The most pressing concerns for the church are seldom the most important and the most important concerns are seldom the most pressing. The three greatest challenges we face may not be pressing, but they are important:


#1 What is the church?
In the coming years we have to work out what the church is and what it is for--our ecclesiology. Is the church essentially a locker room where we train members for their "real job" of transforming the world or will we be the "called out ones" who reject culture and set up an alternative community? Will we integrate and embrace culture, or separate and isolate from it? Will we try to reform society as James Dobson and Jerry Falwell would have us do, or will we try to reform ourselves and our neighbors? Leo Tolstoy once said, "Everybody thinks of changing the world; nobody thinks of changing themselves." Where will we spend the greater energy: reforming culture or reforming ourselves and our neighbors one-by-one. Choose one emphasis: cultural transformation or personal conversion?

While trying to change the culture the last few decades, it returned the favor--changing us more than we changed it. Now our own marriages crumble and pastors fall in moral collapse. We exchanged sanctification of the individual for sanctification of the state and ultimately got neither. Now we must choose: will we continue to attempt social reform or will we re-emphasize personal conversion? The easy answer, "both," will be inadequate in the future. We will have to serve one of these masters more than the other.


#2. What is sanctification?
I am not speaking exclusively about "entire sanctification" as John Wesley taught, but sanctification in the larger sense as everything God does in us to make us more like Christ. In this larger sense sanctification is about God's inner work changing a believer's thoughts, words, deeds and attitudes. Why is this a major challenge to the church of the future? Because sanctification it is increasingly dominated by science not religion. The church's domain has been shrinking through history. First we shrunk our work related to demons or sickness, largely surrendering these fields to science. But we jealously kept for ourselves sanctification. Can't control your anger? Come to Jesus and he will set you free. Need deliverance from alcohol? Come to the altar and God can deliver you. Got your marriage in a tangled mess? Come to church-- God can make your marriage whole again. While we surrendered mental and medical maladies to science, we clung to inner spiritual healing of temperament and character.

We are about to lose this arena now. Some of you reading the above list were saying under your breath, "but when someone is angry, or an alcoholic, or has a tangled marriage we don't send them to the altar, we send them to counseling!" Here lies the first stage of a massive shift we face. Sanctification will be increasingly the role of science not religion. Modern behavioral science has moved in to do the sanctification God used to do directly through "spiritual" means.

But the church has long since adapted to the modern science of psychology, counseling, and "Twelve steps" groups. These changes are mostly over and finished. Now we are facing loss of territory to chemical sanctification. Face it, the testimonies to Prozac's effectiveness at making people into new creatures is far more impressive any testimony to an altar experience today's young people have ever heard. This is just the beginning. Drugs will increasingly be available to control conditions and propensities we have formerly called sin. As a parent would you encourage your teen son to take a pill which banished lust with no side effects? Is this a new way to overcome sin, and will we embrace it as we have other scientific advances as "tools God uses?"

But the really big one is coming soon: genetic sanctification. We will live in a future where it will actually be possible to correct certain genetic propensities to sin. Holiness theologians who have wriggled about for decades to teach us that depravity is not a "thing" will have to recant. Advances in bio-genetics may prove just the opposite that some (all?) sinful propensities are genetic. And as science learns how to adapt and "fix" these genetic tendencies we may be taking our children to a genetic clinic instead of youth camp to get them straightened out.

I know all this sounds far-fetched and more like a science fiction movie than a "challenge to the church." So this issue like the other one will likely be dismissed by the church while we focus on "more pressing" concerns. But just because they are more pressing does not mean they are more important. Will we adapt to these coming changes purposely and thoughtfully… or will we adapt without thinking about them as we focus on the more pressing concerns that are more temporary?

#3. What is a person an when do you become one?

This issue is the really big one. When does a person come into existence? In our battle against abortion we have rejected birth/breathing as the moment when "man became a living soul." We've backed up the creation of personhood to conception. That is, we do not believe that the "genetic material" of a sperm cell, or of an egg is a person. But once you put them together--once the egg is fertilized--it becomes a living person and God now "knits the person in the inward parts." We have theologically stated that these few cells are now a living soul--an "unborn child" for whom Christ died.

This concept will be tested again in the future. Somewhere around to world scientists are rig