GEORGE BARNA, JOHN WESLEY, AND REVIVAL

 Investigator and writer, George Barna has often written about the status of the American Church. He maintains that most people who claim to be Christian are ignorant of what a Christian worldview is all about:

·       A recent nationwide survey conducted by Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview asked respondents to determine what the term “biblical worldview” meant to them and whether they fit the definition they embraced. The survey revealed that 51% of American adults believe they have a biblical worldview…[However] 50 questions used to track the worldview of American adults reveal that only 6% actually have a biblical worldview.

 

·       Roughly 70% of U.S. adults claim to be Christian. Of those, 84% claim to have a biblical worldview. However, the American Worldview Inventory reports that only 9% of self-professed Christians actually hold a biblical worldview. That is a remarkable level of self-deception…

 

Over the past years, Barna used six basic questions to determine whether those he surveyed had a Christian worldview:

·       The Bible fully accurate.

·       The Devil exists.

·       Jesus was sinless.

·       A Christian must evangelize.

·       Salvation is a gift.

·       God is omnipresent and omniscient.

 

Barna consistently found that only about 4-6% could positively endorse all six. While there wasn’t any statistical behavioral difference between the 84% who had called themselves “Christian” and the general population, Barna found that the 4-6% were behaviorally distinct:

 

Of these 4-6%:

1.     3x     less likely to Get Drunk

2.     17x                    to gamble

3.     2x                      to view pornography (50% vs. 25% in church)

4.     12x                    to indulge in extramarital sex

 

Barna concluded:

1. “The reason that people do not act like Jesus is that they do not think like Jesus.

2. “Although most people own a Bible…most Americans have little idea how to integrate [it].”

 

Over the last century, the Christian voice has fell silent. It had also been silenced in early 18th century England. Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi writes:

 

·       In 1738, two centuries after the Reformation, Bishop Berkeley declared that religion and morality in Britain had collapsed “to a degree that was never before known in any Christian country.” The important reasons for the degeneration of Protestant England were the restoration of the monarchy and the supremacy of the Anglican Church at the end of the seventeenth century. Once the
Anglican Church came back to power, it began to oppress the Puritans and expelled more than four hundred conscientious Anglican clergymen. They had become priests to serve God, and therefore they refused the oath of allegiance to William of Orange.” (The Book that Made your World, 259)

 

Along with this, the Anglican priesthood became utterly corrupt:

 

·       A succession of archbishops and bishops lived luxuriously, neglecting their duties, unashamedly soliciting bishoprics and deaneries for themselves and their families. Parish clergy followed suit. (260)…Corruption spread like cancer. (261)

 

The church is the conscience of society. When it is silenced, corruption and moral decay are free to spread to all segments of society. Mangalwadi continues:

 

·       The moral darkness of the age expressed itself in a perverted conception of sport, which, like alcohol, brought attendant evils in its train, such as further coarsening of the personality, cruelty, and gambling. (262)

 

·       As for lawlessness, thieves, robbers, and highwaymen, Horace Walpole observed in 1751, “One is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one were going to battle.” Savagery showed itself in the plundering of shipwrecked vessels, lured by false signals onto rocks, and in the indifference shown to the drowning sailors. This was a regular activity along the entire coastline of the British Isles.”

 

Similarly, it appears that as the Christian influence has been replaced in the Western nations in the early sixties by a virulent and monopolistic form of secularism, social ills have multiplied. However, there were revivals. Into this English malaise stepped the John Wesley and others. However, their ministry to the poor and downtrodden wasn’t appreciated. No one likes their sins to be exposed:

 

·       For three decades, magistrates, squires, and clergy turned a blind eye to the continual drunken and brutal attacks by mobs and gangs on Wesley and his supporters. Wesley endured physical assault with missiles of various kinds. Frequently bulls would be driven into the midst of the congregations or musical instruments blared to drown out the preacher’s voice. Time after time, the Wesleys and Whitefield narrowly escaped death, while several of their fellow itinerant preachers were attacked and their homes set on fire. Hundreds of anti-revival publications appeared, as did regular, inaccurate, and scurrilous newspaper reports and articles. And the most virulent attacks, not surprisingly, came from the priests, who referred to Wesley as “that Methodist,” “that enthusiast,” “that mystery of iniquity” [anti-Christ], “a diabolical seducer, and imposter and fanatic.”

 

However, revival eventually came, but how? Charles White, professor of Christian Thought and History, wrote about the role that the small groups played in the Methodist revival:

 

·       The Methodists made such an impact on their nation that in 1962 historian Elie Halevy theorized that the Wesleyan revival created England’s middle class and saved England from the kind of bloody revolution that crippled France. Other historians, building on his work, go further to suggest that God used Methodism to show all the oppressed peoples of the world that feeding their souls on the heavenly bread of the lordship of Christ is the path to providing the daily bread their bodies also need. (Mission Frontiers, Sept-Oct 2011, 6)

 

·       Coming to Christ through the Methodist movement changed the loves of a million people in Britain and North American in the eighteenth century….most of these people and their children moved from the desperation of hand-to mouth poverty to the security of middle-class life as they made Christ their Lord and experienced the impact of His power on their economic lives. As these people moved up the social ladder, they began to influence the political life of their nation. They helped to transform Britain from an eighteenth-century kleptocracy – where the powerful fueled their lives of indulgence by exploiting the poor into a nineteenth century democracy – which abolished slavery and used its empire to enrich the lives of every subject of the crown. (9)

 

What happened to the Methodist Church? With their increased affluence, the requirement for membership in a small group was dropped and they “progressed” to a professional clergy instead of appointing leadership from within their groups. Fewer demands were made on the congregation, and everything became more comfortable.

 

We must pray that the Lord would revive us – whatever it might take.