Predictions for 2025: What I Suspect Will Happen
When it comes to the start of a new year, there tend to be two kinds of predictions. Key predictions for 2025 outline where theology may be tested. It’s the second of those types of predictions that can be of use, and I offer a dozen here that I hope will serve churches and their leaders for the coming year.
It’s the second of those types of predictions that can be of use, and I offer a dozen here that I hope will serve churches and their leaders for the coming year.
1. Ideology will replace theology as the gravitational center for an increasing number of churches. Rather than churches being built around core theological principles such as the inspiration and authority of the Bible or the atoning work of Jesus, they will become tribal in nature on the basis of political or cultural issues. For example, it will become more important that a church’s leadership supported a certain political party, or embraced a political stance, than whether it embraced an aspect of historic Christian orthodoxy.
2. Said ideological churches will not do well in the long term. Because they were attractional on the basis of cultural divides, coupled with a spirit that valued and embraced such division, they will continue to divide among themselves as new and various issues present themselves. When acrimony leads to assemblage, it is not long before that assemblage turns its energies on another enemy as the spirit of division knows no end. As Frederick Buechner once noted, “To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king.” Yet Buechner was wise in carrying the meal through to its final course. “The chief drawback,” he continues, “is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
3. Adding to church woes will be the expansion of theological “essentials” for tribal identity and inclusion. This is akin to churches that have little more than an ideological identity. Churches that have an ever-narrowing theological identity add so many things to the “essentials” category that it borders on cultic. It’s not enough to embrace, say, the Nicene Creed or the more recent Lausanne Covenant. Now, there is a move toward specific views of women in ministry, or the embrace of Calvinism, as new tests of orthodoxy. The dictum “in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity” has become “in our essentials, unity,” with an ever-diminishing category for anything in the liberty category and charity almost forgotten.
