We don’t often think about the future of the church. We talk about children in church as ‘the next generation’ when they’re a vital, hopefully integral part of today’s church, and we don’t seem able to think much further. Why is that, do you think?
My own reflections say it’s because we’ve inherited a mindset of short-term-ism. Our politics and economics are all short-term – we need to see results before the next election. Football world is worst of all: Chelsea fans baying at the heels of the new manager for not having popped the team on top of the Premier League after four months in post. Planning beyond the next twenty years doesn’t seem to occur to most people, with the possible exception of environmentalists.
Our church worldview has an effect too. Some of us are infected with the idea that the end of the world is very near, so there’s no point planning for the future. Others think the church has always been ‘like this’ and always will be; others think it’s on the point of dying out and there’s little we can do to save it. Personally I think God is unlikely to have spent billions of years creating the cosmos only to wrap it up after a few hundred thousand years of developed sentient life, and unlikely to pull the plug on the church only 2,000 years after he came to live among us in Christ.
If the world and the church are looking forward to another several millenia of life (and in Advent it would be daft to make any predictions about ‘the day or the hour’ when the whole enterprise will be wrapped up) then it’s inevitable we’re in for radical change. We need a church that improvises an ongoing dance with God, shifting easily between the shuffled tracks of each new generation and era of history. We need a flexible, bendy, shock-absorbing church, like a well-engineered tower block or bridge. We need a speedy, easily deployable, rapid-response church like emergency response teams or fast attack craft. Agree? If so, what does this look like in real terms?
