Ahead of the Trinity Test, the first test of a nuclear weapon, there was serious (and not unfounded) concern among scientists that the bomb would ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere, which would set off a chain reaction that would ignite all of the air on earth. Every single thing would be engulfed in flames, and we wouldn’t even have time to explain ourselves to every man, woman, and child killed in the process. 

They did the test anyway. Just a decade later, when we sought to launch the first satellites, there was an eerie echo; a small but not insignificant portion of scientists who had real concern that the atmosphere might be a one-way valve. They theorized that while it was fine for things to fall from space, if we sent things the other way, the atmosphere might be sucked out into the vast emptiness of space, that we were essentially living in an airlock. Sputnik went up anyway. 

This isn’t a psychological quirk of the nuclear age. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, believes that artificial super-intelligence has a twenty-five percent chance of creating apocalyptic outcomes, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (of ChatGPT fame) is famously a doomsday prepper.¹ And yet, the data centers are popping up in every square corner of our country, gobbling every drop of water and watt of power we give them. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who run the doomsday clock, founded in 1945 in response the development of nuclear weapons, has never placed us farther from 17 minutes to midnight. Ever since that first Trinity test, we as a species have lived in the imminent threat of self-induced extinction (not to mention the less likely but always possible threats of external extinction from comets, catastrophic natural disasters, disease, sudden climate change, etc).²,³

This lingering threat of total apocalypse has a non-zero effect on human psychology. There have been well over 100 predicted doomsdays, and at least once a generation, there is a movement of people who really believe this is the end of days. They all had their reasons, some more scientific than others.⁴

But its also worth noting that every single prediction has been wrong. We are still here. I remember the early days of the pandemic, when in just a few days, all major events were canceled, when the grocery stores were empty, when schools closed, indefinitely. I remember not being entirely sure how we would all bounce back from that. How it felt like the world was ending all around me. And here we all are. Not to minimize the loss we experienced, my boss was one of the one million Americans who lost their lives to Covid in the first year of the pandemic. 

But I remember in those early months, that Easter with an empty sanctuary, a pastor preaching earnestly about hope to a camera, and feeling like the world we knew, the ministry that I had learned how to lead might have experienced an apocalypse of its own. We all lead churches now that are different, and changed, but the marking of seats, the mask mandates, the contact tracing, the vaccine cards, are all a memory. We, in large part, survived. Not unchanged, but persisting. 

I wonder if it would be worth it for us to take just a momentary break from wondering about the next threat – to the church, to the environment, to our attention spans, to our mental health – and reflecting on what we have proven capable of surviving. The church has survived wars upon wars of its own making. It survived the invention of the scientific method, including evolution, a much older earth than Genesis suggests, even the reality that the Earth isn’t the center of much of anything. It survived being used as a justification for chattel slavery, and that system’s collapse. It survived evolving understandings of gender, family, relationships. It’s survived the advent of the internet and social media, and even the smartphone – which starts to sound like a lot smaller challenge when put in a larger context. 

Which is sort of my point. The Church, and we as humans more broadly, have proven to be a lot more resilient than we seem to give ourselves credit for. We aren’t unchanged by the things that happen to us. It’s not like there is no hurt or damage caused by tectonic shifts in our world. But I think of Jesus, resurrected, with holes in his hands and his side; he is changed by what has happened to him, but he is not hindered. The post resurrection Chirst is at work in ways now that would have been unfathomable to those who assumed Jesus’s crucifixion was the end of the story. 

It is an uncertain moment, particularly in American churches, where political conflict and the adoption of religious rhetoric by political movements has made us uneasy. It is a moment where rapidly changing technology, and rapidly changing understanding of the technology, makes it difficult for us to speak with confidence about the future. It is a moment where the biggest IPO in history seems built on a fantasy of leaving Earth behind altogether, and some of the most powerful people on Earth think these next few decades may well be our last.⁵ 

I’m not as convinced. We’re resilient creatures. We build resilient things. And more importantly, when it comes to us, in church work? We were made by a God who has demonstrated resilience in the most profound form – bringing life after death, rainbows after floods, and resurrection into our lives over and over again. We are made in God’s image, we are called to be imitators of Christ, and I think Paul said it best,

 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

1. Interview with Dario Amadei: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ai-ceo-says-25-chance-163548286.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANrDd4Uvpbseyx2FzHmadVQqlKDCvAjVENuxalLTozoNlSymzuz2DuI284l2yBh4OJh1MkRh1aPmuHRc8Z-G7qGGyFUVKKbRdqDZgcSajbVu2wdZEdi0DOiN0nxYRBbCUNzA-2ffKNyRjK6DKbo3XeB_uKw5lb-snRJutbqv2oGu ↩︎
2. Excellent podcast on the topic! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-opera-game/id1844631307?i=1000773247330 ↩︎
3. The Doomsday Clock: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/ ↩︎
4. Enjoy this rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events ↩︎
5. SpaceX IPO: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/12/spacex-ipo-spcx-live-updates.html ↩︎