James Choung: Diverse Community
National Director, InterVarsity Asian-American Ministries, Madison, Wis.
America will be even more ethnically diverse in the near future, and with the rise of mixed marriages, the old ethnic lines won’t be as distinct as they used to be. Diversity will probably bring a greater tribalism, as people in more diverse environments tend more to seek out people like themselves. But the upside is the greater opportunity for innovation, since the increasing diversity will demand new ways of doing things, and also a greater opportunity for justice and reconciliation. It will be increasingly difficult to have influence without the ability to see and understand our world through different cultural lens.
People are giving up on organized religion in droves. We can’t bank on others having any kind of biblical literacy or even a value for a communal sense of religion. Spirituality may still be around, but it’s becoming increasingly individual and a la carte—picking and choosing what works for them. To grow, a ministry will need to know how to make a convincing case for people to submit to each other in community. It’ll need to have leadership and a culture people trust enough to entrust some of their lives to it. The need for community can’t be taken for granted.
Cole NeSmith: A New Posture
Pastor, City Beautiful Church, Orlando, Fla.
I sense God is stirring in the hearts of the coming generation a desire for seeing the world reconciled to God through the work of Christ that outweighs holding onto denominational doctrines, interpretations and differences. We’re coming to a place of seeing the work of Christ [as] more important than being right.
The word “manna,” when translated, literally means, “What is it?” In much the same way, Christians have the opportunity to provide godly insights that lead people to ask, “What is it?” thus opening a door to glorifying God and pointing people toward Him. Rather than taking a defensive posture against science, academia, industry and creativity, we have the opportunity to operate beyond human capacity in each of these areas.
Cazden Minter: Authentic Incarnation
Lead Pastor, LiveOak Church, Cedar Park, Texas
The heart of ministry and evangelism has always been—and will always be—about relationships. People most often come to Christ because someone they know loves them and, over the course of a relationship (maybe even a lifetime), finds some way to point them toward Jesus. This will be at the heart of any outreach we do in the next 10 years as it has been over the last couple thousand years. At the end of the day, it comes back to this idea of incarnation.
Evangelism in the coming generation needs to move away from both the crowd and the individual. Instead, I think outreach will need to be grounded in authentic community, in groups of Christians who function like the picture Paul paints in Romans 12. People have broken families, cultures, work environments and friendships—everything is broken. But when they see “whole community” being lived out and they are invited in, life-change really happens.
James Emery White: Persecution & Passion
Founder and Senior Pastor, Mecklenburg Community Church, Charlotte, N.C.
Evangelism will need to make the same transformation as modern military combat: less large-scale, mass invasions and aerial assaults, and more house-to-house, hand-to-hand engagement.
In a post-Christian culture, churches will have to choose between wider cultural acceptance through cultural compromise or growing animosity and even persecution through continuing orthodoxy. It is ironic that the very thing the world hates about the church is its worldliness. When churches and church leaders become entangled in the web of party politics, power, greed and sexual immorality, the world’s stomach turns in disgust. Once the church purifies itself of such things, the second task is to fill itself with our great distinctive—grace. Grace combined with truth is what sets us apart and is the one thing we have to offer the world that it does not already have.
We will have to take prayer much more seriously and engage it much more intentionally. If culture progresses as it now portends, spiritual warfare will rear its head in ways most of us have only read about in missionary biographies. Finally, we will need to prepare Christ-followers for an ever-increasingly hostile environment where a vibrant faith brings persecution.
