David Hawkins says:

Barna\'s over-riding message is that \"whether you become completely disassociated from a local church is irrelevant to me (and, within boundaries, to God).\" This ignores all precedent and instruction laid out in the book of Acts and Paul\'s letters. Heb. 10.24 and Prov 18.1 immediately come to mind. Paul\'s practice was to set up churches, not \"mini-movements\" -- churches, with qualified appointed leaders, with accountability, with established principles of church governance. And we are commanded to follow Paul\'s example.

The problems with this book are numerous:
1) It is heretical to say that the local church is unnecessary or irrelevant.
2) It encourages people to be lone rangers, a direct violation of Scripture. His ideas are very AMERICAN but they are not CHRISTIAN.
3) It ignores the value of church governance, pastoral oversight, and the functioning of the church as a body / family.
4) It bashes the bride of Christ. Mercilessly and arrogantly.
5) There is no hard data to review! Let\'s see the actual surveys -- how were the questions worded. Let\'s see where the respondents were drawn from. What about Barna\'s own personal story -- let\'s see how his \"research\" was affected by his personal biases, his own \"bad church\" experience.
6) God gave some to be elders, etc. The qualifications for elders are set forth in Timothy & Titus. Implicitly, what this guy is saying is, \"Leave the local church. Appoint yourself an elder.\" But many who will read the book will not be anywhere near qualified to be elders, neither for themselves nor for their house church group, if they lead one. He\'s validating anyone who leaves the local church, telling them that they are the truly mature, on-fire Christians, and the people in the local church are weaker Christians. That\'s pure nonsense -- there are both mature and immature believers in any setting.
7) There is no such thing as a cyberchurch, nor will there ever be. The entire notion is just a superficial way for Christian malcontents to justify their rejection of the God-ordained concept of the local church body.

The title says it all: He adamantly wants people to Revolt. But instead of asking them to revolt against sin, or against bad church practices, he\'s asking them to revolt against the entire concept of the local church, which really was established by Jesus and by the Holy Spirit. May God have mercy on him and bring him to repentance. #

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