How to Futureproof Your Church

You’re standing outside church one Sunday morning, the early-spring sun warming your back as you chat with a newcomer about what he liked about the singing. Suddenly, the screeching of tires and an electrical crackling sound swivels your head.

In the shrubbery—dangerously close to the glass sliders of the new foyer—a gray sports car, smoking and steaming, has come to a halt. Before you can gather your thoughts, looking around for the police car that’s surely on this chase, the gull-wing doors open and a figure jumps out and races over to you.

“Quick! We haven’t a moment to lose!”

It’s your pastor. Or is it? An older version, by the looks of it. Your mind scrambling to make sense of it all, you shoot a look into the sanctuary. You can see your pastor chatting with one of the elders. What? What’s going on?

Before you can speak, your pastor—this older one—grabs you by the arm. “Jump in! Strap yourself in! Don’t worry. I’m still your pastor, but I’m back from the future: 2054, to be exact. You’re gonna see what it takes to stay Christian in 30 years’ time. What it looks like doing church in the West. Prepare to have your mind blown.”

Before you know it, you’re screeching out of the parking lot at 88 miles per hour. You look over your shoulder. People are rushing into the lot. You spot a church lady raising her hands to the heavens in anguish at the desecrated shrubs, then pow! You’re gone. You’re on your way to see what life as the people of God looks like 30 years from now.

Scary Present, Uncertain Future

Sure, it’s a bit of imaginative fun. But who hasn’t speculated? We’re watching the gathering storm clouds of a culture fracturing along ideological lines. We’re seeing increasing polarization in communities, with our political opponents no longer regarded as merely wrong but as evil—not helped, of course, by the geriatric clingers-on on Capitol Hill.

We’re witnessing the decline of church attendance at a rate we’ve not seen before. We’re nervous about the rise of reactionary nationalism countering an equally hard post-Christian globalism. We despair and rage over radical gender theory infesting our education systems and pushing untested drugs on children, constantly backed by legislation hostile to biblical anthropology.

And then there’s the explosion of social media, opposed to deep-rooted faith in both content and form, which is being manipulated by foreign forces. We see resulting anxiety and addictions in people young and old.

And then there’s war. Everywhere. It’s like Whac-A-Mole. Push down one conflict; another pops up somewhere else, with the usual round of slaughters, recriminations, and bloodied images beamed into the smartphones in our pockets.

And then there’s work. It’s more invasive of our time and our values. HR departments demand allegiance and alliance to convictions that run counter to ours. Why have that break-room conversation about Jesus your pastor tells you to have when it could cost you that promised promotion?

Amid such challenges, who wouldn’t want a Back to the Future experience? We could head to 2054, take extensive notes, capture some video on our iPhones, then come back and prepare ourselves for what’s coming. We could batten down the hatches in the face of an approaching storm. Or (we hope) we could chill out because, surprisingly, things are coming up roses for us.

Nervous Church

How do we “futureproof” our churches, and our lives as God’s people, amid such rapid change? How do we get ready for what we don’t know?

The church is nervous. We see it in the theological capitulation to progressive ideas on sexuality. We see it in the embrace of an increasingly hard nationalism that wraps a flag around the cross. We see it in the increase of parents bunkering down, taking their kids out of state schools, or—in the case of one family I know—moving to conservative Poland. Even as evangelicals, they feel a staunchly Roman Catholic country is a safer bet. (That is, until Poland catches up with the rest of us. Then where do we go?)

Nervousness isn’t new to God’s people. When storms were approaching the nation of Israel in the time of the prophet Isaiah, the first instinct for many was to tap into their version of Back to the Future, sending ever more inquiries to mediums, necromancers, and false gods who—for a price—could tell them what the future held (Isa. 8:19).

Yet the God of Israel told his people not to trust in such false hopes but instead to put their trust in him. There’d be no sports car whizzing them forward to see Jerusalem’s fate. But there would be a God—their covenant God—who’d be with them as they stepped into an uncertain future.

Israel’s covenant God would be with them as they stepped into an uncertain future.

The false gods, the false hopes, the other nations, the syncretistic efforts to manipulate history and outcomes—all needed to be rejected. The one, true, and living God had futureproofed them already.

Futureproofed Church

While we cannot predict black swan events (pandemic 2.0, anyone?), the trend indicates we’ll only become more polarized, more isolated, and more meaningless and despair-ridden. Doesn’t sound like a happy future.

Yet in the gospel of Jesus Christ, the church has a way of outrelating, outpurposing, and outlasting a culture that’s being reassessed by many of our disillusioned neighbors. This is already creating a head swivel among those who confidently predicted Christianity’s demise. The gospel’s transcendent message—grounded in the person of Jesus in actual history—is a compelling background against which to live in our rootless age.

As Tim Keller wrote in his final piece in The Atlantic, the church in the U.S. (and across the West) is due for revival. Things have become so fractured and uncertain that people who were once the “dones” or the “nones” are now asking serious questions about God again. British author Justin Brierley’s new book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheists and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again doubles down on Keller’s view. However the future of religion appeared in the eyes of Richard Dawkins, it ain’t going that way—or at least it’s far from settled.

But back to the future. How do we futureproof the church? Despite various pressure points—ecological threats, technological changes, polarizing effects of post-Christian societies looking for new (and often contradictory) sources of meaning—we must hold our nerve. And in holding our nerve, we must double down on things we know are true and on ways of life that have done well for us so far. We must put into the bank the communal, moral, theological, relational, and intellectual credit we’ll need in 2054, should this cultural trajectory continue.

We must hold our nerve.

So let’s determine to put time and energy into building resilient churches that take forgiveness seriously in a cancel culture, practice deep community as more and more people live alone, offer costly generosity in an era that worships self-care, and discern how to navigate a culture given over to technique and technology when it comes to sex and the body.

At the very time it feels safer to dial faith down, to put our hope and interests into our “paneled houses” (Hag. 1:4), a deeper, stronger Christianity is the answer.

Flash Forward

It’s counterintuitive at times like this, but if you could jump into that car and head off to 2054, I reckon you’d be surprised by the markers of a faithful and flourishing church. I imagine, despite present concerns and fears, you’d love to be part of it. And perhaps so might those young, non-Christian friends of yours who are still in college and still hostile to your beliefs.

Hey, they might even be the elders and worship leaders in 2054. God works like that.

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