A theme of this site is that all human organizations ― including churches ― eventually fail and die. This is hardly an original thought. Indeed, it is the insight that forms the basis of the book City of God, written by Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th century. He and the other church fathers developed a world view that successfully explained how both the spiritual and the physical worlds worked. In other words, these men successfully developed a theology for their times in which they tried to understand the nature of the only permanent institution: the City of God.
Their theology held sway until men such as Galileo came along nearly a thousand years later and provided a much more convincing explanation as to how the physical world works. The church at that time did not try to engage with the new ways of thinking. Instead it retreated into the domain of ‘just’ spiritual concerns.
If the church is to become relevant in today’s world, I suggest that it needs to re-engage with material issues. For example, Richard Heinberg has just published an article Why Artificial Intelligence Must Be Stopped Now. Heinberg takes a moral stance regarding artificial intelligence (AI). When it comes to moral issues the church should be providing leadership. Yet whe was the last time you heard a sermon preached regarding the morality of ChatGPT? (As an aside, I asked ChatGPT to write a sermon on the gospel text for that week; it did a very good job. Yet when I mentioned this to a priest, his response was, “I will never use AI to write a sermon”. My unspoken reply was, “Why not?”)
If the church is to become relevant to our rapidly changing and rather scary new world its leaders will need to work out a theology for our times. Such a theology will provide guidance on moral and material issues such as AI, climate change and self-sufficiency.