Change. It’s happening at such a pace it has become cliché.

Joel Barker is so 80’s. Yet Barker is still around. A self-described “futurist,” Baker popularized the term, “paradigm” to describe our behavior patterns. Our recent Lifeway Research findings inspired us to go back and consider one of his most famous warnings:

"You can and should shape your own future; because if you don't someone else surely will."

Influencing the future begins with assessing our current realities. Predictions of radical change are nothing new. Walt Disney made a nice living imagining the future since the mid-1900’s. Two futures are critical for the church to understand and embrace. Although our ability to control the future is questionable, our influence and response to the future is critical to our effectiveness in God’s mission.

The first future is “inside” the church.In most churches, Boomers will continue to be firmly in leadership.They will work longer and live longer (including pastors, staff, and lay leaders). As difficult as it seemed for previous generations to pass on leadership in the local church (still in process), Boomers may find it more difficult.

Boomers are the “better idea” generation. The technology revolution was spearheaded by Steve Jobs (born 1955) co-founder of Apple and Bill Gates founder of Microsoft (born 1955). The contemporary church movement led by Rick Warren (born 1954) and Bill Hybels (born 1951) inspired a generation of church leaders. Dissatisfied Boomers decided to “go west” to a new contemporary church world. Now, subsequent generations have gone in new directions—too numerous to list here. Things in the church change.

At the same time that many evangelical leaders lament the sin in our midst, talk of transforming the world for Christ rallies big crowds to action. We bemoan the present world as we long for Christ to return and make all things new. Somewhere in between, we eventually realize that we can accomplish more for the cause of Christ than we have so far, but not so much as our rhetoric sometimes suggests. Trevin Wax, author of Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals, offers pastoral wisdom on living according to the next world’s values even now.

You pastor a Southern Baptist church in Tennessee. How has your experience as a pastor shaped your desire to write Holy Subversion?

For five years I served in Romania, a formerly Communist country where evangelicals were the minority. The majority of Romanians were Orthodox, but most were Christian in name only. So there were clear lines of distinction between evangelicals and the rest of society. Once we returned to the American South, we discovered the situation was completely reversed. I was ministering in a context in which everyone seemed to be Baptist, but the name was just a name.

So living in one context as part of a beleaguered minority and then being thrust into a different context where we were part of the “majority” opened our eyes to the way evangelicalism mirrors the world in the West. Holy Subversion is an attempt to call the Western church away from cultural captivity, and to shine light on the blind spots that we often miss.

What are the key threats to the church that you believe Christians need to subvert?

1. A self-centered understanding of salvation that centers solely on personal benefit at the expense of radical grace that transforms our hearts and lives.
2. A church-less gospel that individualizes the Christian life to the point where there is no longer any real reason for a Christian to be part of a church.
3. A worldly understanding of success.
4. A slavish addiction to work, wealth-accumulation, and entertainment.

Often, in the midst of something new, we can not tell the difference. Whether it is a fad or a movement won’t be known for many years. I am sure many thought John Wesley and what was derisively called “Methodism” was just a fad. It turned out to change the landscape of protestant Christianity (especially in North America) for all time. Anyone who is an evangelical lives beneath its shadow to this day.

In the last 10 to 15 years there have been a few tidal waves of reaction to North American evangelical Christianity: Emerging Church and its founding Emergent Village, the Organic (or Simple or House) Church movement, and of course Missional Church. There has been a lot of blog commotion recently over their demise or decline of these expressions. In each case I suggest we are worrying too much.

Things That Are Changing

1. Multi-site churches. According to the book Multi-Site Roadtrip, an estimated 2,000 churches in America use the multi-site model. Travis: "If you're a large church, you're thinking multi-site."

2. Social media. According to the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds use social networking at least once a week. Senior pastors under 40 who are leading large churches all use social media. Travis: "This is a radical shift in how we understand leadership. Fifteen years ago, pastors were wondering how they could be less accessible. Today, younger pastors want more access."

3. Internet campuses. Turnkey solutions are being developed that make it cheap and accessible for all churches to incorporate an internet campus. Travis: "For some this will be a fad, but for others this is going to be a big part of their reaching strategy going forward."

4. Online giving. It's here, and it's growing. If churches want to encourage donations from people in the pews, they're going to have to provide more natural ways for them to give. Travis: "Younger leaders recognize that no one carries cash or checkbooks anymore."

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1. On a personal level: My initial intro to the Emerging Church movement came in a seminar with (yes, believe it or not) Doug Pagitt and Mark Driscoll…together. At a low point in my life and faith, feeling burned and burned out, they talked about a postmodern (hey! remember that word??) approach to faith that was more about Jesus than institution; more about life in the way of Jesus that made a difference in the world, and less about getting people over the goal-line of decision and their rears into heaven. All of that resonated with me deeply.

I was working through all sorts of things that threatened to shipwreck me. But during that time books like Brian McLaren's The Church on the Other Side and More Ready Than You Realize, Len Sweet's Postmodern Pilgrims, an Origins conference with Erwin McManus (and many of his books), all of these kept my vision and heart for faith and the church from falling apart. And even though I now find myself pushing back against both Driscoll and Pagitt from my tiny speck of ground in the middle, I'm eternally grateful that at just the right time God allowed our paths to cross.

USA Today has just published the first news report about the pastors in Haiti and the terrible victimization of young girls that is now occurring. Driscoll gave this report:

We were downtown loading up our film crew. There were no police, no medics, to be seen by a huge park with hundreds of people camping out with no where else to go. There was a little cart with a red umbrella and a man selling cell phones and cigarettes -- and a few young girls.

"You want to buy loving?" the guy asked me. I said, "What in the world are you talking about?"

But there was another guy there, who claimed to be a translator for a relief agency, who was negotiating a price for a girl. I asked him what he was trying to do. He said, "Oh, she's a friend of mine. We're just trying to connect."

That's ridiculous. A young girl. A man 20 or 30 years older. I told him this was unacceptable. MacDonald confronted him, too. But there were no police and you could argue all you wanted but the girl took his money and they walked away."

Two things in short supply for nearly every church leader—time and money. Unfortunately both are necessary if we hope to buy and read the numerous books intended to help us in our work. That is why Leadership created the Golden Canon, the ten books of 2009 most valuable for church leaders. The winners were selected by a diverse group of more than 100 pastors and leaders, including our contributing editors, who selected the best books in two categories: The Leader's Outer Life, and The Leader's Inner Life. We hope this list contributes to your development as a leader, and assists you in determining where to invest your finite hours and dollars.

Read more at LeadershipJournal.net.

Research conducted by LifeWay last year found that “Younger evangelical pastors are less likely to self-identify as conservative than older generations and more apt to view social justice as a gospel imperative.” Commenting on the findings, Ed Stetzer said, "I think ultimately that we are at a season right now where the issues of social justice are growing and a desire to integrate compassion and commission are clearly evident among younger evangelicals and evangelicals as a whole.”

Some are celebrating this movement as long overdue; the healing of an unfortunate rift in the church that occurred nearly a century ago by pitting social concern and justice against the preaching of repentance and salvation. The impact of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy shaped the direction of the American church for most of the 20th century by creating an “either/or” scenario. Either a church cared about social justice or it focused on saving souls.

The fact that orthodox, conservative, Bible-believing evangelicals are now showing great interest in matters of justice and compassion may indicate the aftershocks of that rift 100 years ago may finally be over. Or are they?

I love the work that Neil Cole is doing—and Alan Hirsch (The Forgotten Ways), Bob Roberts (Transformation: How Glocal Churches Transform Lives and the World), Frank Viola (Finding Organic Church), and many, many others.

In one form or another, they are champions of "organic church." The term is fluid, but it contains at least three ingredients: Frustration with the-church-as-we-know-it, a focus on people (vs. programs) and mission (vs. institutional maintenance), and a vision to transform the world.

As Neil Cole put it in his book Organic Church, "It is not enough to fill our churches; we must transform our world." He puts it similarly in his latest effort, Church 3.0. The book is ostensibly about how to shift from program-driven and clergy-led institutions to churches that are "relational, simple, intimate, and viral." Still, says Cole, "Changing the church is not the idea of this book … . The only reason to shift from Church 2.0 to Church 3.0 is to change the world."

I love the passion. And the prophetic word to institutionalism (believe me, I know the evils of institutionalism: I'm an Anglican!). And the vision to make Christ's love and grace known to the four corners of the planet.

What I worry about is the coming crash of organic church.

In the hierarchy of church problems, most pastors wouldn’t mind figuring out how to handle a congregation that has grown so rapidly that they can no longer get to know everyone personally. The multisite church boom has met this very challenge by leveraging the best teachers with new technology to reach mass audiences at low costs. Motivated by spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, pastors understand the number of new professions of faith as a sign of God’s blessing. There appears to be little downside to adding new church sites. There is little of the personal risk and exorbitant cost of church planting. In fact, there are few arguments against multiple sites that can’t also be made against multiple services in one church building. And most medium and large-sized churches crossed that line without much consternation some time ago. So if people don’t mind watching a pastor on television, what’s holding us back?

Maybe some people really do mind. A recent report on multisite churches by Cathy Lynn Grossman in USA Today revealed some concern about the growing disconnect between pastors and their large congregations.