You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
For the hour of new clarity.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest delivers sermons and goes around the temple connecting with worshipers. But Mindar has some unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters. Mindar is a robot.
Designed to look like Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, the million-dollar robotic priest is an attempt to reignite people’s passion for their faith in a country where religious affiliation is on the decline. For now, Mindar is not AI-powered. It just recites the same pre-programmed sermon about the Heart Sutra over and over. But the robot’s creators are planning on giving it learning capabilities that will enable it to tailor feedback to worshipers’ specific spiritual questions and ethical quandaries.
“This robot will never die,” said Tensho Goto, the chief steward at the temple, Vox reported. “It will just keep updating itself and evolving. With [the infusion of artificial intelligence], we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles. It’s changing Buddhism.” AI religion is upon us. Welcome to the future.
Sampling High-Tech Faith in Troubled Times
This is a daunting time to be a Christian leader. Western countries are seeing increasing numbers of churches graying and declining. While not many churches have AI pastors yet, there is a very active search for new possibilities, including using new tech. More pastors rely on online tools for liturgies, robust biblical language programs for engaging the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts, and social media to appear connected. We can’t forget that many multisite churches simulcast their sermons. Some have even experimented with 3D holographic preachers, and today if you want to go to church, well . . . there’s an app for that.
As we race into this new decade of accelerating tech, some of the megachurches in the US are leading the charge. For example, in 1996, Graig Groeschel started Life Church in a garage in Edmond, Oklahoma. Today, it is the largest church in the United States on a huge campus. Ten years ago, they launched an internet church, inviting visitors from all over the world. Reportedly, Life Church now has 70,000 members composed both of those that come to their campus and those who worship online.
Not surprisingly, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, has joined the cyber-church club. Their online church allows visitors to watch or join live streams from other campuses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, and South Manila.
Andrew Conrad writes, “Today’s online churches treat the internet as a campus all its own, with interactive chat, dedicated online pastors, and a web ministry ready to serve their cyber-congregation.” Which means, like televangelists of an earlier era, there are a growing number of electronic congregations. For example, Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Churches have 43,000 members that attend only on-screen.
This on-screen option is an important resource for people with mobility challenges and for many seniors. However, as cyber-congregations with visitations from online pastors continue to grow, it is difficult to predict to what extent it will replace face-to-face community gatherings. Even some local churches in the non-Western church are joining these online communities.
Join the Three-Step Dance
Now we will invite Christian leaders and those you work with to join the dance . . . anticipate some of the changes your churches, your people, and organizations could face if present trends continue as we race into the 2020s. For one last time we will invite you and those you work with to reflect on some of the societal and biblical issues before you that you need to grapple with in order to respond faithfully to these challenges and opportunities. We will reflect briefly on our theology of missiology but spend most of our time reflecting on a theology of formation. The reason for this is that there is a direct link between the growing crisis of participation in our churches and the growing seduction that an aggressive consumer culture poses, a culture that would like to persuade us to invest more of our time and resources into another view of “hope.”
Finally, we will survey some more examples of how Christian leaders and their teams are responding to these troubled times with innovative responses that welcome change to people’s lives by creating new forms of church-making.
We want to end this book by encouraging you to continue doing the Three-Step Dance of Anticipating, Reflecting, and Innovating. We also urge you to take regular time to search for best practices as you plan. Join those Christian leaders who are embracing new disciplines for themselves and their colleagues and developing new habits. For example, could researchers in some seminaries and colleges near you help you start the search? Create a network of colleagues who will be able to put you in contact with those finding new ways forward.
Urging Leaders to Welcome
the Good News Generation!
All Christian leaders know about what the Pew Research Center has categorized as the “nones and dones” of Gen Y and Z. We all know that these two incoming generations have the lowest rates of church affiliation. However, leaders in Silicon Valley firms are aware about other characteristics of Gen Y and Z that most church leaders aren’t.
Because these two generations are the first digital generations, they are much more aware of and concerned about the issues of economic, racial, and environmental justice. Christian leaders need to realize these generations not only care, but a higher percentage want to do something about these issues. Some Silicon Valley firms have actually added a social mission to their corporate policies to attract this generation of compassionate and creative young leaders.
We will, at the end of this chapter, share some examples of how these young innovators are creating new social enterprises to empower neighbors at the margins. Dwight and Tom will also suggest that church planters should consider starting their projects by inviting the youth in their communities to become involved in neighborhood change-making way before trying to create a worshiping community. Let’s start by identifying some of those changes and challenges that are likely to face our churches as we race into the 2020s.
Anticipating . . . The Rise of the Majority Church
In his book Future Faith, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson states:
Today, Christianity is undergoing another historic shift. For the first time in more than one thousand years, a majority of the world’s Christians are living in the Global South. This trend is accelerating, constituting the most dramatic geographical shift in the history of Christianity. For four hundred years, a Western culture shaped by the Enlightenment has been the comfortable home for dominant expressions of Christianity in the world. Now that all of this is changing, Christianity has become predominately a non-western religion.
As a Christian leader, what are the implications of this dramatic shift for your church and denomination as we move further into the twenty-first century?
Here is an example of the good news of leadership shifting to the global church. Micah Global is a great model of a new majority-world-led Christian organization. They are one of the faith-based organizations leading the way into being more faithfully present to the particular gifts brought to the world through each culture and people. Micah Global is an organization that was birthed as a hope-filled alternative to the political and economic colonizing impulses of Christendom’s missions predominantly led by white westerners from the USA, Canada, and Western Europe. From Micah Global’s inception, it drew on the leadership and influence of leaders from the majority church to create this organization committed to integral mission. Micah Global seeks to fan the flame of global richness at the heart of its innovation all over the planet.
Granberg-Michaelson’s insights are simultaneously convincing and hopeful. This global shift to the majority world represents a very important ecclesial transformation that has tremendous potential. This shift may well be signaling the end of the Christendom era. Thanks be to God! Yet what does the church look like post-Christendom? Dwight encourages leaders in Western churches to learn what this means.
The seeds of the Christendom church can be traced back to the church’s collusion with Rome beginning in the fourth ce...
