I have never been more concerned about the state of the world.
There, I said it.
At the same time I have never had more hope…
This is a short article in which I aim to do two things: Firstly, I want to add my voice to Christian leaders who have recently felt led of the Lord to carefully say ‘Something serious could be coming. We need to be ready.’ Secondly, I want to briefly lay a foundation for my own thoughts and discernment. I may build on this down the track.
Let me begin by taking note of those serious, prayer-filled voices. I detect in them little desire to catastrophise or hasten tribulation. Rather, they are carefully considering the signs of the times and are looking ahead with caution, wisdom, and hope. I’m thinking in particular of recent talks by Pete Greig and Jason Clark at this year’s Wildfires festival.1 Consider also the recent video released by Steve & Esther Uppal of All Nations Church. I’ll add others as I find them.
Servants of the church have a responsibility. It is our task to both comfort and challenge, as faithfully as we can, according to God’s word. We are not above the fray; we preach to ourselves also. Often this means positive encouragement; we declare the delights of the joy that Jesus set before us: the forgiveness of sins, our adoption and belonging, and the wisdom of everything he commanded. But we do not tickle ears. It is also our task to speak about uncomfortable things such as the reality of evil and injustice, or when we need to attend to our discipline or repentance.
This current moment is one of those difficult times. There is a fragility in the current world order that is unprecedented in our generations. I don’t intend, here, to paint a full and detailed picture; there are others who are expert in their field who can do that detailed analysis without getting stuck in conspiratorial mires or despair. But consider the broad landscape:
We are not waiting for a global-scale conflict; we have one. We don’t have to amplify the rhetoric to ‘World War 3’ to be realistic about the wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and other less-spoken-about places. The next phase of a kinetic war would only take an Archduke-like spark…
As someone with a tech background, new technology does not scare me. I am not afraid of AI. There is always turmoil when there are technological step-changes, and that is pain enough. Nevertheless, the chatbot Turing test is well behind us. We now have self-improving intelligent agents inhabiting the same online territory which humanity - through our reliance on digital identities and systems - also inhabits. We can not assume a benign, or controllable, outcome…
I am not an economist. But I can see the interweaving currents of a sovereign debt crisis and the fraying threads of currencies and energy markets. The economic gears that enervate the social contract of welfare and security, freedom and prosperity, are grinding their teeth rather than freely turning. We assume we are too big to be a failed state…
Our society is increasingly incoherent. This is amplified as intersectionality collapses in on itself in practice. Our common grounds, now deconstructed, are increasingly shallow and bureacratic; they are therefore increasingly authoritarian. The result is structural extremism. Dehumanising ‘Never Agains’ are reemerging, including the blinded horror that is antisemitism. Disaffected tribes of all persuasions are coalescing, and are literally masked and marching. We can ponder what happens if the calls for uprising (in their various slogans and languages) get an organised response…
Different takes on this picture exist and will emerge. When I find commentary that is useful, I may link it here.
But, for my purposes, the question is this: As Christians and Christian leaders, what should be our response? If something is going to happen, how do we prepare?
These are my brief thoughts:
Firstly, we don’t turn away.
I remember once when I was praying for my church of the time; I had gone for a walk and was looking over an idyllic English early-summer pasture with woolly-plump sheep resting in the sun beside still waters. As I prayed, they became a picture of the church, and I had a strange urgency: ‘They are not ready to be uncomfortable, they don’t know what’s coming…’ I remember another time at a youth festival; during the Eucharist I suddenly wept as I glimpsed in my mind’s eye thousands of young fresh-faces in uniform, a generation to carry the brunt of what might be. I share this, not to claim any sense of being a prophet, but to remind myself how I shrugged and deflected those thoughts.
At the time I spiritualised them as useful internal metaphors. By some providence, since then, I have been exposed to places and people for whom conflict, division, and displacement are not images but concrete reality. As church leaders the expectations on us often push us towards positivism - joyful worship events, popular courses, and an upbeat vision statement. These need to continue! Yet the way of depth comes from concretising our faith in real terms; even, and especially, when that reality is not pleasant.
Sometimes there is a time to let troubles and potential troubles push us to seek the Lord. Not hopelessly. Not morosely. But seriously.
Many years ago, as part of an exercise, I was invited with other young leaders to do some distant-horizon future planning. It coincided with a thought experiment in our church planting team: ‘What would happen if the world collapsed and we are isolated? Who would we be? What would we pursue?’ It was a useful theoretical question to distil vision and values. It is more concrete now. We need serious people to talk about serious things, seriously.
I sincerely hope that our governmental leaders, behind the scenes, have done this serious work; that there are plans to handle the scenarios that we hope will never happen. Church and Christian leaders need to be similarly serious. We need to turn towards these uncomfortable things, avoid dystopian or utopian naivetes, and be seriously praying, seriously discerning, seriously preparing. Together.
If the church and its leadership is apostolic in any sense, it is realised in its willingness to pursue the grace of God even, and especially, when it’s hard or when hard things loom. We run towards the storm, so that we can be the shelter of God. We turn towards the dark, so that we can be light of God. We extend ourselves vulnerably, so that we can be the blessing of God. Like Mary at the foot of the cross, we do not turn away from the birth-groans of creation.
Therefore, secondly, we practice hope, in prayer and worship. Pete Greig, in his talk, was exactly right when he said that the first thing we pray for is peace. We do not want calamity; our vision is Jesus.
Now I must be clear: the return of the Lord and the current fragilities are not the same thing. The coincidence of the coming decade with the 2000th anniversary of the death and resurrection of the Lord is obvious; but the excesses of eschatological fervour do not necessarily follow! What we can note is this: Whenever we look towards the future - no matter our location on the timeline of history - the wisdom of Christ’s promise of return means that we will perceive him as the end and goal. However distant it might be, that vision of Jesus encourages us, and exhorts us.
I was reflecting the other day with a friend about Jesus’ prayerful agony in Gethsemane. He alone could carry the pain and sin of the world, yet he invited his friends to share that moment and watch and pray with him. Here’s the pondering: if our Lord was so moved before his Passover, what moves him now as we approach the 2000th anniversary of it, and perhaps (in some day or hour), that crisis of trumpets, judgement, and union? I’m sure that there is a delight in his bride as a hope set before him. But trepidation also perhaps? Justice comes with tears; the day of the Lord is a fearful making of all things right. We sing ‘break my heart for what breaks yours,’ and the fullness of that is, at least, to watch and pray, and maybe even with blood and sweat and the fear of the Lord.
What else is prayer, but the bringing the fullness of ourselves to our Abba Father in the concrete essence of the Lord’s Prayer: your will be done on earth as it is in heaven? Begin in me, and in us! It is offering our bodies, our fears, our sins, our anxieties, our privileges, our weaknesses, our all. So when I say practice prayer, I mean it as that - practice it, as an exercise - because if catastrophe comes, we will need it like muscle memory. I am preaching to myself here.
And what else is prayer, but the grasping of hope? For his is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen. As Christians, we have a heritage that is most firmly established not in the fair weather of commercial or political power, but in the witness of those who have gone before, who with assurance of eternal security invested their whole lives in the way of the Lord. As Western Christians we can receive from the charism of brothers and sisters from troubled places who practice faith in concrete adversity, and hold to hope. It is because we trust in the work of God, that we aspire to speak life instead of death, blessing instead of curse, and to live at peace in so far as we are able. In hope, we bet it all on faithfulness first.
So is it a time to prepare?
Yes! This has ever been the case. Drawing on the wisdom of his promise again: the Lord taught our forebears, ‘you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him’ (Matthew 25:44). This type of readiness is the paramount task for church leadership right now.
Let us at least learn from the experience of the covid era. We know what it’s like when the forms of church fall away; when we no longer have access to the riches and strengths that we were used to: our services, gatherings, conferences, and other aspects of industrial Christianity. But the substance didn’t fade, although some struggled to find it in the chaos of that time.
As we extrapolate from that experience, we might note that:
We need to holdfast to our message, our kerygma. One of the things I have learned from those who have navigated faith in difficult contexts is this; faith comes before flag. Whatever authority and capacity we have to serve and bless derives from our Lord, Jesus himself. As soon as we subsume that to the flag of a nation or a cause, we undermine the essence of who we are. This does not mean rejecting patriotism or matters of justice; we love, we serve, we bless… but in His name, for His sake, in His way of truth and life.
We need to invest in the means of sharing and disseminating discernment. In times that are substantially volatile, unpredictable, and obscure, the capacity to make decisions as it ‘seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us,’ according to his word, is concretely practical. Again, I have observed this in those who have weathered affliction; a genius for weighing things up in faith, and being boldly decisive.
We need to prepare for institutional systems failure, but persistent local liveliness. How do we resource, enable, hold - including accountability and support - a large number of small, local, behind-the-scenes, communities persisting and pursuing prayer, mission, and justice? We will need communication through online and offline means; funding and releasing people for grounded and itinerant roles; collaboration across traditions; etc. etc.
We need to negotiate our interaction with ‘power.’ How might we bless and pray for government leaders, and cooperate and offer ourselves as a means of good order and public welfare? At the same time, how do we hold our prophetic voice, and know when to stand against? How might we have each others’ backs, and prepare for the possibility that faith and freedom may not share the same path?
These are big questions, and there are other questions that we cannot yet comprehend. They need to be asked and answered, without fear, and in hope, as best we can. By God’s providence, he has placed us, in this place, for such a time as this. In every sense of the phrase, God help us.