Mark's Notebook


	If you believe everything you read, better not read. - Japanese Proverb

State of the Pews

Newsweek Commentary

Thursday 5 January 2006, 2:45 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

by Rabbi Marc Gellman

The Barna Group (barna.org), a consulting and religious research firm in Ventura, Calif., discovered these trends in their research into particularly Christian religious life in America in the past year:

1. Pathetic prayer. Churches are more concerned with programming than with prayer. Most church attendees say that they do not experience the presence of God in the service and fewer than one out of 10 spent any time worshipping God outside of their church service.

2. The continuing demise of the black church. Using the measures of church attendance, Bible knowledge, the priority of faith in a person's life, and the reliance on the religious community for support and relationships, Barna concludes that things are not looking good for black churches. Barna surprisingly concludes that the main reason for this decline is the increasing wealth of the black community.

3. The energizing of the evangelicals. Although only 7 percent of adults are evangelicals, their voice is the loudest and their energy, charity, Bible study, and prayer life is the greatest. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was the evangelical volunteers who came in the greatest numbers and stayed for the longest time.

4. Biblical illiteracy. The Barna Group has discovered that most Christians (and I would add most Jews) are in increasing numbers biblically illiterate. Churches have demoted and de-emphasized Bible study. The Sunday-TV preachers I regularly monitor for good jokes use biblical verses as mere decorations for their psycho-babble sermons, not the driving reason for their sermons. Most of the baby rabbis I mentor still preach sermons (if they preach at all) that sound more like Dr. Phil than Rabbi Phil.

5. Revolutionaries. Barna labels as “Christian revolutionaries” the more than 20 million people who are pursuing their Christian faith outside the box. They meet in homes or at work. These revolutionaries, as Barna labels them, are really passionate Christians who have no patience for the moribund bureaucracy of organized church life.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10696190/site/newsweek/