Recently a friend of mine produced a blog entry asking what the church might look like fifty years from now. His excellent piece jogged my thinking a bit, and I want to try and bring some order to the results.

Let's start with a dose of reality: no one (least of all me!) can hope to predict accurately the look or shape of church life half a century from now. That's true even if we limit ourselves to the church in North America, let alone the rest of the planet.

Still, it's fun and perhaps useful to try, so here goes. Assuming we're still around fifty years from now, I predict the church in the United States may exhibit the following characteristics.

Sharply focused on a few well-defined ministries. Churches during the middle of the 20th century tended to look a great deal like the "Big Three" auto makers in Detroit. They offered a wide variety of ministries to a flock of consumers, and the biggest tended to offer the largest number of selections. The coming generation of believers likely will insist on identifing a few core ministries, doing them well, and accomplishing them with limited resources. My guess is that corporate worship, personal devotion, small-scale and highly personal ministries and mission activities, intentional building of healthy relationships, and character development will claim the church's attention.

Division Resistant Connectivity. American churches often grew by distinquishing themselves from one another during the past century. The coming generations will connect with one another through email, blogs, and whatever technology succeeds such things. It will be far more difficult than in the past to isolate believers from other believers. They will discover for themselves what they have in common and increasingly feel at home with one another in spite of inevitable differences. Effective church leaders will learn to work well in the context of such connectiveness.

Shared Facilities. Some churches will choose to own their own facilties. Others will meet in  homes or rented quarters. Given human nature, though, most churches will continue to buy and develop property. Costs coupled with increased connectivity as described above will lead many churches to choose to own and share property with two or more other congregations. Such facilities will tend to be designed to serve many purposes and will be well built and maintained.

Spirituality. Classic spiritual practices such as disciplined prayer lives, rejection of the excesses of materialism, direct  and personal care of the sick and aged, reflection on the scriptures and the like will become central to the daily of lives of many Christians. One result will be the continuing defusion of Christianity into its surrounding culture, perhaps replacing almost entirely large-scale evangelisitic events.

Humility. The church militant will be replaced (for the most part) by the church humbled. As the last remnants of "Christendom" fade away, many Christians will turn from previous strategies devoted to gaining power in the world to seemingly new (yet very ancient) strategies, which reject power in favor of humility and service. Many older observers will be surprised by the results. The humbled church will prove quite effective at being the people of Jesus in the world.

No doubt I could generate more projections, but it seems best to pause at this point and invite comment. For my own part, I look foward to seeing what the future holds for the church.