Megatrend 20: The emergence and loss of the AD2000 megamagnet
by Justin D. Long
In the year AD 960, Bernard of Thuringia predicted the imminent end of the world for the year AD 992. Alarm spread throughout Europe as the end of the first millenium approached. By AD 999, multitudes were journeying to Jerusalem to await the second coming of Christ as believed prophesied in the Apocrypha and expected in AD 1000. The milennial year was preceded by widespread terrors as panic-stricken mobs thronged into Rome and Jerusalem to await the end. Richard Erdoes, in his book, AD 1000: Living on the brink of Apocalypse (1988), vividly describes the tension in St. Peter's basilica in Rome as the brilliant scientist Gerbert of Aurillac, now Pope Sylvester II, celebrated midnight mass on New Year's Eve, AD 999, regarded as the dreaded eve of the Millenium, the Final Hour, the onset of the Day of Wrath. For centuries afterwards, millenial fever gripped Christendom. By the year AD 1060, vast numbers of medieval millenarian movements had arisen, involving millions of desperate rebels, radicals and rootless poor seeking hope in a newer world.
The mass panic engendered throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages has been captured in earlier classic, Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium (1957, 1970).
As the year AD 2000 aproaches, there are many parallels today to that era. There are also some striking differences. First is the instantaneous speed with which modern communications can spread news, alarm, panic and even hysteria. Second is today's vast agenda of world missions. In AD 999, the Christian multitudes were largely concerned with saving their own skins and had no interest in the fate of the world's 202 million unevangelized Christians at that time. Today, by contrast, Christians are widely involved in schemes to evangelize the world, including its 1.3 billion unevangelized persons.
Like a huge electromagnet, the Millenial Year is both attracting and repelling global Christianity with enormous force. Half the Christian world sees enormous significance in this date; the other half denies any significance at all.
Attraction of AD 2000
First, millions of Christians are greatly attracted to the AD 2000 date. Large numbers of plans to evangelize the world by the end of the century are coming into existence today, in all branches of global Christianity. At present, some mighty global plans and over five hundred non-global plans have been announced with AD 2000 as their target date.
Reasons for this attraction include:
- widespread secular discussion of 2000 since the first United Nations' projected population statistics for AD 2000 published fourty years ago;
- fifty years of writings by secular futurists (for instance, H. Khan's "The Year 2000" in 1967);
- the feeling among Christians that there must surely be something significant in the end of two whole millenia of Christian endeavor;
- the emergence since 1970 of a large body of Christian literature on the year 2000;
- the rapid approach of the Millenial Year itself, now only three years away;
- and the current focus on the final decade of the Second Millenium, the years 1990 to 2000, as a Decade of Evangelism. This decade has been planned in detail by the different churches under a wide variety of names, and in over fifty languages: Decade of Evangelism, Decade of Harvest, Decade of Destiny, Decade of Decision, Universal Decade of Evangelization, Decade of World Evangelization, Decade of World Mission, Decada de Evangelizacion Mundial, and so forth. All of these will climax on the first day of the twenty-first century which will be, strictly speaking, January 1, 2001.
The repulsion of the AD 2000 date
By no means everybody, however, is enamored of the Millenial Year. Many Christians are insisting that it has no more significance than a date like 1997, 2002 or 2010. It has long been noticeable that a number of major Christian organizations (WCC, WEF, LCWE, Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples) have not publicized any interest in AD 2000 thinking. Many such bodies are repelled by the prospects of millenial hysteria. They have reacted either by deliberately ignoring it in all their public utterances or self-conciously setting different decadal dates. Thus the World Council of Churches has long avoided any statements about 2000 and instead launched the Ecumenical Decade of Women for the period of 1988-98.
Another reason why the megamagnet repels many is that they imagine that AD 2000 protagonists are identifying the year with the Second Coming of Christ. Very few protagonists have ever said anything of the sort. Almost universally they have disavowed any prophetic insights.
For most supporters, the AD 2000 date is simply a mechanism very much in tune with our times, with widespread acceptance in churches of planning, action plans, five-year plans, project management, deadlines and so forth. Further, many Christians feel totally accountable for the fate of their generation, usually reckoned as a thirty year period of opportunity. The sixty-six generations of Christians since AD 33 have each failed to evangelize the world; a target date as powerful as AD 2000 was seen as a providential gift to be employed to the full.
The result of the AD 2000 date
Barring some major event (which did not happen in AD 1000 or in 1900), when the Annual Status of Global Mission table in the January 2000 issue of the International, it will show that not only is the world about 33% Christian, it will also be about 16% unevangelized, with hundreds of ethnic groups lacking both an indigenous church and any knowledge of the Gospel.
This means that, despite the "push" of the year 2000, despite all the megatrends in our favor, the plans of Christians worldwide to accomplish "a church for every people" by AD 2000, or even to accomplish global evangelization by the same time, will not have not been achieved. Worse, the next three years are not likely, in our opinion, to see any new breakthroughs that will bring them into completion.
For example, consider the Pashayi of Afghanistan. This small ethnic group has just 141,000 members. It has no Scripture in its own tongue, has no broadcasting, has no "Jesus" film, has no missionaries deployed among them, and no churches planted. They are mostly Muslims living in Nuristan. In order for this to be accomplished, either an indigenous group of Christians (of which there are few in Afghanistan) will have to penetrate them with the Gospel (not likely in the next three years), or cross-cultural assistance from the outside will have to accomplish the same task (against the huge barriers of language, local politics and war). Will anything happen among them in the next three years? If not, then the goal to accomplish global evangelization or "a church for every people" by 2000 will have failed. There are thousands of other groups in the same position.
It is a hard thing to speak of failure, and yet it is coldly and realistically very probable. We are balanced on the thin knife edge of loss. At the start of this decade, when the grand vision of "global evangelization by AD 2000" was propagated by many voices, it was completely possible. Now, though, it is highly unlikely.
Reality Check
Quite simply, for all our grand plans, the church failed to accomplish two things which were absolutely necessary in order to reach the lost by the year 2000: (1) mobilize Christians in sufficient numbers to reach the peoples with missionary effort; and, (2) redeploy resources from those who have much to those who have little.
We can always finish later... right?
Already, someone is poised with the old objection: let's not speak of failure and get everyone discouraged! We've ve gotten off to a good start, and we can always finish it up in a few years. What's the difference in 2000 or 2005? Let's be hopeful and optimistic!
The difference is over 50 million souls who will slip through our fingers by 2005. Those are 50 million souls which THIS GENERATION of Christians is responsible for!
Worse, given current trends, even with all the current missions energy from the many great campaigns, even with the vast indigenous church movements, even with all the many things working in our favor, still the task will not be completed in 2005, or 2010, or even 2025--but rather, not until around 2050. Between now and then, somewhere around half a billion people will perish, never knowing about Christ and the story of the Cross.
Or... the indigenous groups will finish it off?
The second objection to this critique is that the indigenous groups will be able to finish the task. But this, too, is unlikely. Consider the Pashayi of Afghanistan again. What indigenous church is in a position to cross the barriers of language and plant churches among the Pashayi? With just a few thousand Christians in Afghanistan, it is unlikely that =all= the indigenous groups can be met by the indigenous church!
Beyond 2000: where to from here?
We are about to lose a great psychological advantage: the idea of finishing the task by a large, looming time. We are going to have to either replace that "looming deadline" with another deadline, or else learn to cope without it. The moral of the stories of the last two centuries =might= be (and I emphasize the "might") that we need some other tool besides deadline dates.
In the years beyond 2000, it will be left to the next Generation to maintain the current missions energy, to redeploy so that the unevangelized receive the focus of our urgency, and to increase our effort markedly in order to reach more people, now.
Notably, these are goals that we could not achieve during the final decade of this millenium. How we achieve them in the years to come, without the energy and urgency created by the looming year of 2000, is a topic around which all our creative energies and discussions ought and must be gathered.
