The smell of incense lingered faintly in the sacristy as Father Jun wiped sweat from his brow. Sunday Mass had ended ten minutes earlier, but the complaints were just beginning.
“Listen, senpai,” he said, plopping into a chair. “Last week during the offertory, I spotted a parishioner holding his smartphone way above his head. I thought he was taking photos, but no—he was livestreaming the Mass on TikTok.”
Across the room, the senior priest, Father Ishida, lounged on a bench reading the morning paper—still stubbornly printed on actual paper, not a tablet. He chuckled without looking up.
“Hahaha. That’s nothing. Once, during my homily, a young man jumped onto the ambo, flashed double peace signs, and shouted, ‘Shoutout to everyone watching!’ I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out. The congregation applauded.”
At that moment, the sacristy door creaked open and an elderly parishioner shuffled in without hesitation. It was Mr. Arima, a devout believer known for believing all rules applied to everyone except him.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Arima began abruptly, “when I first saw a parishioner praying while wearing earphones. Earphones! During prayer! And apparently listening to some ‘guided meditation podcast.’”
Father Jun sighed and turned to the repair estimate on his desk. The parish’s century-old pipe organ, silent for nearly fifteen years, was now so badly weathered that the tuning alone exceeded the annual maintenance budget.
“I haven’t seen parishioners younger than me in months,” he muttered. “The average age of the congregation is what—seventy-two? If this continues, the Church will go bankrupt. Actually bankrupt. Religious corporations in Japan have been closing steadily since 2010. Is that… a problem?”
Arima warmed his hands on the steam pipe, as if it were a sacred relic.
“I’ve been coming here ever since I was old enough to know what ‘God’ meant,” he said softly. “It always comforted me. But talking with my daughter and grandkids… I’m starting to see that religion might be… unreliable.”
Jun raised an eyebrow. “Unreliable? You mean you doubt God’s protection?”
“No,” Arima replied. “Not God. But the way religions talk. All the prophecies, promises, blessings—none of them have deadlines. They never say when, or how long. Without a deadline, no matter how beautiful the words are, they can’t be considered a promise. Not by today’s standards.”
He wasn’t wrong. Younger generations—used to project timelines, OKRs, and legitimate expectations—struggled with what sociologists now called “deadline-free authority.”
Jun turned to his senior. “What do you think, Father Ishida?”
The old priest finally folded his newspaper, revealing a headline about declining temple memberships and the rise of AI-driven spiritual apps. He scratched his beard thoughtfully.
“Religion,” he said, “is a thesis without a deadline. Every divine message, every teaching, every hope we offer—none of them come stamped with a due date. And because of that, people have allowed religions to accompany them for thousands of years. If there was a deadline, it would end instead.”
He leaned back, gazing at the cracked ceiling.
“But today… people live in an age where everything has a timeline. Even love expires. Software updates expire. Subscription trials expire. If hope has no deadline, it feels… obsolete.”
Arima nodded quietly. “My granddaughter told me yesterday: ‘Grandpa, if a promise has no deadline, it isn’t a promise—it’s just poetry.’”
Jun looked at the dusty pipe organ—an enormous, majestic relic. Once the heart of the parish. Now silent, expensive, and increasingly irrelevant.
“But poetry,” Ishida murmured, “is sometimes the only thing that survives an age.”
Outside the sacristy, the church bells began to ring automatically—controlled by a cloud-based scheduling system installed last year.
The sound echoed through the empty nave, through the aging wooden beams, through the few remaining parishioners slowly shuffling out.
A thesis without a deadline.
A promise without an expiration date.
A hope built not for next quarter, but for centuries.
Whether that was salvation or downfall, no one in the room could say.
And so the bells continued to ring—faithfully, mechanically, endlessly—into a future where fewer and fewer were listening.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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