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Outlaws at sea, chaos ashore

By Erich Bridges

Those pirates tormenting ships off the coast of Somalia are no isolated band of cutthroats on an otherwise placid horizon.

They represent what author William Langewiesche calls the “outlaw sea” — global coastlines and deep waters increasingly plagued by buccaneers, hijackers, drug runners, smugglers and terrorists.

In his 2004 book of the same name (The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, North Point Press), Langewiesche explored the vast expanses of  blue. It’s a place where hundreds of pirate attacks occur each year from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, where thousands of unsafe, unregulated merchant ships sail the globe under so-called “flags of convenience” to mask their origins and owners. This region beyond nations, which covers three-quarters of the earth’s surface, is a “reminder of the world as it was before, but also quite possibly … a harbinger of a larger chaos to come,” Langewiesche observed.

Listen to an audio version of this post.

What “larger chaos”? The Somali pirates reflect what’s happening on dry land: “Failed states” continue to threaten not only their own people but the peoples and nations around them.

Somalia is the poster child for “failed states.” It fragmented more than 20 years ago amid clan wars. No stable national government exists. The chaos has sent throngs of refugees fleeing into other countries, subjected those who stayed behind to terrible suffering at the hands of thugs and warlords — and attracted foreign terrorists looking for bases of operation.

There are worse things than bad government. Anarchy, for instance. Ask the Somalis. Ask the people who endure seemingly endless violence in parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan, in particular, teeters on the edge of instability as radical Islamists wield expanding influence. Its neighbor and longtime enemy, India, watches with growing alarm.

“As much as India fears Pakistan, it fears Pakistan’s collapse even more,” reports Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic magazine. “The threat of Islamic anarchy in the region is perfectly suited to the further consolidation of Hindu nationalism.” Hindu nationalism, in turn, increases extremism and violence against millions of Muslims and Christians in India.

Everything is connected in a globalized, essentially borderless world. The current global economic crisis proves that proposition beyond reasonable doubt. That’s why Christians in safe, quiet places should be concerned about “failed states” and chaotic areas within states. Not only do they destabilize whole regions and cause massive human suffering, they directly affect the church and the transmission of the Gospel.

Many unreached and unevangelized people live within unstable nations and regions. Reaching them with the message of God’s love becomes all the more difficult where chaos reigns. Missionaries who set out to work in such places often never reach their destination because of risks and barriers. If they do get there, they may find themselves targeted as easy prey. Or, they may be unable to minister effectively because of ongoing danger and disorder.

Believers living in chaotic places also are vulnerable to violence and persecution. However, like the early Christians who evangelized the known world amid a crumbling empire, they find many opportunities to minister to desperate people and guide them toward Christ, the only true source of peace.

People who flee chaos for freer, more peaceful areas often encounter the Gospel for the first time. Somali Muslims who might have faced instant martyrdom for seeking Christ in their homeland can learn about Him elsewhere.

More than 150,000 Somalis have streamed into the city of London as refugees and asylum seekers since the early 1990s. They remain clan-oriented, wary of outsiders and strongly Muslim. However, they are finding friends among London Christians who help them with education, finding jobs and recovering from the traumas they have experienced.

Farah,* a respected leader in London’s Somali community, has a close Christian friend. Farah hasn’t decided whether to follow Christ as Lord, but he believes all Somalis should have the right to understand and freely choose their own religious beliefs.

“This is a man of influence, a man of peace, a man who desires to see better days for his people” wherever they are, says his Christian friend. One day, Farah hopes to return to his homeland and help rebuild it.

One way or another, God reigns over all nations — even the failed ones.

—
*Name changed

Hope for the hopeless

By Erich Bridges

Several years ago I wrote about my friend George.

Nice guy. Sincere. Loved to joke around and play basketball. Deeply depressed.

Eventually, he hanged himself.

On the last day of his life, the only words George managed to utter to his father, who later found his body, were these: “No hope. No hope. No hope.”

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By the year 2000, suicide had become one of the major causes of death worldwide among men and women ages 15-44, according to a World Health Organization report. Many suicides, the report stated, occur “during periods of socioeconomic, family and individual crisis.”

It’s hard to live, in bad times or good, without hope. You certainly won’t find it on the shiny shelves of postmodern culture. Phony substitutes and countless distractions, yes. Real hope, no. Most hopeless people keep struggling without taking their own lives, but they see little light in their darkness.

Medication and treatment can help the clinically depressed. At the end of the day, however, no therapy or drug, no self-improvement program, no political or social movement, no philosophy, no economic plan or number of possessions can bring hope to someone who has none.

Only the resurrection of Jesus Christ offers real hope — not just to His followers but to all the hopeless people of the world.

The pop atheists of our day want to bury the idea of Christ’s physical, historical resurrection once and for all, along with its impact through the ages. The world would be much better off, they say, if the “legend” of Jesus rising from the dead had never gotten started. That would mean no churches, of course, but also no schools or universities for the masses, no books or literacy, no hospitals or charities, no freedom for slaves, no great classics of Western music and art and literature.

More than all these put together, it would mean no hope for humanity.

Handel’s Messiah, originally an Easter event, celebrates Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. After conducting it for the last time in 1759, the ailing and nearly blind composer acknowledged the ovation by saying, “Not from me — but from heaven — comes all.” He expressed the desire to die on Good Friday “in the hope of rejoining the good God, my sweet Lord and Savior, on the day of His resurrection.” He died on Holy Saturday.

Some years ago, a woman who had never been out of China attended a performance of Messiah on her first trip abroad. As the last triumphant notes faded away, she turned to her hosts, trembling with exaltation and urgent curiosity.

“I must know,” she pleaded. “Who were they singing about?”

Messiah is a monument of Western music, to be sure. But if Christ is a part of only the Western cultural tradition, why are many of His most ardent followers in the East? Why are the fastest-growing church movements found in Asia? Why have Koreans become the world’s most determined missionary senders? Why are Muslims in many places around the globe seeking out the Gospel after having dreams about a man they identify as Jesus?

At Easter, local believers in a part of the Arab world celebrate the risen Savior and seek to share Him with their families and friends. They ask Him to soften hearts and minds to the truth that God not only gave His Son as a sacrifice, but raised Him from the dead and conquered death. They pray that gifts of Scripture, Easter parties, even dreams will open the door to sharing hope with unbelieving Arabs.

And they do this in places where persecution — particularly of Muslim-background followers of Christ — is increasing daily. They know something many of us in the traditional centers of Christianity have forgotten or rejected: The risen Christ is the hope of ages, the only hope for the world.

Lift up your eyes to the hills from whence cometh your help — and your hope.

“Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through,” sang Bob Dylan after his resurrection encounter with Christ. “Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground. Take off your mask. He sees your deeds. He knows your needs — even before you ask.

“How long can you falsify — and deny — what is real?”

The rise of the ‘nones’

By Erich Bridges

Dear pastor: I’ve been praying for you.

As if your 24/7 ministry weren’t challenging enough, the economic crisis has you working hard to reassure church folks who have lost jobs and homes — or fear losing them. You might be wondering where your own job will be this time next year.

You’re probably not in the mood for yet another report on the rise of American secularism. Even so, I recommend two new perspectives on the changing American scene. They contain some enlightening information about the potential future hurtling toward your church.

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The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 (ARIS), released in March, was conducted by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The national survey found the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled since 1990 to 15 percent of the adult population. Those claiming “none” as a religious preference increased in every state, every race and every ethnic group.

The “nones” aren’t necessarily atheists or agnostics; only 1.6 percent of Americans specifically chose those categories to describe themselves. Many “nones” consider themselves personally religious or spiritual, but they tend to shun denominations and organized religion generally.

Self-identified “Christians” of all varieties still comprise 76 percent of the adult population, according to the ARIS report. But that percentage has fallen more than 10 points since 1990. Most of the recent decline (since 2001) has come among the dwindling “mainline” Protestant denominations. Roman Catholic numbers also fell nationwide. Baptists of all varieties, the largest non-Catholic American faith group, have grown by 2 million since 2001, but continue to decline as a percentage of the population.

The numerical growth that has occurred among American religious believers has come primarily among people identifying themselves generically as “Christian,” “Evangelical/Born Again,” or “nondenominational Christian” (more than 8 million Americans now put themselves in the third category). These three groups have expanded from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 11.8 percent in 2008.

“(T)he alleged decline of Christianity is largely occurring within mainline denominations, while many of the theologically conservative and Pentecostal churches are thriving,” writes Konstantin Petrenko in the online magazine Religion Dispatches. “If this trend continues, American society may find itself increasingly polarized between evangelical Christians and the ‘nones,’ creating a fascinating, albeit potentially explosive, cultural dynamic.”

So, the pundits waving the ARIS report around as more evidence of the imminent demise of U.S. evangelical churches are wrong — at least for now. But what about the future?

In a much-discussed piece published March 10 in The Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer predicts a “major collapse of evangelical Christianity” within 10 years that “will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.”

Spencer, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes the InternetMonk.com blog. He warns that this supposed evangelical collapse “will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

“Millions of evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.”

Hysterical alarmism? Quite possibly. Spencer offers little evidence for his assertions. At the very least, his 10-year timetable for doom contradicts the slower religious and cultural shifts in the United States indicated by the ARIS report and other recent studies.

As to outward opponents of evangelical faith, there’s no shortage of them in America — and many of them would love to silence the church’s voice in the public square altogether. But this isn’t the Middle East or the communist world, or even secularized Europe. We still have a Constitution and a vibrant tradition of freedom of speech and religion.

Spencer, however, eloquently diagnoses one self-inflicted wound that could kill us. In his words:

“We evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing and media have produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey Scripture, the essentials of theology or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures. … Even in areas where evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.”

Christian pollsters have been telling us essentially the same thing for years. Are we listening?

If we fail to make disciples, biblical disciples, of our own children, will we be able to transform an increasingly pagan culture at home — or continue taking the Gospel to unreached cultures across the world, as God commands? Unlikely.

Collectively, we should seize on these hard times to take a long, Lenten look inward. Let us ask God how we can become more faithful disciples, how we can share our faith more authentically with our own families, how we can become a brighter, purer light amid the gathering darkness of our times.

“Despite all of these challenges, it is impossible not to be hopeful,” Spencer writes. “We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.”

Transforming evil

By Erich Bridges

I still think about Fatima, a 15-year-old girl who almost became a perishable product.

She ran to greet us five years ago at a Christian shelter in north India — a safe place for women and children rescued from slavery, forced prostitution and human traffickers.

Her smile shone as brightly as her yellow sari. She was learning to read and sew, to sing and laugh. She recited the Lord’s Prayer by heart and was getting to know the One who taught it. She didn’t go to bed hungry anymore. She knew someone cared whether she lived or died.

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Fatima’s father pulled a rickshaw in Kolkata (Calcutta). She never went to school. When she reached age 6, her abusive stepmother forced her to start cooking and cleaning for the rest of the family. She also worked cutting rubber to make sandals — one rupee (about 2 cents) for 12 straps.

When Fatima was 14, her stepmother took her to a “youth hostel” and left her there. It turned out to be a brothel.

When her first customer came to her room, Fatima hit him on the head with a hard-soled shoe and fled. She walked 20 kilometers to the main train station in Kolkata. A child protective agency found her there and sent her by train to the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. On arrival she was taken to the Christian shelter.

“She was very tense and afraid,” recalled the shelter director. “She shouted, ‘Leave me alone!’ She thought she was being brought to another brothel.” But Fatima was among friends at last.

If only every child in her position could find such a sanctuary.

Human trafficking is a business. More to the point in these brutal economic times, it’s a very profitable business. Like any other business, it has employers and employees, buyers and sellers, supply and demand.

The only difference: The products of this business are people — like Fatima, who was about to be consumed when she jumped off the shelf and escaped.

These human products are bought and sold, used and abused via prostitution, pornography, “entertainment,” slavery, forced labor and other forms of exploitation. When they reach their “use-by” date, the industry tosses them aside and goes after new inventory.

That’s the case in north India, one of the biggest crossroads of  human trafficking. Beset by too many mouths to feed, poor villagers often sell young daughters outright to sex traffickers, who turn a profit by selling them to urban brothels.

When I visited the region in 2003, traffickers could buy a village girl from neighboring Nepal for 10,000 rupees (about $200 at the time) and sell her in Delhi for up to 60,000 rupees ($1,200) — “depending on her color, texture and size,” according to a local observer.

Sometimes, parents “mortgage” a daughter for a few years. By the time they save enough to redeem her, “she has suffered a lot,” said a local Christian leader who fights the sex trade.

“These girls usually start around age 14,” he said. “By the time they are 18 or 19, they’re finished” — exhausted, brutalized, infected with AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, turned out on the street to beg or starve.

Between 12 million and 27 million people worldwide are involved in some type of forced servitude, according to various estimates.

Up to 800,000 are trafficked across international borders each year – the majority being women and children swept up into the sex trade.

Lest we think it’s all “over there” somewhere, more than 14,000 foreign nationals are imported annually into sexual or domestic/sweatshop slavery in our own land of the free, according to U.S. government statistics. An estimated 200,000 American children, meanwhile, are “at risk for trafficking into the sex industry,” reports the U.S. Department of Justice.

Recent investigations of the growth of globe-spanning organized crime syndicates miss the true magnitude of “how far people themselves have become merchandise, as indentured laborers, domestic slaves, child thieves, child soldiers, child prostitutes, babies for sale … and organ suppliers,” writes Peter Robb in The New York Times. “All move around the world with the collusion of customs, immigration, police, social services, charities and aid agencies.”

Bear in mind, also, that human trafficking is only the third-largest criminal enterprise on a global scale. Drug dealing and illegal arms trafficking are even bigger operations. And the United States is the world’s largest recreational drug market, with Mexico being one of its largest suppliers.

That’s why civilians reportedly ran a higher risk — more than three times higher, per capita — of being killed last year in the Mexican border city of Juarez than in Baghdad, Iraq. Out of a population of 1.6 million, some 1,800 people were gunned down in 2008 in Juarez, where heavily armed drug gangs battle police and government forces in broad-daylight shootouts for access to key entry points to the United States.

Many evangelical Christians have become passionately involved in fighting human trafficking and other global evils through education, social action and legislation. That is in the best tradition of biblical justice.

But it’s not enough.

Laws, no matter how aggressively enforced, cannot change hearts. Nations that tolerate or participate in the buying and selling of human beings need something more fundamental. They need spiritual transformation — and we must seek it on their behalf through the transforming power of the Gospel.

That’s what William Wilberforce preached as a follower of Christ and an impassioned supporter both of missions and social change, even as he fought successfully as a member of Parliament to end the slave trade in the British Empire.

“Evil and injustice are rampant in our world today; carnal values and immorality are pervasive in our own society and throughout the world,” writes International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin in his new book, Spiritual Warfare: The Battle for God’s Glory.

However, the notion that human evil has somehow grown beyond God’s power to defeat it, Rankin warns, “is not biblical and clearly demeans who God is and His power. It also dismisses the victory Christ has won on the cross and God’s redemptive activity as irrelevant.”

If the Lord’s declaration in Psalm 46:10 is true, He promises: “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

That includes India, the United States, Mexico and every other nation that is robbing Him of His glory today.

Things of this world

By Erich Bridges

Life would be so much simpler if we didn’t have to deal with … life.

Getting out of bed. Looking in the mirror (which gets more painful by the day, in my case). Traffic. Tedium. Interacting with rude, indifferent and hostile people. Catching yourself treating others with rudeness, indifference or hostility. The countless hassles associated with navigating from morning to night.

Escape to an island of mental and spiritual tranquility sounds great. Serenity now! Lots of people are searching for instant solitude in a distraction-saturated world, judging from the hordes joining yoga classes or permanently attached to their iPods. 

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The only problem with that approach for followers of God: He didn’t put us here to retreat from life, but to live it.

That’s what Jesus did. Yes, He searched out lonely places early in the morning or during the night watches to pray and commune with His Father. But He faithfully returned each day to minister to the pushy crowds who constantly followed Him (before they abandoned Him) — and to patiently model God’s grace for His stubbornly clueless disciples.

“Love calls us to the things of this world,” writes the poet Richard Wilbur. His soul awakes from sleep and “hangs for a moment bodiless and simple as false dawn” – like the fresh laundry gently swaying outside his window in the morning air “awash with angels.”

“The soul shrinks from all it is about to remember,” yearning for eternal freedom from the flesh, but “descends once more in bitter love to accept the waking body … .”

That is as God intends, at least this side of heaven. We are not of the world, but we are in it until further notice. And He uses the foolish, weak, lowly and despised things of this world for His holy purposes (1 Cor. 1:27-29).  

I thought about that during a recent visit to two giant cities in Asia. One is approaching 20 million people; the other isn’t far behind. The Southern Baptist workers in these urban monsters live with all the challenges other missionaries face — radically different cultures, overwhelming spiritual lostness, resistance to the Gospel. They also deal with choking pollution, crime and corruption, constant crowds, despair-inducing traffic gridlock.

How do they cope? Sometimes they don’t. Several told me about struggling with panic attacks, depression, health problems, spiritual oppression.

Yet they persevere, because they love God and the cities they serve. When asked how others can pray for them, one couple offered a simple request: “intimacy with the Lord.” Period. Everything else is secondary; everything else follows.
According to Psalm 25:14, the intimacy (or “secret”) of the Lord is for those who fear Him. “The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him,” wrote Oswald Chambers. 

In other words, you can’t give what you don’t have. Rivers of living water come from Christ within. If His Spirit has been squelched, we are as dry and useless as bones in the desert. 

That’s the balance between body and spirit. God calls us to the things of this world — but He wants to go with us.

The next Nairobi

By Erich Bridges 
 
“If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela [shantytown].”

So wrote religion historian Philip Jenkins in The Next Christendom, his provocative 2002 book about the rapid growth and southward movement of global Christianity.

Listen to an audio version of this column. 

Jon Sapp, the International Mission Board’s former regional leader for Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, agrees with Jenkins — but adds a caveat. Rather than a woman in a hut, Sapp believes the typical African Christian “is going to be a young urban couple. Because we’re rapidly heading toward a 50 percent urban population.”

That’s right: Even sub-Saharan Africa is following the global movement toward cities.

Jenkins acknowledged as much in his book when he quoted Kenyan scholar John Mbiti, who observed that “the centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa and Manila.”

And Nairobi (profiled in today’s edition of Baptist Press).

GRAPPLING WITH THE FUTURE

The city’s young leaders in business, academia, politics and the church are grappling with how to guide their nation into the future — and away from the kind of social conflict that almost tore it apart after the last presidential election.

Before “the skirmishes,” Kenya had been viewed as a largely peaceful beacon to the suffering nations surrounding it, despite periodic political and tribal violence. Refugees and immigrants have long sought it out as a haven.

The savagery of the election-related violence, during which hundreds of people were burned and hacked to death, “was a shock and a surprise to many of us,” says Francis Mukusa, the young missions director of Nairobi’s 4,000-member Parklands Baptist Church.

“For me it was really sad to see human beings killing other human beings. It gives us a new challenge as a church to seek the face of God and examine our hearts. I think the church in Kenya has a big part to play in reconciliation and healing. The church is the hope of this country.”

Parklands sponsored an effort called “Wheels of Hope” that sent Christians into Kenyan towns and cities, even before the killing subsided, to encourage people to reconcile. As they traveled from place to place, Wheels of Hope participants witnessed “the glory of God, the hand of God,” Mukusa says. “They saw people from the different ethnic groups come together, praying and confessing to each other. They tried to tell people, ‘Hey, these are your brothers, they’re your sisters. It doesn’t matter where we came from. We’re all Kenyans and we all belong to one Father.”

The same challenge confronts Christians as they seek to reach the many peoples and classes of Nairobi — wealthy business owners, slum dwellers, different tribal/ethnic groups, Asians, students, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Hindus.

Nairobi is a magnet not just for Kenyans but for people from far and wide, in part because of the ongoing crises of East Africa. “Look at who Kenya borders,” Sapp says. “Somalia, a major problem. Southern Sudan, 20-year civil war. The [earlier] problems in Uganda,” not to mention Rwanda.

“Nairobi just became the hub.”

POWER COUPLE

The question is whether Nairobi’s (and Kenya’s) numerically dominant younger generation can steer society in a new direction — in a culture that has long placed most power in the hands of elders and strongmen. That’s where Sapp’s typical Christian “young urban couple” comes in.

“Their faith makes a difference” in their lives and in the environment around them, he explains. “They treat one another differently. They raise a family differently. They use their time and resources differently. I see it happening. I know people like that.”

Churches in Nairobi are being started by people in their 20s. They aren’t yet rapidly reproducing like some church movements in Asia, Sapp admits, but they’re solid and growing. “They have the passion and they’re learning how to do it on a very thin budget.”

They’ll need to move past a reliance on church buildings and land (extremely expensive in the city), past the “crusade mentality” that produces many spiritual decisions but few disciples — and toward “new evangelical tools and methods that meet the needs of the high-density person,” Sapp says.

“T4T” (Training for Trainers), the simple strategy of teaching Bible stories that can be taught to others, appears to be one of those tools (see “Hope flickers in Nairobi’s slums” story).

“Can you get people to take their faith to the day-to-day, to the street, to affect other lives?” Sapp asks. “That’s what we want. I’m hopeful. We’re not there yet.”

Incomplete obedience is not obedience

By Mark Kelly

In Isaiah 58, God says that although his people “seek me day after day and delight to know my ways,” the Lord nonetheless turns a deaf ear because the people otherwise do what they please and society is filled with injustice. If the people would humble themselves before God and help the hungry and homeless, then God would give healing and cause their light “to break out like the dawn.”

Those are challenging words for any individual whose culture tells him the goal of life is self-fulfillment, rather than serving God’s purposes. We want to honor God, but we also want to be accepted by others and to enjoy the good things our society offers. We find reasons to “go along and get along” — convincing ourselves it doesn’t really matter.

Obedience, however, is complete or it is not obedience. The apostle who most struggled with his impulses wrote: “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 1:14-15 ESV). Those impulses, Peter said, “wage war against your soul.” (2:11)

It is not enough to cultivate private devotion and give ourselves to church work, to participate in whole-hearted worship, even to witness to others and participate in missions projects. If we in other areas of life are still pleasing ourselves or following our society, God rejects our religious activity, however well-intentioned. If we are ignoring the needs of the hungry and homeless, we will hear Jesus say, “Depart from me.”

Predictions and possibilities

By Erich Bridges

The new year brings a fresh batch of forecasts for the future.

Well, semi-fresh.

Some of the predictions from the World Future Society’s recent “Outlook 2009” report already are coming to pass. Others already have proven wrong. Continued growth of the developed world’s economies for another five years? Scratch that one.

Listen to an audio version of this column.

The forecasting business is about as reliable as the current stock market. But here are some intriguing predictions to watch for:

– Total connectivity.  By the end of the next decade, nanodevices and implants will create an omnipresent, seamless communication network  “among all people everywhere” — or at least among those who choose to participate and have access to the technology. Think you’re connected now? Just wait.

– Yotta, yotta, yotta.  The yottabyte (that’s 1 septillion bytes of data) is the digital measurement you’ll be using by 2050. That, according to “Outlook 2009,” raises the possibility that you’ll be able to record and store “every second of [your] life on a computer and no doubt post it on Facebook.”

– 3-D TV:  Mathematicians have developed blueprints for instruments that could project 3-D images, like the holograms in “Star Wars.” Just think: You’ll be able to experience bad reality TV like you’re part of the show. 

– Git along, little microchips:  Ranchers soon will round up cattle remotely with GPS tracking devices and related technology. So much for cowboys.

Enough about technology. On a more human scale:

– Mobility:  More migrants moving from poor to rich countries will provide needed labor but increase social tensions and backlashes against immigrants, particularly in difficult economic times. How will Christians respond to the strangers in their midst — with hostility or love?

– China’s faith to grow:  China’s powerhouse (and now rollercoaster) economy could spur a “rapid growth in religions” as tumultuous shifts create a “yearning for stabilizing influences.” Christianity already is the fastest-growing faith in the world’s largest nation. Whether or not it embraces democratic freedoms, China might count more practicing evangelical Christians than the United States within a generation.

– U.S. “organized religion” to shrink:  Despite a 40-percent increase in the national population over the last 35 years, religious congregations are experiencing declines in overall attendance. Thus, “traditional Western religion’s influence over the mainstream will likely continue to wane.” Whether this prediction comes to pass is up to followers of Christ. What if God Himself were to replace “traditional Western religion” with a new movement of the Holy Spirit across the land — through our consecrated lives? 

– New activism will increase:  “Self-reliance and cooperation will become prevalent societal values” as younger generations replace the baby boomers as social leaders. Gen X and Y are “highly entrepreneurial and … very socially aware. Societies can expect more small-business activity, more social activism and greater outreach across cultures and political parties.” All of those characteristics will serve the cause of God’s mission — if young Christians use them in His service.

– Hangin’ loose:  “Forty-one percent of U.S. adults say they are delaying major life decisions, such as buying a home [or] marrying. … The main reason cited is a lack of personal savings, along with concerns about the U.S. economy’s overall future.” That doesn’t sound so good from an economic and social point of view. But from God’s perspective, how many people who delay major financial and personal commitments that tie them down might become available for His global purposes?

We’ll see what happens. Anyone can make predictions. God holds the future.

Southern Baptist diversity

With more than 9,330 ethnic congregations — almost one in five Southern Baptist congregations — Southern Baptists are one of the most diverse denominations in America.

Oklahoma church engages Native Americans

Arabic-language church reaches lost for Christ

Hmong had never heard of turkey — or Jesus

Multi-ethnic N.J. church shares Gospel worldwide

Lived-out faith changes lives