Imagine it is 2412, and we are a group of researchers asked to contribute to a data pod which is to be sent to Betelgeuse. We are commissioned to focus on the last 400 years, with special emphasis on the people called Baptist. What would we hope to discover, and how might those hopes for the future feed into our discussions now?

We would note that there used to be an organisation called the Baptist Union of Great Britain that supported churches in the complexities of C20 society, and took the flack when things went wrong. These dedicated people worked from a place called Didcot, now lost in the Oxon Metropolis.
This organisation ended in 2060, when Universal Simplification made its services redundant. But by then it had created a culture of such mutual encouragement and concern that its work continued in new forms.

We might find ourselves recording the final disappearance of traditional church in the hyper-individualism of the late 21Century, and the Long Silence of C22 when, without the discipline and support of a Christian community, the Way was almost lost, surviving only in those places where remoteness, urban dislocation or the harshness of the environment kept a sense of mutual commitment alive.