From Research to Response: From Hearing to Doing

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Co-host: Dr. Isaac Crockett

Guest: Dr. George Barna

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 5/22/26. 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 also our monthly focus on culture and values, biblical worldview with Dr. George Barna, founder of the original Barna Research Group and now professor at Arizona Christian University and the director of research at the Cultural Research Center there at Arizona Christian. Today, Pastor Isaac Crockett and I will again converse with Dr. Barna. Now, rather than focusing on the latest research report, today we’re going to address several questions. I’m going to say drawn from years of data showing the sharp decline in the percentage of Americans holding a biblical worldview. That’ll be one area. Another would be the growing influence of culture on the church instead of the church’s influence on the culture. It’s something we’ve talked about in the past. And a third area would be the evident failure of the majority of parents to raise their children as ambassadors in true disciples of Christ, which is obviously God’s pattern for being salt and light in a darkening, pleasure driven culture.

And that goes to any age at any time. Now, the title I’ve chosen to frame our discussion today is simply this, from research to response, from hearing to doing. Right so you get the flavor. With that, George, welcome back to the program. It’s always great to have you on. The subject matter is always so pertinent. So thanks for being here.

George Barna:

Well, hi guys. It’s great to be with you again.

Sam Rohrer:

Today, since there’s no report for this month, George, from which we follow generally and build right off of the report, we’re going to kind of back up and pick up a couple of these things I mentioned just in introduction. So here’s my first question, our first question here. One of the most significant and alarming observations over the decades of your research is the stark and I’m saying the widening gap between Americans, the majority of whom self identify as Christians, but do not manifest a corresponding biblical life and worldview. Now in light of this, from your perspective, how have pastors and church leaders specifically, but I’m going to say Christian adults generally overseen been able to watch this transition over time and develop into what I can only accurately call today a culture of perhaps of counterfeit Christianity. A lot of professors but not possessors perhaps.

And then secondly, what must now structurally shift within our churches to move away from merely cultivating nominal professors instead of focusing on the training of true disciples and ambassadors, which is the whole part of genuine Christianity of which you’ve researched and we’ve talked about many times.

George Barna:

Wow. We could spend the whole hour just talking about those two questions, but let me start off by addressing the first thing. How do we get here kind of. And I think a lot of it is because pastors and Christians and other church leaders in general are pretty much unaware of what’s going on. So we’ve got this form of Christianity that happens where we’ve got our church services, we’ve got our buildings, we’ve got our paid professionals in the pulpit, in the classrooms and whatnot. And so we assume, yeah, things are going on just fine. But back when I was in ninth grade biology, we did an experiment with a frog, the frog and the kettle experiment that my first bestselling book was actually called The Frog in the Kettle. But the idea is when things are changing slowly around you, even though they’re dangerous and could kill you because they’re moving so slowly, you may not notice those changes that are about to take your life.

I think that’s largely what’s happened to the Christian faith in America and that’s been facilitated by the complacency of Christians and church leaders in our country. So you look historically at what happened. It’s like, okay, they took prayer out of school. We were upset but we didn’t really do much. Then they took the 10 commandments out of the schools and off the buildings. We were upset we didn’t do much. Then families stopped praying together at meal times and other times. Then you had businesses opening on Sundays so now people couldn’t go to church because they had to go to work or they were thinking about going out shopping rather than going back to the evening service on Sunday. All of these kinds of things. You had paraphrased Bibles. I remember back there was one called Good News for Modern Man that I think was the first big one, but that started saying, “Well, the word of God, I mean you can play with it, you can make it really comfortable.” Then you had no fault divorce.

I mean it was just one step after another step after another step and we looked at these things independently and we said, “Well yeah, it’s not good, but it’s not that big a deal.” But all of that then kind of led us to the compartmentalization of our faith and so that led to the redefining of our worldview. We redefined truth, we redefined God, we redefined sin, we redefined purpose, we redefined success and we pretty much abdicated leadership from the faith center that we had and from our churches where we actually had hired leaders to represent the faith in all walks of society and then we gave that power and authority to other dimensions in our culture. So you started isolating faith from every dimension of life. You suddenly had schools that were teaching other worldviews and giving them equal weight and authority and credibility. You had the government increasing its power and authority and we stood back and watched even though that was taken away from us and our families, our families allowed themselves and participated in the diminishment of God’s perspective on the family related to marriage and sexual behavior and parenting standard and so forth.

And so before you know it, the culture is changing the church or the Christian faith rather than the Christian faith or the Christian church changing the culture and part of that was due to the absence of strong focused leadership. We went from the 60s, people like Martin Luther King leading the culture to change, to coincide with biblical principles to what do we have today? Mega churches where we’re more concerned about are we big enough? Are we growing numerically? Do we have enough programs? It’s a whole different approach. And so what do we do about it? I think we’ve got to go back to scripture. So we haven’t been doing enough in our culture for the last few years. Go back to James two, verses 17 to 19, where he talks about unless faith produces good deeds, it’s a dead and useless faith. James said, “I’ll show you my faith by my good deeds.” And you can’t see that faith without good deeds.

That kind of faith is useless. So we’ve got to get back to that where it’s not just something we want to be preached about, not something we want to go listen to and take notes on. It’s something that’s going to actually determine the action that we take in our culture to promote Jesus Christ, to promote biblical principles, to promote God

The way that he needs to be honored and worshiped every day.

Sam Rohrer:

And George, how more direct can one say it, ladies and gentlemen, is this? Is God’s word authoritative or is it not? Is it our standard in all things or is it not? Okay, with that, we’re going to come back. We’re going to focus now on the church’s part of this. Well, if you’re just joining us, we’re early in the program right now. Our theme today is this from Research to Response, from Hearing to Doing Dr. Georgi Barna is our guest today and Pastor Isaac Crockett and I are with him. Today we’re kind of asking some questions that have come up repeatedly over many years of research that Dr. George Barna has done and asking for some insight into some of those. So George, I’m going to get into this other one here now of the church’s role. You referred to it in the last segment and we’ve talked much about culture and church or church and culture, but it’s some separate research that I’ve been doing over a period of time and again, we all bring to our experience in life, our experience.

And so from my perspective, I’m a little over 70 years old now. I’ve done preaching, I’ve not ever pastored a church, been an elected office for about 20 years, involved in that process about that same amount of time, but through all of those things and as a parent of children and grandchildren, I’ve made an observation about the church in America and the great majority of Christian leaders that I’ve observed anyways and observe and why, as we’ve discussed many times on this program together, that the culture seems to have shaped the church more than the church has shaped our culture. Now my conclusion has been in part that the cause is what I’m referring to, as you could say, that one would be the apostolic exchange. And what I mean by that is that the original apostle said, “Here’s the primary commission of the church and here’s what the church is to do.

Now go out and do it. ” And they did it then and they changed the world was turned upside down. But I’m thinking that that role in the primary function of the church within God’s ranking of authority, Romans 13, where God has ranked all authority of which civil government is one, the church is another and the family’s government is another. I’m referring to that, but to the church’s role within society to be, I’m going to say a jurisdictionally independent moral auditor through the generations speaking biblical truth to power and that responsibility and speaking the gospel and all of that to the people and to the culture at large, that that primary obligation and view has been exchanged for gaining a perceived, I’m going to say better and quote unquote better seat at the table of political power. The result is that I think the primary duty to God to preach the word and to disciple new believers leaving the result to God was substituted perhaps by deceptive thought into thinking that if they could just get closer to politicians and steer the political process that they could more effectively or quickly force change into the culture through civil law.

But predictably, as we see today, the church I think has been more co-opted and compromised in its God given role as proclaimers of the word and they thus sayeth the word of the Lord function. And that’s a rather long introduction because we could spend a lot of time in it. And when you look back in the last several decades of research that you’ve done, it’s clear that a significant segment of the evangelical church leaders have shifted, at least in my opinion, shifted their primary passion towards seeking or securing a seat at the king’s table, which often means that they don’t not write out there with, let’s say, if the word of the Lord and things have changed. Do you believe that in so doing perhaps that too many inadvertently traded the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit to transform individual hearts for the temporary illusionary hope for faster and more immediately measurable power of civil government and then connected to this based on your historical data, George, has this reliance perhaps on political activism in a role more than it ought to be perhaps contributed to the current decline in biblical worldview by teaching believers, perhaps by example, to look to Washington for societal salvation more than focusing on the hard work of the biblical one of local discipleship?

That’s a long question, but there are a lot of things in there. Go where you want to on that.

George Barna:

Okay. Yeah, it’s a good thing to think about and as I hear you frame all that, what comes to mind is I think there are some basic misunderstandings that we in the church have perhaps unconsciously embraced. I hope it hasn’t been consciously, but certainly one of those is I think we’ve lost sight of the purpose of life and too often these days I think church leaders or certainly Christians in our country think that life is about the pursuit and the acquisition of power or maybe comfort, certainly happiness and security and yet what the church is there to remind us is that it’s not about those things at all. It’s really all about God, which doesn’t mean much to Americans today. So if we break it down, what does that mean? Well, it means that our life is really all about obedience, it’s about truth, it’s about righteousness, it’s about love, it’s about service, it’s about worship.

In other words, it’s about the things that bring honor and pleasure and glory to God. So that’s why we’re on the planet. So those are the things we have to pursue, but I think another basic misunderstanding that we fall and pray to is our ideas about transformation, what it is, how it works and culturally certainly I think we’ve bought into this idea that culture is best changed, most efficiently and effectively changed top down. So leaders give us a vision and we embrace their vision and then the culture has changed accordingly as opposed to the way that God sees transformation, I believe, which is that it’s about individuals coming to him being humbled by him and before him. And so it’s not about getting a comfortable information, which is what the local churches in many cases become. You come here, we’ll download information for you to think about.

That’s not the key. The key here is that really it’s about pursuing a lifestyle of godliness. We were made in his image. We need to live in the image of how he, meaning Jesus lived when he was on earth. He came here, he gave us that example. So it’s not about possessing and pursuing platitudes of personal goodness, it’s about developing habits and practices that represent a lifestyle of godliness. I think about the opening of your program and I was listening during the commercial break and it said, stand in the gap today, transforming the culture one heart at a time. And I wrote that down because that really is the key. A spiritual revolution is desperately needed in America, but that spiritual revolution doesn’t take place one state at a time, one city at a time, or even one church at a time. It takes place on individual broken contrite heart coming back to God, asking him to forgive us, to heal us and to use us.

One last thing, let me say another basic misunderstanding that I think is prevalent in the church in America is that we have a misunderstanding of humanity. We’re not the center of creation God is, but we’ve taken on that mantle where we think everything in the world is all about taking care of us, pleasing us, comforting us and we’ve embraced this idea that success therefore is about possessions and power rather than obedience to God. And so we’ve got to go back and realize we are not the center. We cannot save ourselves through our good works, through our possessions, through our great ideas. All the great ideas we need are in the pages of scripture and if we’ll go back there and embrace those, we’ll recognize Jesus wants to save us. We have a role in that asking for forgiveness, repenting, which means changing our behavior to be something that actually honors and glorifies him, but that’s what our life is about.

Isaac Crockett:

George, real quickly, I want to just kind of slip a follow-up question here. Sam’s talking about the idea that many churches are being drawn to this cultural political kind of sphere rather than the church’s sphere. What are your thoughts on, so many times pastors, you’re talking about this possessions and power thing instead of just faithfully feeding the sheep as a shepherd, just expository preaching, maybe a small group of people but having a large impact on their lives, it’s this idea of, oh, we got to grow. We got to have a bigger budget this year than we did last year. We got to make sure more people walk through the doors this quarter than last quarter and they’ve kind of performed like CEOs of a corporation instead of local congregations. Has that been a part of what’s affecting maybe this overall biblical worldview because we’re so obsessed with numbers rather than biblical growth?

George Barna:

Yeah. I know we don’t have much time left in the segment, but let me just say, you get what you measure and that’s one of the things I talk about all the time and in the church we measure the numbers of people who show up rather than the numbers of people who are devoted disciples of Jesus Christ. They’ve literally been transformed by the Holy Spirit. Their life is all about knowing, loving and serving God with all their heart, mind, strength, and soul. We measure money that we raise in the church rather than the frequency of our acknowledgement and confession of sins. I mean we’re focused, I think, on the wrong things. Just like Washington DC is focused on the wrong things and so it’s become a place of clever deceptions and secret manipulations. The Christian faith emphasizes God’s light in the darkness. It emphasizes our transparency in our motives and our actions.

We can never fool or deceive God so we’ve got to be accountable to the right things for

Sam Rohrer:

The right reasons. George, excellent, excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, stay with us. We’ll break away for just a bit and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk further along the same line we’ve been talking now and actually then getting in and not just speaking to church and church leaders, but to parents. One of the temptations of the world and the world’s system, which the Bible says is under the sway of Satan is to reject the biblical eternal view of life with a future judgment and eternal rewards and punishment. So what’s the replacement for that? Well, it’s the lie that, well, of immediate gratification, the sense we tell ourself there is no accountability to anyone, to God or to anyone in the temptation to pursue quick results, despite the long-term reality that we find that scripture of choices and consequences and generational impacts. The biblical generational view related to parents teaching children who teach their children and raising up a generation who fears God has seemingly been substituted or replaced with a new measure of immediate, well, victory or success.

We’ve got to be able to get it soon or it’s not worth doing and then at that point then it’s defined what is success or victory or something of eternal value is defined by someone else or something else other than God’s word. Now that’s an observation. George, to what degree do you think looking over your research over time, do you think that this short term gratification, to which you referred that just a little bit ago, that short term gratification and the concept that we are controllers of our own destiny type of an approach that’s out there, to what degree has that supplanted the true biblical worldview approach of fearing God, keeping his commandments and trusting him to bless and to bring about that which one would hope to do and that’s really, that’s what’s contained in Deuteronomy in chapter 28 in particular, fear of God and keep his commandments and God will pour out blessing.

That’s God’s plan. And then from your perspective, how did this worldview that we see today come about and to the church perspective of bearing on that, what can the church and citizens do about that, seeing that we have moved so far away from God’s pattern?

George Barna:

Well, I think a lot of times what happens is we don’t really address the elephant in the room and the elephant in the room here has multiple facets. If we think about the reigning philosophy of life or worldview, most Americans, even most of those who call themselves Christians and who attend church services regularly, it’s syncretism and aspects of the most commonly held syncretistic views are things like, well, I determine truth through my feelings or my experiences as opposed to God’s word. Everything has to satisfy my needs as opposed to I’ve got to satisfy God’s needs. I need outcomes immediately. I don’t have time. Life is short and so I’ve got to pack in as much as I can as opposed to my days on earth are numbered by God, not by me. And so I need to pursue his truth in his ways according to his timeline.

And so what’s happened is we’ve become so self-centered that rather than building our worldview around God’s truth, we’ve built it around us and our feelings and our sense of urgency to make things happen immediately. It’s all about me. And so one of the saddest realities we found in the research is that people now reshape God in our image rather than seeking to understand he made us in his image and therefore we need to understand what that image is, what it looks like, what it’ll take for me to more appropriately and fully embody that. And in that process of turning things upside down, in essence, we’ve neutered God and because of some of the attributes that we commonly ascribe to him, what we say is,

Isaac Crockett:

“Yeah,

George Barna:

We don’t need to worry about that. ” He’ll understand he loves me. And so we go through empty practices of seeking forgiveness without genuine repentance because genuine repentance requires consistent and constant change of our behavior to reflect that that’s in the scriptures and we pursue comfort rather than allowing ourselves to face fear of God. We don’t want that kind of God where we have to be fearful of him. Why would we be fearful of him? Because he has actual standards and we don’t like those standards so if we ignore them, we can embrace the kind of comfort, but that comes at the cost of self-deception and that self-deception then develops a series of daily habits that move us farther and farther from the ways of God. How can we put up with that? How can we do that? Well, it’s because one of those habits is we no longer read the Bible regularly.

We no longer dive in and study his word regularly and so we’re ignorant of biblical principles. We own Bibles but we don’t really read them or follow them and so it becomes a lot easier for us to ignore them because we don’t even know that we’re ignoring them. We’re kind of like patients who get a prescription but then we refuse to take it and we think, “No, I don’t really need that medicine. I’ll be healed otherwise.” And so I think a lot of this is kind of the result of a satanic power play that’s happened during our lifetime for many of us who are older at least and what’s happened is our dominant cultural institutions have now become players in this game of life where they have helped in this deception of individuals in our culture and the consequences that we’re pursuing a new agenda that is not God’s agenda and every day it just leaves us another inch, another foot, another yard, another mile astray and until true disciples, some of whom are pastors, many of whom are not, until those people say, “You know what?

This is my time. I’ve got to stand up and serve the Lord by representing his truth and calling our culture to transformation, biblical transformation.” Until that happens, it’s just going to get darker and darker.

Isaac Crockett:

George, when I see your research and I see this darker and darker stuff going on, this generation has already not got a great track record when it comes to biblical worldview, but the generation after it’s even much worse and much worse. I think about in my own life working in public schools and sometimes when you’re dealing with a student who’s just having all kinds of problems, oftentimes what I call stinking thinking and it’s messing things up and you bring the parent in and it seemed like in many of those situations you could tell immediately the children’s problem was that the parents had the same sort of stinking thinking and the kids maybe took it even further. Occasionally you’d find a parent who they seem like a really genuine, nice person, but they were too timid. They didn’t know how to rear their children. Well, that being said, your research often highlights the importance of parents.

As we know, biblically is very important and they really are the primary spiritual leaders for their children. I see this as a pastor as well as when I used to be a teacher and they’re more influential than all of the different programs that we could hire somebody to do or all of the teaching things that we could pay for somebody to do. What would you say are some of the common misconceptions that parents have about the role? And I know you’ve written on this, you’ve written about raising spiritual champions. So how can we shift as parents, even grandparents or family members that have some sort of role in helping children, how can we get out of this outsourcing mentality and really owning the discipleship that you were talking about, this bishop process that the Bible describes?

George Barna:

Well, Isaac, I think a few things that come to mind. One would be that we find that most Christian parents do not consider parenting to be their primary life or spiritual responsibility. So right from the start, we’ve downplayed the importance, the significance of what we’re doing with our children. Well, that gives us a lot of leeway for how we’re going to use our resources in life. Secondly, we tend to, as adults, parents and grandparents And even extended family members underestimate our influence on children. We can have huge influence on children. When I turn to the research and report that parents and grandparents are not having much influence, it’s not because they couldn’t have that influence. It’s because they’ve chosen not to by the other choices that they’re making in their life, but we can restore that kind of influence within the family. Thirdly, I’d say that when we choose to outsource, meaning that we hire other people to raise our children in various dimensions of their life, whether it’s their education, their spiritual life, their athletic pursuits, what we’re doing is we again are inviting people to bring errant worldviews into the presence and the minds and the lifestyles of our children.

So we think that what we’re doing is a good thing because we’re hiring the best people we can find to prepare our kids for life. But in essence, what we’ve done is we’ve then said to our children, “Now pay attention to these people because they’re going to teach you how to do things right.” And very few of those people are going to have a biblical worldview. It’s important that we restructure our lives to reflect that raising our children needs to be a priority, but that doing that, being that kind of parent is going to require sacrifice. That’s not going to feel good. It’s not going to make us happy maybe unless we take the long view and we realize if I make these sacrifices now, it’s going to benefit us in the long haul. And so in the course of doing that, we not only raise up the probability that we can have greater positive influence on our kids, but it enables us to really invest ourselves in that disciple making process.

The relationship, the conversations with our kids, modeling things for them, the accountability.

Sam Rohrer:

And stay with us ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be back in just a couple of minutes. Well, as we go into our final segment, again, the theme today has been from research to response from hearing to doing and you can see the connection here. We’re talking to Dr. George Barna today and we’ve done this every month for just a long, long time. The reports that he has produced, particularly now of this connection at the Arizona Christian University at the Cultural Research Center there, their website is culturalresearchcenter.com, culturalresearchcenter.com. So if you are at all interested in going deeper on any of the things you’ve heard today or wanting to look back, maybe you teach a Sunday school class or maybe you’re a pastor, who knows what your interest level may be. It’s really a good thing to be able to go and look at the raw research, the real material.

You can find it all on that website, so that’s why I give that to you, plus other information that is there. George, in the last segment, we talked about the church at the beginning and its role in the culture versus culture impacting the church more than the church impacting the culture. We talked about the whys and the wherefores of that. In the last segment, Isaac asked you a question about parents. We’re shifting to that part, parents being the most significant influence on children and you may not have been completely done with that, but he asked you a question about how can parents perhaps more fully own the process of parenting and teaching children rather than outsourcing it to other people. So you may want to complete that, but if you have anything to say, but tie it into this, I want to ask you this now goes into it, because when it comes to parents and grandparents, Deuteronomy chapter six, other places talk about the vital role, because God’s plan is fathers, teacher, sons, and your son’s sons, which indicates a generational long term process, which walks right against the short term part that you were thinking about.

So in that regard, how would you differentiate the concepts of, let’s say, of modeling and example by parents before children and/or their grandchildren and direct teaching, particularly as it relates to making disciples as Jesus commanded. So take that Old Testament piece, the New Testament discipleship piece and kind of put some of that together geared towards parents and grandparents since their job is not done when their children are raised. I’m speaking grandparents.

George Barna:

Well, it’s not an either or proposition. It’s not like, okay, you can get the job done through direct teaching, period, or you can get the job done simply through your behavior, letting them see what it looks like. That’s great, but I have this action I use all the time, we do what we believe. And so both of those elements, belief and behavior are not only crucial to your worldview, but they’re crucial to having a life that makes sense to you and that honors God. And so it’s really about having both of those in place, taking the opportunity to invest in the life of somebody by having conversations with them, by being able to explain biblical principles to them in the course of those conversations, hopefully in response to questions that they’re asking, because then that means that they’re invested in the process, they care, they’re listening, it’s something that matters to them.

And so you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re giving them teaching without modeling, because then it’s just a bunch of empty words. It’s concepts without the ability to convince them by them seeing what it looks like and what difference it makes in practice. Those empty words ultimately in a person’s life just lead to empty habits, empty meaningless routines. And so you’ve got to have both of those working together. Weak beliefs lead to inconsistent unbiblical behaviors and so you want to have that strong teaching, yes, but then you’ve got to link it to a lifestyle where you show them and here’s what that looks like. Here’s the impact it can make in my life, in the life of others who are touched by whatever it is that I’m doing to serve them. It’s important that we have both of those things, the principles and the applications linked together.

Isaac Crockett:

As we are wrapping all this up, George, we’ve talked about so much in your studies have really delved in and are kind of showing these different, I guess we could call them trends, but the whole point of all of this is we want to all of us do better to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and as parents, grandparents, pastors, Sunday school teacher, whatever your position, whatever outreach God gives you, we want to do better and grow closer to the Lord and help usher other people, help shepherd other people to him as well. So as we get ready to close, if you were to take from the different research you’ve done from all that the Lord has allowed you to do in your life personally and abroad through your ministry and things, what would maybe be one piece of advice that you could say taking this piece of advice and putting it into your life, you get the most bang for your book so to speak.

You see maybe the greatest difference spiritually

George Barna:

Well, children are our legacy. They’re the future of the church. They are the future church and so we’ve got to take them very seriously. God gave them to us as a gift, but not without expectations. And the expectation is that we’ll raise them up to know him and love them and serve them as best they can. And so I think maybe the key thing I’ve discovered is that you can’t afford to raise children spontaneously. So many of the parents we’ve interviewed and grandparents have had the expression, “Oh gosh, I’ll know what to do when the moment arises, when the situation arises.” And that’s just not true. And so what I encourage people to do is to take time, get on your knees before God, read the scriptures, listen to him, but have his vision of what kind of a desired outcome he wants for the lives of these children and then reverse engineer a plan from today forward to get to that outcome.

A friend of mine, Dr. Robert Schuler used to preach and one of the things that he’d say was, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” And that’s because God doesn’t want us just doing everything randomly and spontaneously, unconsciously. Our faith is logical, it’s reasonable and the principles are laid out for us in a way that will help us. And so think through, yeah, what is it that I really want to see happen here? Disciples do not get produced. They do not emerge randomly or inevitably just because we want them to or we think that we’re doing a good job. We’ve really got to plan this out and obviously we’re going to have to call audibles along the way because things will happen that we didn’t anticipate, but at least you’ve got something to build off of and ultimately you’re going to an endpoint that you’ve identified very specifically.

If there were four words that I could leave with parents and grandparents, maybe the four words would be intentional, be deliberate, be consistent and be vigilant.

Sam Rohrer:

George, those are excellent. That brings us up to the conclusion. It makes me think, ladies and gentlemen, as a parent and a grandparent, we talk about in the program here that the Christian life is not manifested or lived in a day. It’s actually day by day. Raising children in the fear of God to be disciples of Christ does not happen in a day. It happens as we instruct and live before them Christlike day by day. So perhaps that’s an encouragement to all of us. So with that, Dr. George Barna, thank you so much for being with us today. Always a blessing, man. Lord, bless you and all that you’re doing and Isaac, great to be with you again today. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend, the Memorial Day weekend we’re heading into and we’ll see you back here this next week, the Lord willing.