EDITORIAL
Barna Trends | David Kinnaman
Christians are a “storied people,” as my friend Tony Cook (executive director of The Hopeful Neighborhood Project) says. Scripture itself is a master class on the power of personal narrative to show how our pasts are redeemed and our lives restored and re-storied in the narrative arc of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection. Moses, Paul, the Samaritan woman at the well—their backstories could easily have caused their lives to end in ruin. But God in his mercy used their pain, sin and suffering to redeem their stories for his good purposes. And isn’t that true of each of us?
As part of Barna’s ongoing Spiritually Open study, we have been using social research to uncover the ways people’s backstories have shaped their present-day faith (or non-faith). And we have learned a lot. First, the encouraging news: 72% of U.S. adults qualify as spiritually open. This is a mind-boggling stat. There exists today massive receptivity to the possibility of God. People want to believe in something bigger than themselves, a higher power to help them make sense of this messy world. We’re living in a cultural moment full of enormous evangelistic opportunities.
To learn what factors contribute to people being spiritually open today, we asked, “Today, if a person wanted to know about your personal faith story, what would you say is most important for them to know about?” When it comes to interpersonal factors, we discovered that healthy families (especially mothers), experiencing kindness, and a lack of loneliness emerge as among the significant factors correlated with spiritual openness today.
Growing up in an unhealthy family also has a strong effect on people’s faith stories. For Spiritually Open Non-Christians (11% of U.S. adults), nearly one-third (31%) rate their childhood family experience unfavorably. They report that their teenage years were even harder: 49% rate them as negative These are the top five factors that emerged as most formative to their faith story:
* I often felt lonely. (42%)
* I had a caring group of friends. (41%)
* I often felt overlooked by people around me. (32%)
* I often felt like no one believed in me. (28%)
* Few people had my best interests in mind. (27%)
People who are Spiritually Closed Non-Christians (16% of U.S. adults) cite nearly the same top five factors. The desire to be seen, known and valued are universal human needs. Conversely, traumatic experiences seem to stunt spiritual growth and curtail openness to faith.
People are waiting to be awakened to God’s purposes in their lives. Our churches can be places of healing and wholeness, through the power of the gospel. By understanding people’s pain and trauma, we can be conduits to the redemptive power of Jesus in their lives. Theologically speaking, no one’s backstory equates to their worthiness for salvation. It is an unmerited gift of grace. Counterintuitively, pain and suffering frequently become the pathway to God writing a new story of eternal redemption in people’s lives.
Still, churches can be places where followers of Christ carefully listen to and pray through people’s life stories with empathy, extending the kind of care and grace that Jesus showed everyone, regardless of their backstory. Can we begin to see people for the stories they have lived? Christians can become even more effective decoders of people’s backstories and help them to re-story their lives in light of the great gospel story.