I WOULD LIKE YOU TO CONSIDER WHAT GEORGE BARNA HAS TO SAY ABOUT THE CHURCH WHICH I CERTAINLY AGREE WITH.

Reinventing the Church
"The Church seems afraid to invest in new modes of being the Church, breaking free from antiquated models and irrelevant traditions toward living the gospel in a twenty-first-century context."[1] George Barna, Leaders on Leadership
 
"Our common future will depend on the extent to which people and leaders around the world develop the vision of a better world and the strategies, the institutions, and then will to achieve it."[2] The UN Commission on Global Governance
 
"...there is a substantial critical mass of people and churches that are already moving.' ...While acknowledging that there are still many unhealthy churches, there is a justified 'change in basic premises, basic attitudes, basic mind set... on the whole, we are on the march...."[3]
"Peter Drucker on the Church and Denominations," Leadership Network.
 
A strange distortion of truth has spread like a grass fire on a windy day through churches around the world. It calls God's people not just to understand our changing times from the world's perspective, but to actually flow with the wind and help fuel the transformation. It uses familiar old words to persuade the people, but it conforms God's Word as well as human thinking to politically correct views of unity, community, service and change.
 
Behavioral laboratories, schools, UNESCO and liberal churches all helped light that fire during the 20th century. Hidden from sight, their subversive efforts seared America's Biblical foundations and prepared the masses to believe a lie.
 
Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, "conservative" and "evangelical" churches are following suit. Worldwide "Christian" networks provide trained leadership and management consultants to guide God's people along this alluring superhighway to a new world order. Forget the old narrow way that leads to life. Today's "change agents" hope to popularize Christianity so effectively that whole nations will join their crusade.
 
Forget solid Bible teaching and "the offense of the cross." To win the masses "for Christ", the church must be re-cloaked in a more permissive and appealing image. It must be marketed to the world as "a safe place," purged of the moral standards that stirred conviction of sin and a longing to separate from the world's immorality. So they re-imagined a feel-good church stripped of offense - one the world could love and claim as its own.
 
Their march to a "better world" is well under way. In this new church, group thinking, compromise, conflict resolution, the dialectic process and facilitated consensus are in. Uncompromising conviction and resistance to group consensus are out. For God's way seems far too intolerant to fit the managed systems of the new millennium. [To better understand these terms, please read Brainwashing in America and The People's Church]
 
Guiding the revolution
 
Hard to believe? Then listen to the leadership team chosen by George Barna, founder and president of Barna Research Group, to write the revolutionary book, Leaders on Leadership. I call it revolutionary because it is. It actually invites a revolution in the Church and shows leaders how to manage it.
 
Doug Murren, church-planter and senior pastor of Eastside Foursquare Church wrote a chapter titled, "The Leader as Change Agent." In it, he explains the first step in the psycho-social process of "managed change." Notice that he takes his cues from an experienced "change agent" at Stanford University which -- like MIT, Harvard and Teacher's College at Columbia -- is a major research institution in the area of social change, persuasive propaganda and psycho-social manipulation:
Arnold Mitchell, a social psychologist from Stanford, has spent years studying the attitudes and behaviors of Americans. He contends that three ingredients are necessary for change to occur. First, Mitchell notes that change comes from dissatisfaction.... Effective change agents assess the chances for change by evaluating the level of dissatisfaction within the group. If dissatisfaction is strong, the potential for change exist....
 
To be effective, a leader must also deliberately develop dissatisfaction. ...
 
Preparing people for change sometimes takes what seems life forever.... I shared startling or even embarrassing statistics about where we were as a church body and where we needed to be, seeking to create the right level of dissatisfaction....
 
Positive change rarely intimates 'returning to the way it used to be.' Most positive change I have witnessed has been about creating a better future rather than returning to a cherished past."[4]
Notice that Pastor Murren's "three ingredients" for changing people have nothing to do with God's guidelines or standards. They have everything to do with deceptive human visions of how elite "change agents" can control the masses. Their manipulative methods have become so familiar that their subjects barely notice what is happening. Lest you forget, take another look at the initial steps:
1. Assess (survey) the attitudes, values and wants of the people. Your personal assessment will be the benchmark for measuring planned change in the months and years ahead.
 
2. Stir dissatisfaction with the old ways so that the seeds of revolution can grow without regrets. Actually, the survey itself initiates the "dissatisfaction", since a "good" church survey would contain anxiety-producing questions that suggest internal problems and prompt public dialogue and complaint.
 
3. Offer an inspiring vision of "a better future." That better future must be a here-and-now future -- one that man can create with his imagination. It's the opposite of the glorious future God offers us for all eternity. In this context of worldly change, heaven serves no earthly purpose. Only visions that motivate collective efforts and drive transformation can advance revolutionary plan.
To guide this process, well trained leaders are needed. That's why Mr. Barna gathered "a team of experts that is as awesome as any of you can imagine" to write his manual for the church. "Fifteen people have contributed chapters to this book," he wrote. "I believe that the cumulative efforts of this team have demonstrated the meaning of synergy."[5] emphasis added
 
Mr. Barna wrote the chapter on "The Vision Thing" himself. In it, he explains that vision "is a view of the kind of world God wants us to live within, a world He can create through us if all those He has called as leaders would lead according to the guidance provided by His Spirit."[6]
 
Does that statement sound like an oxymoron? It is. Mr. Barna seems to imply that God will recreate the world around us if today's "change agents" would walk by the Spirit. But these leaders of "managed change" have been trained to follow a formula never given by Holy Spirit. Man may shoot himself in the foot, but God will not give us tools that clash with...
Biblical absolutes
His call to trust Him, not human ways and philosophies.
His call to share in Christ's suffering and persecution
For example, Barna calls for "evaluative tools prepared so you can assess how well you are doing along the way, fine-tuning your implementation efforts as you go along....." But God doesn't tell us to continually assess and evaluate our progress. He tells us to love Him, study His Word and follow His ways, then leave the result with Him. He will produce the fruit. He knows that if we continually measure our successes, we may shift our dependence from Him to our own efforts. That's why David was punished severely when he disobeyed God by measuring (assessing) the size of his victorious army.
 
God's Word and Spirit must guide our daily steps, not our human standards and measurement for success. And His ways tend to clash with the world's vision of prosperity, numbers and success. But that matters little to mentors of "managed change" whose ears are tuned to their methods rather than their Maker.
 
Molding Truth to fit the vision
 
Mr. Barna introduced Jim Van Yperen, another change agent on his team of experts, as "a marketing strategist and creative communications consultant." Van Yperen has "worked with a wide variety of churches, parachurch ministries and non profit organizations in the areas of vision development, strategic planning... resource development and conflict resolution."
 
Note those buzzwords. They help us identify the change process whenever we see it.
 
Mr. Van Yperen is consultant, not a pastor, but he has been "serving several churches as Intentional Interim Pastor." He hires himself out as Interim Pastor after leading a church through the initial phases (assessment, dissatisfaction, vision, etc.) of the change process. Using his strategic surveys to assess church attitudes and needs, he facilitates group dialogues and "diagnoses" the health of the church.
 
Since he speaks persuasively and manages this process well, he can soon inform the members that their church has some good qualities yet current conflicts and dissatisfaction demand drastic measures. To become a "healthy church," it needs leadership, new structures, new schedules, a new way of thinking and a new emphasis on spiritual growth through group relationships.
 
He also teaches a new way of understanding the Bible. His chapter in Barna's book, "Conflict: the Refining Fire of Leadership," contains a section called "Affirm Truth in Community." It helps set the stage for the consensus process by suggesting that the Bible can best be understood in groups where members pool their thoughts and shape their consensus. Notice how his guidelines minimize the New Testament emphasis on a personal love relationship with Jesus and maximize the world's view of the collective:
 
"Nearly all of Scripture is written to and for groups of people, not individuals. We must learn to read our Bibles this way. Instead of asking, 'What is God saying to me?' we need to ask 'What is God saying to us?'
 
"Responding to power with truth places Christ at the center and builds bridges with our brothers and sisters. It acknowledges that no one person knows the truth completely, so we need each other. It opens up the opportunity to own our assumptions honestly, state our convictions directly and allow others to give perspective openly."[7]