Westerners Are Frank with Their Faith

Cheyenne Wyoming Tribune-Eagle ^ | 02-04-05 | Eastwood, Cara

[Theodore R.]

Westerners are frank with their faith

By Cara Eastwood rep4@wyomingnews.com Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle

CHEYENNE - Christians in western states share their faith more than those in any other region of the United States, a recent study shows.

The study, conducted by the California-based Christian research organization The Barna Group, found that 65 percent of born-again Christians in the West actively shared their faith with non-Christians in the past year.

This compares with 58 percent of born-again Christians in the Northeast and 59 percent of southern Christians.

The group defines born-again Christians as those who said they had made a personal commitment to Jesus that is important to their lives today. Also, born-again Christians believe they will go to heaven when they die because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.

In Barna studies, evangelical Christians are considered a subset of born-again Christians who also agreed to several conditions, including feeling a personal responsibility to share their beliefs with non-Christians.

George Barna, the group's founder, said he is not surprised by the study's findings.

"The West is an environment that calls you either to be serious (as a Christian) or to give up," he said.

The challenges that Christians face in the West include more liberal public sentiments that favor gay marriage, abortion and lenient immigration policies, Barna said.

"If you're someone who stands out and wants to be different, and you say to yourself, 'I believe I'm different because my perspective comes from the Bible,' you'd better know how to connect Scripture to the issue in a compelling manner, because neither the media nor the general population believes that the Bible matters nor that it is truth," Barna added.

The study also found that evangelism divides along an ethnic line, as only 49 percent of white Christians said they evangelized in the last year, while 63 percent of blacks and 76 percent of Hispanics said that they had.

The most common form of evangelism is to offer to pray with a non-Christian, the study found. Eight in 10 Christians, or 78 percent, said they had made such an offer in the last year. Three out of every four Christians said they shared their faith by example, a behavior that Barna calls "lifestyle evangelism."

Pastor J.D. Megason of Cheyenne's First Congregational Church, who heads the local Evangelical Ministerial Association, agrees with Barna's observations about Christianity in the West.

"I've spent most of my life here in the West, and there's a very strong spirituality here, it's just not necessarily oriented in a Christian direction," he said.

Megason finds Western Christians to be more independent thinkers than in other places and thinks that they're reluctant to toe the party line on political or religious issues.

"It's not so much that people don't want to include their faith in their politics, it's more a matter of independent thinking. Even among Christians in Cheyenne, there's a feeling of independence - people think for themselves on both religious and political issues."

Megason said Western culture doesn't automatically include a Christian worldview.

"Often Christians confuse their faith with other concepts that they view through the media," he said.

Barna likens the experience of being a Christian in the West to "ideological combat."

"If you're going to go to combat as a Bible-believing Christian, you'd better know your stuff," he said.

The study's findings stem from an annual phone survey that the Barna Group conducts in January every year. Households are chosen at random for interviews that take about 20 minutes, Barna said.

Although all faith groups can participate in the survey, this particular question pertained only to Christians.

This study's findings about evangelism don't fit with the stereotypes of faith in the West, Barna said.

"When we study where people have a Biblical worldview, it ain't the West," he said.

[Dark Skies]

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[KidGlock]

Barna likens the experience of being a Christian in the West to "ideological combat."

Which is a lot more civilized than the suicide bomber cobat that Muslims practice.