Part One: All
Change
Exactly one
hundred years ago, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh
month, the guns ceased firing in what was known at the time as the Great War. Today, we know it as the first world
war. It was supposed to have been the
war to end all wars. It was, of course,
nothing of the sort. It was, however,
the end of an era. Not that most people
saw it that way at the time, and afterwards much continued as before when the
men returned from the trenches. Those
that did return, that is - some 40 million didn’t.
In the
hundred years that have followed, however, we have seen great changes affecting
and transforming every aspect of life on the planet. Thanks to many of those changes, a child born
today can expect to live for a hundred years.
What will life be like for him or her in the next hundred years?
Some years
ago now, I went for the first time to India.
I visited, as you do, the Taj Mahal, and still remember how amazing I
found it that I could phone my mum and tell her where I was. A child born today simply will not be able to
understand what was so amazing about it.
Just over ten years ago, smartphones made their first appearance. There are now more smartphones on the planet
than there are people.
What sort
of a world is today’s child entering?
Charles
Dickens, in his famous novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, set at the time of the
French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, begins it with the words, ‘It
was the best of times; it was the worst of times.’ That, I think, is a good description of the
time in which we live. Depending on how
you look at it, today is both.
A few
examples may serve to make the point.
As a
species, we have made huge advances in the past one hundred years. We are well on our way to eradicating famine
and mass starvation. A person born today
is more likely to die from obesity than malnutrition.
For most of
us, war itself is comparatively rare compared to the past. Despite our fear of terrorism, you are more
likely to be killed, for example, in London by a car in a traffic accident than
you are by a bomb in a terrorist attack.
Thankfully, today thousands are not killed in a single battle as they
were during the Great War at the Somme or in any of the many other senseless
battles of that terrible war.
Many deadly
diseases have been either eradicated or else can be treated. We are now living longer. And while there may still be a way to go, as
a species, in many ways, we have never had it so good.
We have,
however, created new threats for ourselves.
We now have
the power not only to kill thousands with our weapons, but to destroy the
planet itself. While we have become
somewhat complacent about the threat of nuclear war, it is as real as ever. Different to the days of the Cold War,
certainly, but real, nevertheless. The
United States, for example, has recently pulled out of the deal over nuclear
weapons with Iran. And China has made
its position with regard to Taiwan all too clear. In 1914, it only took an assassin’s bullet to
set the world on fire. It needs only a
similar event in one of the many flash points around our world for the same to
happen today.
Economic
growth has made us all materially better off, but it has been at the cost of
huge environmental damage. A recent
United Nations Report concluded that we have only 12 years left until the point
of no return on climate change. And a WWF
Report, just published, concludes that this is the last generation that can
save the planet.
Experience
teaches that any picture of the future is likely to be wrong. What we can be certain of, however, is that
with the development of artificial intelligence and bio-engineering, what time
we do have left on the planet is going to be as much a time of change as the
past one hundred years have been.
So where do
we as Christians fit into all this?
Where do we as a Church fit into this?
Where does
our Synod meeting fit into this?
Next:
Part Two:
Meet Milly
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