“When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times." + Jesus (Matthew 16:2-3) Will we be able to interpret the red skies?
This quote from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew helps provide the background for the title of my favorite book of essays from 2022, Red Skies: 10 Essential Conversations Exploring Our Future as the Church featuring missiologists, entrepreneurs, theologians, and more. The intention of the book as a whole is to be "prophetic," not so much in future-telling, but in revealing, as the late Hans Urs Von Balthasar elaborates:
Prophecy, of course, does not mean foretelling the future but knowing what God's righteousness demands in any particular instant; knowing how, from the standpoint of God, to assign to things and to human beings, to events and their configurations, their place in the overall pattern. The tangled threads of time are unravelled, and "the system" is laid bare. But one cannot wish to play the role of the conscience of the age without being oneself involved centrally in it.
This City Notes (CN) post is the 2nd of 3 posts featuring excerpts from Red Skies that help parse out Balthasar's quote above in relation to patterns found in our society at personal, communal, and global levels. This post includes some quotes and adapted excerpts from Leonard's Sweet's essay, "Red Skies, White Elephants, Gray Rhinos, and Black Swans," which is worth the price of the book alone. If anything intrigues you below, I encourage you to purchase Red Skies for yourself and read Sweet's entire essay that is the 1st of 10 as it features more research statistics, hypotheses, insights, and stories than I can post here. Enjoy, and if you want to engage in discussing anything that you read, feel free to reach out.
A Minyan of Trends, Terrains, and Trajectories w/ Leonard Sweet
1 | Red Skies are meant to do to us what a red rag does to a bull: awaken us, alert us, and sometimes anger us into agency:
environmental change and rising temperatures;
global and local pandemic(s);
consumerism;
celebrity and entertainment worship;
increasing polarization.
2 | White Elephants in the room are the things we know we should deal with decisively, but either we don't know where to begin or we're afraid that waking these disputatious giants would be worse than going around them and letting them just lay there:
global and local poverty;
economic inequality and universal basic income;
racial injustice and common equity;
new masters of the universe: media, money, and marketing;
conspiratorial suspicions and loss of trust.
3 | Gray Rhinos are predictable crises that silently and stealthily rear their ugly head, for which we are ill-prepared to stare down:
higher education in crisis;
emotional intelligence and intellectual intelligence growth;
mental health needs.
The zoological term for a group of rhinos is a crash – and when many rhinos travel together, we may well expect some kind of crash to happen. Black swans are a wedge, white elephants a parade, and red skies, a blaze.
4 | Black Swans are unpredictable and unknown (in contrast to Gray Rhinos); they ambush us as Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposes in his Black Swan Theory, highlighting the role of history-changing eruptions that are unseen, unforeseen, and unprecedented:
human identity and reality questions;
artificial intelligence and technology evolution (GRAIN);
disenchantment and seeking new means to make utopia.
The next two decades will promise to be some of the most challenging days in the last five hundred years for the connecting of the red skies to the blue heavens.
| 1 | A Gathering Blaze of Red Skies: Ex. The Rise of Globalization and Localization
The church is caught in one of history's strongest headlocks, forcing it out of its insider, establishment, default comfort status into a more outsider, outlier, uncomfortable mode. Some of us believe these headlocks are shaking Christianity into its true form, forcing Christians to dig deep and return to our roots. Were we ever designed to be part of an establishment anyway? The Covidian Era spells the end of Constantinian captivity of the church and the collapse of Christendom.
What is most concerning is a syndrome best described as JDD (Jesus Deficit Disorder) – the disappearance of Christ from his church. The church of the future must move from fortress church to field church. Strategic planners must become seed planters. The church must move from an insider mentality (it's-all-about-us) to an outsider focus (let's-get-over-ourselves) that tracks what Jesus is doing in the world. This may mean the rebirth of the Catacomb Church, new forms of cellular spirituality, and new monastic mentalities and modalities of mission.
In the future, hidden religions will emerge. For example, think of "religions" already forming around sports. English philosopher Simon Critchley proposes "football fandom" as a viable polytheistic religion of the future, "given that it allows the worship of multiple gods (teams), accepts that everyone thinks theirs is the best, that they all rally around a common history and set of values, and that it teaches fans how to accept failure and disappointment." In fact, novelist and film critic Anthony Quinn doesn't see much difference between worship at a stadium and worship at a sanctuary. Whether or not sports is sticky enough to form a new global civil religion that can bind all the peoples of the earth together is one of the unknowns of the future.
There are ten times as many fences in the world as there are roads and highways. The world is simultaneously becoming more divided and more connected. Everything is moving in two directions at once: more global, more local; more planetary, more tribal; bigger McMansions and smaller "tiny houses"; megachurches and microchurches. Do you love the world? Do you love your zip code? Both "loves" require high contextual intelligence, which involves knowing the underlying factors of every situation or location in order to know when to add more theology or more narrative, when to sculpt or augment. Much of the church is too inclined to add on for the sake of itself, leading to that which will run off in the face of the heavy rains of change. Other parts continue to whittle away at the bedrock of faith, leaving nothing on which to stand.
Opposing alternatives can be interdependent as well as contradictory, but only if there is an overarching metanarrative that can embrace and embed opposites within a higher missional framework. We must therefore know our sacred story, not in default settings of chapter, verse, or even sixty-six books, but as one dynamic story, from Genesis to Revelation. In 1979 Billy Graham said, " ... There have been times in the past when I have, I suppose, confused the kingdom of God with the American way of life." Now more than ever, we will need to delineate what is of the kingdom and what is of our culture. Many US churches have already divided or are dividing into red and blue, but the church of Jesus Christ doesn't align with either side, only with the wounded side of Jesus. Opposites don't cancel each other out, but in relationship add something new and unique.
Here are the Top 9 Paradoxes I believe will rule the next two decades:
(1) Do little large.
(2) Move up by bending down.
(4) Your only control is learning how to be out of control.
(5) Creativity needs constraints – the more you break the mold, blow up the box, and rip up the templates, the more you need to create new tools (or better, dynamic frames) to design your thinking.
(6) The more global we become, the more local we need to live – only locavores can globalize.
(7) Go slowly with the Holy – the faster the world gets, the more we will need to walk softly, go slowly, and rediscover the "off" button.
(8) Cultivate both / and mentalities, as well as and / also modalities.
(9) It's more important to know what you don't know than what you know.
| 2 | The Coming Parade of Elephants: Ex. Media, Money, Marketing and Conspiratorial Suspicions
Now we are all confined in cells. They're called cell phones. Our cells do exactly what they say they do – imprison us in cells with bells and buzzes, rings and tremors, and keep us under constant surveillance. The more digital we become, the more we live in bondage to monitoring, enslaved by incessant notifications from shock collars, also known as Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, not to mention rolling news feeds, noisy distraction-based apps, and hacks from the stygian depths of trolling. Human dumbing down by smartphones in the form of intellectual laziness, idle scrolling, lost retention, sluggish cognition, and impaired social and emotional skills, has become a sacred cow that impacts the church, but no one wants to address.
In the future, the invisible will be the invincible. As our lives become more reactive, rapid, furtive, dizzying even, the more the monastic traditions will attract us and teach us what we need most to thrive:
+ Slow Down;
+ Be Silent; and
+ Listen.
In a world weary of division, listening unites us as human beings. It was Henry David Thoreau who said, "The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."
When we don't learn how to be with and listen, we are more prone to embrace the diabolic. The Greek word for devil is diabolos, from which we get our word diabolic. Evil and devil are basically the same word, and they are based on a definition of diabolos that literally means one who spreads false reports, one who slanders and defames and casts aspersions, one who lies, and thus divides people from one another. When we learn not to listen, not to trust what we see with our eyes, or hear with our ears, everyone is on the edge of fear, misgiving, and suspicion. Our suspiciousness has made what used to be called association fallacy a new standard operating procedure: if you don't agree with everything someone says and does, you talk to them, quote them, or associate with them in any way at your peril. There is no better breeding ground for conspiracism and despotism. In parallel fashion, social media promotes rants over reason and opinions over experience. Under the lash of a financial metricization of "hits," the best way to engage is to enrage.
The appeal of conspiracism is that it offers a Theory of Everything (TOE), a global metanarrative that is helpful in making sense of troublesome times, while also often bringing its bearer into solidarity with a community of intimates and insiders. It emphasizes the importance of "self-rightness," compounding mistrust in institutions or hierarchies, and creating subcultures where echo chambers reinforce preconceived perceptions. The challenge for the church amid a culture of "your truth," is to tell God's great story as a grand and glorious narrative in the language of the culture. Jesus taught with more than words. He used meals, animals, signs, spit, stones, healings, walks, weddings, sailings, and feasts as favored ways of teaching. We owe people holistic, experiential, and grounded ways of knowing God in the story of Jesus.
| 3 | The Coming Crash of Gray Rhinos: Ex. Emotional Intelligence and Holistic Health Needs
We learned from COVID-19 that the future is more local, online, multigenerational, and community oriented. Those reading this are "the WEIRDest people in the world." WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic. As much as we take WEIRD for granted, it is the exception, not the rule, in human history. In the US today, elite colleges have more students from the top 1 percent than from the whole of the bottom 60 percent. There is an 8:1 ratio in the UK between investment in training the "cognitively gifted" (i.e., higher education) and investment in everyone else who works with their hands. One can only wonder how much greater the US ratio is. Our educational systems have created students who are unskilled at any trade and little prepared for a future outside the box of higher education. How much longer will universities be trusted to educate the future? Institutions that were once dedicated to fostering independent thinking, protecting serious debate, and tolerating unpopular opinions, have now become brook-no-dissent indoctrination centers. Learning, unlearning, and feedback learning were once cherished and rewarded, not crushed and reported.
In the wider worlds of learning, credentialing will become as important as accreditation; courses will take pride-of-place over classes; the student will become the ultimate syllabus. "What's your major?" will become "What's your mission?" Learning best takes place not in centralized houses of lecture halls but in decentralized sites like studios, architectural sites, streets, fields, skies, homes, and gardens. Now that it has been established that emotion is more powerful than reason, and that your emotional intelligence (EQ) is more key to your future than intellectual intelligence (IQ), social science and theology will integrate emotion into their studies. The role of the arts in learning will undergo a renaissance, as well as help bring religion back to the wellspring of faith and truth. The ancient Greeks called this educational ideal eudaimonia, or human flourishing. Eudaomonistic learning, or what I call enchantment learning, will be the ideal learning experience of the future.
For an example of how this might impact the field of medical education, we can take a look at the most popular rewriting of the Hippocratic Oath (featuring the principle of patient confidentiality, forbids sexual abuse of patients by healers, and insists on a standard of professional accountability), which includes this: "I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug." The frontlines of health and healing will focus on innovations that enable a world where all can join in, including the disabled and mentally ill. Currently, 15 percent of the world's population live with a severe disability, a figure that is increasing with time. What a treasure trove of assets.
Too often, we have viewed those with disabilities as a Gray Rhino – something we are uncomfortable with, ignorant of, and so choose to leave out. (We) must come to see people with disabilities not as awkward problems for ministry but as equal partners in mission. As one online account highlights: "The open wounds in Jesus' body after the crucifixion challenge our modern conception of wholeness and perfection. Similar to the 'upside-down' kingdom, Jesus' wounded body demands that our definition of holiness embrace what the dominant (culture) calls imperfect, broken, and abnormal." Prioritizing disability-led innovation will be a feature of the new church, as well as post-pandemic culture. Can the church become a temple of creativity, rewarding those who live out of their divine DNA of design (innovation), noetics (imagination), and artistry (creativity)? In the next 25 years, we must attempt what has never been done before: the dramatic redesign of how we live together on this planet from the bottom up. The church of the future will encourage and energize its members to see themselves in the healing and healthcare ministry. It is time to integrate our own rewritten Hippocratic Oath, focusing on sozo Jesus. Whether it is the problems of poverty, hunger, and education of the developing world, or the Gray Rhinos of loneliness, boredom, lack of real community, obesity, and depression of the developed world – all are in need of healing (for a bit more on this, see "A Time to Heal | Sozo Jesus, Shalom, and Kintsugi Gospel").
| 4 | The Coming Wedge of Black Swans: Ex. The Transcending of the Human Through Science and Technology
Time magazine reported a "transgender tipping point" in 2014, when a slew of celebrities came out as trans and when "queer" became a celebrated cant for all those keen to kick against their birth box. The rainbow flag is now a global summons to belonging, an international cosmopolitan identity that can be stronger than the flags of nation-states and in some ways is replacing them in terms of identity, loyalty, and politics. There is so much misunderstanding and misinformation circulating about the trans phenomenon. How the church can be the church to trans people may be our rude awakening to the tectonic shifts taking place in human sexuality all around us, and to the deeper, future discussions on what it means to be human. Phrases like "Man Up!" or "Woman Up!" rightly set this culture's teeth on edge for gender stereotyping. But perhaps in the future, the defining question will be less about gender and more about humanity. Maybe we'll be challenging one another to "Human Up!" The language of the "human" is the new shibboleth of the future.
In the unstoppable reframing of what it means to be human, the only question is, Who will get to write the script for this new humanity? It is now not so much a matter of whether something is scientifically possible but rather whether it is incompatible with the biblical portrayal of what it means to be human. The Red Skies indicate that one of our biggest challenges will be how we are a credible witness to the gospel in a "transhuman" future. "Transhuman" literally means the transcending of the human through science and technology (for some more details on transhumanism, see Wesley J. Smith's "New Time Religion" article from a few years back about his observations at the Religion and Transhumanism Conference in Piedmont, California).
Will the church find a voice of public discourse to advocate putting virtue in the virtuosos of runaway science and technology? Most advocates of transhumanism are painting scenarios of humans becoming God. But the story of the Bible is the other way around: God becomes human. Humans are already so special that God becomes "one of us." What will be the impact of this collision of stories? Or will the church remain somnolent? GRAIN is an acronym for five driving technologies constructing our transhuman future:
G – Genetic Engineering.
R – Robotics.
A – Artificial Intelligence.
I – Information Technology.
N – Nanotechnology.
The church must be "in" a GRAINy culture but not "of" a culture that attaches an incantatory magic to every granulation of GRAIN. Each one of these technologies is itself an inverse pyramid that moves forward, giving a singular person immense power to steer in any direction with a minimum of input. With every turn and change of direction, the pyramidal scope increases – for good or ill. There once was an axis of evil: Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, and Japan under Tojo. Whether GRAIN will be the new axis of evil today, or an axis of good, should occupy the best minds of the church.
People under Jesus have an opportunity to write a new narrative. However, right now we have too much of a close-minded church; feeble-minded people; money-minded boards; success-minded pastors; and small-minded thinkers. And in the world, we have growth in absent-minded drivers of technology; double-minded leaders; narrow-minded nationalists; politically minded media; like-minded masses; and utopia-minded mobs. And they are all armed with GRAINy WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). For the church to have a voice in this GRAINy future, it needs to know its birth story better than ever before.
Our prime directive is to conserve and conceive. How do we conserve what God has created, and continue conceiving without tangling the thread of our story?
In an age of transhumanism, will we respond to the call to live beyond ourselves? Will we discover the true and pure human story, the first human story, brought to us by Jesus, the New Human, the "Great Disrupter." Jesus' disruptions always bring greater enchantment to life. The "disenchantment of the world" that may be coming is much more horrific than Max Weber could have anticipated when he first used that haunting phrase.
For the church to go further than play a more alluring tune alongside the horrors that may come, it must learn to be a force of enchantment.
And you can't enchant without a chant. The more godless the culture, the more important "insonification" becomes. We must insonify the world with soundscapes of beauty, goodness, and truth, so that humans can live inspired and insonified lives. The church of the future must come to terms not just with the enchantment of music, but with silence, mystery, and rich gestural ritual. The paradox of the global surge in traditional and Pentecostal Christianity lies precisely in the power of embodied gestures. Hence the appeal of the Old Rite Mass and smells/bells/chants worship among the young, as well as the interactive, music-driven, embodied praise and worship. The more we stay cocooned in our digital caves, the more we will want to come together periodically in assemblies of worship. Why else do fans still gather in city squares, pubs, and bars to watch sports matches on big screens?
The church of the future will come in many shapes and sizes. But as an authentic body of Christ, the church must become a free space for faith to form, to flow, to flourish, to flounder, and to connect and come together. In a world of Red Skies, White Elephants, Gray Rhinos, and Black Swans, the future needs planters more than planners. As every gardener discovers at planting season, we must learn to stick our necks out and put our heads together at the same time. There is no problem facing humanity that cannot be repaired and redeemed by generous plantings of faith, hope, and love. Especially love. The way into the future is not to focus on the future (or past or present) but to focus on Jesus, who is The Way of and out of our past, The Way in and through our present, and The Way to a future of Truth and Life.
Next post: Red Skies Delight | Contextual Intelligence in Community
Bonus resources:
+ Ready or Not: Kingdom Innovation for a Brave New World by Doug Paul
+ Reframation: Seeing God, People, and Mission Through Reenchanted Frames by Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson
Christ is all,
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