Lutheran Hour Ministries (LHM) is pleased to announce a new partnership with Barna Group, an industry leader for insights about faith and culture, leadership and vocation, and generational groups. This partnership will use research conducted by Barna to help discover the needs of LHM's constituency as well as the general U.S. population and other non-Lutheran Christians, provide thought leadership for the church-at-large via workshops and media, inform the development of yearly LHM products and programs, and expand the use of LHM offerings within the United States.
This bold new collaboration will allow LHM to create outreach courses and materials that address very specific needs within the targeted demographics - both for those within the church and those outside of it. With information based around a yearly theme, the product suite for 2018 is geared toward spiritual conversations in the digital age, with 2019 based around households of faith and 2020 on communities of action.
"This research allows LHM to provide resources that are extremely timely and relevant for today's world by allowing us to meet people where they are and deliver the saving message of Jesus Christ to them in ways that they are receptive to and that make sense for their world view," says Rev. Dr. Tony Cook, LHM's executive director of United States Ministries.
Barna Group has carefully and strategically tracked the role of faith in America by conducting more than one million interviews through hundreds of studies, developing one of the nation's most comprehensive databases of spiritual indicators. They have worked with thousands of businesses, nonprofit organizations, and churches across the U.S. and around the world.
In addition to conducting and providing groundbreaking research, Barna Group will create a co-branded monograph for LHM that contains all the data as well as thorough analysis to uncover evangelism beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and practices in the digital age for a broader audience. The Barna editorial team will unpack the research so readers can learn how to engage and equip Christians for evangelism in the digital age. The monograph will be offered to church leaders throughout the United States when completed later this year.
Further partnership opportunities between the two organizations are being explored beyond the initial three-year agreement.
