Book Reflection 3: The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why by Phyllis Tickle

Part 1: The Great Emergence: What is it?

Chapter 1: Rummage Sales: When the Church Cleans Out Its Attic

Tickle cites the Right Reverend Mark Dyer, contending that every five hundred years “the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity…become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.” (p 16) We are currently living in the midst of such a transition, which she likens to a “rummage sale.” She says that there are three consistent results of upheaval of this nature: the emergence of a new, more vital form of Christianity, the “refurbishment” of the formerly dominant expression of Christianity, and the spread of the faith into new geographic and demographic areas.

Chapter 2: Cable of Meaning: The Loss and Discovery of a Common Story

In this chapter, Tickle compares religion to a cable that connects the human social unit to some purpose and/or power greater than itself. The cable has as its components: the shared story (the rubber casing), the common imagination, or worldview (the mesh sleeve), and a three-stranded center cord, spirituality, corporeality, and morality. Inevitably, cultural/social/political changes (water) creeps into the center part of the cable, which leads to the examination of each of the three strands.

Part 2: The Great Emergence: How did it come to be?

Chapter 3: The Great Reformation: A Prequel to Emergence

Tickle uses the Great Reformation as an historical example of the process she described in the former chapters. She demonstrates the political/social/cultural changes that lead to/flow from the question, “Where is the authority?” This question, she states, is common in every re-formation.

Chapter 4: Questions of Re-formation: Darwin, Freud, the Automobile, and the Power of Myth

This same question of authority is asked in events/developments/thoughts of more recent history. Particularly, the work of Darwin, Faraday, Freud and Jung, and Campbell has been the tipping point of a questioning of the identity of the self and reality. Thus, the complimentary questions of the Great Emergence are: “What is the human consciousness and/or the humanness of human?” “What is the relation of all religions to one another?” This is the context of Emerging Christians.

Chapter 5: The Century of Emergence: Einstein, the Automobile, and the Marginalization of Grandma

The 1900s is a century of rapid and innumerable change. Themes that run through the list that Tickle lays out for the reader include the increasingly accepted believe that the only certainty is uncertainty, doubt and an emphasis on what is becoming rather than what is, the increasingly “unnecessary” place of the Church in broader society, and a move towards spirituality and away from religion.

Part 3: The Great Emergence: Where is it going?

Chapter 6: The Gathering Center: And the Many Faces of a Church Emerging

At this point, Tickle focuses the discussion on the Church. At the end of the 1960s, she claims, an assessment of North American Christianity would place congregations within one of four quadrants with the following titles: Liturgicals, Social Justice Christians, Renewalists, and Conservatives. With social and cultural changes, however, the conversation between these quadrants increased significantly, and the lines between them became blurry. A center where all four quadrants overlapped began to emerge – it was a hodgepodge of “things” cherry picked from each quadrant. Groups of people who felt out of place within just one of the quadrants began to meet together independently, thus beginning the house church movement. Finally, the currents surrounding this cherry picked center are these groups: traditionalists, the re-traditioning group, progressive Christians, and the “Hyphenateds.”

Chapter 7: The Way Ahead: Mapping Fault Lines and Fusions

Even within the Emergent Church, there is discussion about where authority lies. Tickle asserts that the Emergent Church is “a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves from subsets of relations within their smaller networks…in interlacing levels of complexity.” (p. 152)  Many answer that the Emergent Church is a “conversation.” John Wimber’s idea, similar to network theory is that a “center set” group is clear in their vision and about the work of the Kingdom, while letting people sort themselves out by how close they each wanted to get to the center. Here we see the principle “belong-behave-believe,” instead of “behave-believe-belong.”