discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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194 Future Church
sion have thought about that future and reflected on possible scenarios, the
better prepared they will be to face what actually does come.
If you had really believed in what you tell us is the Christian message,
you would have been here long ago. 4
—response of a man in China
It is quite clear that paradigms developed in the Industrial Age and the Enlightenment
period are being superseded and discarded. Much of the human
race now lives in a postmodern period that has been called the third wave or
the information economy. Even that information age has begun to wane with
Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, authors of Future Wealth, predicting that a
bioeconomy period is now getting underway that will hit full stride by the
2020s. In a TIME magazine article, Davis and Meyer talked about what they
expected in the near future:
Generation Xers born after 1964 . . . will experience two major economic
shifts: first, from the crunching to the connecting halves of this information
economy and, second, from a microwave-based connected universe
to the cell-based world of biologic and bionomics. Those of you in
Gen Y may have to go through three! 5
Radically new paradigms of church and mission may or may not now be
germinating in the soil of these global changes. To be sure, the Church is centuries
old and while it has experienced some enormous changes through the
centuries, some things that people thought would change have remained the
same. About three-quarters of the way through the 20th century, some predicted
that preaching was about to radically change and maybe even disappear. For
most pastors, even very successful ones, it has not. Without a doubt, some new
ways of doing old things will come along and be embraced. The fact that people
change jobs and even careers several times during their lifetime is affecting
how people view missionary service. Missionary candidates used to think in
terms of spending the rest of their lives on a mission field. Now, people applying
for missionary service are willing to commit for 10 to 15 years and then
reevaluate where God may be leading them. Some other changes will be in the
area of how financial support is given. Already people in some countries give to
mission organizations by credit card or automatic bank withdrawal. Some
changes will be in communications with missions organizations likely doing
more and more communicating with supporters through electronic rather than
printed means. In the early 1970s some people predicted the demise of large
churches and the disappearance of denominations by the year 2000. Neither of