Six major American themes may miss out on important niche trends

In a recent study, the Barna Group identified six major themes, regarding the church and Christianity in America, in 2010:

1. The Christian Church is becoming less theologically literate.

2. Christians are becoming more ingrown and less outreach-oriented. With the advent of social networking technologies Christians are strangely enough becoming more tribal and connected-into than connected-out.

3. Growing numbers of people are less interested in spiritual principles and more desirous of learning pragmatic solutions for life. I theorize this is the Xer effect.

4. Among Christians, interest in participating in community action is escalating.

5. The postmodern insistence on tolerance is winning over the Christian Church.

6. The influence of Christianity on culture and individual lives is largely invisible.

I find these results to be interesting especially in the light of the strong trend of conversation I saw at the Cape Town 2010 congress in which there was some polite-if-clearly-there clashes between the ideas of social ministry and evangelism. These two trends are bashing heads if doing so diplomatically. Everyone says the formulaic “we need both/and” then goes on “but especially…” So while this list has a strong examination of the growing introverted and socially oriented nature of the church it seems to miss out on this conflict. Does that mean introversion and social justice are winning? Or have won?

Of course I didn’t really expect to find anything of cross cultural missions on such a trend list although it is sad that is the case. This list would have been very strange to the church of the late 1800s in the midst of the effort to “evangelize the world in this generation” but then perhaps not so strange to the generation just 20 years later post World War I when the Student Volunteer Movement was beginning its decline.

That decline happened in large part because the world evangelization movement was actually quite triumphalistic in nature. After two world wars the world was largely turned off to what Christian nations (or at any rate nations perceived as Christian) could do. So were a lot of potential missionary candidates. At that point the missionary movement began splitting between the more tolerant side emphasizing social works and the more conservative side emphasizing evangelism and not so much works. This was how the conservative student movements and campus ministries got started.

Generational studies such as those by Strauss & Howe have compared the Gulf War under Bush I to World War I (which really was not a world war at all) and the current economic crisis and conflict with terrorism with WW2. The comparison is a generality to be sure. Nevertheless we can theorize that in times of cultural crisis, prior to the resolution of the crisis, we are likely to see such splits in the church over the best way to respond to external issues. We see some of those fractures in the survey above, but I wonder if the survey is really detailed enough to pick up on some of the many nuances within the church.

I think perhaps the Barna study captures a broad national look but misses some of the undercurrents. To understand the church best perhaps we have to avoid too broad a look (which does not grapple with the complexities) but also too narrow (which gets into the weeds of the individual denominations). In his talk at TED, Eric Berlow in 5 minutes examines the need to grapple with complexity in order to have, on the other side, a clearer and more accurate view
(http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity.html). This is the simplicity on the other side of complexity. It might be a worthwhile pursuit here too.

One example I have been looking at is the Prizm segmentation system by Claritas and Nielsen (www.claritas.org). This is a demographic segmentation system which segments zip codes into 67 different social segments for marketing purposes. Some of these include segments like “upper crust” or “gray power” or “God’s country” or “low-rise living”. Each segment is defined by demographic traits like urbanicity, income, income producing assets, age, presence of kids, homeownership, employment, education, and ethnicity.

Another interesting examination of these kinds of sociopolitical groups can be found in “Microtrends” by Mark Penn. Penn was a controversial advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign but the book itself is a fairly apolitical look at niches within America. Among them are such groups as “commuter couples” and “diy doctors” and “shy millionaires”.

I have toyed with the idea that it might be good to try developing a similar framework for understanding the church within America (or any given country) by looking at its smaller groups. Penn’s study looks at groups that top out at about 1% of the population (or in the case of America, about 2 to 3 million people). “The one size fits all approach,” he says, “is dead.” I think the same argument could be made for understanding the church. Obviously we rely on Barna and Gallup and Pew but still we all know isolated cases that seem to disprove the national trend. Perhaps a more granular look would bring more clarity.

Tagged as: trends