Barnabas File

Leaders in every field either fear, anticipate, or attempt to create the future.  Change is inevitable and those with the right skills will be able to thrive within a changing reality.  In The New Leadership Literacies , Bob Johansen identifies the literacies--combinations of disciplines, practices, and worldviews--that will be needed to lead in a VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Johansen is a futurist with both a Master of Divinity degree and a PhD in sociology.  He writes, “While I don’t claim to be an expert in the present I have been pretty good at listening for and foreseeing the future.” Johansen’s goal is that by “looking out ten years [one] can look backward from the future and provoke, not predict.”  He sees a future where everything is distributed with the potential for both positive and negative results. The author’s approach suggests five leadership literacies:  Looking Back from the Future, Vo...

Strategy planning is not what it used to be.   There was a time when governments, businesses, and even churches planned for the future as if what happened next would be a natural consequence of what had gone before.   Of course, this kind of linear thinking no longer applies.   Instead of assuming that the future will be like the present, we recognize that change is all around us and we try to ascertain trends that will impact what we will be doing five, ten, or twenty years from now . . . and sometimes it works.   Of course, most forecasters missed the impact of the personal computer, the Internet, and social media, but we still try! In a recent blog titled “5 Unexpected Factors That Change How We Forecast The Future, ”  Jamais Cascio suggests that although we often think about the future in terms of technological changes, we would do better to look at social, cultural, and environmental changes.  These are factors that are likely to significantly i...

Churches spend a lot of time on visioning processes and strategy planning.   Of course, sometimes these are a waste of time and effort.   The work is done and put on the shelf, leadership changes, or the ministry context changes due to unforeseen circumstances (economics, demographics, etc.).   This does not mean that we should not think about the future and the opportunities that God will provide in coming days, months, and years.   There are always open doors for those who look for them. In his e-book The Knight and the Gardener , futurist Cassidy Dale writes: The future cannot be “won” for any one party, group, nation, or religion.  Instead, the longer term we think, the more we realize we can only enable good futures to emerge by building robust capacities for people to solve problems we cannot yet foresee. Dale suggests that rather than pursuing a simple “problem-solving” approach, we should seek to discover a “meme”—a contagious idea—or a “m...

Forty years ago, Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote  Future Shock, a groundbreaking book about what we could expect in the future.   It was a challenging and, in many ways, accurate forecast.   Some of its projections are still coming to pass. Toffler Associates has released a special report called "40 FOR THE NEXT 40: A Sampling of the Drivers of Change That Will Shape Our World Between Now and 2050." The report identifies future trends in politics, technology, society, economics, and the environment. You can download it here  as a PDF file for free. I picked out several that seem to have specific implications for the church.   First, THE NUMBER AND VARIETY OF NON-STATE ACTORS WILL RISE DRAMATICALLY.   NGOs (non-governmental organizations) will be the fastest growing non-state actors and will be extremely influential in humanitarian and social concerns.   If churches and their mission organizations are to have an impact around the world, the...