What Does It Mean to be The Church?

George Barna and Fred Viola have collaborated in a book called, "Pagan Christianity", and Barna in other sources has stated similar opinions regarding the impractical nature of the local church as its practice has been since the Reformation, and as I see it, the way it was established in the first century.

With the differences over several forms of polity aside (Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational) the way in which a local church is to function is never to be established by what we believe "works". Granted, no individual local church or denominational polity is enacted perfectly, no matter how closely it operates to the biblical mandate of its existence, it remains the community of creatures yet to be glorified.


Though Mike Horton in an article at the White Horse Inn has already accurately critiqued Barna's position, I too will take a stab.


I think that it is clear that Horton isn’t suggesting that the layperson neglect personal Bible study just that, contrary to Barna’s heterodox conclusions, shepherds are not trying to work themselves out of a job as it were As Horton points out, “The church’s min-istry is exercised faithfully when the people are fed, not when the sheep are expected to become their own shepherds.”

Here are a few disturbing quotes from Barna:

“Ours is not the business of organized religion, corporate worship, or Bible teaching. If we dedicate ourselves to such a business we will be left by the wayside as the culture moves forward. Those are fragments of a larger purpose to which we have been called by God’s Word. We are in the business of life transformation.”–George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church (Nashville: Word, 1998), 96.

“Believers need not find a good church, but they should “get a good coach.”–Barna, The Second Coming of the Church, 68, 138-40.

Once the PRIMARY reasons we gather together at a local church become something other than to worship God by “hearing the gospel preached”, and to participate in the sacraments rightly administered, and to submit ourselves to the discipline of the elders, then we are skewing the purpose of God in the local body. When Christ told Peter to feed His sheep, it wasn’t the pragmatic feeding of the food of self help or “moralistic therapy” or the fickle “felt needs” of each individual layperson, it was the food of the gospel that Christ was commanding Peter (and all elders following)to feed His sheep.

There certainly are SECONDARY and even byproduct reasons for gathering: worship through fellowship, catechizes, and other implements of sanctification, but these can never be elevated to the preaching and hearing of the gospel and the viewing of it in the sacraments of baptism and the Supper.

Somehow, I think that when we have a hermeneutic that doesn’t lead us to Christ and His gospel as we interpret all of the OT and NT, the result is that a vacuum is created that we try to fill with our “felt” needs.

In conclusion, it's hard not to question Barna's adherance to the doctrine of sola scriptura when he is so zealous to take a pragmatic approach to, not just the re-structuring of local church government, but really his willingness to promote its total dismantling.