Rising Tides

Finding a Future-Proof Faith in an Age of Exponential Change

Neil Cole

• Publisher: Cornelius Cole
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780990660491
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Kirche

We stand on the edge of an opportunity unlike any in history. Every moment we hesitate, the distance between irrelevance and influence grows exponentially. Our time is now.

Today’s culture is defined by four exponential growth trends: the population boom, the technology tsunami, the rising economy gap and the increasing polarization of worldviews. Rising like tides, these trends are leading us toward a crushing break.

Rising Tides is is a wake-up call for God’s people, who must act now to respond to the demands of these shifing tides if they hope to weather the storm. Time is short.

Neil Cole carefully lays out some simple ways we can catch up, and keep up, with this rapid change. With an unflinching appraisal of the challenges we face, coupled with tangible and achievable solutions, Rising Tides offers profound hope for the way forward.

We can future-proof our faith.

The Church will not be overcome, but our old ways must be if we hope to survive the rising tides.

PART ONE

Navigating the Now: Four Trends of Exponential Change

CHAPTER ONE

Too Many Rats in this Race: The Rising Population

Our earth is becoming too small for us, global population is increasing at an alarming rate, and we are in danger of self-destructing.

—Stephen Hawking

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

—Lily Tomlin

THE CABIN LIGHTS FINALLY DIMMED on a red-eye flight as I was returning home. Having been speaking all week, I was worn out and just wanted to slide on headphones and an eye mask, lower my seat, and forget the world for a few hours. The passenger next to me had other plans. He was talkative. Reminding myself why I’m here on this planet (and plane), I brushed aside my initial annoyance and engaged with him enthusiastically, all the while praying for a meaningful conversation. It was indeed memorable.

He was a Jewish doctor who sold medical equipment in Asia. He asked me what I did, so I told him I was an author. Then he asked what kind of books I wrote. I had the opportunity to tell him about myself and what my life was about. I expected that to end the conversation—most of the time it does. In this case, however, he was intrigued and wanted to talk.

Somehow we began discussing the state of the world and whether evil exists. The doctor believed that we were evolving to become better humans and that evil was not inherent in us. He had recently read a book proving that we, as a species, are actually improving and evolving to become better.

“Really?” I asked. I brought up the Nazi Holocaust, Mao Zedong’s slaughter of millions, Stalin’s mass murders, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, weekly terrorist attacks, and constant wars, and asked, “How does that sound like we are doing better than previous eras?” I commented, “The only thing we seem to be better at is killing more people with less effort or remorse than any previous generation.”

His answer was that the population is much larger than previous generations, so the percentage of people being killed is actually much less than it used to be.

“How many people killed unnaturally would it take to prove that we are not getting better but worse?” I asked. He just looked at me. I could see that my odd question surprised him, and he was trying to figure out how to answer it. I added, “We already mentioned hundreds of millions, probably as many as a billion. How many killed, given our large population, would it take for us to be considered worse than any previous generation?”

I helped him out by saying, “If an additional billion lives were extinguished at the hands of other people during the last fifty years—above and beyond the other genocides already mentioned—would that be enough to destroy the hypothesis that we are better than the people of previous eras? That would put the unnatural death toll higher than 20 percent—would that be high enough?”

Nodding, the doctor answered, “Yes, an additional billion killings would probably change that argument.” Then he added, “But it hasn’t happened, so it’s an irrelevant hypothetical question.”

“Oh, but it has,” I said. “Since 1970, there have been a billion abortions in the world. Our population would be a billion more if not for abortion. One billion lives have been extinguished by the hands of other people in less than fifty years.” I then added, “That would bring the number of unnatural deaths due to genocide, war, and intentional eugenics up to about two billion in one hundred years, among a population that has grown from three to seven billion. Two billion killed, out of a potential nine billion lives—I would say that is a significant percentage of the total population. Are you still thinking that we are better than previous eras?”

Shaking his head he said, “Abortion doesn’t count.”

“I would say it counts,” I retorted. “I’m glad I wasn’t aborted. How about you? Are you glad you were allowed to live? Are you glad you were not aborted?”

He nodded. He had to. Quickly he went on to protest, “Yes, but…”

In the end, he refused to count those numbers. He preferred to believe that we are better people than previous humans. We had a lively debate and the time passed quickly, but I didn’t change his mind and he didn’t change mine. No one wants to believe they are worse than the people who were before them. We all want to think that we are the best. I get it. It is an unfortunate reality that many people would rather remain deluded than face the truth all around.

Lest you think that it is only the heathen and humanists of this world that are kidding themselves, we Christians are perhaps the most deluded. Our days are rapidly passing and time is no longer abundant. This is a wake-up call. We must abandon our old ways in order to become what we were always meant to be—a rapidly expanding, persecution-proof movement of Jesus’ disciples.

A steep learning curve

We have heard the statistics about the population of our world. There are seven and a half billion souls living on this planet—and that number rises every second.

Having always lived during this population bloom, we may not realize how dramatic it is within the timeline of history. Perhaps a picture can help put context to our birthdays beyond candles and cake and demonstrate the consequence of being alive in these days.

Below is a chart to visualize the dramatic upswing we are in the midst of, shown from 10,000 BC until now.

Figure 1.1

From the day Noah stepped off his boat, it took until 1804 AD to pass our first billion people living at once on this small blue planet. In just one century (1804–1900 AD), we tripled that number. In my lifetime we have grown by four billion—and I’m still breathing and tapping on these keys. How much higher could the spike rise during the rest of my life—or my children’s lives?

Exponential growth is a powerful phenomenon. The momentum of this population growth has been a tidal wave hitting this planet. What could possibly slow it down? Plague? Wars? Economic collapse? Famine? Massive genocide? Weapons of mass destruction? Orchestrated eugenics? So far, these horrors have not slowed the pace.

If you were twenty years old in 1914, by the time you turned fifty you would have lived to see two world wars, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s great purge, two atomic bombs dropped on populated cities, the Great Depression, the Dustbowl and the Spanish Flu pandemic—and the momentum on the chart above never even paused for a moment. In fact, the rate of growth increased. Since 1970, there have been over a billion abortions globally. All of this devastation and unnatural loss of life has not even slowed the upswing of the growth curve. The momentum of exponential growth is something that is hard to fathom.

Whatever your view of the end times, you certainly have to agree that we are in significant days that are barreling toward a breaking point. Now consider that this is the era God chose to bring you into the world—you and seven and a half billion other souls (and counting).

The challenge of the task ahead of us

In the first century, Jesus gave His eleven surviving disciples a challenge. He said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). Can you imagine how impossible that sounded to a small group of fishermen, reformed tax collectors, and zealots? Well, it is nothing compared to the challenge He gives to you and me at this time. What was a few million is now a few billion, but the task has not changed. We must make immediate and drastic changes if we have any hope of fulfilling our call to make disciples of all the people groups.

Prior to the rise of Emperor Constantine, the more organic and movemental expression of the early Church succeeded in accomplishing what nothing else was able to do—defeat the Roman Empire in a head-to-head conflict. Rome considered this fledgling faith a challenge and did everything it could to stomp it out. In the end, the Empire surrendered to Christianity. For a brief moment, it seemed like the commission given to the Church by Jesus was fulfilled. But the old saying, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” was a strategy well played by the world. In no time, Christianity was overcome—not by brute force, but by the seduction of power and privilege. Under Emperor Constantine, Christianity not only became legal, but worse, profitable. The Church became a political enterprise, with all that entails. The Constantinian expression of church was born.

What is the Constantinian model of church? It is what comes to your mind when you ask yourself, “What is a local church?” It is a location, often a building, where clergy conduct sacred activities on special days for the faithful in attendance. As common as that understanding is to us, it is actually foreign to the New Testament.

This model that came into prominence post-Constantine was not sufficiently able to make disciples of the world even when the population was a fraction of what it is today. The Constantinian model of church has remained in place since the 300s AD. The global population back then was about the size of the current US population, but the Church failed to fulfill the Great Commission. In order to reach this world, we have no other option then to consider “organizing” under a different paradigm, that releases multiplication so that we can fulfill the commission given to us by Jesus.

Unfortunately, church leaders invest everything they have in making that ineffective model work. Why? Because their security, identity, and purpose are intertwined with that model’s function. Those who have the best opportunity to make it change are the very people most motivated to keep it the same. As Upton Sinclair once quipped, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”¹ Our leadership is invested in upholding a model that is incapable of accomplishing what God asks of it. This model has been in place for one and a half millennia, so it now has become our very definition of church. It is a challenge to imagine anything else, but we must if we are to make a difference in this generation.

A final word on the “rat race”

I would be remiss if I did not mention that in recent days the pace of exponential growth of the population appears to be slowing. While violent force could not slow the growth, other factors seem to be more effective at doing so in our modern world. Education, economics, modern medicine, and selfishness are decreasing the birthrate.²

There is much speculation about whether the population will grow, slow, plateau, or even subside in the future. What is not under debate is the incredible exponential growth rate we have already experienced, illustrated in the diagram above. It is clear that our current means of doing church and reaching the world are inadequate. Remember, this book is about the now, not the future. We can debate the future, but no one disputes the exponential growth rate of the population and where we are now in terms of billions.

If the population growth were the only rapid current we need to deal with, it would be enough to challenge our church structures—but it is not. In the following chapters I will lay out for you three other exponential swings upward that set the stage for the Church to either fade into irrelevance or rise to the challenge of our times.

CHAPTER TWO

The Skynet is Falling: The Rising Technology Tsunami

In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

—Neil Gaiman

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

—Arthur C. Clarke

IN 2016, I WAS INVITED to share at an elite conference on technology. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and many powerful innovators, entrepreneurs, and world changers were addr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Time and Tide Wait for No One
• Introduction: The Beginning of the End
• Part One: Navigating the Now: Four Trends of Exponential Change
• Part Two: Surviving the Soon: Perched on the Precipice
• Part Three: Delivering on our Destiny: Finding a Future-Proof Faith
• Conclusion: The End of the Beginning
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• About the Author
• Other Books in This Series