Predictions for 2023

A lot of year end content is retrospective and that’s fun. I enjoy critics' lists of the 20 best movies and the 15 best albums and so on. 
But the end of year content that intrigues me the most are the prospective ones, the ones that try to pull back the curtain to take a peek into the future. 
Of course they’re often wildly, laughably wrong. Things written at the end of 2019 about what sort of year 2020 would be make us wince now in retrospect. 
So why bother? For the fun of it, certainly. But also because it’s a valuable exercise. Even if weather forecasting is imprecise and occasionally very wrong, it’s still wise to look at the day’s forecast before getting dressed in the morning. 
So here are some of our best guesses about what the coming year holds for us. 
For Furnace Brook Wesleyan Church:

• Joel’s sabbatical this summer will put some stress on the church, but will result in leadership development and Joel will be revitalized for an important season in the life of the church as we head into the fall.
  
• The biggest milestones in the life of the church in 2023 will be personal things like conversions, baptisms, births, weddings and the like. 
  
• We will need to develop additional worship times and contexts to accommodate increased attendance and participation.
  
• There will be increasing pressure on us to relax our commitment to orthodox Christianity, especially as it pertains to sex and sexuality.
  
• This will be the year that our commitment to orthodoxy begins to cost us in some measurable ways.
  

For the culture:

• The rate of change on things like euthanasia, transgender ideology, drug use and other progressive social movements will accelerate with sad effects.
  
• This will be the year that unforeseen consequences of AI become front page stories with real, human costs.
  
• Churches that continue to use the church growth paradigms from the early 2000’s will continue to see some modest success, but with diminishing returns and their efforts will increasingly be costly to their long term success.
  
• This will be a bad year for celebrity leadership and the organizations that depend on celebrity leaders.
  
• People looking for churches in 2023 will be at least as interested in the church’s relationship to technology as in its politics and doctrine.
  

There’s a bunch of other stuff that I’m thinking about and so much that I don’t know and I didn’t even touch on the geopolitical things that could unfold this year. So let’s wrap this speculation up with some certainty.
Let’s start and end with Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega. Jesus is Lord. He was the Lord of every moment in 2022. His lordship will extend to every moment of the coming year. 
He is powerful to save and people will come to saving faith this year and be baptized so that nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever separate them from the love of God that’s theirs in Christ Jesus. In that respect this year will be no different from every year since Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to the courts of heaven and no different from every coming year until he returns to establish his Kingdom. 
Praise him.

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