Shifting into the Future Tense: Churches in the Information Age Have Tremendous Resources to Plan for the Coming Decade

TOM SINETom Sine is the convener of the Creative Futures Center in Seattle, a group that helps denominations and Christian groups plan more creatively. He is the author of Why Settle for More and Miss the Best (Word), and the soon-to-be-released Wild Hope (Word), a book on the future and the church.

A leading futurist predicts that we will experience as much change in the next ten years as we have in the past three decades. Such rapid change means that the church can no longer plan as though the future is simply going to be an extension of the present. We will not only need to do a better job of anticipating the future, we must also become more imaginative in responding to tomorrow’s challenges.

We can learn much from the corporate world on this score. The competitiveness of the marketplace makes it imperative for corporations both to anticipate change and be creative in responding. If we have any hope of addressing the urgent challenges of the nineties we must become more creative.

One Christian organization attempting to take the future seriously and respond creatively is the Philippines Council of Evangelical Churches. A thorough forecasting effort to the year 2000 in all sectors of national life made it immediately apparent that inflation would continue at a high rate. Evangelical leaders asked how that would affect their congregations.

They found, to give one example, that because the majority of families lived at a subsistence level, mothers would be forced back to work to provide for their families’ basic needs. And without adequate child care, children would be left without supervision, placing tremendous pressure on family life.

The Philippines Council of Evangelical Churches therefore took the next step of anticipatory planning: They devised new responses to the anticipated challenge. They created opportunities for mothers to make the extra money their families need in jobs they can do at home, allowing them to care for their children while they work.

A Seattle-based relief-and-development organization, World Concern, provides another example of this two-step process of anticipating need and creating new responses. Forecasters used computers to analyze future needs in the 22 countries in which World Concern works. Included were a range of economic, political, religious, and social trends. It was found, to cite one instance, that Kenya is experiencing a 4.2 percent population growth rate. Realizing that such growth means an increasing number of mothers with children, it was not difficult to predict the likely needs of this population: nutrition, immunization, education, and maternal and infant child care. World Concern set to work to develop a strategy for Kenya, addressing the emerging needs of the nineties.

Here are a few of the new challenges likely to confront the church in the nineties, and some of the creative ways forward-looking Christians are already responding:

The Erosion Of The Middle Class

Economic white water is likely to be a part of the American future. Economists tell us that our recent prosperity has come primarily not from our productivity, but our indebtedness. Americans have rung up an unprecedented $10 trillion of personal, corporate, and governmental debt. Like the bumper sticker says, we have been living off our children’s inheritance.

Consensus among many economists is that we cannot “grow on” like this. At some point in the not-too-distant future there is likely to be a day of reckoning. Whether it will be a mild or major recession, it will have the greatest impact on the American poor, who already lost significant ground during the last eight years.

But the economic white water is not just going to have an impact on the poor. This time it is already beginning to affect the middle class. In the nineties we will see some of the middle class move into the upper class, but a larger segment is likely to downscale and join the lower class. And this will include many of our young people.

The under-35 crowd has been programmed to do everything that Mom and Dad did and a little bit more. But while their parents were able to afford a split-level home and everything that goes with it on a single income, America’s young are finding it takes at least two incomes to get by, and even at that many cannot afford a house.

Because young adults are trying to do everything their parents did, the church could lose a whole generation. With both husband and wife employed, the American young may make it to church on Sunday. But if they do, few will be likely to have time left over to minister to anyone else or support other activities of the church as their parents did.

The first statistics confirming this may already be in. The under-35 crowd is not giving anything like their older counterparts. Their giving to Christian organizations is significantly lower. If this trend is not turned around, the future of the church and its mission is at serious risk.

Thankfully, there is a small but countervailing trend within the church that offers a glimmer of hope. There are younger Christians who have not bought the economic dream American society is peddling. They are taking charge of their own lives and creating lifestyles with a difference. Out of a much-more serious brand of discipleship they are reducing the costs of their own lives so they have time and money to invest in the work of God’s kingdom.

In Washington, D.C., for example, Joan Orgon and six other Christian professional women and a couple chose to rent a house together in the inner city in order to reduce their living costs and increase their opportunities for service. By sharing meals and meeting one night a week for mutual discipling, they have created a community. Not only does their shared housing reduce living expenses, by taking turns cooking they also free time in the evenings, time spent opening their home one night a week for storytelling. Neighborhood kids, sometimes with moms in tow, show up for the stories. And predictably, these Christian householders find they are even getting a chance to try their hand at child care. Is this the wave of the future? Perhaps not. But it is a promising example of some of the Christian young who are determined to put first things first.

Jeff Wright, a young pastor working in Southern California, is considering creative ways to do more than just plant a church but also develop a Christian community. In a region where families typically pay $200,000–$250,000 for a basic three-bedroom house (which translates into nearly a million dollars over 30 years), he is exploring the possibility of securing land for the church that would also be zoned for multiplex housing.

In this young pastor’s model, once the land is paid for, six units would be constructed, using volunteer labor, for around $60,000 a unit. An alternative mortgage scheme would enable the first six families to purchase their units on a five-year, no-interest loan, eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest. They would write into the contract that a certain percentage of the freed time or money would be immediately invested in the work of God’s kingdom—perhaps constructing Habitat for Humanity housing in the same complex. At the end of five years, when the mortgage is paid off, it would no longer be necessary for both husband and wife to work, freeing one person for full-time nurture of the family and more time for service to others.

Finally, before the first six families moved into their homes, they would draw up a covenant to be a small group together within their church. They would not only meet once a week to nurture one another, but would also seek to create together new styles of parenting, celebration, and stewardship that reflect the values of God’s kingdom more than their suburban counterparts.

An Epidemic Of Autonomy

A value that will increasingly shape society and church in the nineties is autonomy. Sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues write convincingly in Habits of the Heart that autonomy is one of the most characteristic values of modern American culture. Recent Gallup polls point to how pervasive this value has become (see “Tracking America’s Soul,” p. 22). Sociologists of religion Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney in American Mainline Religion also argue that autonomy will alter the face of religion in America in tomorrow’s society.

This means that we are likely to see more people in an increasingly secular society tailor-making their own faith. In this do-it-yourself religion, individuals will likely draw on the resources of Unity, New Age, and motivational psychology, fashioning a religion that is customized to meet their needs while making very little demand to alter their behavior or attitudes.

Not surprisingly, we are likely to see individuals, even within evangelical traditions, becoming much less committed to particular denominations or traditions and much more autonomous in the ways in which they seek to affiliate. Increasingly they will be drawn to churches that promise to cater to their personal needs. Individuals within churches will resist the call to be held accountable for their behavior by those within the church, believing this to be their private affair.

Last summer I visited the Bruderhof community in Woodcrest, New York, which provides a striking alternative. This group of Hutterian Brethren, dedicated to communal life and painstaking adherence to the Sermon on the Mount, insists on placing community before individual choice. No one in the Bruderhof makes personal life decisions apart from the will and tradition of the larger community.

Even for those who could not fit into such a radical approach to community, options are available in local churches. The Assembly Mennonite congregation in Goshen, Indiana, for example, has broken its fellowship into small groups that meet weekly. What is unusual is that members of the small groups not only nurture, they hold one another accountable in every area of life, including their stewarding of family finances. Periodically they reveal their income and expenditures to one another, seeking through their community the guidance of God on how they can live more justly in a world in which other Christians are dying from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. Predictably, this decreases the amount they spend on expensive items and increases the amount they invest in the work of God’s kingdom.

The Polarization Of Young And Old

We are moving into a future in which we are likely to see not only a widening gap between the rich and poor, but also between older and younger members of our society. Twenty years ago a significant percentage of our senior population was very poor. In the intervening years, that has dramatically changed. Through AARP and Gray Panthers, seniors of all economic conditions have learned to use their political clout to enhance and expand government services to their population.

At the same time, poverty has dramatically increased among many of the youngest members of our society while government benefits have, in the last eight years, been seriously cut back. Jonathan Kozol compellingly describes in Rachel and Her Children how tens of thousands of children spend almost their entire childhood in the homeless shelters of our nation. And there are hundreds of thousands of other children who do not have access to adequate nutrition, health care, education, or day care in the U.S.

Age Wave, a new book on the future of aging by Ken Dychtwald, sketches the changing landscape of tomorrow’s world. We will continue to see a steady increase in the senior population in the U.S., he says, as seniors live longer and as baby boomers grow older. As a consequence, they will place much greater demand on health-care, social, and governmental services at a time when we will still be trying to do away with our enormous federal-budget deficit.

To their credit, several of the senior lobbying organizations realize that an older/younger polarization will not be good for their cause. And they are endorsing some much-needed legislation for children and youth. But we are still likely in the nineties to see polarization that needs to be addressed.

One Presbyterian church in the Alaska-Northwest Synod, sensitive to this trend and aware of the tremendous resources in the growing number of seniors, created a new ministry. With economic pressure driving more mothers to work, the church foresaw a growing need for day care that could be met in part by seniors. The congregation has started a day-care program staffed largely by senior volunteers; this approach not only keeps costs down, it provides an opportunity for cross-generational linkage.

In a similar vein, Newsweek recently published an excellent article on volunteerism and discussed the tremendous volunteer potential of the retired. Increasingly, seniors are being put to work in shelters for the homeless or are tutoring in inner-city schools. The church has a unique opportunity in the nineties to bring together the resources of older members with the escalating needs of the young—reconciling them in the cause of Jesus Christ.

A Cross-Cultural Future

Not only is American society graying, it is becoming much more racially pluralistic. If you live in California in the year 2000 and you are white, you will be in the minority. The Los Angeles school district already makes use of 80 different languages in its classroom instruction. The United States and Western Europe of the nineties will continue to become more ethnically diverse. This provides a tremendous opportunity for people from different cultures to get to know and enrich one another.

Young people raised in the all-white suburbs of America and able to converse in only one language will become the culturally disadvantaged of the nineties. They will be ill-equipped to participate in the increasingly cross-cultural and transnational environment of tomorrow’s world.

While the 11 o’clock hour on Sunday mornings is still the most ethnically segregated hour in America, a few churches in the U.S. and in Europe are marching to a different drumbeat. Many West Coast congregations have Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese congregations worshiping in their sanctuaries. And in nearby First Covenant Church of Pasadena (Calif.), the Hispanic and Anglo communities have united as a single congregation and called a Hispanic pastor.

In England, a new congregation has been planted that subscribes to the “heterogeneous principle.” Ichthus Christian Fellowship is as diverse as the cross-cultural environment in South London in which it was planted. Twice a month members meet in small home groups. Every third Sunday they meet in a regional group. Once a month they come together in a rented school—all 2,000 of them—Pakistanis, Bengalis, Nigerians, working-class Brits, and young people delivered from drugs. They worship God together—in a foretaste of the kingdom.

Preservation Of Our Earth Home

A direct result of moving into a more culturally pluralistic future is that we are beginning to discover that, ultimately, all problems are global problems. One of the major prolife issues in the nineties, therefore, will be the preservation of our environment. If we destroy the earth in which God has placed us so that it cannot sustain life, then all other prolife issues become academic.

There is growing evidence that the greenhouse effect will decisively alter agricultural regions in the U.S., raise ocean levels around the world, and jeopardize our common future. From oil spills in Alaska to hospital waste washing up on the beaches of New Jersey, we are being buried in our garbage. I believe we are entering what could be called the “Earth Decade.” The preservation of planet Earth will become the growing preoccupation of virtually the entire planetary community in the nineties and beyond.

Evangelicals, who almost entirely missed the last environmental movement, could miss this one, too (CT, Sept. 22, 1989, p. 40, and Nov. 3, 1989, p. 15). There was virtually no mention of care for creation, for example, in Lausanne II’s Manila Manifesto. If evangelicals fail to help provide leadership in the wave of concern for the environment we are about to witness in the nineties, others will be more than willing to fill the breach. These include the World Council of Churches, creation-centered pantheists, New Agers, and those worshiping Canaanite fertility goddesses.

In spite of this blind spot, there are a few signs of hope. Christian relief-and-development agencies, like World Vision and World Concern, are increasingly focusing on ecological development in Third World countries. They are on the lookout for self-help projects for the poor that both provide economic assistance and restore the environment through reforestation and terraced farming.

The Evangelical Covenant Church of America is another example. They have embarked on a new project in Latin America that helps the poor while not harming the ecological balance of the region. As a result of earlier relief efforts, they were granted development rights to a section of rain forest in northern Ecuador. There they were able to resettle victims from a March 1987 earthquake in a way that preserves the region’s rapidly disappearing rain forests.

Toward The Twenty-First Century

To anticipate and respond to the challenges of the nineties will require a renaissance of Christian creativity. We need to pray that God’s Spirit will blow through our imaginations.

We need to burst out of the wineskins of the conventional and create whole new ways to seek first the kingdom of God in our lives and in our mission.

We need, more specifically, seminary graduates who have been taught how to plant churches and create ministries that are responsive to the challenges of a new decade.

We need decision makers who place the advance of God’s kingdom above the maintenance of Christian bureaucracies—leaders who are willing to risk creating the ministries the nineties will require.

And we need a generation of Christians who are willing to put first things first, designing imaginative new ways, in community, to free more time and money for investment in the work of God’s kingdom.

As we approach the twenty-first century we have an opportunity to be proactive instead of reactive, creatively and compassionately responding to the world in which God has placed us. We have an opportunity to move the church into a leadership position in a time of unprecedented change. We have the opportunity to advance God’s kingdom in some partial ways now—in anticipation of Christ’s return when all things will be made new.

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