Bonus Prediction: A few prominent seminaries will break with ATS and start training pastors in an entirely new and innovative way.

While there have been some advancements in seminary training in the last twenty years, most notably the move to distance learning cohorts, the strictures seminaries must adhere to in order to stay in good standing with the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) puts significant limits on the kind of innovation schools can experiment with. But in a world where we regularly train pastors for a world that no longer exists, coupled with significant rising costs, we believe there will be a few bold institutions that figure out how to successfully experiment, which could become the future training grounds for pastors. If this subject is of interest to you, JR Rozko and I wrote a whitepaper on the subject a few years back.

Bonus Prediction: There will be a crisis in how people relate to local spiritual authority.

Between podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube channels, Reddit threads, online communities and a plethora of articles, people will be more committed to a tribe online than they will be to a particular people in a particular place. There is ongoing macrotrend within culture of people aligning themselves with people who tend to agree with close to 100% of what they believe. The Christian community is no different in this respect. Locally speaking, it will be hard for churches to lead with spiritual authority as people will increasingly live out a more individuated existence, choosing to belong to an online tribe of peers they agree with.

Bonus Prediction: The efforts of churches to reach cities and rural America will look wildly different. Forget your models.

There is a global trend of people moving towards cities, particularly among people younger than 40. These people are more diverse in terms of religion, ethnicity, worldview, education and background experiences. There has already been an end to the monoculture that long dominated the American consciousness and that is having profound effects on the church. But the end to that monoculture means the church models that “worked” will do poorly at reaching people who aren’t already predisposed to church. To reach people in cities will mean a diversity of missional models will be pioneered. But for every action, there is a counter-effect. If people move to cities en masse, the other side of the coin will be rural areas that feel more isolated, more spread out, smaller populations and fewer job opportunities. There will be a mission landscape (and opportunity) that is quite different than what it looks like today.

Bonus Prediction: Gospel saturation will hit a tipping point in a few cities.

The idea of “Gospel Saturation” is an idea that is already catching on. The principle  of saturation is that to fulfill the Great Commission, people in a geographic place need multiple opportunities to hear and respond to the Gospel and the only way to do this is for churches to work together, and not in competition. There are already a number of organizations making significant strides towards activating this principle. ChristTogether is currently working in 88 cities. The NewThing Network is seeing a wave of church planting happen with this principle that we haven’t seen since the Vineyard movement. And Saturate the Sound is one example of a city prototype that’s coming alive.

Bonus Prediction: The church will have a poverty crisis to contend with. 

Economists are predicting there will be an unemployment and refugee crisis coming and the American church will need to choose its’ posture towards the problem of poverty. Some of it will be people of color from different countries, but most people will be white and come from middle-to-upper-middle-class-backgrounds. There are 2 dominant factors at play: Unemployment will be driven by automation and the burst of the education bubble, while the refugee population will (possibly) soar due to climate change and global political terrorism.

Bonus Prediction: Many of the most “successful” churches will have a team-based leadership structure.

There has been a move in both business and the church towards more fluid, flatter and team-based leadership structures. While there will always be models of the genius with a thousand helpers, the significant movement of the APEST principles and practice in the church, coupled with the proliferation of similar visions of leadership in Silicon Valley, will dramatically shift the way the future leaders of the church choose to operate.