As in the past, George Barna has served the church by describing and documenting trends that are shaping the culture and in revealing the superficiality and failings of all too many local congregations. Regrettably, his prescription is even worse than his diagnosis, for minimizing the importance of the local church runs directly counter to the Bible's vision for the Christian life. The real answer to Barna's concern is the recovery of biblical ecclesiology--a recovery that would relativize and revolutionize the entire landscape of contemporary Christianity in America.
The revolution we truly need is a recovery of the New Testament vision of the local church--a comprehensive embrace of the totality of congregational life, including all of the functions and marks revealed in Scripture. This is the great task to which this generation of Christians is called--and we will need Barna's Revolutionaries in order to make this happen. Channeling all these energies into a comprehensive recovery of the biblical vision for local churches would be a revolution worth joining--and worth celebrating. Viva that Revolution!
