The last two days, we’ve had a look at a prophetic forecast for 2008 and some microtrends. While we’re speaking of trends, here are a number of resources that you might find helpful when thinking about and contemplating the future …
- The Barna Group, an organisation led by George Barna, dedicated to pulsing the culture from a Christian perspective and to spotting emerging trends affecting the Christian church.
- Christianfutures.com, a web site dedicated to helping communities of faith develop foresight.
- Christian futurist, Tom Sine’s, web site.
- Future.com, a web site dedicated to discussing issues related to the future.
- Post-Modern Pilgrims by Leonard Sweet. [This book summary is from www.christianbooksummaries.com an excellent web site with free summaries of influential Christian books] Sweet’s latest book is The Church of the Perfect Storm.
- Ten Major Trends by Howard Snyder. [Thanks to Steve Addison for a copy of this article]
- What’s Next: Top Trends, an interesting blog about trends.
As followers of Christ, we are the ultimate people of the future, yet living anchored to the firm foundations of our historic faith, and living with full engagement in our present time. We worship and serve the God "… who is, who was, and is to come."
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the Christian book summaries site. A quick way to find out more books to read or not. Another useful source for (extended) reviews of books is Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed http://www.jesuscreed.org
Before consulting secular resources for information about the future, it is important to recognise that as Christians, we already know the future: it is a time when Jesus Christ will be all in all. A time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.
N.T. Wright comments in his recent book, Paul: Fresh Perspectives (2005: 171-72) that the “fifth act, in which the church is called to live and work, is therefore characterised by two things. First, it has firm and fixed foundations, including a definate closing scene which is already sketched in Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians 1, Colossians 1 and Revelation 21 and 22. Second, it has the command, under the Spirit, to improvise a way through the unscripted period between the opening scenes and the closing one. Note: no musician would ever suppose that improvising means playing out of tune or time. On the contrary, it means knowing extremely well where one is in the implicit structure, and listening intently to other players so that what we all do together, however spontaneously, makes sense as a whole.”