Church and Mission: Book Review #1

The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle

Phyllis Tickle is a lay minister in the Episcopal Church whose work as the founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly has given her the opportunity to engage with a wealth of perspectives as she examines the direction in which Christianity is currently moving and the events, ideas and developments that have occasioned and shaped this movement.

Tickle’s thesis is quite broad in scope, covering not only the particular transformations and alterations occurring, but also including an examination of the three major revolutions within the history of the Church. She argues that “about 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,” (16) and that this occurrence results in the emergence of a “more vital form of Christianity,” the reconstitution of “the organized expression of Christianity. . . into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self,” and the spread of the faith “into new geographic and demographic areas” (17).

Using the analogy of a mooring tether, she explains that religion, as a social construct, ties society to a greater sense of purpose, that it is shaped by culture, place and time and that when the culture’s world view changes dramatically, so too will its religion. What will ensue is the examination of three threads within this cord: spirituality, which Tickle defines as the internal experiences and values of the individual or group; corporeality, the particular physical embodiments of spirituality; and morality, the application and praxis of spirituality. The Great Reformation is briefly reviewed in order to exemplify this analysis.

Tickle contends that the overarching questions facing society at present, as initially provoked by both Michael Faraday’s hypothesis that light and matter are the vibration and intersection, respectively, of energy fields and Joseph Campbell’s broadcast series The Power of Myth, are what constitutes humanness/human consciousness and how each religion relates to the others. Beginning with the theory of relativity and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, she then traces the development of Christianity’s still coalescing answers to these questions and sketches the changing shape of Christianity’s range of beliefs over the past forty years from a quadrilateral to a more cruciform image and finally into what is becoming a “gathering centre.” In conclusion, emergent Christianity’s belief as to where spiritual authority resides is explained a related to network theory, stating that this emergence is the “formulation of a working answer to the question of what exactly a human being is,” (161) as both a single creature and as part of a group within creation.

Tickle’s explanation of emerging Christianity is masterful, thorough and extraordinarily helpful for anyone interested in learning how and why this ascending form of Christianity has come to be. It is an easy, engaging and entirely non-threatening read, and as such I would particularly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves lost and confused within a changing culture or who might view emergent Christianity as merely a passing fad or heresy. The Great Emergence is indeed the same as its subject matter: a conversation of what exactly this new, yet not so new, kind of Christianity is.