Another day, another mass shooting, is the world going to hell in a hurry?

If you watch the news, diligently, you will hear a story about a mass shooting and/or an act of terrorism somewhere in the world each and every day.  There will be a weather related crisis, or perhaps an earthquake, or a man-made disaster too.  There are plenty of things going on in a world with over seven billion people that demonstrate the inhumanity of man toward our fellow man and the corruption of human endeavors.  We could be pessimists without much prodding.  We could despair of the future and throw our hands up in the air and say, "Come Lord Jesus!"  Many Christians do just that, they're convinced that the United States, the West, even the World is spiraling out of control and the return of Christ is imminent because things are "worse than they've ever been".  This isn't a new phenomenon, it isn't particularly surprising either, but it is sad and unnecessary because by any indication, whether that be violence, poverty, life expectancy, responsible government, and especially the growth of the Church, we are living in the most prosperous and secure generation in the history of mankind.  It doesn't seem like it, not when ISIS is shooting up restaurants in Paris or new polls show that less Americans are going to Church than in prior generations, but it is true.
Our ancestors one hundred years ago, and especially further back than that, lived in a world that was more dangerous, poorer, more corrupt, and a lot less Christian than it is today.
Your gut may be fighting against that claim, you may not want to believe it, especially is you have a lot emotionally invested in thinking like a victim or claiming that the sky is falling, but not wanting to believe a fact doesn't make it untrue.  Five hundred years ago, to pick a random spot in history, the average person lived hand to mouth, always one bad harvest or pestilence away from starvation, and always worried that a marauding army was just over the horizon, not to mention pirates and their own rapacious nobility.  The average person was illiterate, had very few possessions, may never have traveled more than an hour or two away from the place where he or she was born, could expect to bury several children who didn't make it out of infancy, and aside from Europe, lived in a world where the vast majority of the people knew not the name of Jesus, let alone believed in him.
Today, by virtually every measurable statistic, things have improved, and not just a little, by leaps and bounds.  There are still pockets of poverty, endemic bloodshed, and resistance to the Gospel, but they're pockets now, not whole continents.  Africa has been transformed in the past fifty years, millions have been lifted out of poverty and the Church has not only conquered the animism that once thrived there, but is pushing back the frontier of Islam as well.  Asia is following suit, with India and China seeing hundreds of millions of people lifted out of abject poverty and the amount of Christians in their midst growing rapidly.  The world's largest Christian population will soon enough reside in China.  The Church may be declining in the West, but it is exploding in the South and East.
We have many reasons to be optimistic about the future, and many reasons to not despair about the present.  Remember, Jesus spoke of a Church against which the gates of Hell would not prevail, but if the Church is to conquer even the stronghold of the enemy, it will be on the offensive not cowering behind high walls and a moat.

I'm not a pessimist, not because I choose to be an optimist in the face of contrary evidence, but because my faith in the power of God agrees with all of the good things that are really happening in our world today.  The future is in the hands of God, and those hands are capable indeed.

For an excellent detailed examination of this issue, please read the article below by JD King.
Why You've Been Duped Into Believing The Myth That The World Is Getting Worse and Worse