With respect to writing, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my own work. Thus, one of the worst punishments that can be inflicted upon me is to force me to look at one of my books after it’s been published. I immediately see all the flaws and weaknesses. That said, I would do three things differently:
(1) I would have announced in the beginning, all throughout the middle, and at the end that Pagan Christianity is not a stand-alone book. The book is only the first part of a fuller argument. As such, it doesn’t seek to solve the problems we address. It only deconstructs. In the original release of the book, this was stated in some of the footnotes and in a big advertisement at the end for the upcoming constructive sequel, Reimagining Church. But many people missed these announcements despite that it’s been repeated all over the Web. The recent printings have a new preface in it that makes this point loud and clear.
(2) I would have added more “Question and Answers” sections to some of the chapters. But we were limited by page count.
(3) I would have removed all the exclamation (!) points. Not too long ago, an exclamation point denoted emphasis and passion. And that’s how I’ve always read and used them. Today, however, it denotes anger in the minds of some readers. There’s no anger in the book at all, but some people read anger into the book due to several exclamation points that we used for emphasis. So I’d probably remove those if I wrote the book today. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.
George Barna: It’s not repudiation or change of content from what we wrote, but my primary focus has shifted away from corporate religious structures and behaviors to the means of personal life transformation that God uses to enable us to become who He intended us to be. That’s a natural progression for my work if you assume that religious institutions are not supposed to have a stranglehold on people’s faith experience and expression.
Joe Miller: Can you summarize for my readers what you have been doing these past four years? Where have you been, and what have you been writing that we should know about?
George Barna: In 2009, I sold the Barna Group to David Kinnaman. That has freed me up to write a more diverse range of books and other pieces about the Christian life and experience, including some books I have written for others. The most significant book I have done recently – perhaps ever – is Maximum Faith, which took six years of research and identified the process by which God transforms people’s lives and describes what we can do to get on board with His process.
I have also had some involvement in the 2012 presidential campaign, have invested a lot of time in family challenges (addressing some serious health issues facing our three daughters), have been much more heavily involved in playing music, and will soon start writing my first novel.
