By Matt Horan
I've found myself lately doing a lot of reading about the future of the church. Turns out that lots of people believe lots of things about what the church will be like in the future. Not long ago I read The Future of Christianity by Alister McGrath. The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins is a good read. Most recently, I just finished reading the latest edition of Collide Magazine. The cover story is, "The Church in 2034." It's a host of predictions about the church 25 years from now.
I have to confess that they make some compelling predictions. I wasn't too keen on their prediction that androids will replace humans as parkers, greeters, and ushers, but some others grabbed my attention.
Mock all you like the "Hyde Park Softball Twittercast," or our "Become a Fan on Facebook" link on our church website. Grimace at the idea of preachers who preach to congregations from afar via video feed. Imagine even the collection plate complete with credit-card scanner. Like it or not, a quarter-century from now, technology will be the way church is done.
Most writers agree on a couple fundamental shifts. For one, the American Southeast will no longer be the self-proclaimed center of the Christian world. The church is growing the fastest in Africa and South America and China. It is most likely that the leaders of the church in the future will come from these places, and that they will exert greater and greater pressure on the form of Christian practice, as well as on Christian theology and doctrine.
We might expect that, with advancements in mobile communication devices and technology, church will happen less and less at a specific place and time, and more throughout the week. With theological interaction available all week, sermons will shift. They will wrap up the conversation threads from the previous week, and introduce a new direction for the conversations of the week to come. They will become shorter, and pre-recorded, so that video effects can be added to help make the point.
Collide predicts that there will be very few "in-person" preachers. The best and brightest preachers will make their video feeds available to churches who can shop around for the preaching product that most fits with the needs of the subscribing congregation. (Sounds like a new type of "circuit rider.") At first I wasn't sure about this prediction--surely there will be people who prefer a flesh-and-blood preacher. But in 25 years, we will be so conditioned to receive information from a video screen that this doesn't sound all that far-fetched.
Further, during worship services, we are just a few years away from it becoming standard for worshippers to interact with the service: sending questions via text message, posting responses on a blog, contacting someone seventeen pews away. Mere spectating will become a thing of the past.
Lastly, writers predict that the Church (Big "C") will become a network of churches (little "C") that share information and expertise in order to more effectively achieve their mission. These network connections might align along denominational lines, but a stronger link will be the usefulness of the connection. If a Lutheran Church in Green Bay feels that using the sermon feed from a Presbyterian Church in Newfoundland will be more effective than the one from a Lutheran Church in Des Moines--effectiveness will win out.
Of course, it's also possible--likely even--that none of this will come to pass, and that the future of the Church will be something entirely unexpected. Either way, nothing will replace the power of prayer. Nothing will replace the transformational effect of studying the Scriptures--even if it occurs on your Amazon Kindle. And nothing can change the fact that, just as God has been at work for the last several eons, He'll likely still be up to something pretty good in 2034.











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