Shakespeare and Surfing

Believe it or not, William Shakespeare has some important insights on surfing. In his play Julius Caesar, he has Brutus address Cassius after the slaying of Caesar, attempting to refocus the political life of that community: “there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; amid it all the voyage of their life is bound in the shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea we are now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves us or lose our ventures.
I am persuaded that Shakespeare’s counsel is spot on. In a world changing as rapidly as ours we must either learn to surf with Shakespeare or experience repeated rides on the wet side. Wayne Burkan, a corporate futurist, puts it in slightly different terms: “To survive in an ever changing world, it is vital to anticipate the future”.
One has only to look back on the waves of change that have battered the Church in the last four decades and see the waves we have missed to realise there must be a better way. For example, we failed to anticipate the impact of MTV and video games on the young in the eighties and nineties. And the Church has been decades late in waking up to the growing need for racial reconciliation in America. Belatedly, Promise Keepers, ‘a group which encourages men to live truly Christian lives’, discovered that this is a serious issue that Evangelical Christians need to address.
Too often in the past the Church has either been jolted by waves of change or allowed them to pass us by altogether – because we have made virtually no effort to anticipate them. Too many of us in leadership have been operating as if we are frozen in a time warp. As a consequence we have missed repeated opportunities to make a difference. In the third millennium the Church needs leaders who can lead with foresight.

by Tom Sine