Where will Christianity be in 100 years.

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Shibboleth:
It is my ultimate hope that we will all join as one Church but I do not think that this is possible. At best I think that maybe some of the more traditional Churches such as Lutheran, Catholic, and the like will grow closer together as they start working together.

This will be partially due to people putting away some pride and general healing but I also think that it will be the byproduct of necessity to combat decreasing Church populations and increasing attendance in some of the Assembly of God type congregations.

I do see Protestantism further breaking apart and degrading but I think that as the crumbs fall the hart of that which is strong and True will slowly be exposed.
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Personal opinion - some will mesh together - Anglicans, Lutherans and Orthodox will merge with the Catholic Church, while mainline protestants such as Baptists and Methodists will continue to be separate. More protestant denominations will exist.

There will be movements that unite liberal Christians. The Unitarian Church will grow larger. Interfaith churches will exist. The majority of Christianity will continue to become more liberal and tolerant and politically correct. Islam, Buddhism, Paganism will continue to grow and expand in America. Secular society will become more and more atheistic.

And, of course, the Catholic Church will continue to be the conservative force that it has always been.

My 2 cents.

Peace…
 
In a hundred years, acually much sooner, Jesus Christ will back on this earth, and the Kingdom of God will be established, and Christianity will cover the earth, Isaiah 11:9 It will be the officail world Way of Life and religion.

A good day to all, GED
 
Father John Hardon used to say that the 21st century would be the greatest age in the history of the Church, for the simple reason that the 20th century had seen the greatest number of martyrs. He liked to say that in the 21st century, for the first time in over a millenium, “Catholic” in peoples’ minds would again be synonymous with “Christian.”

But I look around and see secularism in power everywhere and Christianity in decline in the Western world. It seems that this trend will continue and that the West will soon be actively persecuting the Church. And the sole superpower is now the US! I sometimes think that, ferocious as they were, Nazism and Communism (and a few lesser beasts) were really just feints of the Evil One, and that all along he was distracting us from his real attack, which he would make from the heart of the West – from what we always thought was Christendom. The real monster was to be secular liberalism/materialism in the full flowering of its pride and with a now almost “religious” zeal for"tolerance/diversity" and “political correctness” and sexual hedonism. The vision gets murky here, but I think now in some way that the persecution of the Church will be occasioned by her insistence on the sanctity of life and marriage.

Now, I must admit that we are perhaps even now seeing the beginnings of a paradigm shift away from this: the coming struggle with Islam just might be the scourge that God will use again, as he did in the development of Europe, to forge a new Christendom. But if so He will do this through much suffering. Grace is not cheap.

But if Islam does not rise to this role, I think that the outlook is so bleak, and the time frame for Father Hardon’s predicted triumph of the Church to occur in this century is so short, that there will have to be some sort of miraculous intervention. Now Catholic historian Warren Carroll makes the point that the Church at every period in her history has come up with an earthly protector. With the US and Europe persecuting her, who might this protector be? As we are guaranteed that Russia will be converted (and humanly speaking there is no current likelihood of this) I like to think that this protector might be a newly Catholic Russia that would put herself at the service of the Holy See. This was Vladimir Soloviev’s great vision, and precedents for this exist in history, such as the Franco-Germans in the 8th century and Spain in the 16th, and maybe even the US during the Cold War. And there is a precedent for a nation’s sudden conversion: Mexico’s conversion at the instance of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

So even as we see things go from bad to worse we can take comfort in this, that the Church is never so strong as when she has only the angels fighting for her, and that God will bring down utterly any nation that persecutes her.

Regards,
Joannes
 
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Kevan:
“Well, we do.”

“So you just sort of take care of confession between you and God, without involving the priest?”

I need help in understanding why so much importance is given to confessing to a priest? Isnt Jesus Christ our mediator?

thanks

BIC
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I need help in understanding why so much importance is given to confessing to a priest? Isnt Jesus Christ our mediator?

When you confess them to a priest, are you not confessing them to Jesus through the priest?

After all, be honest now; if you didn’t have a priest around to confess to, how often would you think to confess sins to Jesus?

The priest, as the stand-in for Jesus, takes us by the collar and says, “O.K., what devilry have you been into lately?”

Which gives us pause to think.
 
Christianity will be where it is right now … still struggling for the minds and hearts of men.

We needn’t falter or lose heart with Jesus on our side.
 
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Edwin1961:
I try not to worry about such things.
(It’s not apathy, it’s Faith and the acceptance that God the Father has the whole plan already worked out and I just have to be that soul flowing along in His plan.

In struggles we should gain courage and faith in what Christ has planned for His Church now and in eternity!

go with God!
Edwin
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Yep 👍 ! Christ is still building His Church just as He said He would… and the gates of hell will not prevail…it stands until His return and that’s the way it is going to be !!! ** We trust in Him** always ! :yup:
Shalom,
Catherine
 
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Glenamyaglen:
In a hundred years, acually much sooner, Jesus Christ will back on this earth,
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“No man knows the day nor the hour…even the angels do not know.”
 
Jesus told Peter(Matt 16: 18-19) that He would always be with the Church.
We may be battered, despised or supressed as a Church, but we will be.
Will we be like we are now? Maybe not but close.
 
Kevin Walker:
Unrecognizable as Christianity.
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I’d say unrecognizable as the Christianity we know and have experienced.

In his future Church, Rahner has prophesied that “Infallibility”
confined to one person or to the word “pope” will be “as obsolete as a dodo bird.” [National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 1973, p 5].
 
Your assuming mankind hasn’t blown up the world yet.

Mainline denoms will become nearly non-existant and irrelevant.
Evangelical will have splintered themselves into 100 thousand different non-denoms. All having the true Holy spirit thier church into all truth of course. Catholcism will be still around but perhaps in smaller numbers it might suffer some schism as the more liberal church in Europe and Canada and the U.S. will create thier own catholic church. OF course by doing that they cease to be really catholic. But their still will be a faithfull remanant of catholics most likely latin american, africa and parts of asia will the future for catholcism as the western and afflent countries drop it for a version of catholcism closer to the episcopal church.
 
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Shibboleth:
It is my ultimate hope that we will all join as one Church but I do not think that this is possible. At best I think that maybe some of the more traditional Churches such as Lutheran, Catholic, and the like will grow closer together as they start working together.

This will be partially due to people putting away some pride and general healing but I also think that it will be the byproduct of necessity to combat decreasing Church populations and increasing attendance in some of the Assembly of God type congregations.

I do see Protestantism further breaking apart and degrading but I think that as the crumbs fall the hart of that which is strong and True will slowly be exposed.
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I agree, it seems like it is impossible for all of Christianity to become one. I would say that the conservative churches may grow closer, like Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Orthodox, but the non-denoms and the fundamentalists will continue to split.
 
I thought I would explain my answer since I was one of the small group (10%) that said about the same.

While I believe the Catholic Church will grow in numbers, I believe, as the Bible states, that there will be many non-believers and people with hardened heats, even until the end when Jesus has returned! While at any given time maybe a few more percentage points move to Catholicism, at other times a few less perentage points will be Catholic.

I guess I could believe that with our strong work an example we will out-do the other-believers and grow some, but if a large number of people did not believe Jesus was the Messiah when he was HERE, and if Jesus has said that there will be many non-believers, I just don’t think the percentages will change much.
 
I believe that Christianity & Catholicism will spread throughout the world marginally statistically & most importantly the faith of a great number of us will be strengthened. And I think we will see this in less than 20 years.

Why?

The work, writings, teachings, experiences, of the recent faithfully departed, Mother Teresa, Don Luigi Giussani, to name just two, and of course our perfect Pope John Paul 2 will be just coming to “ripen” and be picked by the youth of the world.

The young men & women, who are filling the seminaries & convents, church groups, the INTERENT, are studying and being guided their part in part by the works of these great people. (and the Holy Spirit)I think there will be many shepards to guide us.

Why Else?

The Western “free culture of sex & death” of the 60’s are beginning to see the downward spiral that they lead their children and grandchildren in. (If they weren’t aborted) It will all come full circle.
 
Remember Matthew 16:19. Jesus said He would be with the Church until He comes again. He will be with the Church, not all the people. By that I mean Jesus will be with the church, it’s organization, it’s structure. Actually I believe our church will grow aand it will double in size in 50 to 70 years. The big problem will be where are the Priests?
I think if our Churches remain Novus Ordo and contenue to sing Protestant songs at Mass the Seminaries will be depleated of novices.
 
Some interesting comments from Cardinal Ratzinger:

Q: Many years ago, you spoke in prophetic terms about the Church of the future. At the time you said, “it will be reduced in its dimensions, it will be necessary to start again. However, from this test a Church would emerge that will have been strengthened by the process of simplification it experienced, by its renewed capacity to look within itself.” What are the prospects that await us in Europe?

· Cardinal Ratzinger: To begin with, the Church “will be numerically reduced.” When I made this affirmation, I was overwhelmed with reproaches of pessimism.

And today, when all prohibitions seem obsolete, among them those that refer to what has been called pessimism and which, often, is nothing other than healthy realism, increasingly more [people] admit the decrease in the percentage of baptized Christians in today´s Europe: in a city like Magdeburg, Christians are only 8% of the total population, including all Christian denominations.

Statistical data shows irrefutable tendencies. In this connection, in certain cultural areas, there is a reduction in the possibility of identification between people and Church. We must take note, with simplicity and realism. The mass Church may be something lovely, but it is not necessarily the Church´s only way of being.

The Church of the first three centuries was small, without being, by this fact, a sectarian community. On the contrary, it was not closed in on itself, but felt a great responsibility in regard to the poor, the sick-in regard to all. There was room in its heart for all those nourished by a monotheist faith, in search of a promise. This awareness of not being a closed club, but of being open to the totality of the community, has always been a constant component of the Church.

The process of numerical reduction, which we are experiencing today, will also have to be addressed precisely by exploring new ways of openness to the outside, of new ways of participation by those who are outside the community of believers. I have nothing against people who, though they never enter a church during the year, go to Christmas midnight Mass, or go on the occasion of some other celebration, because this is also a way of coming close to the light. Therefore, there must be different forms of involvement and participation.

· Q: However, can the Church really renounce its aspiration to be a Church of the majority?

· Cardinal Ratzinger: We must take note of the decrease in our lines but, likewise, we must continue to be an open Church. The Church cannot be a closed, self-sufficient group.

ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=19347
 
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ruzz:
The Church is in serious decline.

Protestant churches are holding ground and some are growing quite fast.
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Yes, I am following you around because you are an anti-Catholic in disguise with ulterior motives and agendas. You have been posting anti-Catholic website propaganda and I am close to reporting you.

This is from the associated press last summer:

The United States will no longer be a majority Protestant nation in years to come, due to a precipitous decline in affiliation with many Protestant churches, a new survey has found.
 
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