Save America Ministries

Chuck Crismier: It was one of the most astounding cover stories in the history of modern news magazines. It came on the front cover of Time magazine. The date was April 5th, 1993. Just a few months before we formed Save America Ministries as a voice to the church, declaring vision for the nation at America's greatest crisis hour.

Here is what Time magazine had to say. It was a front cover with a large cross. Surrounding the cross were dozens and dozens and dozens of little images of Americans. We the people. And in the lower right-hand corner were these words: "The generation that forgot God." Now, it was not talking about the generation that was going to forget God. It was talking about the generation that already had.

Well, here was the environment. It was right after Gulf War I, and Americans were flooding back to church. Fear had pervaded the atmosphere and people were putting up patriotic little yellow ribbons all over the trees in America. Americans were flooding back to church.

So the feature article by Time magazine was called "The Church Search." It talked to leaders around the country concerning the condition of Americans and their thoughts concerning the Bible, Christianity, church, and all of what we thought were the foundations of a Christian nation.

And here is what they concluded. Americans were flooding back to church and church would never again be the same. And here is the reason: because Americans were looking for a custom-made God, one made in their own image.

So welcome to the conversation here today with a longtime friend, George Barna, who has been talking about the condition of the church now since 1984 or before. He's not the one that wrote the famous book 1984, but that is when he launched a research group to find out what was really happening among professing Christians in America. George Barna joins us here on Viewpoint today to talk about what it means to think like Jesus. George, it is good to have you on the program.

George Barna: Well, Chuck, it is good to be back with you. I wish I was born in 1984. That would give me another 30 years to go.

Chuck Crismier: Yeah, but all those prophetic statements made by George Orwell concerning his book, I am not sure you wanted to be there anyway.

George Barna: Well, that's true. True story.

Chuck Crismier: All right. Well, it's so good to have you back on board here. You and I have a very long sojourn, going back to the days in Southern California. We actually had a timeshare there in Ventura where you were living and where you launched this ministry—we'll call it a ministry—called the Barna Research Group. Tell us about that.

George Barna: Yeah, that was back when I was still living in Hollywood. We actually launched that. Long, convoluted story, but the short of it is God has been incredibly faithful to me over the course of four-plus decades. Disney became our first major client and we had some good times with them trying to keep them on the straight and narrow, morally speaking.

Chuck Crismier: That's been a pretty tough job, George, by the looks of things.

George Barna: Well, yeah, that only lasted seven years. We only got into the early '90s with that. But after that, we've worked with major, minor, and small all kinds of ministries across the country, thousands of churches. And it's been a great thing. I sold the Barna Group back in 2009.

Currently—and I've been there for a while—at Arizona Christian University in the Phoenix area, we launched the Cultural Research Center there. Now we're constantly studying the worldview of Americans, what's going on with children, and how we can transform the culture. Many of the same kinds of issues that you're very concerned about at Save America Ministries are the kinds of things that we're constantly researching.

Chuck Crismier: I remember many years ago, shortly after I had formed Save America Ministries in 1993, across from my law office on Lake Avenue in Pasadena, California, was a large church, Lake Avenue Congregational Church. One of my former professors encountered me there and he said, "Chuck, what are you doing with yourself these days?" And I said, "Well, we've just formed a nonprofit organization called Save America Ministries."

In his usual acerbic way, he said, "Well, at least you didn't bite off more than you could chew." History has proven him to be absolutely right. You're still chewing, aren't you? Oh, I'm still chewing. Sometimes I'm chewing my fingernails, George. And you too, because you've been dealing with this matter of a biblical worldview.

You've written so many different books. You've had pastors and conferences with pastors and tried to help them understand what's going on in our world today. But here's one that just came across the web today. It was an undercover video of the Reverend Carol Johnson from St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

She said, "We don't have a lot of people who are religious here. Don't laugh at me. We're not a belief-based church, we're a values-based church." And that's the church where one of the major competitors for the U.S. Senate has been attending since he was a young man. That tells us a lot about the state of the church today and why it's so necessary for us to talk about this today, doesn't it?

George Barna: Well, that's true. One of the things that jumps out at me about that statement is that it falls in line with the research we've been doing about how pastors evaluate whether or not they're successful in ministry. For several years running, we asked a large national sample of senior pastors of Christian churches across the country that question: "Are you effective in ministry?" More than four out of five of them claim that they are.

We said, "Okay, great. But how do you know that? What are your metrics?" And we found that there are five particular measures that they typically fall back on. Those are how many people attend, how much money they raise, how many programs they offer, how many staff people they hire, and how much square footage they've built out.

My reaction to them is, "Look, I'm a measurement guy, so I'm really glad you're measuring things. But one of the things I always teach my students is you get what you measure. So if you measure the wrong things, you're going to produce the wrong thing." And let's look at those five measurement factors you've got. Jesus didn't die for any of those. So why have you made that the centerpiece of determining whether or not you're effective in ministry? Those are pretty irrelevant, actually.

Chuck Crismier: So Time magazine was absolutely right. Americans were looking for a custom-made God, one made in their own image, setting up their own metrics for what it means to think like Jesus, but not so much so.

George Barna: Every once in a while, a blind hunter shoots and hits a bird in the sky. So that was Time magazine.

Chuck Crismier: Well, those are the days in which Time magazine was almost worth reading. Anymore, not so much. Well, today, friends, George Barna joins us here to talk about his new book, "How to Think Like Jesus." He says there are seven cornerstones to build a biblical worldview. We're going to talk about those as we move forward here today.

I want you to get a copy of this book because it's going to be very helpful to you and helpful to your young people that are living in your home or maybe not still living there, but you have conversations with them. $17 is going to put the book in your hands. It's on our website, saveus.org. Give us a call at 1-800-SAVE-USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries, PO Box 70879, Richmond, Virginia 23225. We'll be right back.

Chuck Crismier: What a joy it is to join you again here today, friends, on Viewpoint to talk about the things that matter most. The things that matter most from God's viewpoint. You see, we're not here to talk about just our own viewpoints. We know that viewpoint determines destiny. There are no neutral viewpoints. Our viewpoints do determine destiny.

So do we have Jesus' viewpoint? If we had Jesus' viewpoint, we would think like Jesus. If we thought like Jesus, we would have his viewpoint. But what if we don't think like Jesus and what if we've developed our own alternative viewpoints to replace his? What would be the effect on our lives, our children, our congregations, our neighborhoods, yes, even our whole nation and the world?

This really does have a vast import for us as we talk about this with George Barna today. I hope you'll get a copy of his book, "How to Think Like Jesus," because as a man thinks in his heart, so is he, Jesus said. The thinking is not just in our minds, it's in our hearts.

As the Apostle Paul said in Philippians chapter 2, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." Well, what was that mind anyway? Do you have the mind of Christ? How would you even know if you had the mind of Christ? That's what we want to talk about on the program today.

George, we're weaving together a whole lot of what the Scripture has to say about Jesus and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It seems to me that when you and I grew up, we used to sing a song, "I Will Follow, I Will Follow Thee, My Lord, Follow Every Passing Day." I don't know if you remember that song. But what does it mean to follow Jesus if we don't think like him?

George Barna: I would even go so far as to say you really can't follow him the way that he wants us to if you don't think like him because you do what you believe. That's one of the things I've learned out of our research. Early on in my research career, I used to think, "Okay, if I simply study people's beliefs, that will tell me everything I need to know."

Over the course of time, what I realized is that when you ask people about matters of faith, we're pretty good at parroting things that we've heard. But do we really believe it? The only way I know if you really believe it is if you take it so seriously that you act upon it. You put it into action. Over the course of years, I've had to realize I can ask you what you believe, but then I also need to follow it up with questions about, "And what do you do with that? How do you prove that you believe that through your behaviors?"

Chuck Crismier: The interesting thing about that is that we process the word "belief" through a Greco-Roman mindset. Jesus was not Greco-Roman, he was Hebrew. He had his own mindset about what that meant. If you look at what the word "belief" means from a Hebrew perspective, it doesn't mean that you have a cognitive assent to certain truths that you say you believe. It means that your life is conformed to what you say you believe.

Therein lies one of the big problems that we have when we say, "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you should be saved." So we have Greco-Roman thinking, but we don't have Jesus' thinking, do we?

George Barna: No, we really don't. Frankly, sometimes as you observe what's going on in America or like me, you measure it, you wonder if we're thinking because some of the things that we're doing make absolutely no sense.

Chuck Crismier: No question about it. Okay. So what we're going to do here, as we always do, is try to drive a little more deeply into this. It's not about information. God never commanded us to be informed, but rather to be transformed, and that by the renewing of our minds, that we might prove what is that good, acceptable, and perfect will of God, which was first expressed by Jesus.

Jesus made this statement: "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." Now, we have a mind's mouth, and then we have the mouth on the front of our face. We can speak through the mind's mouth, that's our thinking. When our thinking is stinking, it comes out of the mouth on the front of our face. So what we say out of our mouths is an expression of what's in our hearts, according to Jesus. Do you agree with that?

George Barna: We can play this game all day long. I'm never going to disagree with Jesus, okay?

Chuck Crismier: I am so glad to hear that, George. You're one of the first people I've ever heard to say that.

George Barna: Well, I hope I'm not the last, either. We've got our work cut out for us.

Chuck Crismier: That is exactly right. So the question is: what does my life speak? The Apostle Paul in the King James Version uses the word "conversation," which basically is talking about my life. What does your life or your conversation speak? It speaks what I think. It speaks what I think, whether I think like Jesus or whether I don't, doesn't it?

George Barna: Again, that's true. And that's one of the reasons why when we find that people say they believe something, we want to find out if they really believe it or are they just saying they believe it because it's comfortable, it's expected, it's popular, it's common. We've got to make that distinction in our culture so that we get to the biblical truth of how it is that we're supposed to live.

The whole idea for our lives is to become disciples. A disciple basically means an imitator of the master. When we look at what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, we're supposed to be imitating him. That means our lifestyle should reflect the same lifestyle, the same life choices that Jesus made or that he would make in our situation. In order to get there, because we do what we believe, we've got to think like him first so that we will then follow through with the appropriate action.

Chuck Crismier: Some people would say—in fact, many people would say—"Well, that's all nice in theory, but we live in America and we live in a modern culture and we live in a culture that's swimming with all kinds of spiritual refuse and contamination. We want to be accepted by the rest of the world and we don't want to be turned away. We want to be nice and we want to feel good and other people to feel good about me."

Therefore we become increasingly conformed to the ways of the world rather than the thinking that Jesus had. How do you respond to that? That actually has been what's been happening over the past 50 years as I've watched the trajectory of the so-called evangelical church all the way from Southern California to the East Coast and back again. That's been the pattern.

George Barna: I like to go back to Romans 12 in a situation like that and say God anticipated that we would have these kinds of challenges and pressures and desires. Right there, he's very clear about saying, "Don't be conformed to this world, but have your mind transformed."

He wants us to be able to be like Christ. That's the whole point of our lives. It's not to be here and experience all the things that you were alluding to, acceptance by the world. Well, that's not going to get us very far in terms of the kingdom of heaven because this world is at odds with God's kingdom. We've got to make a choice. Feeling good about ourselves, that's not really the point either. I was created by God. My goal is to help God to come alongside of me through his Holy Spirit to show me the pathway to go. I want to be friends with God, not friends with the world.

Chuck Crismier: Now, you are a professor. You're not only the head of research. Now you sold the Barna Research Group, and you're heading up this Cultural Research Center there at Arizona Christian University. As you're dealing with modern professing Christian young people, you're facing this very issue head-on every day, aren't you?

George Barna: Absolutely. And it's a fascinating journey. At Arizona Christian University, we're what they call a covenant school, which means you only come there if you're willing to sign our covenant, which talks about the fact that you have confessed your sins, you have accepted Christ as your Savior, you're repenting for your sins, and you're living your life for the glory of God and to advance his kingdom.

That's all well and good, but when you actually get in the classroom with students or you're hanging out with them on campus, what you find is that their understanding of that commitment is very different. They've interpreted being a Christian to mean, "Well, I'm basically a good person. I'm pretty satisfied with myself because I'm not mean, sometimes I'm generous, I think good thoughts." And I believe in God, and I believe Jesus was his Son, right? And I even go to church sometimes.

When you start saying, "Okay, but I'm not sure that that's what really defines the life of Jesus. Let's talk about how he lived his life and what he was trying to accomplish. How well do you reflect those things?" You start going through truth and morality and service and all the other elements that really set Jesus apart from everyone else. They're like, "Well, nobody can live that way today." Ah, that's where you're wrong and that's why you're here. Let's dig into it and start to figure out how you can be that kind of person.

Chuck Crismier: In 1996, I was so broken up in my spirit concerning what I saw happening in the body of Christ from coast to coast and the seeming rejection of Jesus' thinking, his words, his will, his ways, the authority of Scripture and so on, that I took a week off of prayer and fasting, complete fasting, at a place called Prayer Mountain there just north of Colorado Springs, under the shadow of Pikes Peak, America's Mountain.

When I left there, I left with the words of a document that I called a Spiritual Lawsuit: "Jehovah God, the Lord of Nations versus the Spiritual Leaders of America, aka Pastors, Para-Church Leaders, Broadcasters, and so on as Defendants, Filed in the Courts of the Lord." I served that on 300 of the most prominent Christian leaders in the land.

Here is what I said in that document that was 28 pages in length: Belief in God is killing America. Belief in God is killing America. I said what God was after is not that we believe *in* Him, but that we *believe* Him. And isn't that our problem? We just don't believe Him.

George Barna: It's true. Part of our research is showing that the percentage of people who even have some kind of mental assent to the fact that there is a God that exists is now below the 50% mark in our country.

When you dig deeper into that, Chuck, as you know, and you start asking people, "Tell me about God. What do you know about him? Do you know him personally?" they're like, "Well, now you're stepping on my toes." Somebody's got to do it because this God of heaven, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible—one and the same—is real.

He has given us this document that we call the Bible that's supposed to help us live an appropriate life, a good life, a meaningful life. Not according to our standards or our culture's standards, but according to the standards of the one who created us for His purposes. Let's try to be successful in His eyes, not our eyes. That means that we're going to be consistently obedient to His teachings, His principles, and His examples. When we are in that kind of a lifestyle, that's when we're actually making progress.

Chuck Crismier: Well, that statement makes war against the spirit of the church growth movement that began in the early 1970s in Southern California where you and I were living. That was all about compromising and cutting away the edges of truth in order to try to grow big churches. That eroded into the seeker-sensitive movement, and now we're wondering to what we are sensitive, and certainly not too much the words and thoughts of Jesus.

All that being said, you say that you've arrived at seven foundational statements, understandings, that are so essential if we're going to think like Jesus, that without these, it's virtually impossible to think like Jesus. Do I have that correct?

George Barna: Yeah, and that's not out of my head. That comes out of the research where I was looking at people who actually have a biblical worldview, those who do not have a biblical worldview, trying to figure out the differences. I found this astounding correlation between the people that don't just believe, but they really own these seven scriptural concepts—these things that I'm calling the seven cornerstones of a biblical worldview. Those people have an 83% probability of developing a complete biblical worldview.

Chuck Crismier: As I look at these in your table of contents, George, I see that what you actually have done, you've moved away from just creedal statements and you've made them applicational statements. That's so important and I want to get into that with you in the second half of the program today. Friends, George Barna, his book "How to Think Like Jesus: Seven Cornerstones to Build a Biblical Worldview" on the website saveus.org.

Announcer: There is so much more about Chuck Crismier and Save America Ministries on our website, saveus.org. Click cell church. We can provide first-century Christianity for the 21st century. It's about people, not programs. It's about a body, not a building. That's saveus.org, click cell church.

Chuck Crismier: Again, I welcome you back to Viewpoint. Today we're talking about our viewpoints concerning Jesus, concerning what Jesus thinks. How would we know what Jesus thinks? Does my mind, does my heart, line up with Jesus' thoughts?

Our special guest today, George Barna, research guru concerning all things Christian and what's happening in the church for the past 40 years, is talking. He's mentioned this word "kingdom" two or three times just in the last 10 minutes or so. One of the biggest problems that we have is that we do not recognize viscerally in our minds and hearts that there are two kingdoms and they are radically opposed to one another. If you're part of the kingdoms of this world, you're not a part of the kingdom of God. Unless we think like Jesus, ain't no way we can be part of the kingdom of God, can we?

George Barna: No, I'd agree with that. I think what happens with a lot of Americans is we've been seduced by the culture into thinking that it's important that you be happy, it's important that you be comfortable, it's important that you feel safe, it's important that you feel you belong and you're acceptable. All of that relates to the kingdom of this world.

You want the people around you to know you, to love you, to accept you, to embrace you, to work alongside of you, as opposed to having the bigger picture of "Why am I here?" which goes back to purpose, it goes back to creation, it goes back to a lot of seminal ideas. We don't tend to do that because we've become such a superficial culture. We don't spend time slowing down, thinking about the genesis of our ideas and our behaviors, thinking about our ultimate purpose in life.

We fall for the alluring claims of the culture that surrounds us. They pretty it up, they make it sound good, they make it look good, and they hope that it makes us feel good. Really, that's not what life is all about. There's such a big difference between happiness and joy. Our culture wants us to feel happy; God wants us to experience His joy.

Chuck Crismier: And to be holy. He said, "Be ye holy, for I am holy." Of course, that helps us to see the difference between the two. Worldview, how would you simply define worldview?

George Barna: Maybe the simplest way is just to say that it's your decision-making filter. Everybody makes decisions every moment of every day of their life, and you've got to do it based on something. That something is your worldview.

It's your intellectual, emotional, and spiritual filter that helps you to make sense of the world and based on your interpretation, to make choices that you believe will reflect you and what you believe in and what you want in the best possible way. I think that's why we've got so many people having been seduced by the culture. They wind up with something that's not a biblical worldview, but it's an alternative worldview.

There are many of them. We measure this every year at the Cultural Research Center and we've been tracking it for years now. We're at a point where when you talk about having a biblical worldview—that is, the beliefs and the behaviors of Jesus Christ lived out in your life today—we're down to 4% of adults who have that worldview.

Chuck Crismier: Okay. You're talking about 4% of all Americans generally.

George Barna: Of those 18 and older, yes.

Chuck Crismier: Okay. So among professing Christians—and I say professing Christians—what would you say the percentage is of having a true biblical worldview?

George Barna: Different people take professing Christians different ways. People who call themselves Christians—I would call them self-identified Christians—6% of them have a biblical worldview.

Then there's another group that I've been studying for 30-some years, 40 years, I guess: theologically identified born-again Christians. That's a group of people who not only claim they're Christian, but who also say that when they die, they feel assured that they're going to spend eternity in heaven or in the presence of God only because they've confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. Even with that group, you're only at about 11% who have a biblical worldview.

Chuck Crismier: My goodness. I've been thinking about this quite a bit for the last several years, George. Maybe we miss the point with regard to the use of the word worldview. Maybe the real problem is our God-view. That's certainly a vital part of it. You're not going to have a biblical worldview if your God-view is off, that's for sure.

If we believe that God is God, this is the problem that God had with Israel. He just couldn't get it through their minds: "I am God and there is none other." Even through the prophets, he would say, "Hey, guys, I'm God. Don't you get it? I'm God, you're not. Listen to what I have to say and it's going to go well with you. If you don't listen, it ain't going to go so well." But they never seemed to get it. We're not getting it today either, are we?

George Barna: No, we're moving farther away from that perspective. We've now got literally tens of millions of Americans who would say, "Well, there are multiple gods. Which god are you talking about?" We've got tens of millions of Americans who don't actually say this, but their lifestyle says it for them, which is, "Well, I'm God. I'm the god of my life. I'm the one who determines my destiny. I'm the one who has to come up with the resources to make my life work."

Then you've got millions and millions of people who say, "Ah, God, yes, we're talking about the universe." There are other perceptions about God, too. We've just gotten so distracted and so manipulated that we've refused to go back to the very basic foundation of who made you, who made the entire universe, who controls that universe today. How do we know that? There are ways we can know all of these things.

We refuse to look at it that way because we don't find it emotionally fulfilling. We've become a culture that is so touchy-feely, so wound into our feelings. Make me feel good, make it feel right. It's all about our feelings. Now even when we do our studies of people who regularly attend churches and we talk with them about, "How do you make your decisions? How do you determine right and wrong and good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate?" what we're finding is that even a majority of regular churchgoers are saying, "It's all based on my feelings. If it feels right, it must be right."

Chuck Crismier: Isn't that what Pat Boone's daughter said back in the 1970s? "How can it be wrong when it feels so right? Now you light up my life."

George Barna: Could be, Chuck, but I don't know the lyrics of that song well enough.

Chuck Crismier: Those are the lyrics, and it was one of the most popular of her time. Yeah, it was number one for weeks and weeks. We're not going there. We'll move on. Belief in God, that's a given. Even the devil believes and trembles. To say that we believe in God doesn't mean anything.

The question is: do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that he came to die for your sins and that his blood is efficacious to cover our sins if we will confess them, walk in faithfulness to that profession? We've got that one down: existence or reality of God. All people are sinners. That seems to be something that is hard for people to grasp. They say, "Yeah, we were sinners in Adam, but I don't sin, therefore I'm not a sinner." What say you?

George Barna: It doesn't matter what I say, but what the American people are saying is that other people are sinners. They've got issues. Me? Not so much. I've figured it out. We've come to this mindset of "But I'm a good person." How could we possibly think that when you look at the world? Because we look at other people and we say, "I'm making better choices than Joe and Jim and Sally over there, so I'm a good person. I'm not the problem. It's got to be everybody else."

Chuck Crismier: Do you know that this is the problem that we've had with the whole culture war movement since 1979? We saw the rest of the world as wearing the black hats and we wore the white hats because we were conservatives or professing Christians. When God says, "No, it's My people. You're the ones that I'm trying to correct."

Pagans will be pagans. But you're living like pagans and expecting pagans to live like Christians. What's wrong with you? About 12 years ago, Dr. James Dobson sat with me on the floor of the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. We were talking live on the air and he said, "Chuck, I hate to say it, but we've lost the culture wars." That was 12 or 15 years ago.

George Barna: All you have to do is go back to the Scriptures. Paul just bangs this drum over and over again until there's no drum left around the idea of "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." That's not how we raise our children in this country. It's like, "You're going to be an overcomer. You're going to be an overachiever. You're going to be a success story."

We refuse to look at our own failures—spiritual failures—as God would see them. Instead, what we want to do is we want to look at a child, look at a teenager, young adult, anybody, and see the positive potential in them. That's all well and good, but let's look at ourselves the way that God looks at us, because come the end of our lives, we're going to have to go through that kind of a reckoning.

God's going to make it very clear who we were. Not who we felt we were, not who we thought we were, not who we wanted to be seen as, but who we really are. God deals in reality. God is reality. God is truth. God is love. So we've got to come to grips with the standard that He sets, not the standard that our culture sets.

Chuck Crismier: Yet the late, great Robert Schuller, who launched the church growth movement in the early days of Southern California, said people should not be told they're sinners because that's abuse. Don't tell people they're sinners, all they need is more self-esteem. He built the whole church growth movement on that concept: helping people to gain more self-esteem. That set the stage or a foundation that's radically contrary to how Jesus thinks, isn't it?

George Barna: He was a good person. But my view is abuse is evangelism without discipleship. You can share the good news, but then you've got to know how to live the good news. If you don't have somebody alongside of you to do that, that's spiritual abuse.

Chuck Crismier: We need to build on that when we come back. Very potent conversation. We'll be right back, friends. Get a copy of the book, "How to Think Like Jesus," $17 on our website, saveus.org.

Chuck Crismier: It's easy to make a baby. It's hard to train them up to maturity. There is our problem in the church today. We're so excited about making spiritual babies; we call it evangelism. And yet the Great Commission doesn't say we should evangelize the world. It says teaching them to obey everything that God has commanded. That's discipleship.

Our guest today, George Barna, having looked at what's happening in our country and in the church for now a good 40 to 50 years, says, "We've just kind of missed it." In fact, Billy Graham admitted that himself on Larry King Live. I listened to him live, and Larry King said, "Well, certainly, Dr. Graham, with all of your success, no question about it, there should be nothing that you would have left unturned that would be disappointing to you."

And he said, "No, that's not right, Larry. What really bothers me is that I didn't spend time in discipleship." That's a big deal, isn't it, George?

George Barna: That's a huge deal because that's the end point. What was Jesus' final command to us? "Go make disciples of all the nations." He didn't say, "Go make converts." He didn't say, "Go make church members." It was, "Go make disciples."

How could He say that to us? He just spent the last three years modeling for us what it meant to disciple people. He took 12 Yahoos out of the marketplace and He invested His entire time in their lives: talking with them, teaching them, having shared experiences with them, praying with them, worshipping God with them. There's nothing that Jesus didn't do to show them, "This is the life of a disciple."

God has been gracious enough to give us that book that details that three-year journey that Jesus took the Yahoos on, and they came out transformed individuals. They were willing to die for what Jesus had taught them and shown them and experienced with them.

Chuck Crismier: In other words, they thought like Jesus and they believed Him so much that it was completely internalized in their lives and changed everything, every way they thought, the goals that they had, and were even willing to give up their lives for it.

George Barna: It's one of the things that strikes me out of our research: we've got a majority of Americans who fear death. Now, if you're alive in Christ, you no longer fear death because you know where you're going after you die and you know what you're supposed to be doing here before you die.

What does death have to do with it? It's just the end of the opportunities that you have to fulfill your God-given calling and purpose and privilege of knowing Him and loving Him and serving Him with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul. What if you're not walking with Him in spirit and in truth? What if you've made your profession and you've gone on and decided to do what you want to do: fornicating, frolicking, adulterizing, stealing, just living like the world? Where's the mind of Christ?

You know as well as I do that when somebody makes that kind of a quote-unquote "profession of faith," it's a commitment. It's a lifelong, full-life commitment. It's not a magic prayer that you say at one point in time that gives you fire insurance for eternity.

What it does is it insinuates, "Hey, look, right now, I'm putting my stake in the ground. I am no longer here for George Barna; I'm here for Jesus Christ." What I do from this point forward has got to bring Him glory, it's got to advance His agenda, and it's got to reflect His principles that He consistently taught so that we could live the life that brings Him honor and glory and advances His kingdom. That's what I think is part of the problem that we've got in evangelism in America: we're counting souls as opposed to trying to facilitate true full-life transformation.

Chuck Crismier: You know why that is, George? Because you can market evangelism. You can sell it to your denominational heads. You can get all kinds of credit for it. You can put it on the back of your book and say, "I got a church of 14,000." You can do all those things which are self-aggrandizing, but you can't measure discipleship fully. It doesn't market well.

George Barna: That's where I have a lot of angst with pastors. They'll say, "George, you're talking theoretically. We can't measure disciples." My reaction to them is, number one, you've never tried, so how would you know? Number two, let's go back and realize that Jesus gave us six factors that he talked about that makes somebody a disciple. There are six times in the Scriptures when he said, "This is a disciple."

In John 8, he said, "You will be my disciple if you obey my teaching." Oh, you just used the most hated word in the church today: the word obey. It's a four-letter word. Well, that's their problem, not mine. Jesus used it; I'm okay with it. In John 13, he said, "You will be my disciple when you love the others, the other disciples."

In John 15, he said, "You will be my disciple when you produce fruit." He was talking about spiritual fruit, which of course means disciples. In Luke 14, three times he said, "You cannot be my disciple unless..." In 14:26, he talked about the fact that you've got to put God first, God above everything else in your life. It's all about God. It's not about you. It's not about your legacy. It's not about your family. It's about God.

In 14:27, he also said, "You cannot be my disciple unless you pick up your cross and follow me," which in that context essentially meant give up your agenda for life and embrace my agenda for your life. In 14:33, he said, "And you cannot be my disciple unless you're willing to surrender everything to serve me."

There's six criteria that I use for measuring whether or not people are disciples. Is it perfect? No. There's nothing perfect that any human being will ever do. But it's an estimation and it's going to get me a whole lot closer than saying, "Yeah, but they come to church every week and they throw money in the bucket when it goes by. Of course they're a disciple."

Chuck Crismier: All right. So I have a question for you. If my viewpoint concerning any particular issue differs from God's viewpoint as recorded in the Scripture, am I His disciple?

George Barna: You can be because we're all always in process. Was Peter a disciple? Yeah. Did he have everything figured out? Obviously not. You look at him throughout the journey that he was taking with Jesus. He was fully committing his life to Christ. He wanted to do what Jesus wanted him to do, but he didn't get it all immediately. It took some time.

That's another research project that I did following people's spiritual journey. I found that it takes years and years and years for us to empty ourselves of the cultural momentum that we fall prey to.

Chuck Crismier: What you didn't know, George, is that my latest book just came out. It's called "The Power to Overcome," dealing with these issues that we struggle with in our lives as Christians. We're just not embracing Jesus' viewpoint. If you look at the book of Revelation, it's all about being an overcomer. He says if you're not an overcomer, you don't get it. "He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear." You're just speaking it in another way here and I appreciate it so much.

George Barna: So much of this comes back to what are you trying to accomplish in your life? Are you trying to balance God's views and the world's views? That's not going to work. That's a failed strategy. Are you trying just to make yourself feel good, feel like "I did my best"? Who gives a rip if you did your best?

Did you do the best you could to know, love, and serve God according to His ways, His principles, and His models? That's really what we've got to move toward here. Moral truth. Years ago, you came up with many different books and studies talking about how our view even within the body of Christ concerning biblical standards of morality—even with regard to marriage and divorce and so on—was so out of sync with Jesus' views that it was like we were almost indistinguishable from the world as a whole. Why is it that we can't get our minds and our hearts in alignment with God's word, will, and ways?

If you're going to have a biblical worldview, it's got to be built on a solid foundation. That's what I think these seven cornerstones represent. It's basic Christianity. It's Sunday school 101. One of the things I've discovered is that most people would flunk Sunday school 101, no matter what their age is. If we have a weak foundation, we're going to have a weak worldview. You've got to build that strong foundation.

Chuck Crismier: Absolutely. So you're involved there at Arizona Christian University. Tell us a little bit about it.

George Barna: The reason that I'm there—I've taught at four other universities, several seminaries—I never lasted at those because they talked about what they were doing and I didn't see it in practice. At Arizona Christian University, the thing I love about it is they make no bones about the fact that we are here to develop disciples who are going to go out and transform the world for Christ. They're going to transform it with God's truth, taking the Bible's principles and applying them in every dimension of our society.

It's a four-year discipleship training process. Not every class is theology or biblical studies. You're still going to have classes in nursing, history, English, and Spanish. But every class is going to be taught through a biblical worldview perspective. By the way, it's hard to find professors to hire.

What we're finding—because I do research with our students before they set foot on the campus, before they get to the campus, I'll do a worldview measurement. At the beginning of every subsequent year, we'll do it again. Before we hand them a diploma, we'll do it one last time.

I've got a longitudinal study of all of our students and we're able to not only track how the students are doing—and by the way, there's no comparison between them and the world—but we can also change our classes, our faculty, and our extracurricular activities based on whether or not the research is showing that it's contributing to them becoming disciples. That was critically important to me. It's critically important to President Len Munsil at the school. He said, "We need to know this because this is our distinctive: we make disciples." You only get your degree when you're going through this process of becoming a disciple. That's the key.

Chuck Crismier: It's been a while since you and I have chatted and this conversation today has been so important to me personally, validating everything that you and I have been doing. We've seen the trajectory. We saw what happened, how it spread across the nation through the God is Love movement in the 1970s and then the church growth movement—all of those things that began to dilute the disciple-making concept of what it meant to think like Jesus.

I really believe that you've gotten on something here: the cornerstones to build a biblical worldview. Friends, get a copy of the book, $17, "How to Think Like Jesus." Go to the website, saveus.org, give us a call at 1-800-SAVE-USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries, PO Box 70879, Richmond, Virginia 23225. George, pray for us, my friend.

George Barna: Lord God, you know that we need You more than we've ever needed You. We pray that You will make Yourself real in the minds and the hearts and the lives of everybody listening today. That every one of us that's here together right now would become Your community of disciples that You can count on to advance Your kingdom. We thank You for the privilege of knowing You, of loving You and serving You, and being loved by You. We thank You for that, Jesus. In Your name we pray. Amen.

Chuck Crismier: Amen. Amen, friends.