First draft by Ken Evers Hood:
The year is 2045. The institutional church crumbling in North America in 2015 is little more than a memory today. After years of denying science, resisting changing attitudes towards the role of women and sexual minorities, leadership incompetence and clergy sex abuse the church moved from being viewed as malevolent to merely irrelevant to little more than a whisper of a memory today.
Yet remnants of the old wisdom remain. Fragments of forgotten symbols surface here and there. Today traces of texts containing epic stories are rumored to exist.
Freed from tone deaf hierarchies is there any life left in these forgotten bones?
How do you find meaning in an increasingly technological age in which you are simultaneously connected and isolated?
How do you celebrate the birth of little ones, naming them and enfolding them into the community?
Where do you find the shared spaces to sing your deepest joys that rise out of ineffable, mysterious depths?
What galvanizes communities to rise up in hopeful resistance to inhumanity quelling injustice rather than just adding to the noise?
How do you say goodbye to your mother? How do you gather the memories of a life well lived and grieve beneath what feels like an empty sky?
What would you miss in a world without church? Are there enough remnants left to stitch together a meaningful fabric? Is it too late?