goings on

I’ve been thinking a bit about our changing world and economy today. I’ve got no great point to make, but I’m going to post what I’m thinking anyway.

Been musing about how the drop in the world economy will change missionary work. The Canadian and US dollar is down on the world market, making it harder to afford out of country employees and supplies. Missionaries who are unable to embed themselves in their host culture and make a living, or part of a living, on the field, will decline. The same goes for national missionaries and even pastors. Will this result in new models of missionary sending? On the world stage, I predict that this will result not in less missionaries, but in different missionaries, and will contribute to the rise in Christian influence of non-western cultures. Christianity has shifted south and east, and no longer has its locus of power here in the west. Mission sending from Asian and South American countries may wake us up to this reality.

Outside of the recent trend in missional/organic church thinking, leadership books for the church have predominantly mirrored US business models. Now that Wall Street is seen as having failed, will we see less books on business management theory for church leaders? If so, what shape will they take? I predict more books like Eugene Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor, and less books on running a tidy organization.

I hear a lot less about the dire state of the planet now that the market is down. Most of us picked up the term peak oil this year at some point, but I’m not hearing it now that oil is down under US$60 a barrel and OPEC is cutting production. A slow economy is forcing us to do what high prices didn’t. With China’s market now on the decline as well, a world slowdown in consumerism may start to reverse some of the ecological damage we do, but this is where we’ll find out who’s really dedicated to living sustainably, and who liked a trendy idea when it didn’t seem like it would cost too much.

Tony Campolo made this point Monday, and I liked it.: this economy makes Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 5-7 look less like spiritual idealism, and more like good advice. Putting all your stock in the coming Kingdom makes more sense when the present one is a bit less promising. As the writer of Hebrews penned, For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. We look, in this season more than any other, for an advent.

Links
Andrew Jones has some good thoughts on the future of conferences and how the slowdown is affecting missions. Chuck Warnock shares his thoughts on what recession means for churches.