Thanks for this question, George. I get asked questions about the future of the church a lot in my travels, and sometimes I struggle to answer … not because I lack opinions and hunches, but because I fear that some unhelpful motives might lie behind the question.

Sometimes people, especially clergy, ask this question hoping I’ll tell them that everything will be fine. That will allow them to return to their previously scheduled complacency or paralysis or business as usual.  Others would be OK if I told them there is no hope, the church is doomed, etc., etc., because oddly, that answer also allows people to return to their previously scheduled complacency.

Sometimes people ask for another reason. They want to hear what’s ahead so they can adjust their expectations and prepare for that future. Unfortunately, though, if I answer the question when it is asked for this reason, I aid and abet the audience in being observers rather than participants in our shared story. Instead of trying to be protagonists who can make a difference and help shape the future, I invite people to be bystanders who will simply need to adjust to a history shaped by others.

I doubt you had any of these motives in asking the question, but I didn’t want to respond without helping other readers see those dangers.

Here’s what I think (since you asked): I think the future holds multiple and opposite paths for our churches.

Some churches are heading full-steam-ahead into Christian nationalism and some, into Christo-fascism.  These churches will be “relevant” - but in the worst possible way.

Other churches will retreat into their liturgies, calendars, and internal debates and become increasingly irrelevant to the rest of us. They will see themselves as the center of the universe.

But I think some churches - and any of us can be advocates and examples of this — will rise to the challenge of this climate-changed world. We will explore new expressions of Christian faith that many visionaries have pointed to for generations. For example, Carl Sagan once wrote, “A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.”

And Fr. Thomas Berry said, “All human traditions are dimensions of each other…. Upon this intercommunion on a planetary scale depends the future development of the human community. This is the creative task of our times… Each [tradition] has a distinctive contribution to make to human development that can only be made by itself.”

So I dare to imagine that bold, beautiful new expressions of Christian community are possible. To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, they are already here, and on a quiet day, I can hear them breathing, singing, and dancing for joy.  People are already writing the practical theologies and liturgies and hymnodies and social and ecological agendas for these new uprisings of Christian faith. When they emerge as various wings of a diverse new movement, they will be so full of such good news that  everyone (including nearly all Christians!) will have to repent (or rethink everything) in order to believe them.

~ Brian McLaren