This Christian Life

What the Church Faces in the Future

*** This was originally posted as a reply to the poll “In the future, the biggest issue for the Church will be…” on Christdot. ***

I think apathy is a close 1st, and human cloning will be huge soon, but, the state of the church right now and the state of our culture points toward something even bigger: the church is not doing it’s job of reaching culture because it is out of touch.

The more reading I do, the more I am convinced that what the church faces now and will face in the next 10 years is that it has no clue about how different our culture is RIGHT NOW compared to how it was 50 or 200 years ago. The cultures are so different in our society now and people (mostly people in their teens and 20s and below) are thinking so differently that we need to think of them as being from a different country.

There is research that shows that the brain develops different areas differently depending on what you are taught or spend a lot of time with. For instance, to a foreigner, the words Cough, Tough, and Dough are incomprehendible when it comes to pronunciation. To us Americans, we can say the /subtle/ pronunciations easily, but don’t realize how different those 3 words are. Try it out loud. We can say them because we have developed that in our brains.

The same is true when it comes to cultural things. It is a fact that people are much more image-based than the old paradigm of being word-based. Younger people in our society can simply think much easier using images and shapes than older people can. Prove me wrong.

This is just one example of many things that are changing in our society that will AND IS influencing how the church needs to respond to it. If we continue to hang on to the old paradigm of doing things, we’ll simply die. The world as we know it in church will not exist any longer.

Then who knows what’s next… underground church? A society that sees no need for church anymore? (That’s already happening!) You’ve been created with a creative mind… you can imagine what could happen.

See Marva Dawn, Leonard Sweet, Brian Mclaren, and Tex Sample for more commentary on this issue. Once you start, you won’t believe what you’ll find.