None of the notable luminaries in this chain had actually met, so this unbroken circuit is purely conceptual. I was forced to use notable people who were unlikely to cross paths because we have so few historical birth records for ordinary folk. The further back you go, the fewer personal records of any sort, and the more difficult it becomes to make an optimal generation chain. The only people with recorded birth dates are the famous. However unnamed people in ordinary families could easily form a relational chain with the same span, with a great grandson arriving before the great grandfather dies. We could easily imagine the grandfather picking up the infant, and perhaps in some indirect way transmitting the wisdom of his grandfather to this next generation. We might further imagine a 70-year person standing with his arms outstretched in each direction – from the past of his birth to the future of his death – fingertips touching the previous generation and the following generation. With a chain of outstretched hands, each about 70 years long, we need only line up 13 people, fingertip to fingertip, to have them stretch their lives over 1,000 years.

This means that the next 1,000 years is only 13 generations away. Calculated this way it doesn’t seem so distant, because this span of humans could fit around a dinner table. We could hold the list of 13 names, linking us and the year 3000 AD, in our head, much like the list of 13 generations just quoted from 1 Chronicles. In terms of lifetimes – which are steadily increasing due to medical progress – 10 centuries is just next door.

THE LAST 1,000 YEARS

As close as it is, the change we can expect in the next 13 generations will be far greater than the change experienced in the last 13 generations. Most of this change is driven by technology, just as it has been in the past. By far the greatest influence upon the Christian church in the last 1,000 years was the invention, dissemination, and perfection of printing technology. From this innovation flowed literacy, ubiquitous Bibles translated into the local vernacular, universities, historical research, and a culture centered around the book, among many other consequences. Printing transformed the church in many ways, not the least of which was the Protestant revolution. Knowledge was organized by printing technologies into encyclopedias, journals, and societies of experts. These technologies combined with a pursuit of truth and other values fostered by Christian faith to produce the way of thinking we call science, which slowly was refined in the last 400 years.

Until the Renaissance, China invented most of the innovations that found their way to Europe. In some cases China invented things 200 to 1,000 years before Europe re-discovered them. China pioneered breakthrough advances like steel, vaccines, suspension bridges, gunpowder, and of course printing and paper. The one invention China never discovered was the scientific method, which was created by the Christianized west, in part because of the sense of order and rational law which permeated the universe depicted in the Bible. Although it was not visible to either medieval monks or illiterate church goers in the year 1000 AD, science was embedded in the values of the Christian church. It took a few generations of technology to expose and release this force.

There are most likely other gifts embedded in the Christian perspective that have yet to be uncovered by new technology or Christian-based culture. The job of the present generation is to detect the signs of the next gifts and prepare the church to make the most of them. At the same time of course, these new technologies also bring challenges to the Christian church, as they have in the past.

FUTURITY

Where is the Christian church headed in the next 13 generations? It is impossible to predict the details of how 6 billion free-willed souls living on the planet at this moment, together with the ocean of ideas each of these 6 billion minds can generate, will interact with the extreme change offered by this century’s technologies such as genetic engineering, quantum computing, and cognitive sciences. The specifics of the next 1,000 years is unfathomable.

But it is not necessary, nor desired, to predict in detail what the world, or Christianity, will be like in 10 centuries. Even if it were possible, it is not evident whether it would be useful. Imagine if you took a time travel trip back to a church in medieval England around the year 1000 AD. You appear at Mass one Sunday and have a chat with the priest afterwards. You could, of course, describe exactly the milieu of the year 2000 AD (cars, internet, rock and roll, medicines, obesity) but what could you tell him about our daily lives that would be useful if he wanted to prepare his church or the church at large for the future? What you’d like are some tools for presenting new perspectives.

THREE “THINKING TOOLS” FOR AIMING CHRISTIANITY INTO THE FUTURE:

Large-scale trends
In the year 1000 an awareness of how literacy would increase and become ubiquitous, and how nations and markets would rise in importance, are two examples of large-scale trajectories that, if accepted at that time, could have prepared the church for what was coming. In the 20th century you didn’t need to know anything about IBM or Apple to understand what computers did to the culture; all you needed to know was that computers would be half as small, and twice as fast every year. We can look for similar trends at work today. In the long-term careers will become more and more specific, if not tailored for specific individuals. In real dollars the cost of food and other necessities has been dropping for centuries. All trends today point toward more leisure, more abundance of choices. We can’t predict what company will win, or what specific technologies will triumph, but we can clearly see that the electronic network of cell phones, TVs, and computers will converge into one global web.

Scenarios
While we cannot predict what will happen in the far future we do know that whatever happens has to be possible and plausible. We can therefore eliminate the impossible from our forecasts, which leaves us only with the possible. The realm of all that is possible is still a very large pool of potential paths and might include such mysterious (but not physically impossible) inventions as flying cars and invisibility cloaks. The other key thing we know about the future is that whatever it is, every stage between today and then must also be possible and plausible. So the story of the next 1,000 years must make sense every step of the way, and any future where a discontinuous breach is required can be rejected. The result of these conditions is that we can imagine the future as a map of hundreds of possible narratives, each one a coherent story beginning today, each one as likely as the other, all bounded by an edge beyond which lies the impossible. The actual future will occupy a small point inside this boundary.



To construct useful scenarios then, we will map out the outer boundaries of plausibility (always remaining just inside the possible), knowing that the actual future will be less extreme than the four corners of extreme plausibility we stake out. So our task is to permit our minds to imagine various coherent stories of the future that are both distinct (pushed to the four corners of plausibility) and still possible. We can then begin to unroll those extreme corners back to today and see what kinds of events, forces, drivers would need to be operating now in order for those scenarios to play out over time. If every Islamic nation today converted to Christianity by 3000 AD, what kind of signs would we need to see now? Likewise, if the US was not a Christian nation in 3000 AD but China was, what trends would we likely detect now?

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