"And the Year is ...2020!"

This was an article I wrote for a panel discussion back in 2007. We were imagining the trends and the changes that might be emerging around us. Ridiculous, at one level, because the future always surprises us when it does arrive! But it was a helpful exercise in learning to observe and interpret more carefully what is happening around you. I wonder what would you add or subtract to this list? I think if I were re-writing it now, almost eight years on, I'd add in something about:

- The 'inter-culturalisation' of the Aussie church.

- An increase in many challenging and varied shapes and expressions of Kingdom community.

- A healthier fusion of proclamation and action.

- The rise of a more contemplative mainstream spirituality.

- An increasing ability to engage diversity without abandoning one's own framework.

- The return to a form of  local parish community and neighbourhood.

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"And the Year is ...2020!"

OK! I admit it; I love Dr Who! I just love the idea that I can hop into the Tardis and instantly jump into the future ten thousand years or even a leisurely ten million years or so. ‘Trouble is that that’s easy compared with gazing a measly TEN years forward!

Last year, I was invited to be part of a panel discussion given the topic: “What will Church be like in 2020.” That’s a tough one! I’ll be getting close to retirement! Hopefully Collingwood will still be getting the ‘wobbles in September! The Olympics will be on! There will be a U.S. Presidential election. But what will be happening in our so-called ‘post-Christian’ western world? I wonder what we dream God will be doing? Here’s some of my wonderings: 

1. Twenty-Four Seven Discipleship 

The church of 2020 will have realized that powerful testimony comes from personal transformation! They will realize that our focus should not be about programs, but principles. As we live as disciples ‘obeying all I have commanded you’ so we incarnate the Gospel into our world. The church of 2020 will not focus on getting the vision and strategy right; and making the people fit into it. Rather they will understand that obedient consistent ‘holy’ living will mark a ‘culture’ that fascinates people to faith.

2. The Rediscovery Of Family

The churches of 2020 will have replaced the ‘corporation’ for the ‘family’ as a model of institution. Back in the late 1900s people were crying out for intimate community and family – even within the church. Successful churches of the late nineties segmented people into quite homogeneous groups. The spiritual formation of children and youth became disengaged from the locus of family life. Retirees, sports-people, non-English speaking attendees or young families, were segregated into their own safe and amenable spheres of church life, conflict was reduced, the services were tailored to the exacting demands of each niche. Each societal segment had it’s own unique program, pastor and even worship service.  The church of 2020 learnt much from the models of intergenerational tribal society. Youth and children’s ministries don’t exist any more as separate ‘departments’ in 2020; rather it is on strengthening families and households. The home and the neighborhood will be the locus of youth discipleship. 

3. The Church Of 2020 Will Be De-Clergied

It wouldn’t be the clergy who are called to do the work of the Kingdom. All believers will think of themselves as full-time missionaries! ‘Ordination’ to vocational pastoral ministry and denominational hierarchies will become as redundant as it has been in cross-cultural missions.  All who are called to follow Christ into the World will see their vocation, their residence, and their quality of life as subordinate to being sent into this world as Christ was sent. The 2020 church will be the mission team that lives into their context. Their neighborhood will be the ‘tribe’ into which they are sent. That means congregations of 2020 will be smaller. The idea of the priesthood of all believers will sit more comfortably then than it has in times past.

4. Community Not Consumption

The 2020 churches wouldn’t just be about ‘meeting needs’. Disciples will have stopped thinking of themselves as consumers who shop for the right sort of church that ‘meets our needs’. There will be very little driving across town to find a designer church. Congregations in 2020 do not make it easy for Christian friends to ‘church hop’ on a whim. The Gospel will call people to join a radically different Kingdom; one that stands utterly defiantly against the social and spiritual powers of the world. This will be a community of unlikely people loving each other practically in spite of everything to the point where their neighbors can’t believe what they are witnessing – and want to know about the Jesus who has transformed these diverse individuals into such selfless loyalty.

5. Bible Shaped

In 2020 Churches will take the time to re-enter the Bible ‘story’ – not just dipping into the bible for a juicy verse here and there. They will steer away from viewing it as a handbook for prosperous living, loaded with good hints! They will re-enter the ‘story of salvation’. They will read and reread the stories as their story, asking what they meant to the original hearers – what sort of God was meeting them? The Sunday gathering will focus on study of the word, as the locus for worship. As they do this, the assumptions and modern myths their parents used to read back into the bible will fall away. They will become pilgrims on the same journey as the actors in the stories! It wouldn’t be the pastor’s vision which shapes the church in 2020, but the scriptures reading the company of believers – and that is what the disciples of old practiced.  

6. Local Missionaries

In smaller neighborly groups, the believers of 2020 will talk about what they can see God doing in their broader community. They will really connect to their local community in the way their parents expected only of ‘real’ missionaries. Not only that, but they will have discovered that most of the old style outreach events depend on ‘them’ coming to ‘us’ – rather than us being out amongst them. They will let the Spirit guide them as they create the space to connect with the people God has put into their life. They will have moved from the old notion that a ‘seeker sensitive’ Sunday Worship event is the ultimate entrée into the Kingdom. 

7.  Covenant Practices

The Christians of 2020 realized that they had to get serious about discipleship. They will have been faced with a significant proportion of attendees who had never really had much spiritual mentoring in living the faith. The church of 2020 revisited the early Methodists, and monastic orders for which small groups meant accountability to lifestyle – not ‘fellowship’. They articulated faith-practices to which their members covenant – a common rule of life that shaped their spiritual experience. They focused on re-forming households so that they build a positive experience of faith into pre-adolescents. Parents and grandparents became the biggest asset they had, storytellers of the covenant.

I wonder what you imagine? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through out all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.  Eph 3:20-21