1 of 4
 Rethinking FaithAn interview with David Kinnaman
1 of 4
In October, David Kinnaman, president of the research company The Barna Group, published You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church … and Rethinking Faith. In his book, Kinnaman unpacks recent Barna Group findings that revealed that 59 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds "had or have dropped out of attending church after going regularly." Why? Kinnaman has identified six basic reasons: young people find the church overprotective, shallow, anti-science, repressive, exclusive, and doubtless. Charity Singleton of The High Calling recently had the opportunity to talk with David Kinnaman about the Barna Group, his new book, and the "Mosaic" generation. NOTE: For more on this trend and how to reach those who fall into this demographic , see our downloadable resource, "Reaching Millennials Who Leave the Faith." To start with, could you give us an idea of the mission of the Barna Group? The purpose of the Barna Group is to educate people about the broader culture, and we also think that part of our goal is to help the culture understand the Christian community. As you are doing market research, measuring opinions and drawing conclusions about broader cultural implications, how do you and the Barna Group account for aspects of every issue that can't be measured? That's always the balance, and I think our great challenge. You'll see through the history of the company, this dynamic tension of reporting the things we can report on and trying to raise awareness of what we think may be happening, and then recognizing the limits of research. One of the founders of the market research industry said, "Certainly research is one of the worst ways to understand how people think and act, except it's better than all the others." So, it's extremely limited. The idea that we could understand someone's spiritual journey through a handful of questions in a survey is the height of arrogance. But the kind of self-examination that good research should do of ourselves personally, of our organizations, of our businesses, of our churches, that's where research is really most potent, when it begins to start a new way of thinking about a subject area. And even when the research itself has limitations, and it does, it becomes a window to the way we live, the way we run our organizations. In You Lost Me, in addition to the research, you show us the lives of individual young people to help explain the larger cultural trend. Are there risks in telling the stories of young people walking away from faith and church? Alternately, what are the risks of not telling these stories? One of the risks of not doing research is that you fail to capture some of the important nuances that take place in the real stories and in the combination of the stories plus the research. There's another risk that you run in people thinking that you are trying to highlight just the bad news or sensationalize the bad news, looking at or pushing people to consider walking away from something they held confidently. I think that's a fair concern. Certainly Jesus gives a stern warning against people that would pull faithful followers away. |        
       |
share this page
Average User Rating: Not rated
Submit Your Rating and Review *