MSNBC.com

Jan. 3, 2005 - Some people form their opinions of the most important religious trends of 2005 (and most other things) by licking their fingers and sticking them up into the wind. Amazingly, these people inevitably discover that the wind is blowing in exactly the direction they already believed it was blowing. These folks are never disappointed, but they are also never right. Others actually take the time and effort to study what is happening in the world of religion. The best of the others are the people at The Barna Group (barna.org), a consulting and religious research firm in Ventura, Calif. These are some of the trends they discovered in their research into particularly Christian religious life in America in the past year:

1. Pathetic prayer. Churches are more concerned with programming than with prayer. Barna discovered that prayer is rated as one of the top priorities by less than one out of 25 churches. Most church attendees say that they do not experience the presence of God in the service and fewer than one out of 10 spent any time worshipping God outside of their church service. Barna opines, “For churches to get so wrapped up in other matters suggests that we have lost sight of the end goal, which is not filling new buildings with happy people but filling sin-stained hearts with the forgiveness and power of Jesus Christ, and how that power then transforms the individual's entire understanding of the meaning of life.” I notice this in synagogues as well. You can get a movie review or a book review or a TV review or a rant about the president, but a soul-changing prayer experience is hard to come by. I still get many Christians who hear me preach about the Jewish belief in the world to come after death and are amazed that Jews believe in life after death. Many Jews know how their rabbi feels about “Desperate Housewives,” but not about eternal salvation under the wings of God's protecting care. If you ran a deli that didn't sell salami, you would go broke. How houses of worship that are not houses of real worship survive is a mystery to me. Barna reminds us that the decline in church attendance is partly the result of the anemic prayer experience and not the spiritual lassitude of the parishioners.

2. The continuing demise of the black church. Using the measures of church attendance, Bible knowledge, the priority of faith in a person's life, and the reliance on the religious community for support and relationships, Barna concludes that things are not looking good for black churches. Barna surprisingly concludes that the main reason for this decline is the increasing wealth of the black community. Bishop Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church near Washington, D.C., says, ”The black community has traditionally been the group that has been strongest in its involvement in the Christian faith and lifestyle. There is an intriguing—and unfortunate—correlation between the economic rise of the African-American population and the deterioration of its faith in Christ. Hopefully, as black pastors become aware of this decline, they will address it with wisdom and zeal.” American Jewish history shows the same trend. When the rabbi was the only Jew who spoke good English in a Jewish community filled with immigrant tailors, the synagogues were full to hear how to survive as a Jew in America. Now rabbis are more likely to consult Jewish CEOs whom they see twice a year at synagogue about how to survive as a rabbi in America. It seems like only Episcopalians have figured out how to keep rich people coming to church.

3. The energizing of the evangelicals. Although only 7 percent of adults are evangelicals, their voice is the loudest and their energy, charity, Bible study, and prayer life is the greatest. They give away more than three times as much money as other Americans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was the evangelical volunteers who came in the greatest numbers and stayed for the longest time. I hope that even people who are suspicious of their motives for America can admire the power of their good works when America needed good works the most. Even if they wanted to evangelize the storm-tossed remnants after giving them food, shelter and clothing—who cares? They were there, and most other religious groups were not there in anything like their numbers or sacrificial kindness. People who cannot appreciate the energy of evangelicals for good after the experience of their posthurricane mobilization have eyes, but they do not see. Most pious people flee from the culture and its needs. Evangelicals are engaging the culture and producing the most constant and cogent critique of cultural crud that we are seeing from any religious group in our time.

4. Biblical illiteracy. The Barna Group has discovered that most Christians (and I would add most Jews) are in increasing numbers biblically illiterate. Churches have demoted and de-emphasized Bible study. People are too busy and Bible teachers are often ill-trained volunteers or semi-professionals. I agree with Barna and see this in the Sunday-TV preachers I regularly monitor for good jokes. Many of them use biblical verses as mere decorations for their psycho-babble sermons, not the driving reason for their sermons. They rarely engage in sustained text study before launching into the elevation of bourgeois atavisms under the guise of a religious truth. We are people of the Bible but you would hardly know it going to church nowadays. I think we Jews do better on this score, but most of the baby rabbis I mentor still preach sermons (if they preach at all) that sound more like Dr. Phil than Rabbi Phil.

5. Revolutionaries. Barna labels as “Christian revolutionaries” the more than 20 million people who are pursuing their Christian faith outside the box. They meet in homes or at work. I even knew some New York Knicks who had a prayer and Bible-study group, but perhaps to see members of the Knicks turning to deep prayer may be motivated more by necessity than by faith. Anyway, these revolutionaries, as Barna labels them, are really passionate Christians who have no patience for the moribund bureaucracy of organized church life. The havurah movement in Judaism is fed by the same spiritual energy. For many people faith comes from a fire within, not a cup of coffee and a Danish after services in the social hall. And let us say, amen.

I hope the new year gives us all a chance to find each other and a chance to find God in the work of fixing our wounded world and our broken souls. God bless us one and all. Happy New Year!