and the values, biblical worldview all linked together. Coming off of what the research shows with a special and recurring guest, Dr. George Barna. He is a currently professor at Arizona Christian University, as well as director of research there at the research center at Arizona Christian. He’s also the founder of the original Barna Group, lest you not know that, but I link all that together so you know what’s happening today. Pastor Isaac Crockett joins us as normally does when we interact together with Dr. Barna. And together the three of us will attempt, and I’m going to say will attempt to present a lot of information, essential findings, though of two reports. The first had a release date by George of October 13th and the second just released a few days ago, November 13th.

It’s a part one, part two connection. We’ll explain that more as we get into it. Together, these vital releases by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian focuses on key findings relative to the attitudes of identified churchgoers. Are you a churchgoer? Well anyway, we’ll find out more about what that means, but the title I’ve chosen to frame our conversation today and these two reports we’re going to link together is this concerning changes in churchgoers beliefs and lifestyles. And with that established, George, welcome to the program. Always great to have you back, Isaac, and I enjoy talking with you.

George Barna:

Well, Sam, I always look forward to these conversations. We have a chance to dig deeper on what’s going on spiritually in America. I think that’s really going to be the key to whether or not America gets turned around. So yeah, thanks for having me back.

Sam Rohrer:

Yeah, you’re welcome. And because as you know, we comment on, you’re about the only one that does this kind of research and I’ve been doing it for so long and doing it from a biblical worldview perspective, which makes why we approach when we do this kind of research analysis that we’re talking about, it’s so important to us because it is truth and it’s hard to find truth. So let’s get into this. The reports you’ve just released, these two that I referenced appear not to be a part of your normal cultural research center, 2025 research that we’ve been dealing with these last months. And I think you’ve got your last report coming up in December when we meet. We’ll go over that one. In fact, you sent out a release. I’m going to read just a little bit from it because that’s sort of going to bounce off of today.

You say there my latest research being what we’re talking about today, conducted for Family research council in partnership with the cultural research center at Arizona Christian University. And then you go on and here’s the key. You say this reveals this research reveals troubling signs of spiritual drift among America’s churchgoers. You say even regular attenders are losing their biblical bearings. That’s another key point. And you say as fewer recognize the importance of biblical worldview. That’s another big point. And then last one and spiritual certainty on key issues is fading. Alright, here’s my first question, George, identify for listeners again, the purpose for this two-part research and the focus on churchgoers. Why’d you do that as compared to, for instance, professing Christians generally and as an example, and then also define what you mean by churchgoer, just so we’re established there.

George Barna:

Yeah, sure. And first, let me push back a little bit on the idea that this is not what we normally do at the Cultural Research Center. We work with a number of different partners, Family Research Council being one of them, where we do projects in cooperation with those partners. But our continual focus is trying to understand what’s going on spiritually in America and how is it impacting the culture. So this is just a little bit of a different angle. This particular study is a piece of tracking research, meaning that on regular intervals we repeat similar research with a similar population to try to figure out what kind of change is taking place in people’s beliefs and behaviors. And so we did a similar study for FRCA couple of years ago in 2023, and what we’re trying to do is track those kinds of changes in the culture by using many of the same questions.

We added some nuances as well, but looking at a lot of the same things with a sample of the same population that we looked at before. Now why are we looking at church goers? Well, that happens to be the group that FRC in particular has influence upon. That’s who they are working with to try to change the culture. And it makes total sense. People with the same kind of mindset, people with many of the same aims with their own lives. And so for them to understand, yeah, what’s going on with churchgoers is important. And I think probably your audience, Sam and Isaac is comprised primarily of people who go to church or have some kind of an affiliation with the church. So this should really speak in a very pointed way to our audience today. And just so that we have some context here, I think it’s helpful to understand that we define church goers as people who attend church once a month or more. We didn’t set the bar very high, but even with that, what we find is that’s a minority of adults in America today. That’s down to 42% of the adults in our country. But that’s who this survey speaks about.

Isaac Crockett:

As we look through your survey, George, there’s four areas of these concern that you’re pointing out, and we won’t get to all the areas, but there’s these four signs that are overall kind of troubling. First, there’s just a complete spiritual drift that we’re seeing in the numbers. You’re talking about these regular attenders, I mean going on a weekly or monthly basis and they’re still losing their biblical bearings, fewer of these churchgoers, these professing Christians with seeing the importance of biblical worldview or even beginning to understand what biblical worldview is. And then also just an uncertainty, certain key issues that we say this is a biblical issue they seem uncertain about. Now I know when I read these numbers, George, I was so, I guess grieved, saddened. I went to the Lord in prayer and asking him to forgive and to help people like me as a pastor to be explaining this to the people in my church. But could you expand just real briefly on what this means and we’re going to get into the details of these reports in the next segments.

George Barna:

Well, sure, Isaac. I mean when we talk about the spiritual drift, it’s really all about the departure of the church at large from traditional views and moorings that originally came from the Bible speaking to issues like life and family and truth and the role of the church, a person’s spiritual identification, their worldview, their discipleship, all of these things and more. And it seems that no matter what area we dive into in the research, we’re finding that that drift continues to take place. Part of the way that we recognize that is because a lot of foundational biblical themes are no longer in the mind of people. Instead what we’re hearing is that people are saying, no, the Bible is ambiguous and unclear about these issues. And then we find that part of that is because churches are not teaching about them. So that’s part of what we’re struggling with

Sam Rohrer:

Here, ladies and gentlemen, for just joining us, our theme concerning changes in churchgoers, beliefs and lifestyles, Dr. George Barn is Isaac and my guest today and we’re going and talking about some research when we come back. We’re going to talk about these changes in churchgoers beliefs and ideas towards the family and such things as abortion. Well, if you’re just joining us, welcome aboard today, and if you’re just tuning in, you’ll be hearing the voices of myself and Isaac, Pastor Isaac Crockett and Dr. George Barna who we are visiting with today. This is our monthly focus on matters of culture and research, biblical worldview. And this happens to be today we’re taking two reports upon which George worked in conjunction with Family Research Council, but through Arizona Christian University where he’s the director of research and comparing some information from the past with today. So with that, just a brief overview, again, a restatement and we’ll get right into it.

George, in the introductory statement in part one of your latest research project, you entitled it, you gave it this title, US churchgoers are increasingly ambivalent about family and abortion. But you go on to say this, in the text of the report, you say this, even regular churchgoers are increasingly uncertain about the definition of family and related moral issues. You go on to say, while churchgoers still differ somewhat from adults who do not attend church, the research shows that the gap between the two groups, one attending and one not attending you say is narrowing. You go on to say traditional understanding of family and longstanding opposition to abortion appear to be waning within the Christian Church. So here, let’s go here first. What did the survey show, George, that indicates that even regular churchgoers are increasingly uncertain about the definition of family and moral issues? Because I’m going to say just on its face, if people are uncertain about basic moral issues and uncertain about God’s design for the family, it means somebody is in really deep, deep trouble. So can you start here and just share what people were saying about their uncertainty on the family and then we’ll go to moral issues next?

George Barna:

Yeah, I think there are a couple of ways to approach that. One is to simply look at what we’re finding that people believe. And for instance, we found that there’s no majority agreement among churchgoers about how to do something as simple as define what family means. What we found is that among churchgoers, 46% would say that family is a group of people united by God’s design, which is typically one man, one woman, their children and their relatives all united around marriage. Now that 46% was the top answer, but it’s a minority of people who sit in our churches on a regular basis. You had 22% who said that family, that definition changes over time and across cultures that there’s no consistent or universal definition that you can come up with a similar number. 20% said, well, family is basically any group of people who care for each other.

Then yet another 6% who watered it down even more and said, well, family is any group of people that live together. So you’ve got these encroaching ideas within the church body itself about what family, which is one of God’s core institutions, and that he goes to great lengths within the scriptures to define, to tell stories about, to give admonitions about. And yet we in the church today in America are confused. And we also found in doing this research that there was no spiritual or demographic segment that we looked at that had at least six out of 10 of those churchgoers who were segments such as men or women or born again or evangelical church attend. I mean, whatever segments we looked at, it was always less than six out of 10 who selected any particular definition. So clearly there’s a lot of confusion. How can that be?

Well, that gets to a second issue, which is that we’re finding that growing numbers of people in the church are saying that they do not believe that the Bible speaks clearly and decisively on a whole series of issues that we pose to people. And so those have to do with things like the definition of legitimate marriage, the morality of killing an unborn child, the morality of a homosexual lifestyle, the morality of a transgender lifestyle. These things and more are all down by double digits in terms of the percentage of people who say, oh yeah, the Bible is clear and decisive and it’s teaching on that topic. So that then relates to another thing we discovered, which is that fewer and fewer people are saying, well, yeah, at my church, the pastor or teaching team talks to us about these issues from the pulpit. Those numbers are consistently down, so the outcome is predictable.

Look, if you don’t teach people, if you don’t inform people, if you don’t interpret things for people, yeah, naturally they’re not going to know these things. And to me, a lot of it goes back to the whole Acts eight episode where you had Philip and the Ethiopian official, Ethiopian official had a Bible opening and said, wow, I can’t understand this. I need somebody to explain it to me. And so Philip got in the cart with them and they went down the road together talking about and diving into what the scripture said, we need more of that in America today.

Isaac Crockett:

And George, when I was reading through this, I got kind of excited because these are churchgoers. It’s not just self-identified, born again Christians or something, but they’re going to church. I thought this is going to be good, but as soon as I saw those numbers that you’re talking about, I said, this is horrible. This is way lower than I expected from churchgoers. And you keep talking about the morality of this or the morality of that. I’d like to get into this attitude, people’s attitudes towards these moral issues. But before we go into that, I think what we’re realizing, we have to define everything. What moral issues are we talking about? And again, today in 2025, what we call moral issue might mean something different than some people expect.

George Barna:

Well, Isaac, as you know, I mean there’s a page worth of moral issues that we could talk about because people don’t understand that morality simply means making the decision between what’s right and what’s wrong. And the Bible is very clear in helping us to make those kinds of distinctions. So as we’re looking in the research about these things, it’s issues like abortion, it’s issues like something that people might say, well, that’s not a moral issue, but should Christians be supporting the state of Israel? I mean there’s a right and a wrong to that. Why? Because the Bible says there is where God starts talking very early in the scriptures about those who bless my people, Israel will be blessed. And so it goes on from there about the ways that we are supposed to think about and interact with and support Israel. And so that becomes a moral issue. Marriage, religious liberty, homosexuality, transgenderism, euthanasia, these are all things that we looked at in the survey that are examples of those moral issues.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay, George, there’s so many different directions we could go. I’ve got to come back and ask you on this, when you selected this group of, I don’t what if it was a thousand or so that comprised churchgoers, do you have any way of knowing what kind of church to which they are going? In other words, are they going to a Bible believing church, or are we measuring you talking to people here who are going to a church that denies that Jesus Christ exists as an example?

George Barna:

Well, we were talking to people who attend a Christian Church. And so as you know Sam, that’s a pretty broad umbrella. And so we’ve got Catholic and we’ve got Protestant, we’ve got Mainline, and we’ve got Evangelical, we’ve got Pentecostal, and we’ve got fundamentalist, we’ve got independent and non-denominational church. I mean the whole range is represented in here. And because of the way that we did the survey, the proportion of people who attend any of those kinds of churches reflects the proportion of people in America who attend that type or style or profession of church. And so yes, I mean there are some churches in here that I wouldn’t go to because they don’t necessarily believe in the Bible. I mean, I’ve actually attended churches as a visitor and realized that they believe that their feelings are more important than God’s truth, and that’s how they preach and that’s how they do their Christian activity as opposed to the types of churches I’m personally more attracted to, which say, I don’t care what your feelings are, get over it and get onto God’s truth because that’s what matters.

He created you for a purpose and he gave you guidelines for how to live in a way that will honor him, and you better do that because that’s why he gave you breath is to no love and serve with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul. So when you get out of bed in the morning, don’t be thinking about what will make you feel good, be thinking about what will make him feel good, what will please him, what will honor him, what will advance his kingdom? Those are the kinds of churches I prefer to go to. But in America today, those churches do not dominate the spiritual landscape.

Sam Rohrer:

So we don’t have much time left in this break that’s very short, but were you able to identify a group of churches that would one consider be Bible believing churches? And if so, and you may not have been able to break it out, but if so, did those church attenders manifest attitudes that were more biblical? Let’s put it that way.

George Barna:

We were able to break it out, Sam, and what we found were two things. Number one, the people who attend the Bible believing churches are more likely to believe the Bible, they’re more likely to reflect biblical answers to our questions. But secondly, we also found that in those churches that Bible believing mindset is rapidly declining and so all is not well even in the best of our

Sam Rohrer:

Churches. Okay. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’re hearing all of that. The applications are significant, and by that extent, each of us need to think about what am I getting in the church to which I am attending? What am I hearing preached? Is the word of God authoritative? Because if it’s not, everybody’s going to move away from it. When it come back, we’ll go further into and find impacts on political and religious beliefs. Well, welcome back. We’re halfway through the program now, and George, let’s move now to part two of your recent research. There’s a part one, part two, we talked about that earlier, but in this one, you’ve entitled this Churchgoers Exhibit Significant Changes in Political and Religious Beliefs and Lifestyles. Right now in this report you start out by saying a new report describing the continuing ideological and spiritual shift among Americans shows how traditional biblical beliefs are being pushed aside by people who consistently attend Christian churches.

This transition is leading to more churched adults abandoning traditional conservative perspectives on social and political issues amid a firm disinterest in their world of view. Alright, now a question for you. Again, this is not possible in this our program to go into depth on these. So I want you to, when you come back, tell people where they can pick up this report, these reports, but when you use the word quote exhibit significant changes, I know that you choose your words carefully. So significant and changes mean something. So how significant, and while you’re defining that, would you also define what you mean by political and religious beliefs and lifestyles? Why you put those words into that title and then we’ll break them out a little bit into the balance of the segment.

George Barna:

Well, Sam, first of all, when I talk about significant shifts, there are two different ways of thinking about that. A traditional market researcher, public opinion researcher would say, well, based on the size of your sample and whether or not it was a random sample of the population, you can estimate if something is different in terms of statistical significance. And with a sample of a thousand people like we had for this survey, normally that would be plus or minus three percentage points, maybe four percentage points depending on certain parameters. For me, I tend to think, okay, that’s helpful from an academic or scholarly point of view, but I’m a practical kind of guy in the trenches kind of guy, so I want to know, but when does it really start to make a difference? And so in a lot of the research I do, I’m looking for differences of 10 percentage points or greater because that’s when you can actually start to visualize those difference or experience those differences in the marketplace.

That means that you’ve had a shift of one out of every 10 people, and so that becomes real. If you’re talking plus or minus three percentage points, that’s one out of every 33 people, and you’re not really going to notice that, and it may not make that much of a difference, but when you start to getting one or two people out of every 10 who have switched sides or who have a new perspective, that begins to make a difference. So that’s what I’m looking at here. Now you also asked how we’re defining these things, political and beliefs or lifestyles, political and religious. We’re looking at things like what people believe about the value of life, about applications of the value of life, such as murdering an unborn child, things such as political engagement. Do you vote? How do you decide how you vote? Do you turn to the Bible to help you figure out what matters when you’re picking a candidate or choosing to vote for a particular change in public policy?

Things like how you think about Israel. So those are political and religious beliefs. You can also add a lot of other moral ones like homosexuality, transgenderism, we look at all those things. Lifestyle has to do with how you integrate what you believe into what you do from moment to moment, how you treat people, how you think about people or money or institutions or even faith and religion and spirituality. All that is part of that lifestyle component. And so what we’re trying to figure out is, okay, are there changes taking place in regard to all of those things? And if so, what are the nature of the changes?

Isaac Crockett:

And George, again, I just want to thank you for doing this research and then making it available for all of our listeners, for anybody who will listen. You’re giving this information out there. It’s so good. It’s so important, you and your team at the Cultural Research Center. Thank you so much. And let’s dive into this because this is what life is all about. What was the most significant or some of the most significant findings that you did run into? We’re talking again about churchgoers, people attending Christian churches, gazing into the political and religious beliefs. What did you find and what does that mean? What are the implications of it?

George Barna:

Again, because of time, I’ll just quickly bullet point some of these things, but among those eye openers for me with the fact that one third of all people who regularly attend our churches say that they prefer socialism to capitalism. We found that when we talked with people about Israel and what is a Christian’s responsibility, if any, to Israel these days, what we found was by and large lukewarm support at best for Israel, we asked what should we be doing? Well, only six out of 10 said that they believe it’s important for Christians to consistently pray for Israel. I mean, we’re just talking about praying, not that it’s unimportant, it’s hugely important, but the fact that only six out of 10 say they’re even willing to consistently pray or to consider the possibility of consistently praying for Israel for me as a mindblower. But then the other things that we asked if people would do on behalf of Israel were even lower.

Would you talk to other people about what’s going on in Israel and about the biblical perspectives on Israel? It was a minority, 44%. Would you personally think it’s important to urge our government to work with and to support Israel in its search for freedom and security? Only 40% of churchgoing Christians, would you personally give money or other personal resources to something that would help Israel? Only 37%. So we’ve got issues with Israel. We can look at other kinds of moral issues. We find that fewer and fewer churchgoers say that they feel like they know what they believe related to things like abortion. Now, come on folks. I mean that’s been a top news item for 60 years. Now granted, the survey also found that most pastors are not preaching about these issues, but there’s certainly an abundance of information available. But Christians say, yeah, I don’t know and I’m not willing to go out and get that information.

Somebody’s got to deliver it. To me, issues like a homosexual lifestyle, a growing number of Christians say they don’t know what to make of that transgenderism and even higher number of Christian or churchgoers are saying that they don’t know what to believe about that issue. One’s personal social responsibility to get engaged with what’s going on in society. Those numbers are down. So I mean a lot of the things that we’re looking at here that matter are down. Why is that? Well, part of it is that most churchgoers do not consistently read the Bible. A large share of them do not believe the Bible is truth. We find that only 39% of them say that they believe the Bible is the primary moral guide for their life. And then when we ask them, well, what’s morally wrong and right, only 43% would say something like euthanasia is morally wrong and we could go through all the other issues.

It’s similarly depressing. So I mean we’ve got an issue here where people aren’t studying the Bible, they’re not trusting the Bible, they don’t have a relationship with God that’s personal and deep and intense and growing, and they don’t understand the nature of that God who they could have that relationship with. We find that there are all of these things in life that are blocking them from identifying and recognizing and investing in spirituality as the key component of their. Instead, what we’ve done is we’ve defined success as material possessions, personal reputation types of relationships we’re able to establish. Basically it all funnels down to happiness rather than consistent obedience to God in his ways. And so until we recover that, yeah, this nation is going to be in a world of hurt.

Sam Rohrer:

And George, I can’t help but bring it up at this point, I just came back from Israel and the major concern of there and other Christians who are part of the group I was going there to was the fact of they’re looking at the global antisemitism and anti-Israel attitude, but the biggest is to move in America, which the numbers indicate. And I’m wondering as we look at it, is that you often say a person does what they believe they do. And I’ve shared that many times as well. They do. Theologically though many of the groups who are active as churchgoers from those who are a part of the new apostolic reformation as example, are those who adhere to dominion theology, Roman Catholics who embrace replacement theology as an example about Israel. All of them don’t feel Israel’s important. And in case many of them believe that they’re not at all important, God’s done away with them, so they have no interest in Israel. I am finding that as this kind of activity increases, it does make changes and her range of things, including attitudes towards Israel. Did any of that kind of thing come up in the research?

George Barna:

Well, let me put it in this framework. I know I’ve only got a few seconds and that’s that. If we stand back and try to identify what are Americans like, one of the key components we would have to identify is that we’re very selfish. Everything revolves around us. We want the best. We think we deserve it, and we’re going to commit ourselves to that as opposed to looking at the world through the lens that God gives us, which is what the Bible provides. And so this replacement theology movement that’s so big in America, I think is simply a reflection of that selfishness.

Sam Rohrer:

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, again, what to come back to the authority of scripture and how we interpret scripture, which is what we emphasize so greatly stay back, we’ll talk about implications. Well, as we’re going into our final segment now, again, thank you all for listening to us today. If you want to pick up these reports and a lot of the other, I think all of the other research that we’ve covered in the past months this year and what will be coming up in December when we or George, again, you can get at the website of cultural research center.com, cultural research center.com. And anyway, we’ll just leave it there because I would encourage you to get that when we do these kind of programs, we’re just taking just some highlights of research that is much larger, far more detail than what we’re going over. We’re giving the essence of it.

So what we’re giving is accurate, but it’s not at all comprehensive. And if you’re at all interested in this topic we’re talking about today or any of the others you can find and get the entire report, it’s easy to get. And I would encourage you to do that. Alright, now, George, the changes that you’ve identified in these two reports, they seem to be similar to the reports that you’ve been releasing during the year in recent years, which is what you said at the beginning. You do some research like you’ve done here, family research council and for their purposes, but the information tends to cross back and forth and it’s in the same kind of area. But the fact that this trend away from the authority of scripture in a person’s life that we’ve talked about much before. He talked a little bit in the last segment as well, the increasing loss of people with a biblical worldview, which I think one of the times we just talked with recently found about 4%.

I mean, it’s incredible low number, but to me it mirrors in some respects what God said would happen in the time in which we live. He calls it the latter years of the end days, the end days being the time from when Christ descended to when he returns now, but scripture often uses these terms. There will be a falling away, talks about people gravitating to people who tell them what they want to hear. They have itching ears and tied up with false prophets who come out and they share some truth. But it’s a mix, it’s error. It’s some demonic error in there. And of course, the Lord says these days it would be marked by rise of false prophets. So I’m looking at all of these things and I look at your research and I’m saying, boy, it seems to me that that’s what your research perhaps clearly is indicating.

Here’s just a question for you right now. What are your comments about the cause of where we are? And you may want to tie it in to what we just left off in the other segment, but what does that mean for the immediate and foreseeable days ahead? Because you and we have talked here and you’re tracking trends that over cross periods of time, and we’ve had other programs with you where the trends as they extend out, you’re not anticipating trends, don’t anticipate major blips in the middle. It’s a trend. And so we’re on a trend that does not portend the ability to continue to maintain a nation of freedom that we have had because it depends on fearing God and keeping his commandments. Anyway, speak to that if you don’t mind.

George Barna:

Yeah, well, I’m glad you gave me a small topic to talk about. Go where you want. Yeah, I mean to me, as I think I put in one of these reports, I think a lot of the social turbulence that we’re experiencing in America today is easily and directly traceable to the fact that there is an absence and an invisibility of genuine disciples of Jesus in our culture today. And so what you’ve got is a shockingly small number of people who represent God, who represent biblical truth, biblical morality, the spiritual health of churches and families based on scriptural admonitions. And then you’ve got to start asking, okay, well then how did we get there? Which I think is part of your question, and what do we do about it? And to me, this comes back to some of the axioms that I always share with my students, and there are a whole series of those.

We alluded to one earlier, you do what you believe, but I’ll give you a few others. You reproduce who you are. And another one, only genuine disciples of Jesus can make genuine disciples of Jesus. And so then the axiom that I wanted to get to is yet another one, which is, but we know what’s going on because you get what you measure. And so if that’s the case, then we’ve got to start asking, given where the church in America’s at today, how do we get here? Well, let’s take a look at what we measure. Now, we’ve asked in our surveys, senior pastors of Christian churches across the country, what do you measure to determine if you’ve got a healthy, successful growing church? There are five things they measure, attendance, giving programs, number of staff, people hired in square footage. Jesus didn’t die for any of those.

Let’s look at Christians. What do Christians in America measure about their own lives? Well, they measure their intentions. They measure their performance, and they measure their happiness. Jesus didn’t die for any of those. Let’s look at political leaders. What did they measure? They measure their own electability, how much money they can raise and their favorability ratings. Jesus didn’t die for any of those. Let’s look at educational leaders. What do they measure? What do our schools measure? Graduation rates, number of people enrolled reputation in their profession. Jesus doesn’t give a rip about any of those. So basically what we’re doing is we’re measuring things that don’t matter, but the results of those measurements are what propel us to do the things that we’re doing that drive us away from the values that God gives to us for our lives in the Bible. We need to be measuring the things that God measures.

And the scripture is very clear that he looks at our heart as an indication of what really matters to us. What are the things that we love? Because those are the things that we’ll do. What are the things that we believe? Those are the things that we’ll do. And what God says he’s going to measure is obedience and fruit. Until we begin to measure that in America, which is what we’re trying to do in the research, give people a jumpstart here. It’s like, Hey, look inside yourself. Look inside your church. Look inside your family, and let’s start to measure these things because until we do, I would say we’re bound to have continual turbulence and chaos and violence and disappointment and anger and hatred until you and I and the church produces disciples who are able to jump into the culture and change the conversation.

And because of that conversation, change the direction of the culture, and then we can begin to measure things that matter to God. And so we’ve got to start producing more of those disciples. And each of us needs to be that kind of disciple who isn’t simply comfortable with the fact that we know the Bible, we try to live the Bible, we believe that we’re pleasing God because we believe the things that Jesus believes. That’s great. But for a reason that in our research we measure both beliefs and behavior, when we look at worldview is because we know you do what you believe. And so you may say you believe something, but you don’t really believe it until you start to do it. Until people can see that belief in the flesh, in how you choose to live from moment to moment in what you choose to say in conversations about the hot topics of the day. Those are the kind of disciples that we need to be.

Sam Rohrer:

And George, you’ve delivered a challenge right up to the very end, and we’re out of time now, ladies and gentlemen, but what kind of disciple are you desiring to be? I ask myself, and I all should ask ourselves the question, when we stand before the Lord and give an account, which we will, will he say, well done, good and faithful servant? Well, if we don’t know God’s word, we don’t make it our standard. We don’t readjust ourself to it, recalibrate every day. We’re never going to hear those words. George. Dr. George Barna, thank you so much for being with us today. Again, his research can be found@culturalresearchcenter.com. Dr. Isaac Crockett, thanks for being on board as well today, ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Get into a Bible believing church and worship the Lord with other believers.