I've noticed in Christian ministry that we don't often reverse engineer from the super horizon, the end of time. We might plan a sermon series or next year's church camp but we don't think about where history is heading and the state of Christianity in our part of the world and where it'll be in a decade or two. Now admittedly, the plans will be hazier than next year's conference but we need to be connecting the dots all the way down. Otherwise there is a gap between our espoused theology (the importance of history and Jesus' return) and our practiced/actual theology (concern only for our local patch).