Pastors overestimate flock’s commitment to God, survey reveals

VENTURA, Calif. — Pastors contend that 70 percent of the adults in their congregation consider their faith in God to be the No. 1 priority in their lives.

That’s the finding of a survey conducted by The Barna Group—but don’t tell the congregants that; another Barna study of adults reveals that pastors have an unrealistic view of their flock’s devotion to God.

Conducted last fall, the surveys provide a glimpse into the contradictory views of church pastors and the people who attend churches, the researchers said, signaling a “huge gap between the perception of pastors and the reality of people’s devotion to God.” The results were released last month.

George Barna, the chief researcher for the surveys, attributes the polar views as a problem created by a misguided, or even lack of, assessment by church leaders.

“The only way to explain the enormous gap between the perceptions of pastors and the reality of people’s lives is to understand that pastors evaluate spiritual health from an institutional perspective—that is, are people involved in keeping the system going—while people are aware of their unmet need to have a deeper and more meaningful relationship with God.”

In the pastoral study, based on interviews with a representative national sample of 627 Protestant pastors, the Barna study discovered that pastors believe a large majority of their congregants deem their faith in God to be the highest priority in their life—on average about 70 percent. Further, as many as one out of every six pastors (16 percent) contends that 90 percent or more of the adults in their church hold their relationship with God as their top life priority.

In a general though, a separate sample of 1,002 adults, revealed that only one out of every seven adults—just 15 percent— placed their faith in God at the top of their priority list.

According to the research, in an apples-to-apples comparison, the survey isolated those who attend Protestant churches and found that even among that segment of adults, less than one in four (23 percent) named their faith in God as their top priority in life.

Some specific populations, however, were more likely than others to make God their No. 1 focus. Among those were evangelicals (51 percent of whom said their faith in God was their highest priority), African-Americans (38 percent) and adults who attend a house church (34 percent). The people groups least likely to put God first were adults under 30 years of age, residents of the Northeast and West, and those who describe themselves as “mostly liberal” on political and social matters.

“The nation’s adults deserve some credit for recognizing and acknowledging that God is not a top priority in their life,” Barna said.

The responses, he said, showed that regardless of how the population was evaluated, there was no segment of the adult population that came close to the level of commitment that Protestant pastors claimed for churchgoers.

Poor assessment
While the reality gap between the two surveys was wide, Barna suggests that the pastor’s survey offered a clear clue: few pastors rely upon specific standards to evaluate the spiritual commitment of their congregants.

Overall, only one measure—how many people are involved in some form of church-related volunteer activity or ministry effort—was listed by at least half of all pastors (54 percent) as a measure of the spiritual health of their congregation. Only two other criteria—church attendance and some type of life change experience (usually meaning that a person has made a first-time commitment to Jesus Christ as their savior) were named as important criteria by more than one out of every seven pastors.

Each of these criteria was listed by 45 percent of all pastors.

Other top-rated standards were whether congregants were involved in evangelism (13 percent), how much new information or knowledge about Christianity the people received (10 percent), how much money was donated to the church (10 percent), and the comments made by congregants to the pastor (10 percent).

Superficial measures
The unifying thread running through pastors’ responses to an open-ended survey question regarding how congregational health is assessed was that the most common measures do not assess much beyond the superficial participation of people in church or faith-related activity.

“There has never been a time when American society was in more dire need of the Christian Church to provide a pathway to a better future,” the researcher said. “Given the voluminous stream of moral challenges, and the rampant spiritual hunger that defines our culture today, this should be the heyday for biblical ministry. As things stand now, we have become content with placating sinners and filling auditoriums as the marks of spiritual health.”

Expanding on the findings, Barna said that on average, a pastor might seek information as to attendance relative to previous years; how many people, if any, had accepted Christ as their savior; and whether there were enough people involved in the church’s ministry to keep existing programs going.

Vague impressions
In other words, the typical pastor measures the spiritual health of congregants by considering one or two numbers (e.g. church and Sunday school attendance) and a handful of vague impressions (what did exit comments suggest about people’s reaction to the sermon, how widespread was people’s participation in the singing, were there enough people who were sufficiently trained to enable the services and programs to operate smoothly).

“The challenge to church leaders is to stop pandering for popularity and to set the bar higher,” the researcher said. “People only live up to the expectations set for them. When the dominant expectations are that people show up, play nicely together and keep the system going, the potential for having the kinds of life-changing experiences that characterized the early church are limited, at best. If churches believe in the life-changing power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit, they must hold people to a higher and more challenging standard.”

Published, March 2006

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