Jeffery Tucker looks at John Allen's new book, The Future Church: The Elephant in the Living Room. I don't have the book, and I don't plan on purchasing it, but based on what I've read in Mr. Tucker's post and Mr. Allen's brief description of the book, I think Allen gets the long-term future wrong, even if he is extrapolating based on current trends.

The book is my attempt to describe the ten most important trends shaping the future of the Catholic Church, on a global scale. My choices are the product of almost two decades of reporting, and hundreds of hours of interviews with bishops, priests, religious women and men, and laity all over the Catholic world. They’re not styled as my personal vision for the future, but rather a reporter’s effort to capture those forces which really are most significant today, whatever I (or anyone else) might think about them.

The trends are:
A World Church
Evangelical Catholicism
Islam
The New Demographics
Expanding Lay Roles
The Biotech Revolution
Globalization
Ecology
Multipolarism
Pentecostalism

I believe that the Church, if it is to remain "effective" in the future, must rediscover what it is for the local Church to be local -- only then can there be a complete renewal of Christian spirituality. (And part of that renewal includes a better developed liturgical spirituality.)

If the elites try to hold on to their political and economic power, in the face of peak oil, resource depletion, and the rest, I believe this will be accompanied by greater attacks on the Church, so that the Church must start operating more like revolutionary cells, than a mainstream social institution.