Book Review: Raising Spiritual Champions
George Barna's new books exposes the church's failure to disciple children in a biblical worldview and how to accomplish this task.
Title: Raising Spiritual Champions: Nurturing Your Child’s Heart, Mind and Soul
Author: George Barna
Publisher: Arizona Christian University Press, 2023
For decades, the American church has witnessed a dramatic exodus of its teens. Commonly, people cite that 70 percent of young people leave the church after high school graduation. Some come back, but many do not.
I believe many leave because they never received meaningful discipleship instruction. Without being firmly anchored in biblical truth, most drift away along cultural currents of trendy ideas.
In his most recent book, author and director of the Cultural Research Center George Barna’s research demonstrates why so many young people leave the church. Even though 49 percent of early teens identify as Christian, only one percent hold a consistent biblical worldview. Of this age group,
10% believe absolute truth. (Or 90% don’t believe in absolute truth.)
17% agree that people are born sinful. (Or 83% believe man is naturally good.)
18% use the Bible as their primary source of moral truth.
27% believe that God is the basis of all truth.
28% believe God established marriage as one man and one woman as the only place to express sexual intimacy.
31% believe in the inerrancy of the Bible.
39% believe in reincarnation.
56% say moral truth is up to the individual.
61% say Jesus may have sinned.
If these individuals claim they are Christians, how did they come to hold unbiblical beliefs?
After studying this problem, Barna declares that children need intentional discipleship training in his newest book, Raising Spiritual Champions: Nurturing Your Child’s Heart, Mind and Soul. Filled with statistics to support his assertions, the author points out that Christian parents and the local church must act now to develop a discipling ministry with young children.
Why Focus on Children?
In Section I, Barna lays out the problem.
Initially, he begrudgingly researched children’s ministry for what he considered a “filler” talk for a conference. Little did he realize that he would stumble on the key to passing the baton of faith to the next generation.
During the subsequent eighteen months, as we conducted the research, and I developed the related session content, I was stunned. That “filler” topic turned out to be perhaps the most important topic we could have explored….I came to realize that if we do not get it right with young children, the chances are good that we will never see those people mature into real disciples of Jesus (vii).
Barna presented this research in his 2003 book Transforming Children into Spiritual Champions.
Twenty years later, he revisits this crucial topic backed by seven new studies. “The research is very clear that the more biblically prepared a child is to address life, the more likely they are to embrace a Christlike approach to daily challenges” (viii).
He has determined that children develop their worldview between the ages of 6 months and 13 years. After age 13, a person’s worldview rarely changes.
Church and Parents Dropped the Ball
Unquestionably, most churches are missing this window of opportunity for spiritual formation. Barna found that many churches consider children’s ministry as a place to entertain children while their parents receive instruction. “Nationally, the body of Christ rejects the scriptural idea that children are born as spiritual beings and need to be prepared for spiritual battle at an early age” (50).
It’s not enough to take your kids to church and teach them Bible stories. Jesus commanded his disciples to make disciples, not just church attendees. But that is what most churches are producing—pew sitters, not disciples. Knowing about Christianity is not enough. We must learn to think and live like Christ.
If a disciple is a person transformed by the love of Christ to become like Christ, the means to that end is through their worldview—the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual filter you apply to every situation so that your choices and decisions reflect the ways of the Lord (9).
The church needs to move beyond evangelism. It must also train people, particularly children, to make Christ the Lord of their lives.
Those who recite the “prayer of salvation” and believe they have guaranteed themselves eternal security without experiencing a life-transforming change of heart and lifestyle are guilty of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace.” That is the act of assuming that God's grace to sinners is not only free but costless, i.e., cheap. Cheap grace is nothing more than a comfortable but illegitimate facsimile of the true grace of Jesus experienced by those who are genuinely repentant and surrendered to God (11).
Not only has the church erred in passing on the faith to the next generation, but so have Christian parents. Parents are their children’s first teachers, and they have the duty to instruct them in the ways of the Lord. God told the parents of the ancient Israelites:
You shall teach them [the laws] diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up (Deuteronomy 6:7).
However, while 68 percent of American parents call themselves Christian, only two percent of them hold a consistent biblical worldview (39). Instead, they are syncretists, meaning they have cobbled together a worldview from various belief systems.
Parents can’t teach what they don’t have. Barna recommends that parents seek out mature Christians to disciple them biblically. After that, they can train their own children.
Christ followers, we must keep in mind that proponents of other worldviews have well understood the value of worldview training children at an early age. Many tyrants have said, Let me have a child until he’s seven, and he will follow me for the rest of his life. Advertisers and cultural influencers capitalize on this concept to capture our children’s minds and create lifelong customers.
It is time for parents and the church to make a concerted effort to disciple young children in the way of the Lord before the world disciples them into worldly thinking.
How to Disciple Children
In Section II, Barna lays out his child discipling road map by describing four practices of serious discipleship:
Making a life-defining commitment to be a disciple of Jesus
Accepting the biblical principles and commands that lead to becoming a disciples
Adopting the lifestyle of a disciple—obedience through application of beliefs
Inviting personal accountability and stability—through assessing what matters, reinforcing growth, and celebrating disciplehood (62, emphasis in the original).
Ideally, parents ought to work one-on-one in relationship with their children in this discipleship process. As mentioned above, many parents may need more training themselves and will need to enlist a mature Christian to disciple their children in their stead.
Elaborating on the first disciple-making practice of commitment, Barna explains the importance of our identity in Christ. “...we are rejecting the values of the world in favor of the values of God” (72), which requires a serious commitment.
The second disciple-making practice chapter focuses on developing a biblical worldview, and Barna covers his seven cornerstones of a biblical worldview.
The nature of God
The sinful nature of man
Forgiveness is only available through Jesus
Inerrancy and reliability of the Bible
Absolute truth
Man’s purpose is to love God
Success on earth is through obedience to God
The third disciple-making practice chapter covers the spiritual disciplines and how to teach the child to shape his behavior to agree with the biblical worldview.
The fourth disciple-making practice chapter describes how to hold the child accountable and measure his spiritual growth.
Families and Churches Working Together
In Section III, Barna explains how the local church can support parents in discipling their children in the Lord.
First, Barna addresses the need for parents to monitor their children’s exposure to various media. Our culture is now anti-Christian, and many children’s shows and video games promote unbiblical philosophies such as secular humanism, post-modernism, Eastern mysticism, and even witchcraft. It's the parent's job to explain to their children how these worldviews conflict with the biblical worldview. Mama Bear Apologetics provides an excellent method for having these discussions.
Don’t let Madison Avenue and Hollywood disciple your kids. That’s your job!
In the chapter on the local church, Barna points out that statistically, children's ministry leaders “are the poster children for syncretism” (187). He cautions parents to monitor the worldview of those they put in charge of shaping their children’s beliefs.
A few years ago, the author’s team surveyed Christian parents on how they selected a good children’s ministry. They found that most parents sought programs that were “...safe, fun, [had] the potential to meet acceptable friends, and [would expose their children] to Christian teaching” (188).
According to these parents, “Christian teaching” had more to do with being a good person than for children to learn about “truth, biblical authority, the nature and character of God, sin and salvation, biblical standards for morality, discipleship, and understanding purpose and success, which explains why just 12% of churches have children’s ministers who are Bible-oriented” (188-89).
Barna then describes what an effective children’s ministry looks like, citing examples from churches that disciple children well.
The last chapter, titled "Fight for Your Children," draws from Ephesians 6 to explain that a parent must be a spiritual warrior who puts on the Armor of God.
He closes with
Raising a spiritual champion can be an exhausting and difficult process, but it is also an incredible spiritual adventure and a transformative parenting experience (214).
Barna excels at articulating the church's crisis in failing to disciple children and explaining the remedy. However, he needs to provide more concrete examples for parents to put these ideas into practice.
For more hands-on information, I suggest the aforementioned Mama Bear Apologetics and also Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side. Also, see my posts on apologetic books and worldview resources for parents and teens.