The Barna Group is an evangelical Christian polling firm based in Ventura, California.
[3] The Barna Group consists of five divisions[citation needed] focusing on: It was founded in 1984 by George Barna, a media research specialist holding graduate degrees in urban planning and political science, for the purpose of providing "research and marketing expertise as a service to Christian ministry.
[4] The term notional Christians seems to have been created by the Barna Group for the purposes of gathering statistics.
Recent popular titles include De-evolution (2006), which discusses how Christians have exited traditional churches to embrace non-traditional/Jewish faith communities and unChristian (2007), which studies how outsiders perceive the church at large and includes contributions from authors like Rick Warren, Brian McLaren, Mike Foster, Sarah Cunningham, Margaret Feinberg, and Rick McKinley.
[8] In his book Finally Alive, John Piper, a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN, states that: In the report titled “Born Again Christians Just as Likely to Divorce as Are Non-Christians,” Barna uses the word evangelicals interchangeably with born again [....] In other words, the broadly defined evangelical church as a whole in America and the West in general is apparently not very unlike the world.