Page 4 - Digital Church in a Lonely World

A PREF A CE BY D A VID KINNAMAN,

BARNA CEO

I first encountered Ben Windle’s work when I read his digital white paper, “Eight Innovations to Lead-
ing Millennials.” It was well written and well conceived, and corresponded to many of the things our
research showed were important to Millennials and effective in leading this generation.

When I had the chance to meet Ben and to interact with him about his writing and his thinking, I felt
that he represented a voice for younger generations of Christians. As a pastor ministering in Australia,
his geographic location gave him a certain distance from the challenges and complexities of the U.S.
Church and a kind of fresh, independent but practical perspective on what to do.

As a researcher, I’m often looking at the biggest picture—the 30,000-foot overview of what’s happen-
ing. Ben is helping to connect the dots from some of the theoretical, changing social dynamics I see
to the more practical, boots-on-the-ground experiences of a local pastor. As a Millennial himself, he
remains pastoral while also being able to speak from and into the Millennial and Gen Z sensibility.

Since our first meeting, Ben and I have become friends and have spent a lot of time talking, texting
and sharing ideas about what the future of the Church might look like, or how social research could
be made even more practical, creating beta tools that enable more effective ministry. We’ve talked a lot
about what the shape of the Church might look like in the months and years to come. And that’s where
this release comes in.

Our team at Barna worked with Ben on this Barna Ideas piece as he developed an argument about the
things he was seeing and the opportunities ahead coming out of the pandemic. Even more fundamen-
tally, Ben’s Idea captures the zeitgeist—the spirit of the age—when it comes to effective ministry among
younger generations (though not exclusively to younger generations). Ben introduces a mindset that
looks at a more holistic set of principles and attempts to create a framework, putting flesh and bone and
blood onto the skeleton of how to do ministry in this new pandemic era.

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