As Ontario endured day after day of record-setting heat, smog alerts and skyrocketing energy prices this summer, I hit the beach one afternoon and waded through James Howard Kunstler’s new book, The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005).

It made for a depressing read.

Subtitled, “Surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century,” Kunstler’s book offers an in-depth look at the problems we could face living on the downside of global peak oil production. It is a slippery slope we could already be on. Some industry experts claim we’ve passed the tipping point at which half the world’s oil is gone. The half that remains is of inferior quality and harder to get.

According to the author, the oil depletion era he calls “The Long Emergency” is imminent and will be “a horizonless era” of conflict, withering global economics and energy starvation.

He argues our economy is built on the foundation of cheap, accessible oil. In the absence of any viable alternative, once oil ceases to be cheap or accessible, the foundation crumbles. And if the crumbling coincides with severe climatic change, epidemic disease, food and water shortages, as the author believes it will, life as we know it will also disintegrate.

Disturbing thoughts.

But for me, the most disturbing aspect of Kunstler’s book was his prediction about how the Church will respond in the face of such adversity.

A former journalist, Kunstler describes himself as “someone who has not followed any kind of lifelong organized religion.” Yet he predicts the hardships to come will prompt people to seek solace in religious practice, turning especially to what he labels “the cruder branches of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity.”

He says he expects those denominations to provide “simplistic explanations,” “justifications for extreme behaviour” and speculates they will “seek to reinforce the very hyperindividualist philosophies that evolved with the consumer economy of the twentieth century.”

Kunstler’s negative opinion of the Church saddened me, but caused me to wonder whether, if in living out our comfortable North American evangelicalism through the oil era, we haven’t earned such opinions.

While only time will tell whether “long emergency” catastrophes will actually materialize, Scripture teaches that Earth’s inhabitants are indeed destined for difficult days. But it also exhorts us to not be invested in the things of this world, not to worry or be afraid and to serve our fellowman as we await Christ’s return.

Kunstler says that as the world runs out of oil, people will be have to conduct activities of daily life on a smaller, more localized scale.

That could well mean unprecedented opportunities for churches that currently struggle trying to find effective ways to serve their communities. If Kunstler and other proponents of the peak oil theory are correct, we could conceivably return to a situation in which living, working and caring for our neighbours are urgent necessities, not merely strategies for evangelism or church growth.

As I pondered Kunstler’s Long Emergency, the price of crude oil topped $70 U.S. a barrel, the average price of gasoline in this country reached record-setting levels, global scientists warned of the potential for the next major pandemic and Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans; all serving to sober my thoughts.

Fortunately, God is in control. And He has placed His Body here to do His work.

The question is, will we?