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At the close of every decade, this magazine declares what it believes the future holds, with the caveat that no one really knows what the future holds. It is no trivial exercise: how we see the future determines how we see our duties in the present.

Fortunately there are few laughable moments in Christianity Today's four decades of predicting. Because we have seen ourselves as defenders of a historical faith, our concerns for the future have been remarkably stable. Our agenda for today's tomorrow looks much the same as it did in the past: to win the lost for Christ. "We evangelicals must cast aside our ghetto complex and advance actively into the contemporary battle for the minds of men and women," we argued in 1981.

In fact, Billy Graham's diagnosis of evangelicalism at the founding of this magazine remains relevant: "We seem to be confused, bewildered, divided, and almost defeated in the face of the greatest opportunity and responsibility, possibly in the history of the church." Though the specifics may have shifted since Graham's 1955 speech, evangelicals are still confused about their role in society, divided as a body, and even bewildered about what evangelical means.

These issues will only intensify as evangelicalism moves into a post-Graham era. Though the Christianity Today of 2099 may discuss how best to evangelize a post-post-postmodern society or how Generation Z's grandchildren will "change the face of the church," our concerns for the future of biblical Christianity will likely be the same.

Tribalism and economic globalism will jeopardize the multinational church. That the future heart of evangelical Christianity lies more in Nairobi and Seoul than Wheaton and Colorado Springs is no prediction; it is a fact. As we reported last November, Asia has 2.4 times as many evangelicals as North America and has experienced a 326 percent growth in that figure since 1970, while North American evangelicalism grew only by 57 percent in the same period.

What comes next? Foreign missions will mean Christians from the Two-Thirds World preaching to the "lost" West. Church leaders from around the world will work more closely together, whether in missions or relief and development. At the same time, various regional churches will accuse each other of having crossed the line from contextualization into syncretism.

All of these are already true. But what is less easy to predict is how the two forces of multicultural interaction—tribalism and globalism—will play out. Political scientist Benjamin Barber most famously labeled these forces Jihad and McWorld: retribalization is pitting culture against culture while economic (and, Barber asserts, ecological) forces "press nations into one commercially homogeneous global network."

Both trends work against democracy, Barber writes. But they work even more against the church. "Imperialism, in a sense, held tribalism in check," Fuller Seminary President Richard Mouw tells CT. But just as we don't want an imperialism that demands the church look exactly the same in Beijing, Baghdad, and Baltimore, neither do we want ten million churches all screaming that everyone else "isn't doing it right."

So far, Two-Thirds World Christians have justifiably united in their criticism of the West's past imperialism. (As we predicted in 1970, "Nationalism may prove to be [the Holy Spirit's] tool in forcing a change in the paternalism of modern evangelical missions.")

But criticism of that kind only unites for so long. What happens when Latin American evangelicals, often at odds with Roman Catholicism, find themselves at odds with Central Asian evangelicals for making few distinctions between Protestants and Catholics?

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December 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 14