Back in 2014, Pew Research Center made it clear that Church as we know it is dying. I didn’t need Pew to tell me that—I could see it in the aging congregations and increasingly empty offering plates of the churches I go to.
This is the point where most of us (myself sometimes included) have to resist an urge to pull out the ashes and sackcloth and light our hair on fire.
But this isn’t the first time this has happened. To be precise, it’s the fourth. About 500 years after Jesus, Constantine transformed Christianity by turning it from a small, persecuted minority into the national religion of Rome. Reformation 1.0.
Five hundred years after that, the Orthodox Church split from Catholicism in the Great Schism of 1069. Reformation 2.0
Martin Luther came along about five hundred years after that. And, now, in 2019, it’s time for our semi-millennial update. We’re in the midst of Reformation 4.0.
And we’re still here! To the people living during each of the past upheavals, Christianity’s future probably seemed at least as scary and chaotic as it does right now. But the Church eventually adjusted to meet the new spiritual needs of the society around it. And in each case, it lived on.
Read more here about Reformation 4.0 and why it could be the best thing to happen to us.
Reformation 4.0 is an exploration of our new Church and it’s transformation. I hope you’ll join the conversation.