About This Event


This event is brought to you by the TryTank Experimental Lab in the department of Lifelong Learning at Virginia Theological Seminary


What is the church of the future? Will church—as we know it—even exist? Author and noted futurist Bob Johansen, a distinguished fellow with the Institute for the Future, will join a small audience from around the church to look at current trends, future trends, possible disruptions, and why a new way of thinking is required for leaders of the church. Rather than a fearful future, we should embrace it as an opportunity for new spectrums of meaning-making. It will be a fascinating, yet practical, conversation.


In order to coincide with the release of “Church Shock,” TryTank’s movie with a few plausible scenarios of the church in 2032, the release date of the next “Faith in the Future” conversation has been changed.

Why it matters: The movie has been a year long process of discerning signals of the future and then developing scenarios based on those.

·         The method of foresight is the same as the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA, who taught it to TryTank’s director.

What's next: The new date for the release is July 6, the same day that the movie will be available for viewing.

Meet Our Expert


Bob Johansen is a distinguished fellow with the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley. For more than 30 years, Bob has helped organizations around the world prepare for and shape the future, including corporations such as P&G, Walmart, United Rentals, and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as a range of major universities and nonprofits.

The author or co-author of twelve books, including the best-selling Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present, Leaders Make the Future, and The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything. He is currently writing a new book that will be out in early 2020 called Full-Spectrum Thinking: Escaping the Boxes in a Post-Categorical Future. Bob’s books are used widely in corporations, universities, nonprofits, and at the Army War College.

Bob holds a B.S. from the University of Illinois, which he attended on a basketball scholarship, and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University—as well as a master’s degree that focused on world religions.

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  A Conversation In Three Parts
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