Future fatigue
Once upon a time, ministry involved preaching, counseling, leading worship and guiding congregations in mission. All were demanding tasks, to be sure, but they were nothing compared to what is expected of pastors today—predicting the future. Clergy conferences now trumpet words like emergent, postmodern, next and futuring, a vocabulary born out of apprehension that the church is crumbling around us and the future is a giant meteor hurtling toward our doomed planet. A new generation of prophets—mostly young, mostly technologically savvy—paint apocalyptic scenarios of the coming wrath followed by visions of a wireless new Jerusalem rising from the ruins. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote Santayana, but today’s wisdom runs in the other direction. Those who cannot anticipate the future are condemned to be crushed by it.
We who work in seminaries are no exceptions. Until recently, about the only forecasting required of me was to announce what courses I planned to teach during the next term and to participate in the periodic convulsion episodes known as “curricular reform.” But now we are warned that the master of divinity degree (the bread and butter of many theological schools) is rapidly losing traction, the idea of students coming to campus to spend several years reading theology is quaint and unrealistic, and seminaries are beginning to look like Studebaker dealerships.
So both clergy and professors are pressed to be soothsayers. We sit around conference tables gazing anxiously into the future, and what we think we see is as unsettling as it is increasingly clear. The future church (and the future seminary) will be less reliant upon tenured professionals and will be more flexible, increasingly free from bricks and mortar, accessible online, interactive, more focused on experience than on belief and doctrine, and firmly embedded in the digital, fluid, interfaith, multicultural and unbounded realities of the new global context.
