Dr. George Barna: Raising Spiritual Champions
Greg Davis recently hosted Dr. George Barna on Priority Talk to discuss his latest book, “Raising Spiritual Champions: Nurturing Your Child’s Heart, Mind, and Soul.” This book is a follow-up to his work from 20 years ago, “Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions.” But why an update now?
“I wanted to shift the focus. That earlier book focused on what churches could be doing to be effective in children’s ministry. Based on the research I’ve been doing the last few years related to churches and children worldview, [I] really decided that we need a book that’s going to help parents understand that it’s really their responsibility to raise their children into spiritual champions,” he said.
In his new book, Dr. Barna highlights alarming statistics concerning our society: “The appalling tiny incidence of biblical worldview among every age group in our society says it all, declining from the highest-but-anemic level among our oldest adults (8% among those sixty-five or older), to middle-aged adults (5% among those fifty to sixty-four years of age), to frighteningly low levels among adults thirty-to-forty-nine years old (3%) and that eighteen-to-twenty-nine (1%). The barely there proportion remains a paltry 1% among current teenagers” (44).
Dr. Barna wrote this book to encourage and assist parents, urging them not to delegate their God-given duty of raising their children to schools, social media, churches, or other entities. With the right resources, parents can confidently instill a Christian worldview in their children, with support from the Church.
“It’s the job of the church to support parents in [raising kids biblically]; let’s focus now on what parents are doing, what they’re thinking, what they could be doing, what they––biblically speaking––should be doing,” Dr. George Barna said.
You can listen to the entire conversation here:
The famous researcher has now written 60 books and is the Director of Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center.