The Great Emergence: How Christianity is changing and why
Phyllis Tickle (Baker Books – Emergent Village resources, 2008)
Most of us are aware that the age we live in is potentially an epoch-defining one in the history of Western culture. We may well be straddling two ages.
For years we’ve been seeking to understand the wider culture’s move away from the modernism that has dominated the last few centuries, to a post-modernism which is, by its very name’s admission, still more reactive to what has gone before than descriptive of what it represents.
And these changes have also been seriously gnawing away at the church’s understanding of its identity and practice, creating all kinds of discontent, reassessment and a whole lot of saber-rattling.
Something is brewing. Or, in the words of Galadriel from the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, “The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was, is lost.”
We are in epoch-making times.
Phyllis Tickle, apart from having a seriously amusing last name, is a highly respected writer and commentator on religion. One might say she’s part of the established or mainstream religious media. For years Tickle was editor of the Religion department of Publishers Weekly, and she has herself written numerous books. So it’s fascinating that someone of her ilk and background would write a tome under the banner of Emergent – a “mouthpiece” of some of the American emerging church crew – a much criticized and misunderstood “conversation” that has been developing at the periphery of the church.
Though Tickle is a church historian, and this work draws significantly on what has gone before, much of what she writes is speculative. When you attempt to analyse and predict the future while standing right in the centre of unprecedented events and culture shifts, one’s pontifications can only be largely conjecture. This is not a criticism of her work (though there are times where I feel she comes across a little too presumptuous – and her choice of the phrase “The Great Emergence” may be one of those moments) but rather recognition that futurism is a risky business.
In the middle of a giant rummage sale
Tickle begins the book by drawing on an observation from a retired Anglican bishop, Mark Dyer, regarding church history. In her own words she notes that:
…the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale…(In other words) the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.
I love the image of the rummage sale. And as a student of church history myself, I can see that there is some support for this theory – though it is of course a generalization, a point acknowledged by Tickle. For in fact, renewal in the church happens in all kinds of ways and ages. And the “division” of church history into four main periods is not nearly so clearcut.
Nevertheless, as Tickle observes, it is certainly true that around the mid points of the past two millenniums, and also at the start of the same two millenniums, Christianity has experienced quite major shifts. And these have largely gone hand-in-hand with monumental changes in the wider culture.
However, Tickle is certainly not suggesting that God works from a 500 year cyclical clock, by which He/She rings a bell at the end of each “age” and shouts out to us mere mortals – “Times up, folks. Get ready, the game is about to change.”
Rather,
The Great Emergence, like the Great Reformation or the Great Schism or the time of the Great Gregory or the Great Transformation, is a generalized social/political/economic/intellectual/cultural shift.
And such a generalized shift has enormous religious dimensions to it.
A Cable of meaning
In chapter two Tickle uses the metaphor of a cable to describe what is at stake in each of these “five hundred-year hinge times”. I must admit that I got a little lost here in following the intricacies of her use of the metaphor. However, in its broadest sense she describes it as a cable of meaning that allows a group of people to make sense of life. A people’s worldview, if you like. The outer casing of this cable is the story – the shared history of the social unit.
The cable’s job is to “secure human life to meaningfulness”. However, about once every five hundred years all parts of the cable are substantially damaged and we then have to mend it – generally taking about a century or more to do so.
The Great Reformation
In the following chapter Tickle uses the Great Reformation as an example of the kind of process that occurs – tracking how it began (what events/questions etc caused the cable to be severely damaged) and how it was progressively weaved back together again. This re-formation was typical of all such major shifts. It required people to face again the question “Where now is the authority?” Prior to this, the answer in Western Christianity had resided in the person of the Pope. However, this was shattered by the schisms within Roman Catholicism that resulted in multiple popes for a period of time (Avignon et al). The Reformation’s answer to this fractured authority came in the form of “sola scriptura” – scripture only, and its partner, the priesthood of all believers.
Seeds of the Great Emergence
In chapters four and five, Tickle then proceeds to consider the seeds of the Great Emergence in the century or more leading up to our present age. Once again, she suggests, the cable of meaning that had enabled us to tie ourselves securely so we can make sense of the world, began to be eroded and fray at the edges.
So what were the seeds of this? Tickle suggests that not only is Darwin’s theory a significant starting point in this regard, but so too are the electromagnetic theories of Michael Faraday – the British chemist. Between them, the author posits, “…biology and physics were to split the cable open, tear the story, snag the sleeve, and lay out to public view the braided strand.”
Continuing on, Tickle notes the roles of Freud, Jung and Joseph Campbell (if you’ve not heard of this fellow before now then don’t worry, I hadn’t either!) And she adds to the story by noting the parts Einstein, television, and the automobile played. The Quest for the Historical Jesus and the role of Pentecostalism, Karl Marx, Alcoholics Anonymous, Bhuddism, the experimental drug culture, the Pill and the Internet are also thrown into the mix, for good measure! (If you’re confused now as to the connections between all these characters and movements – as you should be – then you’ll have to read the book yourself!)
Where are we heading?
In the third part of the book, Tickle, having shown herself a master (mistress?) of history, begins to move into more speculative territory by contemplating where the Great Emergence is taking us.
She suggests that North American Christianity by the turn of the millennium was made up broadly of four main groupings – Liturgists, Renewalists, Conservatives and Social Justice Christians. Tickle frames this in the shape of a quadrilateral that indicates what a particular Christian or faith community considers most important. I found the categories a little hard to get my head around but after re-reading her reasons for choosing them it made a little more sense.
Her contention is that increasingly a “gathering center” has been developing – that is, individuals and faith communities who draw on elements of all four quadrants and thus no longer camp around a particular emphasis. These are the “emergers” and from this gathering center is evolving a new way of understanding and being Christian and the Church. These “emergers” are not just young people, but folk of all ages.
At the same time, a small percentage of “reactors” (or reactionaries) who don’t like what is emerging are pulling against it. But rather than view these groups negatively, Tickle posits that their reactionary responses are important and necessary – much like the ballast in a boat. “If the boat is not to tip and swamp, the ballast that forestalls too hasty a set of movements in a stormy sea must be there.”
Increasingly, Tickle speculates, “…it is not unreasonable to assume that by the time the Great Emergence has reached maturity, about 60 percent of practicing American Christians will be emergent, or some clear variant thereof.” These folk will establish new forms of church and expressions of faith. Yet according to Tickle, still many others (maybe up to 30 percent) will remain in their “inherited” churches and seek to remodel or refurbish them – to bring renewal within the faith communities they’re part of.
In her final chapter on the way ahead, Tickle suggests that emergents increasingly view the Church not as a “thing” or “entity” so much as a network – kind of like the Internet. She states
…from the point of view of an emergent, the Church is a self-organising system of relations…between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks…The end result of this understanding of dynamic structure is the realization that no one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire “truth” of anything, either as such and/or when independent of the others.
Furthermore, Tickle posits that the Quakers (or at least some of their number) have had a significant influence on this developing understanding and practice of faith. She mentions in particular, the writings and thoughts of Richard Foster, Parker Palmer, J. Brent Bill and John Wimber. (Given the significance of Foster, Palmer and Wimber in my own journey, I was fascinated by the way she noted their wide-ranging impact.) Of the Quakers, she wrote:
Both by heritage and by virtue of having always been middlers belonging in nobody’s camp, the Quakers have from the beginning had a distinctly “other” easiness with the paradoxical interplay of revelation, discernment, and Scripture in the life and governance of the body of Christ on earth.
Charting Wimber’s journey from Quakerism to joining and then leading the fledgling Vineyard movement, Tickle notes how his embracing of a centered set approach to faith was, in her opinion, the forerunner to the “belong-behave-believe” approach she observes of most emergent Christian communities. (A note here: Tickle seems unaware that Wimber’s use of the centered and bound set theory was actually picked up from his Fuller colleague, Paul Hiebert, who used this mathematical theory to differentiate between traditional evangelical understanding of conversion, and a more biblically consistent one. Hiebert’s writings were enormously helpful to the Signpost community in our early days. They’re really worth reading.)
Tickle finishes by noting that emergence thinking is also characterized by an embracing of mystery, paradox and of narrative.
A sound of hope
Tickle’s observations and prognostications are infused with a great deal of hope – not just for those who quickly and freely embrace the new forms of faith – but also for those who are at first resistant. For, according to her, not only will a new expression of faith emerge, but the more institutional church will gain a “grand refurbishment”. As a prior example of this, she reminds the reader that the last “great” rummage sale – the “Great Reformation” caused an equally significant renewal of Roman Catholicism, known as the “Counter-Reformation”. I appreciate that recollection because one of the characteristics of those who proclaim a new way can often be arrogance – a dogmaticism that so easily writes off the expression of faith and ways of being the church one is reacting against.
Additionally, the good news is that:
One of the hallmarks of the Church’s semi-millenial rummage sales has always been that when each of the things was over and the dust had died down, Christianity would not only have readjusted itself, but it would also have grown and spread.
So far from being anxious and unnerved about the tumultuous times we live in, Tickle suggests much good will come from it all. For all of the Church.
Is Tickle right?
Whether or not Phyllis Tickle and others are right about the emergence of a new epoch of church history and what shape it might take, we can only wait and see. The jury is still out – and will be for quite some years. Of course, major watersheds are always much easy to observe in retrospect. As someone once noted, “With hindsight everyone is a genius”.
In fact, by the time retrospective analysis can occur regarding the significance of our times, all of us (including Tickle) will be long dead.
I must admit that I did find myself a little frustrated with elements of the read, for reasons I can’t easily articulate. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating book and while it is clearly a North American analysis, there’s enough in it that resonates with what is happening here in NZ as well.
Tickle is a respected voice and her expansive knowledge and understanding of the Christian movement leaves her well placed to offer the perspectives she does. What’s more, I consider myself part of the broad wave of “emerging” believers.
So for both these reasons, this is a book I’m bound to return to again.
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