Well, the weather has certainly been unpredictable lately, so much so that I’ve started consulting several web pages before planning my daily ‘adventures’.

It’s amazing just how much weather forecasts can vary too, which is why I’ve decided to take the advice of one ‘wise owl’ who said the best thing to do is to look out of the window!

Predicting the future, even the immediate future, is never easy. That’s certainly true of politics in the ‘Trumpian Age’. for example. I’ve lost count of the number of times a senior BBC foreign correspondent has used the word ‘uncertain’ when reflecting on all that’s happening at the moment.

Having said this, one man has taken the brave decision to predict some of the ‘missional trends’ he expects to see in the year ahead. Phill Knox is no intellectual pygmy. He serves as an evangelism and missiology senior specialist at the Evangelical Alliance and that would suggest that his predictions should be taken seriously.

He is clearly convinced for example, that the growing interest in spiritual things we are currently witnessing will continue and that the year ahead will prove “the most spiritually open … in living memory”. The decline in atheism will continue he says, but he also cautions that there is no guarantee that that this will lead to mass conversions to Christianity. The evangelical church will grow, he suggests, but the rising tide will cause seekers to turn not only to all forms of Christianity, but to other religions, paganism and the occult.

Knox expects the sale of Bibles to continue to grow too. He uses the word ‘soar’! Sales have increased by nearly 90 per in recent years in our fake news, post truth culture he notes, with younger generations especially attracted to good news that is ‘true profound and beautiful’.

He may well be right, but this will clearly bring its challenges. The church will need to find ways of making new attenders feel welcome and this can often prove far more demanding than many of them might realise. Churches naturally want to grow but, as any parent knows, a new baby will necessitate new (and often unexpected) changes in the normal routine.

They will need to find ways to help a new generation understand – and adopt – the ideas and the values of a faith that has been so readily dismissed in recent years. The Christian message has often proved offensive and could still do in our polarised post-Christian culture.

Interestingly, Knox also points to research that suggests that a sizeable number of new Christians began their faith journey as the result of a spiritual experience, and he fully expects these unexplained events and experiences to continue too.

This is one prediction I can readily endorse because I have discovered over the years that God can do the most unexpected things and transform the lives of the most unlikely people. We shouldn’t be surprised. If He can arrange a virgin birth and bring a dead man back to life He can do anything. So, ‘roll on’ 2026!