Barna Group

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Barna Group is an American market research firm founded by George and Nancy Barna in 1984 as the Barna Research Group, specializing in survey research on the religious beliefs, practices and generational trends of Americans, particularly evangelical Christians. The firm conducts its research primarily through telephone and online panel surveys, a methodology it has maintained across four decades of continuous operation, publishing its findings as standalone research reports, books and articles rather than through a single flagship periodical the way some rival research bodies do.

In 2004 the firm restructured from Barna Research Group into its present name, Barna Group, a change of corporate form rather than of mission, and it remains headquartered in Ventura, California, as a private research and polling firm rather than a nonprofit or an arm of any single denomination. Its ongoing State of the Church research series, published annually, has become one of the standard reference points American religious institutions cite when tracking their own membership and belief trends over time.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Barna Group has conducted more than two million interviews across thousands of separate studies since its 1984 founding, a scale that has made it one of the two most widely cited sources, alongside the much larger Pew Research Center, for quantitative data on American religious life. Unlike Pew, a general public policy research organization that treats religion as one subject among many, Barna's research has stayed consistently focused on the beliefs, practices and generational shifts of American Christians, and particularly evangelicals, since its earliest surveys.

That focus has made the firm's own name a byword in evangelical circles for data-driven self-examination: congregations, denominational offices and Christian nonprofits regularly cite Barna's published findings when assessing their own effectiveness or diagnosing broader cultural trends, from generational disaffiliation to changing patterns of religious practice. The firm remains privately held today, continuing the survey research program George and Nancy Barna began four decades ago, still published under the same name it adopted in its own 2004 restructuring, Barna Research Group having become simply Barna Group without any change of ownership or mission behind the new corporate title.