Scientists have predicted that in 7.6 billion years the planet will be swallowed up by the Sun. For much of this year, a Christian group in Pennsylvania had been offering a more urgent prediction for the end of the world: they thought it would happen last Wednesday.
Now, like a company issuing a product recall, the ministry and its leader, Chris McCann, has issued a notice to followers, acknowledging the error and offering some answers to frequently asked questions that might be troubling the faithful.
“It is now obvious that we were incorrect regarding the world’s end on the 7th,” Mr McCann wrote, in a statement on the website of the eBible Fellowship, a Christian group that offers weekly online services and sermons.
In answer to the question: “Did we lie?” Mr McCann said: “No. The fact is that we consistently told people that October 7th, 2015 (being the end of the world) was a strong likelihood.”
Mr McCann’s group is an off-shoot of the Family Radio ministry, a confederation of Christian radio stations whose founder, Harold Camping, had confidently predicted that the world would end on May 21, 2011.
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In the light of the Sun rising the following day, he revised his prediction, offering instead a date of October 21, 2011 which also came and went without fiery cataclysm. Mr Camping died in December 2013.
Mr McCann said his own prediction was based on Mr Camping’s May 21 calculation, which was itself the result of some complicated biblical mathematics starting from the presumed year of the Creation being 11,013BC.
In a sermon this year, Mr McCann said Mr Camping had hit upon Judgment Day, rather than the last day. “Now the big question is: how long will Judgment Day last?” he said.
However, he appears to have learnt another lesson from Mr Camping, whose bold prediction prompted a furious backlash when it failed to come true. He said the end of times was merely “likely”.
He concluded that a passage in Revelation, which speaks of blood being trodden from a wine press “by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs,” represented “a period of time of 1,600 days”. This period would end on October 7, 2015.
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There was no doubt, Mr McCann said, that these were the last days. “Just look at gay marriage,” he said in the sermon.
“We openly acknowledged that there was a small likelihood that it would not happen,” he said. Mr McCann acknowledges that followers may be disappointed at the world’s continuing existence. “God’s elect would prefer to be with Christ,” he said. But the end was still nigh. “It’s just a matter of when that remains in question,” he said.