BLOG 1/10/17. HOW DOES THE CHURCH GET READY FOR TOMORROW’S WORLD?
The past and the present are somewhat familiar to us, and there is a very resilient human proclivity to hang-on to what is familiar. It is, likewise, very difficult to think into what might be in tomorrow’s world, … or even to understand the rapidity of change in this present world. There is only a minority of the populace who think creatively into the possibilities that are potentially out there. A recent web article spells out that 65% of the jobs that our children will need have not even been invented yet. We read with amazement of the Silicon Valley wizards who created those mind-boggling enterprises such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and others.
It’s worth stopping and looking at Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who were two super-bright grad-students at Stanford, who got bored early in their graduate program and conceived of a search-engine that processes billions of bytes of data almost instantly, and so we got Google. Then you will have to stop and figure how that discovery went from those two, to twenty-thousand employees very quickly, and how they structured the company to be assured that everyone functioned and was accountable to the company’s purpose. There were few, if any, patterns to look to, so it was creativity every step of the way.
Who could have imagined? Those wedded to the familiar got left behind. Change comes hard. One of the biographers said that those two, essentially, realized that if you were going to make tomorrow’s world a better place, then you would have “to break a lot of rules, and piss a lot of people off.” People cling to what they have always known, i.e., to the familiar, … and the familiar quickly becomes history in this present world.
The church has been very slow to catch on. It still studies its history, and celebrates its awesome accomplishments of the past, its orthodoxy and ecclesiastical patterns, but finds it difficult to see beyond what is familiar today, to the challenges of a radically changing cultural scene. Businesses have found that traditional office buildings have become obsolete as more and more of the transactions of the business world are on line, and people operate from their laptops, and have access to more information on that laptop or iPhone than one can imagine. The new offices become one’s laptop and a chair in the coffee shop, or in a pleasant patio.
Churches, however, are slow to realize such changes, … yet God has always provided those who had a capacity to do cultural analysis on behalf of his people, those this is forgotten easily as those people cling to the familiar. Look at the sons of Issachar (I Chronicles 12:32) “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” Or, look at the four necessary gifts given to the church for the equipping of God’s people in Ephesians 4, one of which is the gift of prophecy. Yes, in the carrying out the mission of the church, one necessity is that of some kind of equipping in cultural analysis so that the people of God are engaging their context knowledgeably, realistically and creatively. For us this means that tomorrow’s church may incarnate those colonies of God’s New Humanity in ways and forms that are anything but familiar to the church patterns of yesterday or of today.
As communications, commerce, and businesses can quickly become obsolete and ineffective, so can church forms that are irrelevant to their contexts. Familiar church institutions, what with their ecclesiastical hierarchies, clergy, stained-glass, and pipe-organs … may be the detritus on the cultural market of tomorrow. Such familiar patterns will become obsolete (though a diminishing few will cleave to such familiar forms until the very end.) And those who understand their times and their cultures will come up with what is fresh and creative and effective … and so will engage tomorrow fruitfully, as God’s New Creation people, in the mission of God. But it will not be familiar to those wedded to yesterday or today. Count on it!
