Uncertainty

Alan Roxburgh explains that we do not need to know the future to be prepared for it.

Our unraveling present is the womb wherein the Spirit is gestating the future. We don’t need gurus pointing to some future. We need to release one another into the ordinariness of our neighbourhoods. Leaders form people who ask: What is the Spirit gestating amongst us and in our neighbourhoods so that we can join with God… It is by discovering how to discern the Spirit in our communities that we live into God’s future.

In my book called Being Church Where We Live, I describe how followers of Jesus can join together to be prepared for whatever future life brings to us.

Possible Future?

1. Season of Urgency
The season is urgent. The spiritual climate of a nation can decline much faster than most Christians leaders realise. Unless something dramatic happens, the spiritual decline in the US will accelerate. Revival and restoration are never automatic. They require a change of heart and change of behaviour of the church and its leaders. There are few signs that this will occur. History has plenty of examples of places in the world where a strong church has disappeared, because people and church leaders did not listen to the Spirit and heed his call to change. The expected revival will not come, unless the church agrees to do things God's way.

2. Truth falls to the Ground
Lying has become a respectable strategy for political leaders on all sides of the political spectrum. When the leaders of a nation lie to their people, and the people welcome the lies, then foolishness and folly follows. Stirring up trouble and disagreement gets easy. When truth fails, power triumphs.

3. Love of War
Because faith in military power is so deeply entrenched in America, if antagonisms intensify, there is a risk that people will seek to resolve their disagreements by military power (as they did in 1776 and 1865). The outcome could be ugly.

4. No Empire
God does not need a union of states, or powerful nations to accomplish his purposes. The does not need a Christian empire to enforce his will in the world. He does not need a powerful Christian nation to restrain evil. He gave his law for that purpose, and it is sufficient for the task (1 Tim 1:7).

God is not interested in Christians seizing political power. He is focused on his Kingdom, which comes to reality, as people freely submit their authority to Jesus and obey the leading of the Holy Spirit. The Kingdom of God cannot be established by political power. It must not be confused with a Christian nation.

5. Political Empire
America might divide and fight along religious/cultural/political lines, as the divided nation flies apart. However, faith in political power is so strong in the United States, it is more likely that a powerful political leader will be given the autocratic power to hold together the divided nation. To ensure the unity of the United States, people would welcome a leader with absolute power. He would use military force to unite the nation and put down those who are rebelling and breaking away.

6. Persecution
If the prophets challenge these developments, the church will almost certainly be hated by people with power. To survive and grow, it will need to become politically invisible.

• No big buildings/facilities
• No public worship meetings
• No big-name pastor-leaders.

Highly visible people and activities make the church easy to track down and attack.
The church must be invisible to political and military leaders, and highly visible to people open to the gospel. I describe how this can be done in Being Church Where We Live.

7. Political and Social Collapse
If a political-military dictator gets control of the nation, he will eventually fail and his power will collapse. The outcome will be worse than the disaster that he was trying to prevent.

8. Opportunity for the Kingdom
A collapse of political power will be a season when God can bring his Kingdom to fullness. Those who have stayed loyal to Jesus (many will fall away) will be prepared for this opportunity. They will have turned their invisible churches into Kingdom Communities that can provide all the services that the government has failed to deliver. The Kingdom Communities will expand and multiply rapidly to bring God’s salvation and kingdom to a broken world.

Future

When we get a vision of our future, we must be careful. God can show his plans for the future, but we must not just assume that it is from him. The enemy sometimes shows us his plan for our future. If we agree with it, then he has permission to fulfil it. So the evil plan becomes self-fulling. Therefore, we need to discern whether what we have seen laid out is from God or the enemy, before we agree to it.

Piketty (13) Forecast for the Future

Piketty shows that the distribution of wealth is changing. Wealth grew during the 19th century. It collapsed between 1910 and 1945 and was flat until 1974. Wealth is now growing again.

Piketty assumes that inequality will increase. He says that the 20th century was abnormal, because capital/income ratios declined, as two wars and the great depression destroyed capital. Following 1945, shortages of skilled labour shifted the balance towards labour. At the same time, unions and labour laws increased the share going to labour. That trend ended in about 1973, and since then the capital/income ratio has been increasing, and inequality along with it.

Piketty says we are coming back the 19th century situation. The twentieth century was abnormal. The 19th century was more normal, so we are reverting the norm.

This does not make sense. Most the wealth in 1800 was land. The aristocracy were allocated their land holdings by William the Conqueror and the winners of various civil wars. Renting land was mostly money for nothing, but the land has to be developed to get better returns.

The industrial revolution favoured capital. A huge army of labourers moving from the country to the cities kept wages down until the middle of the century. At the same time, the landed aristocracy declined.

By 1900, wealth was dominated by industrial capital. Land was a tiny share of wealth. Some of the industrial wealth like the railways was gained through political privilege. Most was gained through innovation and saving to produce what people wanted.

Piketty says that the situation that prevailed in the 19th century is a more normal situation, and that we are going back to that. This does not make sense to me. The 19th century was a very different. During this century, the wealth of the landed gentry declined, and the industrial revolution produced rapid economic growth. There is no reason why our future should be like that.

The nineteenth century was a period of relative peace. Between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, a hundred years later, many wars occurred, but they were relatively minor. The gold standard meant that inflation was almost non-existent for the entire century. Recessions occurred, but they mostly resolved quickly.

There is no reason to expect these conditions will prevail in the twenty-first century. We are more likely to see serious wars and economic disaster.

The Future of Christchurch

The politicians, town planners and guardians of heritage buildings are on the radio and television discussing the future of Christchurch. Their views can be summed up in the following statement. “We must decide what kind of Christchurch we want.” What they are really saying is that they want to decide what kind of Christchurch we want.

What they do not realise is that the shape of a city is not decided by the politicians and planners, but by the people and businesses of a city. As they make millions of decisions, the future city will be formed.

People will decide, if they want to live in Christchurch, or move away. I am staying, because this is where I am called, but many will move away. Homeowners will decide what to do with their homes.

The owners of destroyed buildings will decide what to do with them in (conjunction with their insurance companies).

Businesses will decide if they want to stay in Christchurch. Many will decide to leave the Central Business District (CBD). Lock-downs during a crisis make it a risky place to do business. In the past businesses needed to be concentrated in the centre to ease communications. With modern transport and communications, there is very little to be gained from being based in the CBD I suspect that most manufactures and many office-based businesses will decide to re-establish in locations where they are not surrounded by risky buildings and risks of costly shutdowns. Some will go to the suburbs temporarily, but decide they like it there.

Christchurch people decided long ago that they prefer shopping in suburban malls, so they are unlikely to go back to the central city for shopping now. Many retailers will leave the CBD and take their businesses to where the people want to be.

Christchurch may become a centre-less city. More and more business activity may be pushed back out to the edges and suburbs, but be joined together by communications networks. This may be a better model for a modern city.

The hierarchical-control model has everything clustered at the centre. A more Christian model is decentralised but joined together in networks. If the Holy Spirit is at the centre, that is enough..

There is one important ingredient that the politicians and planners have left out of their discussions. God has a purpose for Christchurch. Men like Robert Godley who were involved in the planning of and founding of the city came here in response to a God’s calling to advance the Kingdom of God. They believed that they were establishing something specific for him. That vision still stands and will in the end carry more weight than the speculations of the politicians and planners.