Thoughts from the future

Now we in the church ought to be doing the kind of exercise that this novellist has been up to of late, to help us think about how we use our efforts best in the near future. Look at this set of scenarios and think about the kind of knock-on effects they will have for the way people live, think about their lives, their spirituality and identities.

Trying to get into the head of a 28-year-old British professional circa 2016 — the people this novel is about — is an interesting exercise, even though people of this generation are easy enough to track down right now: the trouble is, if I ask them questions now, I'm asking a bunch of 18 year olds. Whereas what I'm interested in is what they'll be thinking when they're 28 ...
You were one year old when the Cold War ended. You were thirteen when the war on terror broke out, and eighteen or nineteen when Tony Blair was forced to resign as Prime Minister. You graduated university owing £35,000 in student loans, at a time when the price of entry into the housing market in the UK was over £150,000 (about 4-5 times annual income; the typical age of first time buyers was 35 and rising by more than 12 months per year). Unless you picked the right career (and a high-earning one at that) you can't expect to ever own your own home unless your parents die and leave you one. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect to work until you're 70-75, because the pension system is a broken mess. The one ray of hope was that your health and life expectancy are superior to any previous generation — you can reasonably expect to live to over a hundred years, if you manage to avoid succumbing to diseases of affluence.
For comparison, when I graduated university in 1986, I had no student loans, first homes cost £30,000— or about 2-2.5 times annual income — and the retirement age was 60-65. So it should be no surprise if the generation of 1988 has very different expectations of their future life from the generation of 1964.

Where does the church come in? How do we minister? How do we mission? What are the consequences of having congregation of people in this kind of position: financially, in terms of disposable time, family and social life, pastoral needs ... and what kinds of creative responses might we begin to think about [co-housing?]
And what about the things not mentioned: climate change beginning to bite big; the cult of age because all those boomers are well into a well-endowed retirement that we can only drool over ...

The comments are interesting too. Kinda makes you think that the collective head really can score some benefits over the lone genius.
Charlie's Diary: Thoughts from the coal face:
Filed in: futuring, 2016, UK, experience