The three (minimum) fundamental questions that drive the human experience are 1) "Who am I?" 2) "Who do I belong to?" and 3) "What is worth living for?" I would argue that questions 1 & 3 are subservient to 2. Allegiance drives everything.

Throughout time, culture has asked pivotal and varying questions that require decades of wrestling and response. "Who determines reality?" was answered by Descartes. cogito ergo sum! It wasn't just a statement of existence, but of WHO to trust to shape reality (Answer: the individual, not God). Enter modernic thinking and a whole slew of implications that shaped missions witness, dialogue and approaches for decades (scratch that - hundreds) of years. Humanity doubled down on "rationality" and missions strategy turned to the "provability" of God. Because human experience isn't entirely rational, the question changed. "What is truth?" was answered with postmodern philosophy. Again, missions strategy adjusted by beginning...

There's no way to overestimate the impact a shorter travel times have had on global missions. At one point, going to the mission field meant hopping on board a ship and spending weeks or months enroute. Today, it's exciting, but not innovative, for a church to send volunteers to hop into a metal tube and spend only a few hours to arrive in a different country to help advance missions efforts. The future will continue to shorten proximity. Consider the coming proliferation of air taxis and people-moving/cargo-moving drones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YUv0AMq0x8

https://www.ft.com/content/b91706c6-7728-11e9-be7d-6d846537acab

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58895259

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/18/evtols-flying-taxis-supersonic-military

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-agency-will-review-faa-efforts-flying-taxi-rules-2022-03-07/

The FAA already has "flying taxi" regulations. And note that in the links above, the effort is global. Western Europe should have...

Recently, we left a beach on the East Coast one day early to stay one day ahead of Hurricane Ian. Thankfully, things worked out brilliantly. We stayed ahead of the storm(s), returned over the mountain range back to the Midwest without much disruption at all. Hurricane Ian reminded us of the incredible devastation water can have on coastal cities. And that's just in the U.S. Consider the devastation of water on coastal cities globally. 

Now factor in a sobering thought: people are moving towards those cities, not away from them.

"Cities have become a gigantic engine of change, a catalyst for the end of the world as we know it. Cities occupy 1 percent of the world’s land yet are home to about 55 percent of the human population. Told another way, the total landmass on Earth is 196.9 million square miles and cities account for roughly 2 million of those. With 4 billion urban residents, that’s an average of 2,000 people per square mile in cities, which is...

I've been reading the work of several futurists, all of whom reference global aging and demographic shifts as having a major global impact. That impact is obviously predictable. There's no hidden science in the prediction. We know a crisis is coming because everyone impacted is already born. A massive wave of aging boomers will strain global health care services, Social Security frameworks, and a whole host of other issues. The global demographic impact won't be a ripple, but a tsunami.

• "By 2030 China will have 90 million fewer people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five and 150 million more people above the age of sixty."1
• "The reality is that by 2030 we will be facing a baby drought." 2
• "People don’t stop aging just because times are good. The slowly aging demography of the United States and the moderately aging demographies of Japan and the Europeans and the quickly aging demographies of the advanced developing world all converge on mass retirement in the...