The Great Emergence, Continued

from The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle:

"...when pinned down and forced to answer the question, 'What is Emergent or Emerging Church?' most who are will answer, 'A conversation,' which is not only true but which will always be true. The Great Emergence can not 'be,' and be otherwise..."

Tickle quotes Donald Miller:

"I believe that we are witnessing a new reformation that is transforming the way Christianity will be experienced in the new millennium. This reformation, unlike the one led by Martin Luther, is challenging not only doctrine, but the medium through which the message of Christianity is articulated... these 'new paradigm' churches have discarded many of the attributes of established religion. Appropriating contemporary cultural forms, these churches are creating a new genre of worship music, restructuring the organizational character of institutional religion, and democratizing access to the sacred by radicalizing the Protestant principal of the priesthood of all believers."

Tickle goes on, later:
"The actual nature of the Atonement, for example, or the tenet of an angry God who must be appeased or the question of evil's origins are suddenly all up for reconsideration. If in pursuing this line of exegesis, the Great Emergence really does what most of its observers think it will, it will rewrite Christian theology--and thereby North American culture--into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years...Regardless of what its theology eventually matures into, however, there is no question that the Great Emergence is the configuration of Christianity which is in ascendency.

"What is not nearly so easy to discern just yet is how the Great Emergence will interface with the results and consequences of such realignments; and more than any other of North America's Christians, it is emergents themselves who are going to have to reconsider Emergence Christianity. They must begin now to think with intention about what this new form of the faith is and is to become; because what once was an engaging but innocuous phenomenon no longer is. The cub has brown into the young lion; and now is the hour of his roaring."

I don't know whether or not to agree with this last statement of Tickle's, but I seem, nonetheless, to be experiencing it. I no longer find that I can easily push aside my disparate thoughts about church, God, and our relationship with Him. These thoughts (or the children of them) keep coming out- not oozing quietly- but plopping out at inopportune moments. Usually when surrounded by people who can't fathom what is going on in my mind, nor do they seem to want to. I regret this on several levels, yet I'm still a bit confounded about how to manage it.

The Great Emergence

As I've been given time off from cooking and other chores today (yea!) I thought I'd tell you about The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle.

She begins with the supposition that, according to Rev. Mark Dyer, "about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale. And, he goes on to say, we are living in and through one of those five-hundred-year sales."

The five hundred year points are typically referred to in terms that begin with, or are associate with the word "great," hence, "The Great Emergence."

• There was the beginning of the church in the 1st century.
  
  
• Then around 500 years later there came Gregory the Great and the beginning of the monastic movement following the fall of the Roman Empire.
  
  
• Next, around the 11th century came the Great Schism, the divide between the Eastern Orthodox Christianity (Constantinople) and the Western Church (Rome.)
  
  
• The most easily recognized "great" is the 16th century Great Reformation with Martin Luther and his 95 theses nailed to the door at Wittenberg church-- thus laying the foundations for Protestantism.
  
  
• That bring us to the 21st century and what Tickle is calling the Great Emergence.

I'm with her on this. The majority of the book is a well researched explanation of these events in the life of the Church, bringing us to many observations about the changes in Protestantism in the 20th century which got us to the state of flux we are in today. I think she does a good and thorough job of this, without crossing over into tedium.

The point being made that the Church was ripe for a rebirth, the author goes on to explain the emerging church as she sees it. I'll write a little about that explanation in a follow up post.

10 survival tips

David at nakedpastor has some in depth food for thought:

"I think all religious communities, like our earth, are on a collision course with their demise. And it’s our own fault, not the “world’s”. I’ve been mulling some thoughts around. If we are going to survive into the future, our communities need to:

1. get and stay small (like the best farms);
2. be autonomous but accountable to other communities (like tribes);
3. be indigenous in expression (local creativity and freedom of expression);
4. see love as the new hermeneutic of our books (instead of obedience, justification, salvation, etc.);
5. reject even the subtlest forms of coercion (no imposed agendas);
6. abandon visionary thinking (love without the oppression of expectations);
7. cultivate thinkers who explore the reconciliation of all things (global intelligence);
8. commit to long-term or even life-long oversight (relationship);
9. build an attitude of resistance to success-story thinking (anti-pop);
10. engage all sciences, religions and philosophies with an open, compassionate and humble mind (dialogue)."