From The Wolverine (Wolverine 2), a focus for church?

About Yashida, who appears as a young Japanese POW camp guard at the beginning of the movie with Logan, then as the leader of the powerful industrial complex in the present day (aging gracefully as opposed to Logan, the Wolverine, who does not), it was said (and I paraphrase)

"He has one foot in the past and one in the future". 

He has taken the traditions of Japan in his industrial structure and brought them into the future of technological advancement and attempted to be a bridge, one to the other.

I believe we need the same bridge for our church.  We are doing things 'differently'.  If we don't, we are going to go extinct as a congregation.  We are seeking to be the church for the next generations.  That is where our future lies.  But certain things do not change.

Our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, DOES NOT CHANGE.  God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  The Good News of Jesus Christ does not change.  The 21st century did not bring in a new way to heaven.  The Bible does not change-although our understanding of it certainly does.  To each generation, the Word speaks the Truth.  These are the things of the past and the future.

In the future, the style of worship will change.  Formal authority gives way to earned authority.  Codes of conduct and modes of doing things change.  A more casual generation is on the rise.  The pastor no longer carries the Authority of the Pulpit as in ages past.  The preaching contains more teaching, more persuasion, seeks to address and interpret God's message to new and more diverse situations.  The level of education and bible knowledge has dropped from past generations.  Christianity used to be more in the mainline of the secular culture, but it has been systematically marginalized for the last three generations.

So we stand across the generations, one foot in what came before, the legacy of two thousand years of faith, and one foot in what will come, the ever changing, dizzyingly diverse world of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.  At the balancing point of past and future is the present.  Here today and gone tomorrow.