Why do churches buy insurance?

After all, don't most sacred texts encourage a sort of dependency on the higher powers?  Does the act of purchasing protection from "acts of  God" seem to imply a lack of faith?  Or is it simply just a good idea and a prudent way to manage these houses of worship?

Nate-rodamous

For much of my actuarial career, I have used computer programs to collide one set of numbers (representing you and me and other insured folks) with another set of numbers (representing fate and chance) to produce a third set of numbers which I use to figure how much to charge for a promise, or to make sure that the insurance company can keep its promise.

Some insurance is short term in nature, but things like Annuities, Long Term Care and Life Insurance require forecasts far into the future, often 30 to even 50 years!  30 years ago there were no smart phones, no YouTube videos of cats, and "Googol" meant a really large number. (10 with 100 zeroes after it).

The forecasting models we use are not as advanced as Doc's DeLorean.

To be honest, Actuaries don't know what exactly will happen in the future. Although I played with this idea in my more humorous posts (Scenario 241 Sucks and Actuary Accidentally Invents Time Travel).  The models are basically advanced tools to see how many times you'll get snake-eyes on the craps table if you played once a month for the next three decades. Thankfully, most insurance risks are predictable in the long run.

But, financial mathematicians have also had to eat some crow when the unpredictable happens and models fail.

For me, I think that running a predictive model without considering what the future might look like is like a meteorologist predicting the weather using a computer and never looking out the window. For instance,  I think the recent study from the Global Challenges Foundation on 12 Risks With Infinite Impact should be mandatory reading. Full report here, summary here.

I therefore submit for your consideration some predictions of events (good and bad) that will occur over the next 30 years (or sooner!):