Influence & Cultural Awareness

After skimming the results of a Barna survey found here, I was intrigued by this line towards the end: "For ministers, awareness fosters influence on lives. A favorable image provides access to people’s minds and hearts more readily."

While I can understand this from a purely humanistic, naturalistic point of view, a pastor cannot and should never be concerned with awareness and influence. My pastor for the last four years, John MacArthur, always says "I worry about the depth of my ministry and the leave the breadth to God," and I agree wholeheartedly.

Barna goes on, "A favorable image provides access to people’s minds and hearts more readily"!?!

Does it? Really? I think God alone gives access to people's hearts and minds when His Spirit opens them to receive His Word. Until that happens, all the awareness and influence a person has counts for very little, if nothing.

In fact, I think the more awareness and influence are the goal for a pastor, the less true God-given influence he'll receive because it's easier for the world to pull a Christian down than for the Christian to pull the world up. In other words, worldliness and compromise are always the temptation when influence with the unredeemed world is the goal.

He then writes, "One of the reasons that the Christian faith is struggling to retain a toehold in people’s lives is because even the highest-profile leaders of the faith community have limited resonance with the population."

I think this articles suffers from a huge non-sequitur. It simply does not follow that limited resonance with the population leads to a struggling Christian faith, or that unlimited resonance with the population would mean the Christian faith would not be struggling. Tell that to Paul, the early church, the Albigenses, Waldensians, Bogomils, Anabaptists, etc.

I'd venture to say that one of the reasons "the Christian faith is struggling to retain a toehold in people’s lives" is because people are "accepting Jesus into their hearts" on a trial basis, to see if He does what the preacher promises--give them love, joy, peace, purpose, fix their marriage, their teens and their demanding boss.

Another reason is that "everybody talkin' about heaven ain't goin'" as my beloved professor Ron Wright used to say. Christianity won't keep even a toehold in a person who's already dominated by Satan while sitting in church.

In fact, I think he nails one of--if not THE--reason why the Christian faith is struggling in the next paragraph: "millions of Christians invest more of their mental energy in cultural literacy than in biblical literacy."

Until THIS trend turns around, we'll never have the kind of Spirit-given, God-glorifying, Christ-demonstrating influence that makes a dent in the kingdom of darkness.

Enough of my rant. What do you think?