Sunday morning.

The church building sits with doors waiting to be opened, screens waiting to flare to life, chairs waiting for occupants.

It’s quiet—for now.

The first cars pull up in front of the doors. Couples, families, friends—old and young—step out and, with the push of a button, send their vehicles away to the offsite parking lots. Cars follow each other away from the building in a shining procession of windows and wheels.

Dream

What might church—what might that Sunday morning—look like someday?

There are some ideas, some guesses.

“We are going to have a whole new layer of outreach tools beyond what we have now with people sharing information and messages peer to peer,” said Dave Travis, CEO of Leadership Network, noting the kinds of tools being used by political campaigns for tracking and isolating individuals.

For Bobby Gruenewald, pastor and innovation leader at Life.Church, technological advances create huge potential for the church to ...