Year End Predictions
Note: I shared this on social media three years ago. It is still relevant, as the kids and the boomers say…
One of our anti-traditional baby-boomer LCMS pastors posted one of those "Ten Ways Church Services Will Soon Change" (yawn) blogs from a fellow-traveler.
And it was exactly as anyone could have predicted.
I laughed.
It reminded me of the science book I had in the 1970s with predictions about the year 2000 (so, where in the heck is my flying car and full salary for a 20 hour work week?).
The church growth crowd pronounces the demise of traditional Christianity each and every year: only their buzzwords, their facial hair, and the style of their eyeglasses ever seem to change in these ponderous articles.
At any rate, here are ten ways that I predict that God will actually be dealing with us a hundred (or a thousand) years from now:
1) People will be brought to the faith by water Baptism in the name of the Most Holy Trinity, both as infants and as adult converts.
2) Men - called and ordained pastors - will preach the gospel, administer the body and blood of Christ, and absolve sinners.
3) The creeds of the church will be confessed by the faithful as they have since the earliest centuries.
4) Hymns confessing Christ and divine grace will continue to be sung by the faithful.
5) Young people will be catechized in the faith through catechisms that they will learn by heart.
6) The church's liturgy will continue as it has since the earliest centuries - focused at altar, font, and pulpit; spoken and chanted, with reverence and holy joy, transcending age, ethnicity, and subcultures and uniting the church across time and place.
7) In their personal piety, Christians will make the sign of the holy cross, pray the Lord's Prayer, and chant the psalms, collects, and the daily offices of the church.
8) The canonical biblical books will be studied in their original languages and taught in the vernacular tongues, as well as the historic confessions of the church.
9) Pastors will visit the sick, the shut-in, the dying, the poor, the outcast, and others who are forgotten and left behind by our shallow entertainment and youth culture (which is embraced and obsessed over by the church growth experts). They will bring them the good news of Jesus Christ and will anoint them and prepare them to die in the faith of Jesus Christ.
10) Christians will continue to endure persecution, as the cross is, and will remain, a mark of the church until the Lord returns in glory.