The world is changing quickly.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we work, learn, communicate, create, and make decisions. Medicine is changing. Education is changing. Careers are changing. The amount of information competing for our attention continues to grow.
Some of these changes will be remarkable. Some will be disruptive. Most will probably be a mixture of both.
But the most important question may not be, What is going to happen next?
It may be: Who will we become while it is happening?
In this special, unnumbered episode of The Bible Unplugged, Brent steps away from the normal teaching format to explain why the upcoming series, The Formed Future, has become so important to him—and why it represents an important direction for Power Love and Miracles.
For more than forty years, Brent’s pastoral ministry has placed him beside people whose expected futures suddenly disappeared. A diagnosis changes everything. A spouse dies. A career ends. A body stops cooperating. The map someone had been using no longer describes the territory in front of them.
Those experiences have shaped the way he looks at the extraordinary period of change we are entering now.
The central question is pastoral as much as technological:
How do human beings live faithfully when the world they knew begins changing underneath their feet?
Paul offers a powerful picture in Ephesians 4:14–15. Christian maturity means becoming people who are no longer “tossed back and forth” by every wind that blows around them.
Paul’s answer is not to stop the wind.
His answer is to grow.
To become mature.
To become rooted deeply enough in Christ that every new cultural, political, technological, or economic wind does not determine who we are.
That may become one of the most important spiritual tasks of the years ahead.
The church can spend enormous energy trying to predict the future while neglecting the formation of the people who will actually have to live in it. The Formed Future takes a different approach.
The goal is not to predict 2035.
The goal is to become the kind of person who can faithfully meet whatever 2035 brings.
That means learning to remain loving when others become hostile, discerning when others become confused, peaceful when fear becomes profitable, and fully human when efficiency threatens to become the highest value.
It also means recognizing that technology can amplify what is already inside us. Powerful tools shaped by wisdom and compassion can accomplish enormous good. The same tools shaped by greed, fear, domination, or contempt can magnify those qualities as well.
So one of the most important Christian questions about technology may not simply be: What can this do?
It may be: What kind of person should I become before I use this power?
That is why information alone is not enough.
We need formation.
And that increasingly describes the direction of Power Love and Miracles.
Steady explored how to develop an inner life that does not rise and fall with every circumstance.
Love Beyond Measure invited us to live from God’s love rather than endlessly trying to earn what God has already given.
Still, Here has become a daily practice of presence.
And now The Formed Future asks: What kind of person is God shaping me to become for the life ahead?
Over the coming episodes of The Bible Unplugged, Brent will explore that question through themes including attention, wisdom, power, love, human identity, vocation, and faithfulness in a future we cannot completely see.
The goal is not simply for Christians to survive rapid change.
It is for us to become role models for how human beings can live through it.
To stand without becoming rigid.
To adapt without losing ourselves.
To think without surrendering love.
To use power without worshiping it.
To face uncertainty without being ruled by fear.
And to walk into a future we cannot see with confidence that God is already there.
The world does not need Christians who know exactly what is going to happen. It needs Christians who know who they are when it does.
Scripture
Ephesians 4:14–15
Philippians 4:6–7
Coming Next
TBU 105 begins The Formed Future series with:
The Future Is Already Forming You
The future is not simply waiting somewhere ahead of us. The habits, technologies, voices, fears, hopes, and repeated choices of today are already shaping the people we are becoming.
I am not afraid of the future. I am deeply concerned about entering it unformed.
