Predicting the Future Church

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We cannot predict what we do not already know about.  We ignore the unknown unknowns (a concept that existed long before Donald Rumsfeld turned it into a comedy act). 

Let me put it in another way. We have no vision of the future church and cannot have one until it happens.  Why?  Because if we knew what it was going to be, we would already be there.  Taleb describes this in his book.  If I know that tomorrow I'll know my partner is cheating on me, I actually know it today.  I can no longer go on living as I did when I believed my partner to be faithful.

If we all knew where God was calling the church to go we would be there!  The problem is we have no idea and so everyone's ideas are as good as anyone else's.  Who knows whether someone has the right vision for the future?  We cannot know, without knowing what that future is going to be.

Furthermore, we have no way of knowing whether God will build a future church out of our misunderstandings of what the future church will be.

We base our ideas for the future, on how the church has been in the past but we have no way of knowing whether or not it will be that way in the future.

The one thing we can learn from this is humility.  Just as my ideas might be helpful, a building block for the future, so might anyone else's.

What about prophecy?  It is a reading of the signs of the times, it is insight beyond the superficial insights of reasonable theologians, and acknowledgement that the future church will be born from the actions of millions of Christians today, and not from academic theological papers, read only by those who can afford to purchase expensive books.

Related articles

• Limits to Reason (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)