What will the church look like in time to come and will it still be church?

2010-09-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

In the future, the automobile will probably be electric, sleek, quiet and efficient, equipped with full HD TV, inline toiletry, automated grooming services, virtual office tools and self activated email excuses to explain why you will be late for work. It just a matter of time before we stop commuting to and from work at all. Maybe we won't need automobiles or other transportation at all.

But maybe we will spend our lunch breaks doing a little star gazing. Oh I am sure that if you pay your money you will get to tour space, but for less you will be able to virtually tour space.

I predict that one day the Vuvuzela will either be muted or it will be able to play notes or it will dissapear from the sporting scene altogether. I also predict a time when we will have full three dimensional projected television imagery in our homes.

Talking of sport, maybe sometime this century we might still get to see unbiased commentary on US, Australian or New Zealand sporting channels. Hopefully by then we will also have found ways to search and find WMD's or to make them appear even if they don't already exist.

Perhaps the day will come when we can engineer self-cleaning babies, dogs that bury their own waste, non-destructive children, a way to defuse the noise of barking dogs, a cure for the common cold, self-inflating egos, self-deflating stocmachs, a way to spike adverts and spam so that the originators feel our displeasure, evergreen grass that doesn't ever need mowing ... the list goes on.

Doubtless the time is coming when we will travel at great speeds. Trains will breach the sound barrier and aircraft will achieve transonic speeds. Computers will also process data and store information at multiples of current limits. Some would even predict that a machine will emerge that will have comparable intellegence to a human and what we now call 1 megabyte will become 1 hie or one human intellegence equivalent, by which I imply that machines will be capable of multiple hie's.

We could also follow trends to predict the future of the church. If current trends persist, busy people will attend church virtually and in their own time. Church services will not only be delivered to their homes, but they will even be able to edit out overly challenging remarks or select which choir or what songs to listen to, whilst enjoying virtual fellowship after the service in a virtual coffee shop.

Maybe healing will have been automated by then and prayer queues will be processed by a system that will feed back responses like, "working on it" or "your request is in the queue" or "you are now number 1,279,328 in the queue, please be patient" or "hey whilst you are waiting for your prayer to be answered, why not try one of our instant feel better courses". Alternatively, you can use the time to buy sin credits.

ATM's and hand-held card swipe machines will also be used to collect offerings from those who do go to church or perhaps we will just be tagged and billed at the door, just as cars are tagged on roll roads. Those who stay at home will only need to select an amount on their membership account to pay their tithes, which would also conveniently serve to rate the preacher. Sermons will be translated into many languages.

Aside from all the tongue-in-cheek nonsense above, if the original ideas of men do have their way, church as we know it today may cease to exist or even be lost to antiquity in time to come. Our great grand-children may lose all touch with the faith unless God intervenes.

So, lets debate it. In real terms, given what you see happening in churches today, what will we look like, ten, twenty or thirty, fifty or even one hundred years from now (assuming that Christ has not returned by then).

Image source: http://news.architecture.sk/uploaded_images/2010/08/future-church-03.jpg

Intense Debate

What will the church look like in time to come and will it still be church?