My daughter turned 16 last week, one more reminder that everything in our family is changing. She’s driving now, and the other day she asked to drive us home—in my Jeep! My wife hasn’t even driven my Jeep yet! I said yes, and it was fine. My little girl is a good driver.

One more change: She has a boyfriend now. A boyfriend! Actually, I like him. (Could I have ever anticipated saying those words?) I like having him around. (I think he has a healthy fear of me, and I like that too!)

I know I can only imagine the changes we’ll experience in the next five or ten years. What our family has always known as normal has disappeared, and it’s tempting to long for the normal of the past. Or it would be easy to console ourselves believing a “new normal” will replace what’s changing. But it won’t. We’ll progress through one change after another in the coming years. Life will never settle into normal. The goal is not to settle into normal, the goal is to progress through life. And that’s how it’s supposed to be—not only in the life of a growing family, but for the life of a growing church, too.

I said last week and I repeated this Sunday my conviction that the church will not—we dare not—get back to “normal” once this crisis is over. The old normal just won’t work anymore. And it shouldn’t. Here are three ways the church must be different after the quarantine is lifted.

This is the time when writers and websites everywhere are giving space to a look at the year just past. It’s a good thing. I joined them with my reflection last week on the five most popular posts on this blog in 2019. But now it’s time to look ahead. I’m not bold enough to make predictions, but I do want to talk about three trends the church must not ignore as we begin a new decade.