Posted 231 days ago

2010>>>2020 New Challenges- New Possibilities: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time

Tom Sine

As incredible as it seems we just crossed the threshold into the second decade of the 21st century…2010-2020! The rate of change seems to be escalating and we are likely to hit some new bumps in the road ahead in this decade that few seem to be preparing for.

In this eZine we are launching a new conversation called 2010>>>2020, New Challenges – New Possibilities: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time. We are inviting followers of Jesus all over the planet to join us in creating new possibilities… new mustard seed responses to some of the challenges we face in the coming decade.

This will be the first of a series of Seed Samplers in 2010 where we will invite you to join those on the imaginative edge in creating new ways to be a difference and make a difference that both engage these challenges and reflect something of God’s loving purposes for the whole creation.

In this first eZine we will share three new challenges that we believe are likely to have significant impact on the coming years. We also have added four Seed Shares that demonstrate specific imaginative ways people are already engaging these challenges. We hope these innovative examples will ignite your imagination to create new possibilities for your life, church and action in changing times.

Each of our Seed Samplers in 2010 will present one coming challenge plus share creative ways people are already responding. At the end of each eZine we will invite you to join the conversations and share creative ideas you have come up with or new possibilities you have already launched in your life, church and community.

Don’t break out the party hats yet!
As we emerge from the worst global recession in 70, years David Francis, an economist for the Christian Science Monitor, cautions us not break out the party hats yet. There is reason to believe that there is still more bad economic news on the way that could impact all our lives. Structural debt in the US and other countries could rock our boats before the end of the decade.

I am convinced many of our poorest neighbors locally and globally will continue to be hammered by the global recession well into this new decade. So one place we need to begin using our imaginations is to create new ways to be God’s compassion to our neighbors who are likely to be at increasing risk.

Even though the recession is over, the economic volatility is likely to increase in this new decade. There are a host of reasons for this growing volatility. First, all of us on the planet are becoming more connected in this increasingly complex new global economy, which increases our vulnerability. As we will show in coming eZines, there are many new political, technological, environmental and societal challenges that could decisively increase instability of this economy as further.

Francis also suggests that we aren’t likely to return any time soon to lifestyles that many of us came to take for granted. Research indicates that people in the US are less optimistic about the future as we enter this decade than other recent decades. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey reports that 61 per cent of Americans believe the US is in decline. “Only 27 percent feel confident that their children’s generation will be better off than they are.”ii

I suspect that their concerns are justified. This could be the first generation in many western countries where the young do not exceed the lifestyles they were raised with. How do we prepare our young for a future not only of increasing volatility but possibly increasing austerity as well?

How can we as followers of Jesus imagine creative new ways reduce our economic vulnerability and increase our availability to be something of God’s compassion to our most vulnerable neighbors in these troubled times? How can we prepare our young to create possibilities for their lives that are more about making a difference than attaining the lifestyles they were raised with? Let’s look at some younger Christians who have invited God to ignite their imaginations.

Join those on the creative edge imagining new mustard seed possibilities. I have been deeply impacted by what I have learned from a new generation of innovators and risk takers from the UK, Down Under, and in North America that I write about in The New Conspirators. I am impressed not only by their commitment to Christ but to Christ’s mission in our troubled world. They challenge all generations to discover a more biblical view of God’s purposes. They also challenge us to create new expressions of a more authentic whole-life faith and more missional congregations.iii

Check out what young missional church innovators are doing to create new expressions of church and mission. But also visit some of the new communities of advocacy, action and celebration created by young monastics who are trying to create a more whole life faith.

These young innovators have discovered the secret of the mustard seed in Mark 4:30 to 32. They have found that, for whatever reason, God has chosen to conspire through the ordinary and insignificant to change the world. This is a reason for hope.iv We are convinced that only as we discover the creative ways God can use our mustard seeds to be a difference and make a difference will we find what we are on the planet for.

Many of these young leaders also seem to be more aware than many in established churches that we will need to reimagine how to live our lives and reinvent our churches to engage the changing times in which we live. We invite you to join these young conspirators and discover creative new ways God can use our mustard seeds by learning :

1. To anticipate some of the new challenges that are likely to impact our lives, communities, and the larger world in this new decade of 2010 to 2020.

2. To imagine creative new ways God can use our mustard seeds to respond to these new challenges in ways that also reflect God’s loving purposes for a people and a world.

There are three major components to creating new possibilities for our lives and churches:

• Taking the future seriously
• Taking the future of God seriously

• Taking our imagination seriously
  
  

Join those on the edge… taking the future seriously
We are very concerned how few Christians or Christian organizations make any effort to anticipate even a few of the new challenges that are likely to impact our lives, communities and the larger world…before they fully arrive.

Virtually every church or Christian organization does long range or strategic planning. The problem is that too many of us tend to live our lives as though we are frozen in a time warp… as though the future will simply be an extension of the past. As a consequence, we are surprised by change much more often than we need to be.

As we race into this turbulent new decade we simply can no longer afford the luxury of constantly being surprised by change. We need to learn to take the future much more seriously. But let me be clear. In spite of our best efforts to anticipate change we are going to be surprised by some of what the future brings.


Even though we can’t begin to anticipate all the change coming our way in 2010 to 2020, we can anticipate a few major challenges. For each challenge we do anticipate, we have lead time to create new ways to respond. In other words, in a time of rapid change we must learn to lead with foresight. If we can anticipate even a few new challenges coming our way in this decade, then we can pro-actively create new responses to these challenges.

One distinctive of Mustard Seed Associates is that we seek to serve the church by helping leaders to more effectively forecast and more imaginatively respond to new challenges before they blow up on our doorsteps. For example, we ran a recession preparedness brainstorming session in September 2008, before the economic meltdown began, to encourage congregations to be God’s compassion in tough times. We continued to work with churches through this devastating downturn. Congregations created everything from online church Craig’s lists to community gardens to reach out to those in need.

In November of 2009 we offered a study manual, “Turbulent Times, Ready or Not“ for local churches to help them do a better job of enabling their members to re-imagine how to live and serve God in this volatile new decade.

Over the years, we have worked with a number of major denominations in the US from the American Baptists to the Mennonite Church. We have also worked with a range of mission organizations from Habitat for Humanity to Tear Fund UK. We have also helped a number of college students, families and congregations in North America, the UK and Australia to imagine new ways to live and serve God in our rapidly changing world. As we launch 2010>>>2020, New Challenges – New Possibilities: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, we believe it is essential that we take not only our future seriously, but the future of God seriously too.

Join those on the edge…taking the future of God seriously
Ten years ago we not only entered a new decade but a new millennium. Do you remember that many conservative Christians in America, caught up in the Y2K hysteria, entered the new millennium with such a sense of apocalyptic fear that thousands headed to the hills with their dehydrated foods, their end time books, and their guns?

When Christine and I journeyed to the UK at the beginning of the new millennium, we discovered Christians there who had a a very different view of God’s purposes for the future. No stockpiling of guns and dehydrated foods there. British Christians welcomed the new millennium, not with fear but as a unique time to give birth to new forms of innovative mission, to reach out to those in need locally and globally.

Not only is much of the church suffering from a crisis of foresight but also a crisis of biblical vision. Even though most of us are not end times survivalists, many of us have been nurtured in an eschatology of escape that contains a very limited view of God’s purposes. In this vision, the future of God is seen as individual soul escape to a non-material existence in the clouds…leaving clothes behind on airplane seats. Too many view God’s purposes as singularly focused on the transformation and redemption of a spiritual component of our individual lives.

The problem with this view is that it not only reflects a very narrow view of God’s purposes, it also offers us very little motivation to engage the troubled times in which we live. But it also seems to have very little influence on the direction or decisions of our daily lives.

Without a compelling biblical vision of God’s purposes for a people and a world, many of us have succumbed to the messages of the imperial global mall about what is important and of value…getting ahead in our careers and our middle class lifestyles. Yielding to these seductions also seriously erodes both the vitality of our faith and the time and resources we have left over to invest in Christ’s mission to our world.

For times like these we need a compelling new vision of God’s purposes that call us beyond ourselves. We need a vision of hope that reminds us, in spite of these shaking times, that God hasn’t lost control. We need a vision that reflects a much broader scriptural view of God’s purposes.

Many of the young missional innovators I mentioned have been strongly influenced by the biblical reflections of NT Wright in Surprised by Hope. They look forward to coming home not as disembodied souls in the clouds but as a great bodily resurrected community from many different nations coming home to a new heaven and earth where all things are made new in Christ.
This is not just a different biblical vision of coming home. It is a very different vision of what God intends to make new. This biblical vision in not just about God redeeming a spiritual compartment of our lives but transforming every part of our lives. It is also a biblical vision of God’s intention to transform our society and our world as well as our personal lives. The prophets and the Gospels make abundantly clear that God intends to bring justice for the poor, healing for the broken, restoration of creation, and peace for the nations.

We believe, with the young missional conspirators, that the call to follow Jesus is quite simply the call to put God’s mission purposes first in every aspect of our lives and communities of faith. We all need to imagine a host of new ways we can be difference and make a difference by creating new ways to live, serve and celebrate into that new world that is already here through the risen Christ. If we do, I think we will be surprised by the ways God will use our lives and communities of faith to have an impact on our rapidly changing world.

Join those on the edge…taking your imagination seriously
We not only need to take the future and the future of God more seriously; we also need to take our imaginations seriously. We need a renaissance of Christian imagination. We are convinced that one of the greatest untapped resources in the church today is imagination.

We can learn much from a new stirring of interest in imagination in our society. For example, In the new book, Imagination First: Unlocking the power of possibility, Eric Liu explains how all of us have much more creative potential than we ever imagined. Groups like Idea Camp and Ted.com fashion opportunities for people to explore new ideas and possibilities for their lives and communities. A surprising outcome of new social media is the democratization of creativity. Growing numbers of people are already beginning to ignite their imagination producing their own videos and media.

One of the major characteristics of the expansive new global economy is an explosion of imagination and entrepreneurship…creating remarkable new technologies, new forms of social media, and new business start ups. But as we will see in upcoming Seed Samplers not all the societal impacts of this tidal wave of innovation are positive.

We believe that many people of faith not only suffer from a crisis of foresight and vision but also a crisis of imagination. Seldom are people in our churches ever invited to use their imaginations to create new possibilities for our lives and churches in order to engage the new challenges of our troubled world. I am particularly concerned that we are losing young people from our churches at a rate we haven’t seen before. One of the reasons is that few congregations ever invite their ideas of how to serve their community or re-invent their churches.

This is an invitation that goes out to all generations to join God’s quiet conspiracy and discover the innovative new ways God can use your mustard seed to make a little difference in our rapidly changing world.

Join the conversation- 2010>>>2020 New Challenges – New Possibilities: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time

We invite you to join this conversation by sharing below:

1.Your mustard seed ideas of new of ways to respond to some of the challenges that we are likely to face 2010 to 2020 in ways that reflect something of God’s purposes.

2.Your mustard seed innovations that you or your church have already started to address some of the new challenges of this new decade.

3.Respond to our discussion of the future, the future of God, or the need for creative new responses. We welcome your comments.

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